[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS FINAL MISSION - “ETERNAL BONDS”



Jin’s sacrifice… I don’t know. I don’t know!

I mean, I get it. Jin’s the guy that got dragged into hyperspace against his will 13 years ago to save the world, and now he’s the guy begging to let himself be sacrificed to save the world. Similarly, the Busters are once again having to make the hard call to put the safety of the world above their own desires, specifically to make sure no one has to go through what they did as kids, so they have to let Jin do this. It’s not Hiromu recklessly risking his own life, it’s Jin making sure that everyone is involved with this decision. (That puts him one up on Hiromu’s dad!) It’s a team decision, which is crucial for this show’s treatise on teamwork.

But.

It’s a worse story for me, compared to the Christmas episodes. That one has a character’s sacrifice obviated by his friends refusal to participate in it, forcing him to let them shoulder his burden, rather than the other way around. That one’s a sweeter story for being about the value of a life, rather than the value of a death. This one’s a story of how hard decisions become easier to deal with when you make them as a group – the support of others as a unit, rather than being able to lean on others for support. I just… I sort of like that less.

However.

This one… it’s sort of beautiful, though, in its centering of grief, and on letting someone go. The idea that everyone you love will be around forever… that’s what this show is sort of pushing against, just from its basic premise. The previous two big Messiah stories were about the Busters finally letting their parents go, and then about understanding that their lives are a gift, so maybe it’s only right for the third one to be about letting their friends decide what to do with that gift. It’s a nicely completed circle.

Still.

It creates this weird tension in the episode for me, where Jin’s noble sacrifice seems perpendicular to the larger story of how our imperfections require us to depend on others, and that dependence creates a power bigger than any one person and/or Avatar – but then that bond couldn’t keep Jin from deleting himself to save Hiromu. It’s support and caring for each other and community but now there’s one less of them. It feels like a messier story, and not in a way I liked.

Except.

I did like this one. Quite a bit, actually. Jin’s scene of begging the team to let him lay down his life to save the world was exquisite, nailing the tricky relationships Jin had with the whole cast in just a few precisely applied lines. (And tears! Tears from the cast! Tears from me when Jin brought up Yoko’s mom!) The battle against Enter at the end was the perfect Smug Hero vibes, the cast chuckling at how every one of Enter’s schemes had just been negated without him realizing it. The unified Volcanick Attack! Epic! It’s a robust episode of victory, with a single sour note of failure.

I’ll probably care less about the Jin stuff in a little bit. It’s got its reasons to be there, and I find it harder to articulate why it should’ve been excluded than why it deserves to stay in. But, man. Felt like they needed a different option for this episode.



IT’S TIME FOR Specialest Buster!

Seriously, that Volcanick All Busters Attack, man. So great, the embodiment of teamwork and family defeating isolation and selfishness. What a way to finally end the threat of the Vagras.