[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER BLADE EPISODE 33

This time on Kamen Rider Blade: Hajime is losing his battle against himself! Kenzaki is getting trounced by everyone! And Tachibana is pretty sure this weird dude with a robot Undead who wants to either kill or protect Kenzaki (Or both! It's complicated!) is worth hearing out!



The Tachibana thing... I'm really hopeful that the next episode starts with him going Mistakes Were Made. I want him to have walked out of that skin-crawling meeting with Hirose's dad thinking he had absolutely backed the wrong horse. That scene, it's impossible for me to think Tachibana hasn't figured out he's being manipulated. (My favorite part of the entire episode is in the beginning, when Garren has the goddamn solid gold Jack Form balls to tell Blade that he's being manipulated. Tachibana! Is telling other people that they're blind to manipulation! Tachibana!!!!!) Literally everything about that sequence, up to and including the horrifying man-made monster U.N.D.E.A.D., is a warning that you are in the villain's lair. If the next episode starts with Tachibana just going Pobody's Nerfect and keeping Kenzaki captive so the next phase of Hirose's dad's plan can be enacted... bummmmmmmmmed ouuuuuuuut, man.

So, yeah, basically putting a pin in that for next time. Hoping for the best, ready for the worst.

The rest of this episode is good, but tough to really dig into. It's basically everyone and everything working against Kenzaki's confidence in saving Hajime. Tachibana fights him to a standstill and chides his naivete. (Again, Tachibana does this! To someone else!) King laughs at him for protecting humanity's inevitable destroyer. And Hajime is one more sweaty hour away from losing his grip on his hard-fought humanity. All Kenzaki has is his faith in other people.

And, y'know, it turns out that's enough? Kenzaki only ever really spends, like, two seconds wondering if he's doing the right thing. After getting launched off a cliff by King, he wakes up to the pain of his injuries and no clear path to victory. Hajime's a ticking timebomb, ready to become a monster that could kill them all. But, he hasn't yet, and Kenzaki knows that he's the only one who believes enough in Hajime to save him. So he picks himself up and gets on with it.

I really love that. I love that, again, it's so uncomplicated with Kenzaki. While Tachibana is looking for constant reassurances and explanations, Kenzaki doesn't need anything from Hajime. He's never asked Hajime to defend himself, to swear that he's a good person, that he's worthy of Kenzaki's trust. In fact, Hajime's basically done the opposite, consistently telling Kenzaki to leave him alone and to stop interrogating him. But Kenzaki never makes Hajime earn his trust. He sees Hajime, really sees him, and decides to trust him. It's unconditional, and it's heroic.

But it's also put about ten million targets on Kenzaki's back, making this episode a little overstuffed in threats. It's good in a way, a tense escalation of danger, but it's basically wall-to-wall Blade getting his ass kicked. (With, of course, the exception of Garren. Garren obviously gets his ass kicked.) It makes for a little bit of a grind to this episode, but it's also a first part, and that's the standard.

Not the deepest episode, maybe, but still a pretty fun installment. The Kenzaki/Hajime stuff is so good that I don't really mind the Tachibana stuff not working, and I didn't even realize until this sentence that Mutsuki didn't show up once in this episode. That's how good this one plot is!



Next time on Kamen Rider Blade: Hajime versus Mutsuki! (There he is!) Blade versus King! And the TV debut of Evolution King, a suit I think I basically forgot to talk about from the movie!