[Fish Sandwich]

It never ceases to astonish me that material this clever and skillfully executed is just baseline quality for Zenkaiger, and I'm really happy about that, because I don't ever want to take for granted how special this show is.

The ability it has to commit to a concept is second to none, for starters. When Zenkaiger picks an episode theme, it rolls with it as hard as possible, taking things to whatever weird extremes it can think of, and with scripts as imaginative as Koumura keeps turning out, it can think of a whole lot! This episode gets all that it possibly can out of its art-centric premise, from things as small as the monster calling the mooks his "assistants", all the way to the climax that pulls out all the stops to have half the team fighting the bad guys as pictures. This one is maybe a particularly excellent example of Zenkaiger's precise control over its own madness, because the gradual escalation of the manga-themed gags is pretty much perfect, with things getting more and more elaborate (i.e. crazier and thus more fun) as the episode progresses. I'm seriously blown away here; I say it basically every week, but this was an utter delight.

And that's kinda only half the story, because, well, the story is rather well constructed in its own right. I think this one did a great job taking at least a moment or two to give a ton of different things some attention. Right from the first scene, I appreciate being explicitly shown that, yes, the team is in fact still looking for Kaito's mom in their spare time, which is simply a nice way to emphasize the change in status quo, versus having it be all offscreen until it's relevant to the plot again. But then, it also is kinda relevant to the plot, as this episode spends a lot of time rubbing in how much Zox and his family have softened towards the Zenkaigers by this point. I mean, he's having sleepovers at their house while Flint is acting as their personal chauffer around the multiverse – a lot of distance closed between these two groups somewhere along the line! Combined with the silly yet endearing new angle to Zox that he once stole a mountain of comic art from the comic art world just for the sake of it, only to end up a huge fan once he actually read it, and you've got a plot that makes our favorite world-hopping pirates seem downright cuddly. This far into the show, it feels pretty natural too, so I'm definitely not complaining.

Plus, beyond even that, there's still time for Vroom to his own endearingly dorky self, and a somewhat surprising appearance by Stacaesar. I say "surprising" because I'm pretty sure this is the first ever time Stacey's gotten involved with the action in an episode that didn't revolve around him to some degree. He's not a major force in the narrative, he isn't a particularly huge threat, and his arc doesn't progress at all. This sort of puts a damper on the great rhythm the show has had with Stacey where it's always a huge deal when he goes into battle... but then, I'm almost positive he's here entirely because they didn't want to pass up the opportunity to have a Stacey VS Kaito fight while Kaito is a piece of paper, and honestly? I can't blame 'em for making that choice. It is a deeply amusing confrontation, whether it has dramatic weight or not. Stellar episode all around.

(Also, seeing some of those drawings of Magine made me realize all those rounded shapes make her look the most like a character Ishinomori would've designed, and suddenly I have one more thing to love about Magine!)