[Switchblade]

I've always been in the camp that enjoyed W's finale. This wasn't a show that was designed to be a tragedy; it was meant to be a show about two detectives whose skills combine together to solve mysteries and fight monsters. It wouldn't feel right to me to end on a note where one is dead and the other is struggling to get by without him (or where both are dead, as the teaser at the end of 48 wants you to think may happen). Does it rob some of the pathos from 48 when Philip comes back 15 minutes into 49? Yeah. Does it still feel good to see him after watching Shotaro still having trouble remembering he's gone after a year of in-universe time? Hell yeah. If I want a beautiful tragedy, I'll watch Blade. That's not what I'm here for with W.

Now, in response to your final thoughts, I generally agree. Sometimes a premise works better for episodic storytelling than serialized and W is absolutely one of those. It's basically the Kamen Rider version of a procedural: each fortnight brings a new case with a new client and a new monster. And it works really well here. It works well in tokusatsu in general; Sentai, Ultraman, and Showa era Rider were all built on episodic done-in-ones with the occasional two-parter to shake things up. The Heisei era really revolutionized things by doing more ongoing plot threads and character arcs, which sometimes leads to the assumption that every Rider show needs these, and that view is... complicated.

I absolutely get tired of Kamen Rider just doing episodic stuff. There's years of posts on this site of me bemoaning "monster of the fortnight" story structure, especially in early Drive threads. I think it's a format that works sometimes, but I also like it when shows feel like there's a more serialized plot. I think W is a place where the episodic structure works great because it's baked into the premise. I think it gets frustrating when we don't have any variation from that, which is where we get into my own complicated thoughts on W's legacy.

I love Kamen Rider W. It's been one of my top five - probably top three - Rider shows since it aired and this rewatch has done nothing to change that. Like Die said, it is a show about vibes and those vibes are immaculate. It's also something that led to what I've always felt was the stagnation of the Neo Heisei era. W took the format pioneered by Den-O and perfected it: episodic two-part arcs, main Rider with a non-human partner, generally lighthearted tone where few people get seriously hurt, serious vs. goofball dynamic with the secondary Rider, etc. It did all of this and was a huge success, which led to the next three years being minor iterations on that same set-up to steadily diminishing returns (any time this topic comes up I always think back to this post I made back in 2012). None of this diminishes W as a show on its own, but it is something that I can't fully divorce from it.