[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER W EPISODE 46 - “WHAT K DEMANDS – THE LAST SUPPER”



Not… not great? Not a great episode?

It’s anticlimactic, which shouldn’t’ve come as a surprise, considering there are three more episodes left to go in this series. But this is the end for Ryuube, and the Museum, and it’s all sort of rushed and unfulfilling. The Museum side of things is just Wakana and Ryuube, and Wakana doesn’t participate in the battle at all. The Terror Dopant has a fistfight with Double, and loses like they trotted out the Terror suit for a background fight at the quarry in a crossover film. (It’s, like, under a minute.) The overall plan was just Wakana Will Be A God Somehow, and it’s as vague in its aspirations as the Gathering Data phase of dispensing Gaia Memories was. None of it really comes across as worth 45 episodes of build-up, and it somehow carries less weight than several of the Dopant Dilemmas.

There’s some meat on this thing, largely from how irredeemable the Sonozakis ended up being. (Shotaro’s like Maybe There Was Some Humanity To Ryuube, a scene after he’s gleefully immolating himself while screaming that he regrets nothing he did.) Philip needs to save his family, but even after destroying their Gaia Memories, there’s nothing to celebrate. The only thing that Philip can depend on is Shotaro, and Shotaro is the only one who treats him like a human being. The emphasis of that bond – yet another invocation of Riding With The Devil – is where this episode finds whatever footing it can. It’s good, for that stuff.

And yet… boy, I laughed a lot in the first half of this episode. Whoever decided that Shotaro’s portrayal of bone-deep fear and trauma should be expressed by him screaming like a lunatic at phones and Makura? I would really have gone a different way with it. It cracked me up, every single time, and I feel like that’s not the intended response from the audience. Going out on a limb here. It sabotages at least half of this story, because it never once feels like it’s an observed character trait or relatable human experience, it’s just ACTING as loud as possible. We’ve gone from Shotaro Will Have To Face His Fears all the way to Shotaro Needs To Be Committed Forever with absolutely zero progression. It gets the point across that Shotaro is going to be no help to anyone, sure, but it is relentlessly funny to watch. Again, I might’ve suggested portraying it a different way!

This one was basically a miss for me. All that time spent getting us to a confrontation between Double and the Museum, and it’s Double pushing the Terror suit around by a lake while Accel flies through the air, shooting a CG creature from mythology. It feels… hollow, I guess. Like it didn’t really cost our heroes anything, which is sort of the opposite of how you want such a longstanding foe’s demise to feel. Ryuube’s plan was the usual Power For The Sake Of Power thing, and the final moments of it were as much of a shrug as the rest of his year-long stratagem. If it had some minor pathos for being so much trauma for such a pointless goal, I guess that’s something. Beyond that, let’s see where the final three go.

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DIE-A MEMORIES



-Shotaro’s various looks of fear throughout the first half of this episode – I can’t decide if they’re his worst acting (for drama) or his best acting (for humor). Unforgettable, though, either way.

-Boy, it is all coming back to me, the feeling of not liking how this show ended. If memory serves, we’ve got a Foundation X two-parter that never grabbed me emotionally, and a Wakana finale that I think got something out of me, but this Museum two-parter… ugh. What a fumble.

-Shroud would not miss a dinner where could walk out on her family all over again.