[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O EPISODE 14 - "DANCE WITH THE DRAGON”



I'm pretty sure I've said before how much I appreciate the way this series makes more out of the monster plots. It's never just A Monster Jumps Out And People Scream. (I mean, it does, and they do, but it's never just that.) There's a plan the monster is trying to enact, and a guest star that the plan centers around. It creates a more robust story for the hero to interact with, a sense that there are legitimate stakes to what's occurring. Someone's hopes and dreams are in the balance, and the hero is making a concrete change for the better.

The flipside of that expectation from a Den-O story is that when the monster plot is as thin as it in this story, when the characters are this two-dimensional and blank, it's incredibly difficult for me to invest enough in the story to care what the hero is trying to do.

I mean, they sure do pull the biggest emotional lever around by hinging the hero's success on if a cute dog survives, so they're clearly aware of how little there is in the Park Grandpa and Youth storyline. I don't know if the Youth has even a single line of dialogue in the present day? For a story that, you'd assume, would be about this Park Grandpa missing hanging out with this kid and Youth becoming more closed-off and jaded in the intervening decade, there's almost no effort put into dramatizing that plotline. Park Grandpa's just like The Dog Died And You Got Sad and the Youth nods and it's like... it's like they pulled a synopsis down off of a whiteboard and never filled it in with dialogue or emotion. The relationship between Park Grandpa and Youth never really feels like anything other than a framework for a more interesting story, and it's a bummer that it got such a short-shrift. It's the most perfunctory monster plot this show has done yet, and I'm crossing my fingers that it's the most perfunctory monster plot it'll ever do.

It definitely feels like all the effort was put on the Ryutaros story, and that's... like, I get why they did it, it's a brand-new main cast member with a mysterious backstory and a fun new energy, but it never really feels like it connects to the rest of the episode. There's a sort of vague connection with people bonding over animals, I guess, but the Park Grandpa/Youth relationship never really seems to mirror what's going on with Ryu and the rest of the DenLiner team. He's a fun character, with his dancy movements and inability to understand everyone's anger, but his story just floats in an episode that lacks much connective tissue.

And that's the big problem with these two episodes: I don't know what they're about. I know what happens in them, and the plot has some clever beats (no pun intended), but... like, take the Airi plot, for example. She wanders off in Episode 13, and we don't catch up with her until the second to last scene in 14. What did she remember? Why did she go to that observation deck? What's the significance of that watch? No answers to any of those questions whatsoever, which means there's really nothing to tie it in with the rest of the episode. The scene literally starts with Ryotaro standing up and racing off because he forgot to finish looking for Airi! It's just one more thing that happens in this story without ever feeling like it's there for a narrative reason. It's just a bunch of things happening, most of which are entertaining in the moment, without having a reason to happen. Even Ryutaros appearing after being inside Ryotaro for weeks is chalked up to He Just Felt Like It!

So, yeah. Not a fan of how lazy the writing was for this story. Too many shrugs of plotlines, too many scenes that felt like the director had to keep adding non-dialogue shots to fill up the runtime, too many times my mind wandered while I watched it because I couldn't invest enough in what was happening. Not a great couple episodes for me.



THE BAGGAGE CAR

-Not to keep shitting on this episode, but having Airi remember something huge, and then having her forget it by the end of the story so the audience is kept in the dark is such a dick move. Such a bait and switch. Just lazy, lazy writing.

-Best scene in the entire story was probably Momo giving a Team Imagin pep-talk that devolved into insults and recriminations. It's that mix of teamwork and simmering resentments that is maybe why I love watching these characters hang out. For all the flaws in this story, the stuff with Momo, Ura, and Kin always worked.