[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 29 - “A SISTER, A DOCTOR, AND THE TRUTH ABOUT ANKH”



After what felt like a million years of watching all of the various 40th Anniversary celebration media – two episodes, 49 Net Movies, and one lackluster feature film – we are now back to the serialized storytelling that we love.

It’s an episode that acts as a minor amount of recap, in that we’re hitting nearly every single viable subplot that was left hanging at the end of 26. We’re checking in with Eiji’s concerns, Maki’s backstory, Kazari’s casual endgame, Kougami’s warnings, Gotou’s new Status Quotou, and the duality of Ankh. I think the only thing that goes unremarked upon is Date’s mysterious backstory? Short of that, we’re catching up with the many, many gears that are turning inside this show’s season plot.

In a series that’s often explicitly about how desires don’t exist in a vacuum – how they interact with one another, oppose one another, and beget new desires by the reaction – it’s crucial that there be a lot of antagonists (and protagonists!) who all want slightly different things. That’s just good thematic storytelling, where the shape of the story is helping to tell the story. But it also means this show never lacks for an inciting incident, or a new quandary to vex our heroes.

Like, Birth and OOO basically accomplish nothing this episode? Birth, in general, is a reactive force, but even Team OOO is running around like a Chicken Yummy with its head cut off, flung from one Greeed sighting to the next. It’s an episode all about how the villains are not just sitting around waiting to spring a scheme on the heroes – Kazari, Maki, and Ankh Lost are pursuing their own goals around the actions of the heroes, not because of or in spite of them. There’re a million threads in this one episode, and they’re all pretty compelling.

It’s really the best second-half storytelling in the franchise. There’re any number of shows that need to find a new level when the show comes back from a movie break, or need to introduce new threats to be vanquished. While this episode nominally does that – Ankh Lost is, for all intents and purposes, the big new threat for the quarter – it never feels like it comes out of thin air, and it never feels like the totality of the storytelling options. This thing could’ve just been about Kazari’s reluctance to finish his form, or Maki’s fight against his own Yummy, or Gotou scarfing down a birthday cake as Satonaka's new assistant (!!!), and the episode would’ve felt no worse off for it. Adding in Ankh Lost feels motivated by 26 episodes of Ankh’s backstory, not some weird new menace that dropped out of the sky. This is a show that spent so much time creating a nice stew of different plot ingredients, and now it can ladle them out in whatever portions it wants.

That said! A stuffed episode of a half-dozen barely-intersecting plot threads doesn’t exactly allow any one of them to feel like a lot to talk about. They each get a scene, maybe a scene and a half, and then we’re off to the next thing. It makes for a fun episode of non-stop intrigue, but not much that feels especially evocative. It’s hard to find much to relate to in this episode, but it’s enormously fun to have watched it. Very happy to be back in a mode where plot and character matter again!