[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 36 - “A BROKEN DREAM, A BODY, AND THE RETURN OF THE GREEED”



Tough one! Felt kind of underwhelming?

It’s not bad, to be clear. There’s a nice tension throughout, and a bunch of fun escalations of the series-long plot, both small and large. (My favorite little touch was that the Purple Medals inside Eiji allow him to sense the presence of an active Yummy, just like Ankh can. He’s steadily becoming a Greeed, and this is a neat way to signify it.) It’s an episode that reintroduces Mezool and Gamel into the mix, while setting Uva back at the same time. More than anything, it’s an episode that allows Eiji to control PuToTyra from start to finish, allowing him to combat three Greeed at once. Big episode! Lots of important stuff happening!

It just meant that, for me at least, the whole Unicorn Yummy plot never really went anywhere. There’s a little bit of Eiji talking about how a dream needs to be nurtured and cared for in a longer timeline than a desire, but this was kind of never supposed to be an Eiji plot? It was a Hina plot, and tangentially a Shingo plot, but then none of that really matters at the end. Hina decides to forego her dream in order to guard over Shingo, just like she did before she was hit by the Unicorn Yummy. Shingo’s still more or less comatose the whole time, so Ankh just takes his body back. (It even seems like Hina got her dream back? Maybe? It’s unclear!) The consequences of everything feel ephemeral, and the status quo seems to be right back to where we were at the end of 34, as far as the trio of Eiji, Ankh, and Hina are concerned.

The episode suffers from a lack of focus, if I had to diagnose a single cause to how much of a shrug several of these plotlines ended up as. There’s a bunch of momentum heading into this episode from the end of 35, but then the Greeed stuff dominates this episode in a way that renders everything else rushed and thin. (I sort of can’t believe we had a story where Shingo wakes up and they didn’t think to write one dialogue scene between him and Hina?) While saving Hina from dreamless slumber is a motivation for Eiji, it kind of immediately stops being a story that Hina can actively participate in, and that’s such a bummer. There’s nothing wrong with doing a story that continues to drill into Eiji’s lack of obvious motivation, but it sucks to pivot from a (rare!) Hina story in order to accommodate it. Add to that another Date/Gotou subplot that neither requires any of the other cast members nor causes any complications for them, and you’ve got a two-parter that feels like it accomplishes a bunch of Important Things without generating a compelling enough story to do it.

But, to reiterate: It’s not bad! The action continues to be super solid – we get an OOO/Birth fight versus 3 Greeed and a Yummy for the climax – and the reconstituted Greeed family is a great cliffhanger to go out on. I just… it doesn’t feel like the Dream story really gets a chance to go anywhere? And the Date stuff just gets stated, nothing else? And Ankh’s eviction from Shingo is rescinded by Ankh saying I Do What I Want? I don’t know. I kind of wanted more about Hina than the show wanted to give me, I guess. Hard to believe that she was more integral to the Shocker goof-off two-parter than this one!