[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER 555 EPISODE 18



--1--

It's a lighter episode of Faiz, which I appreciate. The last few have been heavy, deep episodes, and it's nice to maybe just relax for a little bit? I am not opposed to something that's having some fun with this whole Kamen Rider thing.

Also, man, I love it when a show remembers that the non-Rider characters have goals and plans. Gaim was a show that spent a ton of time in the early going on dance crews... until the show had zero bandwidth for dance crews. It left me with a feeling that I wasted my energy getting invested in some of those characters, since they'd never get much of a chance to be relevant again.

All of that is to say that I really dig an episode that's built around Keitaro's easily-manipulated altruism and Mari's dreams of being a hairstylist.

--2--

It's pretty much all Keitaro this episode, so I hope you like seeing Keitaro being taken advantage of by a little girl!

And I do! Seeing him and Keiko bumming around town, him forced to cater to her whims thanks to his need to make people happy, it's pretty fun. It's honestly not much more than a collection of gags, but I laughed a bunch. The very long process of him buying an ice shaver, buying ice, shaving ice, pouring some syrup on it, serving her the shaved ice, and then she eats once scoop before moving on from it? Great. Great gag.

--3--

Keiko's a cute enough character, for sure. She's a total brat, which makes her fit perfectly into the Team Faiz Classic dynamic. (Kusaka is on the road this week, or else he'd've probably murdered her and hid the body.) She's manipulating Keitaro and insulting the other two as soon as she meets them, because this kid wastes no time. She loves pushing buttons!

But, you know, there's a tragedy in her background, two parents that died in a "gas explosion" (probably not even a little nefarious or suspicious) and an unsettled rage. I'm sure we'll get to the bottom of her trauma next episode. As it is, she's a fun, low-impact plot device.

--4--

Same thing with Mari's plot, which is her making a friend at the salon. That friend is Hikaru, who conveniently happens to be the daughter of the barely-remembered Detective Soeno. (I actually really like how the show feinted towards the cops' investigation of the Orphnochs being a thing, and then immediately were like Nah. It'd be hard to fit in amongst everything else this show is trying to do, and I can't imagine it'd be that useful to the plot.)

Honestly, hey, can we talk about "convenience"? Because I think I'm finding that more prevalent in the storytelling than "misunderstanding" or "melodrama". There's a ton of people running into each other in this series, like the city is only two square blocks. I don't really hate it, since it makes for fun scenes and a quick pace (like, I love that the one time we see Takumi go to the batting cage, Yuuji just happens to walk in), but there's a point where it's a narrative crutch. This episode had some unbelievably convenient head-scratchers, like Soeno loudly and repeatedly saying Keiko's name just after Mari arrived to hear it, and Yuuji driving up just as Faiz is fighting Fungus The Clown, this episode's horrifying Orphnoch. It's not that either of those things are impossible, but both of them happening in the same episode is a little lazy.

--5--

But, god, it feels like everyone involved in this show wanted to take it down a notch after all of the Kusaka and Takumi stuff of the last few episodes, so I don't mind a little bit of lazy. What's here wasn't super deep, but it's a pleasant enough episode. That goddamn clown, though! Not pleasant! Does not need to turn into a mushroom monster to be scary!