[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O EPISODE 43 - "SOMETHING MISSING”




Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidn't like.

The main problem with doing any time travel story, especially one that takes a year to tell, is that you really need to clarify what's happening. Like, Doctor Who gets ragged on for some dumb companion characters, but you 1000% need someone who can ask what the hell is going on in the story. There's a half-dozen things going on in this series, with singularity points and train lines and paradoxes and rewritten memories and etc and etc, but I more or less can't understand the stakes of just about any of them. Everything is in flux, constantly. There're plenty of solid emotional stakes, so there's still things to invest in on that level. I care about Ryotaro, and Momo, and Yuuto, and all the rest. How they feel about a story can save it more often than not. But the plot stakes are always suspect, always nebulous.

The main problem with this story is that not only do I not really have a handle on what the hell is happening, I also don't have a handle on why Ryotaro is behaving the way he is. It makes for a story that I don't get on a plot level, and I don't buy on an emotional level.

Like, one of the big things that Owner tries to explain (it is maybe this show's achilles heel that most of the timeline exposition comes from the character least interested in nailing down details) is that there's suspicion regarding Sakurai's importance to the plot. I mostly didn't understand a word of how they were getting at this (god bless the subbing team who had to translate this nonsense), but the end result is that Owner suggests that maybe it's not that Ryotaro is the only one who remembers Sakurai, but that Ryotaro's memories of Sakurai are the fake ones.

This is an absolutely preposterous theory. It's impossible to even briefly entertain, because there have been at least two characters besides Ryotaro who remember Sakurai, by name. (Ryotaro's nostalgia-addicted school chum and the evil banker both mention Sakurai's relationship with Airi. It's even a plot point when the school chum forgets it later!) The fact that neither person is immediately brought up to refute this theory is frustrating, because it means the show isn't paying attention to the details, or that they can't explain their dilemma in a clear and concise way. Either they're bad at the plot or bad at explaining the plot, and I'm not thrilled with either of those possibilities.

The emotional stakes for this one are way worse, and way more disappointing.

Basically, Kai shows up to remind Ryotaro that he's fighting to keep the Imagin's future from existing. Except, his closest friends are four imagination monsters from that future. If Ryotaro defeats Kai, then Momo and all the rest will disappear.

There are so many problems with the way this story is told after that.

First, we were already told about these stakes from the Imagin weeks ago. Not this specific avenue of their destruction, but the idea that their time was running out is not even close to a new idea. It's new to Ryotaro, but making it a huge turn in this episode weeks after the audience started to deal with it feels like Ryotaro is slow on the uptake. It's asking viewers to be as shocked and as shook as Ryotaro, when he's pretty much the only character who hadn't figured this out.

Second, the conundrum Ryotaro has (use the Imagin to destroy their own future or save their future by dooming humanity) is unbelievably cliched and not terribly compelling. Are we expecting Ryotaro to ride a magical time train with his good friends while all of humanity is obliterated by an army of imagination monsters? Is that supposed to be a realistic decision he has to make? I don't want to make a Kobayashi Maru joke here, because it's not just something that crops up in her stories. It's baked into the formula of Kamen Rider. Kamen Rider is, for fifty years now, about using evil to fight for good. That usually necessitates a story where the hero deals with the possibility that defeating evil will leave him with nothing to fight with. It's to this show's credit that it's not power that Ryotaro will lose but friendship, but this is still a disappointingly standard plot point (that it is tough to ever make work) with two startlingly unequal scenarios for the hero to choose from.

Third, in typical Impossible Decision fashion, the hero opts to make no choice, and so we get a long-ass fight scene of Ryotaro getting beaten up. He won't fight with the powers of the Imagin, but he can't survive without them. It's a non-solution that's especially bizarre because it's not like Ryotaro stopped fighting, he just stopped fighting with his friends. It doesn't make any sense. It's a decision that's impossible to understand (he's more or less opting for suicide?!) and leads to literally everyone on the show yelling at him to explain himself. It's meant to be frustrating, but it is such prolonged frustration that I wanted to turn the episode off.

Finally, after Ryotaro gets beaten up because he won't fight with the Imagin and he won't come up with a way to win without them, we get the big emotional standoff at the end between Momo and Ryotaro. Momo is the voice of the audience, furious at Ryotaro for tanking an easy fight because he wouldn't fight with his friends. Ryotaro's response is We Aren't Friends Anymore, which is probably supposed to be some extra-shocking moment in an episode that's probably supposed to feel filled with shocks. Instead, it felt tone-deaf and out-of-character to a degree I'd've never thought a show forty-three episodes in could manage. It makes Ryotaro the bad guy in what's either a misguided tough-love decision, or a full-on psychotic break.

I'd probably be more forgiving of the latter, since we literally just did a story where Ryotaro showed Yuuto the power of connections and the stupidity of pushing away the people you care for. Like, it was the end of the last goddamn episode. So to follow that up with Ryotaro saying that he's Not Here To Make Friends... dumb. Incredibly dumb.

And that's pretty much the whole episode for me. Incredibly dumb. I barely understood what was happening in the plot, and I hated what the main character was doing in reaction to that plot. Ryotaro is at his most unlikeable in this episode, and it made this my least-favorite episode of Den-O. Just a massively disappointing experience to watch this one.



THE BAGGAGE CAR

-So, one of the big reasons I don't speculate on Kamen Rider cliffhangers is so I don't get my heart set on any one theory. As such, I found the reveal of the God Spoons to be a pretty funny subversion. If you went out of last episode expecting some massive info dump or a cool new power-up, you were probably a little less amused! I can only imagine how much more I'd've disliked this episode had that been the case for me.

-However. It seems as though the show is hinting that the Pocketwatchman isn't Sakurai from the future, but Ryotaro from the future. Like Kai's reaction, it's an interesting twist, but I don't really know what to make of it.

-Even Kai is lame in this one! His whole standoff with Ryotaro is shot in a really mediocre fashion (check how shaky the camera move is as Kai enters the frame), and his taunts are just generic Sneering Villain bullshit. There's no spark to his role in this story. Everything but that one Yuuto/Deneb scene let me down!