[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 14 - “PRIDE, SURGERY, AND SECRETS”



ONII-CHAN:
We’ve got three characters dealing with Pride this week – five, if you count the two cats! – and I don’t know that I loved any particular outcome.

Gotou comes out the best, weirdly enough. (I’m mostly bummed we didn’t get to see him filling in more for Satonaka. Everything with the Kougami Foundation was comedy gold this story! The cutaway to her enjoying spicy food is one of my favorite Kamen Rider things of all-time!) It’s relatively brief, but I liked how the show makes a solid case for Kougami’s advice, that Gotou’s pride is getting in the way of his goals, by mostly just pointing out that Gotou’s inability to stay on the same page as everyone else is only getting him knocked out by Ankh and playing second fiddle to a vagabond. But then he’s like, No, It’s The Rest Of The Cast Who Are Wrong, and just rolls up to shoot a shotgun around the heroes like nothing ever happened. It’s a commitment to Gotou’s current prickly irrelevance that I actually sort of love.

Ankh’s story… I mean, what’s even going on here? His departure from Shingo doesn’t really help him in any clear way – it only puts him at risk of being mauled by an adorable corgi while the non-stop cry of ONII-CHAN acts as the only discernible soundtrack to this episode. (Hina probably said it an infinite amount of times, at a minimum. I can still hear her saying it. I will always hear her saying it.) It’s mostly just Ankh throwing a tantrum, and I can’t articulate anything that changed in the core dynamic to bring him back. Like, Eiji begged Ankh to come back, but I feel like he’s done that before? It’s weird. It all seems both charmingly minor – I do actually like that the whole story is just Ankh being a pissy little baby about nothing in particular – and also not really about much that ties into the two-parter. It’s just Ankh being Ankh, but at a slighter higher volume?

ONII-CHAN:
Which just leaves Doctor Tamura, and, man, I did not like this plot!

The whole thing ends up being about her dad/boss trying to get her to feel the fear of losing a patient, in order to make her care more about saving them. This is a vaguely good thing – I like empathy! But, man, I do not think it’s good for a surgeon to be scared that she’s going to fail and kill her patient! (The hospital specifically has rules against family members operating on each other, which tells me that an emotional distance between doctor and patient is sort of considered a good thing?) We never got a sense of Tamura being sloppy or overconfident before, either. The two-parter starts with us being told a) she’s incredibly good at being a surgeon, b) she’s very happy being a surgeon, and c) she’s gotten some acclaim for being a good surgeon. I feel like all of that is good enough for a surgeon? I don’t think she needs to be scared she’ll fail and kill someone? I feel like that sort of terror would actually being counterproductive in a surgeon?

It’s super weird. I don’t think the show did any work making her seem like she was haphazard with her patients’ lives pre-Yummy, and I don’t think Benching Her Indefinitely was proving any sort of point about internalizing the fear of losing a patient. (Boss Dad is right that this is all his fault! Bad boss! Bad dad!) It’s a lesson that’s super useful in general, and worth telling on a show about people letting their desires blind them to their weaknesses, but none of the setup for this two-parter really establishes what this conclusion is trying to tell us. It’s like the heartwarming ending was supposed to be attached to a completely different previous episode.

ONII-CHAN:
Meanwhile, so many things are happening in secret!

As Ankh is dealing with Kazari and his Yummy, the rest of the Greeed have just, like, been effectively farming Cell Medals completely undetected. I like that they aren’t just waiting for their turn in the story to come around, you know? Uva distracted Ankh and Kazari (minimally, but still) while Mezool spawned Yummies off of some rich guy’s embezzlement. It’s not a flashy plot, which is why it’s the fourth-string one, but I like that it lets the other villains move forward independent of the heroes. Mezool and the gang didn’t take a week off just ‘cause it was Kazari’s turn!

And then there’s our end-of-episode stinger, teasing the imminent -slash- currently in theaters debut of Kamen Rider Birth. Feels a little gratuitous to just toss it in at the very end when we didn’t spend any other time this episode with Doctor Maki, but hey! We’ve got a goddamn movie and Secondary to promote! Don’t let a little thing like pride in storytelling get in the way of your desire to set up Q2!