[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER 555 EPISODE 26



--1--

Torn on this one!

Aesthetically, this episode is sumptuous. The cinematography is jaw-dropping. The music (or lack thereof!) is perfectly deployed to heighten every emotion. It's an episode that eschews all of the things that make Faiz Faiz, in favor of finding a new way into these characters, this premise. There's a grounded nature to what's happening that makes it all feel like a slow collapse, the inevitability of misfortune.

Narratively, it's kind-of a nothingburger? It goes in hard on the return of the Ryusei Cram School alumni ("Go Meteors!"), bolstering the dwindling ranks of nobodies with a few more nobodies. You could cut almost all of the dialogue scenes with the human characters and just have them all saying Delta Is Coming. Almost all of the narrative energy is centered on Kusaka's reactions to what's happening, and holy shit do I not like Kusaka in that way.

This one, it's like lipstick on a pig.

--2--

Pretty great lipstick, though!

Visually, it feels like the director read this script and went Oh Man I'm Going To Have To Save This One. So many fun tricks to make a bunch of shitty dialogue scenes work at all.

The best one, by a mile, is the one with Houjou and Kageyama and Murakami. They're in this art gallery, and it's rectangles of flat colors, each of them looking at a different painting. As the scene starts, the camera focuses on the person listening, not the person talking. It's a brilliant choice, making the reaction matter more than the action. It matters more how someone is processing the information, how they're conveying it on their face, than what the information is. (Mostly because the information is that Lucky Clover doesn't like that Murakami is keeping secrets. There is not a lot there!) It sucks you completely into the scene.

The other scenes are no slouch! The scene where Takumi finds out Kimura is a nekojita, and he gets up from the opposing couch to sit next to her and be polite, and it's all one shot. The breakfast scene, where the action (Kusaka and Mari) is one shot, and the reaction (Takumi and Keitaro) is the other shot, a bisected setup. A beautiful static shot of a doorframe, and Kusaka leans back into it to start his line.

And, god, every single one of the new Orphnoch's scenes. The way the bus he's on goes into the tunnel, blacking everything out, and he's illuminated by the burning origami crane? Yes.

--3--

And the sound! Such smart choices!

Up until the end, it's all diegetic sound, which pays such enormous dividends for this episode. Even if you don't notice it, it's changing your perception of the story. Instead of fun music or tense music or spooky music, there's just... scenes. It's not telling you how to feel about it. It's not leading you emotionally. It's just saying Here. Here is a story. It's happening. Watch.

And those scenes with Skullcandy, the EDM Orphnoch, amazing. Amazing. The first attack was brilliant, only the second scene in the whole episode with any music in it. (There's a radio playing as Takumi works the counter.) The camera zooms in on his headphones, music filling the soundstage, slowly drowning out all of the incidental noises. Then a monster enters the frame. No screams, just panicked victims, trapped with a monster. The music not sculpting the emotion, but adding to the wrongness of the scene. This isn't right. This isn't what a monster attack is supposed to be like.

The second attack twists it, leading with one track and then zooming into the headphones for a harsher, more aggressive track.The killing happens with club lights and dance music, wrong, all wrong. The last victim is another Orphnoch, caught up in the carnage.

It's all so purposeful, finding a way to let us know that this isn't just a more powerful monster, but a killer that we haven't previously had to contemplate. This isn't a funny monster, this is an inhuman beast. It's taking Faiz, the funny show about jerks, and making it into an episode of Kuuga.

--4--

I got a little disappointed at the way the big Fighting Score came up after Kaixa ran after the Drop Bear Orphnoch. (What in the hell was it doing on top of a wall?) I thought they'd go the whole episode without non-diegetic music, and I was so ready to knock points off for ruining it. But they did it so they could drop it all out again. Kaixa rounds the corner and sees the tunnel. He freezes. It's just the sound of him breathing, hard. It's fear. You can hear it in his breathing. Faiz rolls up, sees Kaixa immobilized. He tenses. It's all tension, speaker to speaker. The Orphnoch stumbles out of the tunnel, burning in red flames.

Delta.

It's Delta who did this.

--5--

And, like, hopefully I described that in a way that sounds like it worked it pretty well! That's the stuff I like talking about, the stuff that works. Because I could've done points 2 through 4 on how much no one cares about random Ryusei Cram School alumni ("Go Meteors!"), how it's ridiculous to think the show's effectively heightening tension by killing them off, how I don't love that Kusaka wants to keep Mari in the dark to protect her (one of my least-favorite tropes!), how I don't really get why Lucky Clover is so worked up about Murakami keeping secrets when he immediately tells them what's going when they asked, and just basically how dull I found the story that all of this smart construction was in service of.

There's such craftsmanship here, but it's covering up a pretty forgettable plot.