[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER REVICE EPISODE 35 - “THE UNKNOWN THREAT AND ROAD HUMANITY MUST TRAVEL”



It is a bold strategy to start an episode with a villain belittling the effectiveness of our heroes, and end the same episode with the villain being proven correct. It’s not… y’know, it’s not great, as far as watching these episodes to see heroes overcome insane odds and cleverly defeat terrifying threats goes. On that level? Sort of a miss. But its commitment to making our entire group of Kamen Riders look like ineffectual chumps is actually kind of neat!

I liked how much this episode nailed down its conception of Daiji as a guy whose inflexibility and righteousness is starting to become a drawback. He’s destroyed the part of himself that doubted himself, and now he’s a guy fighting to retain the honor of an organization that never did anything good for anyone. He’s always saying he’s going to get Fenix “back to what it was”, and it’s all anyone else – myself included – can do not to laugh in his face. Fenix was comically inept until it was hopelessly corrupt. There’s nothing in it to save, if there ever was. But Daiji lacks the flexibility and self-esteem to abandon the literal sinking ship of Fenix. Ikki’s in a story about Vice needing to look past a label that doesn’t apply to him in order to see the strength of his uniqueness, and here’s Daiji, clinging to his honor and duty when the guy who founded Fenix is laughing at his despair. Daiji’s so desperate to make things conform to his own sense of right and wrong – with Fenix being Right – that he can’t see how hollow and pointless those labels have become. He’s trapped himself in his own righteousness.

Alongside that, the whole Akaishi Hypes Giff battle was pretty entertaining, if only for how over-the-top Akaishi’s cowardly plea for humanity’s capitulation was. (In much the same way that Fenix’s military power and reach seems to ebb and flow alongside the budget for an episode, I sort of don’t understand its political power? How is Akaishi given carte blanche to commandeer live TV and beg all of Japan to surrender their free will to a mute deity? Seems like there should be someone in the Diet that’s like Could You Run That By Us First.) Akaishi has, appropriately, zero respect for the transparent stratagems of the Igarashi family, and he’s clearly having a blast watching Daiji get impotently apoplectic as the trap is sprung. It’s a dumb plan from Daiji, and it probably took Akaishi about eight entire seconds to figure out how to spin it in his favor.

It sort of helps the team that Hikaru shows up as Over Demons, and all of this plotline felt undercooked even by Weekend standards. Hikaru has never felt like anything other than a distraction in the Sakura/Hana storyline, so him proving his worth by taking two good suits and turning them into one okay suit… who was asking for this? This is a real Mihara Is The New Delta-level shrug of a plot, where the least-relevant character becomes the powerful new Rider. I’d rather it be Tamaki! Or Buu! Or Mom Igarashi! Hikaru is a weird imposition, and now I’m going to have to begrudgingly pay attention to him. I even had to learn his name this episode! That sucks!

All that said, I did enjoy this weird episode of Hiromi-esque failure and fumbling. I like the way Daiji’s decision to execute Kagerou – a thing I never enjoyed or agreed with – is now exposed as an error with dire ramifications for the entire world. We’ve got no real avenue to fight the evil running rampant, and the only glimmer of hope is that a group of revolutionaries with a troublingly large budget for gaming chairs and fishnet can find a way to emerge from a shadowy basement and protect humanity. I’m not feeling great about those odds, but I’m feeling pretty good about this show.