[Fish Sandwich]

It's episodes like this that tempt me to stop keeping these posts snack-sized.

Like... well, really like basically every episode so far, there's always going to be so many things that don't end up getting a mention from me here, so just to be clear -- it's not that I don't believe those things warrant mentioning. I would love to make the time every week for every last wonderful detail as small as the hilarious creaking door sounds as Gavv makes his awkward entrance into the fight scene here.

Heck, this week, not only is that fight scene a very elaborate and lengthy sequence with multiple phases of increasingly chocolatey goodness, living up to that episode title in at least two different ways (double the chocolate Riders; double the chocolate guns!), we even get a short appetizer fight scene at the start carrying over from last week's ending. Both of them go real hard! Sugihara's typical knack for video game style action results in both a boss character that leaves quite the first impression in a fairly short scene, and an 80's action movie warehouse shootout that escalates to absurd levels the longer it goes on. Or hey, on the note of things escalating absurdly, how about the joke where the fun idea of portraying Shouma and Hanto's inner thoughts the way these last two episodes have has the payoff at the end where it turns out they aren't as internal as previously thought?

Or just maybe, on the note of Sachika involving herself in the drama of our two Riders, I could talk about Sachika, who is the part of the episode I somehow want to single out above ALL that other stuff.

The point of this two-part story was largely to flesh her character out, after all, and I found myself more impressed by how that was accomplished than by all the other things I was so impressed with. I think it's because it's all surprisingly subtle? I like that it focused more on building out from what we already know about her than it did on introducing any previously unknown facet of her character. Sachika's entire thing in the show so far has been being extremely upbeat and wanting people to be happy, and just by putting her in a situation where her usual approach to that doesn't work, the show is able to very quickly and elegantly get at some of the flavor underneath her mask, which I'm reasonably convinced was meant to be the sorta hidden true meaning to last episode's title.

Because Sachika is human, after all, so obviously she's going to feel more than just one way all the time. She'll get angry at how she's being treated; she'll get worried she isn't good enough; she'll try and avoid confronting the issue; she'll try to avoid burdening others with any of that stuff; she'll get scared working up the courage to speak out; and in the end, she'll get even more angry at how unfairly someone *else* is being treated, because she's still ultimately the same Sachika we've always known -- the one who'll get a big hero moment of telling a monster off, because it's not for no reason that Shouma looks up to her.