[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER KABUTO - EPISODE 38



There's a second half to this episode that's almost halfway decent! It's a shame you've got to get through the first half to see it, though...

The first half is hot garbage, excluding anything with Kagami and Renge. Worse than being dull and obvious (and it is both), it also retroactively renders the last episode completely irrelevant. The characters are doing all of this undercover work, and the main suspect is found by Tendou watching the guy act suspiciously twice. That's it! Skinny Jeans Poirot did not exactly have to get his brain in top gear for this one! All of the vague nonsense of last episode, the rumors and gossip and ghost stories, it never really amounts to anything major? It's all these extra bodies being thrown at a problem that never needed them, and it feels so... just, it does not feel like a ton of thought was put into this mystery.

And the motivation was a principal who wanted more success at his school? It doesn't matter! It is a motivation that feels inconsequential because the only name character in any jeopardy by the time we find out is Juka. Keiko's already dead by the time this episode starts, which is easily the stupidest decision in the story. There's this couple dozen body-count partnership with a Worm, but there's virtually no one important in jeopardy. The baseball player is no one, Keiko's not coming back... it takes half the story for Juka to be imperiled. The first part of this thing is just a mountain of nameless bodies, and it feels gross. It feels boring.

(Also, so, the Worm bumped off an entire afterschool club seven years ago, and then did nothing since last week? What the hell was it waiting for, Pluto to get demoted? Is this revenge against future astronomers? Is this all just a Fourze story after all? Also also, are you telling me this principal lost an entire afterschool club seven years ago and kept his job?! And he's got more kids missing since then? If this is what's going on in the neighborhood, I feel like Tendou needs to start homeschooling Juka immediately. The Worm attacks in his home are a lot less frequent!)

Luckily, there's this middle section that... I mean, it doesn't save this story, not even close. This is probably the worst non-movie Kabuto story I've watched. But! It finds a little room to spotlight Kagami's heroism, and that's almost enough for me.

It's not, like, some huge evolution to the character or anything. We don't really learn anything new about Kagami in 38. But it's similar to Tendou's gift of a yakisoba bun to Keiko in the last one, where it's the specificity of how they relate to children in need. For Tendou, it was with food. For Kagami, as he's on a bus with middle-schoolers who are about to be attacked by Worms, it's positivity and energy. The haunting singing of the Worm Choir is terrifying the kids on the bus, so Kagami just starts belting out their campfire song, loud and off-key, encouraging them to meet terror with confidence, because confidence will always win. It's Kagami passing along his worldview to these confused children, and giving them a distraction so he can go fight for them.

The absolute best part in this entire story is the smile on Kagami's face as he tells Renge he's going to go fight some ghosts. He's totally outnumbered, but he's got these kids' energy at his back, so he can face down any foe. It's so charming, so Emotion Over Logic... so Kagami, you know? It leads to the only real growth in this episode, where Renge now sees in Kagami what we've all seen in Kagami. He's not a joke, he's a hero. He's just a big dumb hero.

Other than that, not a lot that did it for me in this episode. The flash-forward to the solar eclipse was fine. The fact that Tsurugi was just randomly in the woods for the fight was fine. The PunchHopper and KickHopper stuff was fun, basically just for the idea that the only members of the cast who'd be happy fighting/detonating teenagers are these two. (Honestly, all of the stuff with Yaguruma and Kageyama felt too repetitive to me to really work that great. It's fine, it's never not funny, but it wasn't really saying anything new or different.) It was all fine in the second half, after the Kagami scene.

The first half, though! So bad! Not a good story! Probably one to avoid in the future!

A QUESTION

Simple one this time: Have you ever gone camping in the woods?