[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 45 - “A SURPRISE ATTACK, PROTO-BIRTH, AND A DESIRE FOR LOVE”

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It is incredibly difficult to take the rest of the Greeed seriously at this point, and I’m glad that the show barely asks us to.

Ha ha, WHOOPS.

Naturally, not a single episode after I insultingly shrugged off the non-Ankh/Maki/Eiji Greeed as being one-note clowns that the series has largely outgrown, rendering their continued presence to be a distracting and flavorless sideshow to the more epic drama occurring outside and beyond them, this friggin’ show makes them epic and dramatic. I’d be mad, but I’ve actually never been happier to eat my words.

The secret to this episode’s melancholy success isn’t even really in the Mezool story that forms its climax, despite that whole sequence being tense and unrelenting. (The way 9-Medal Mezool just takes apart Proto-Birth and OOO – not through huge new flamboyant powers or CG trickery, but through just being faster and stronger – is one of the best fight scenes yet in this show. The two heroes genuinely look outclassed, while Mezool looks unstoppable.) While the Greeed are desperate to regain their Medals in order to bask in the echoes of humanity, Ankh’s petulance and frustration slowly gives way to a kind of grief and guilt, which is the fascinating story decision that ties this whole thing together.

Ankh’s desire isn’t for some unknowable feeling that he’s never had, like Mezool’s simulacrum of motherhood, it’s basically just to hold onto what he stumbled into over the last year. Ankh can playact as another one of the malevolent Greeed, but he’s so much more than that now. The things that Mezool wants – connection, love, a feeling of contentment that can only come with mutual affection – he had all that, and he gave it up because he feared losing it. That self-inflicted wound grows visibly larger as the other Greeed start to indulge their hunger, because Ankh knows that they aren’t even really tasting what he had. Their hunger is rapacious and infinite because it’s all they are, but they’ll never get the satisfaction he has from possessing a human body. His growing discontent with the fraud inherent in the Greeed ramps up nicely against both Mezool’s brief victorious indulgence, and Eiji’s inability to hide his own changes.

And that’s other nice thing about an episode where Eiji very quickly recedes to the background in order to better serve the larger Greeed cast – it’s a thread that’s sort of all about how Eiji recedes into the background? Eiji’s fervor to save someone like Shingo completely evaporates when his friends ask him to treat his own life with the same respect, and that’s such a fun story to tell as a parallel to the Greeed’s quest for the trappings of human engagement and sensation. Much like Ankh, Eiji has what they want, and he’s letting it all slip through his fingers. Eiji and Ankh are the exact same character in this episode, and they can’t seem to find a way to extricate themselves from their spiral without losing even more of themselves in the process.

This is a pretty perfect Final Four episode (and during March Madness, even!), since it lets the heroes and villains act as mirrors to each other, while also keeping anyone from getting what they want. It’s all fatalism and regret, which is a very fun place to be as a viewer.