[Fish Sandwich]

(Fish Sandwich also watched Kamen Rider Zi-O - EP10)

I don't have as much of a problem with how this episode wraps up this story as Die did. As my post from when it was new can attest to, I was more pleasantly surprised to see Geiz didn't just brush it off at the end than I was upset that was all that happened. Like, it goes back to not being that impressed by the first half, I guess, but I was entirely prepared for this plot to just have some insanely dumb and contrived way to get things back to the status quo, and it was actually really, really cool to have the show's dynamic thrown off like this.

Shirakura sure had his fun roasting the storytelling decisions here in the .5 episode, but Nobuhiro Mouri's crazy vision for Zi-O has an appeal all its own, and hey, it's not like Shimoyama nailed his first script for the show either, right? The two of them basically took turns writing Zi-O in big uninterrupted chunks, so you'll get to see Mouri take another crack at things right away, Die. And then he'll take a few more cracks, while he's at it. It's pretty unusual for a Rider show to have a "guest" writer who gets a huge group of episodes right in a row, and that made this an interesting stretch of Zi-O. Like, Mouri is a guest writer, yes, but he's essentially a guest main writer, considering his first batch of episodes is identical in size to the actual main writer's.

(On an unrelated note, OOO still got what is by far my favorite Rider Armor. Zi-O's basic form changes never left the biggest impact on me, overall, but the sheer creativity of the super robot combination of animals, that gloriously silly spin on the chest logo, and just how bright it is make the OOO armor stand out from the crowd.)