[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OUTSIDERS EPISODE 0 - “THE END OF GENMS AND THE START OF THE OPERATION”



It’s a prelude, basically, so I don’t want to ascribe too much significance to anything it’s doing – this is all basically to introduce the core (?) cast of Kuroto, Dan, Mari, and the Arch Orphenoch. We are table-setting, and not much more.

Even by those enforced lower-standards, I didn’t think too much of this. Tonally, it can’t make up its mind as to whether we should be seeing this through the manic lens of Kuroto, or the now-inexplicable straight man routine of Gai (seriously, Gai is the Tethered To Reality voice of reason now!), so the episode just does both across different scenes. I’m not saying you can’t have jokes inside a serious action story, or vice versa, but you kind of can’t do Kuroto’s cartoon character in a 10-minute special unless that’s all you do. To try and land a scene of Kurotobot powering down and pulling his framed photo of his dad out of his jacket like it's a mallet from a pants pocket, and then be like Here Are The Serious Stakes with Gai and the Ark… man, get out of here with that. Pick a lane, Outsiders!

Beyond that, I can’t say I’m immune to the baser pleasures of a TTFC mini-series; namely, constant and barely-defined fan service. I mean, Mari! In two roles! Plus the Delta suit, making two times that lady got to dub in a voice for a fight scene in the last three years! Mari’s here to loop in Smart Brain and the Arch Orphnoch to the previous Gai/Genm stuff, but the reasoning behind Smart Queen looking like Mari feels unbelievably hand-wavey – I think a villain-centric mini can do a little better than Because They’re Bad as a motivation for a scheme – and very much like someone decided after the fact that they’d rather that actor just play Mari instead. I’m not gonna crab too much, since I recently went on record as saying that Mari is as big a part of 555 as any other character to me, but it’s sort of a narrative cul-de-sac.

Fight was good, though! There’s only the one, and it’s a pretty straight-forward one-on-one brawl between Delta and Genm Musou, but it’s stylish and visceral enough for this thing’s abbreviated runtime and limited scope. Delta’s meant to be a terrifying harbinger of doom, so seeing Kuroto gleefully demolish it in record time is a nice statement of where these characters are at, power-wise.

Still, not much to rave about here. There’s the YMMV aspect of famous faces returning, but Zein is relentlessly vague, and there’s basically no one here to root for; even in a cast of monsters, I’d like there to be someone worthy of my fervor. Nominally Gai, but BOY does he not get much to do besides be ineffectual. We’ll see if anyone steps up in the next episode!

(Not counting, of course, the climactic appearance of a cackling Hiromu Takahashi, the Ticking Time Bomb of New Japan Pro-Wrestling himself! I knew he was in this, and I can’t tell you how happy that stunt casting makes me. Hiromu’s a legend in pro-wrestling, and it’s going to be fun for me to see if they give him space to get weird. Closing shot is a good sign, though!)