[Fish Sandwich]

Much like how Lakia realizes he's been undervaluing Hanto here, I feel like this episode has shown me a level of potential for episodes of this show not written directly by Koumura that I didn't previously see.

I don't know if part of it is just the staff kind of gradually working out how to make guest writers and Gavv mix together smoothly (because it feels like every time it's happened, it's always been better than the last time?), but I was shocked how well this two-parter turned out. It's almost hard to believe this is Uchida's first go with these characters and this world.

First of all, structurally, I love the whole idea of a two-parter that pivots like this in the middle, so that each half is its own distinct thing while still being clearly connected. Rather than a broader consistent tone throughout, the first part played up the clash between Hanto and Lakia's personalities in as overtly comedic a fashion as possible. In a move that also strikes me as very true to Gavv's style for reasons I'm not sure I can articulate succinctly, it also avoided taking the easy way out, so to speak, by resolving the whole glued-together plot point without it bringing the two any closer emotionally by the end. That made room for this part to instead lean into more internal drama, with Valen and Vram's bond ultimately being strengthened solely by sharing their honest feelings and learning to see a bit of themselves in each other. That's the Gavv factor! It helps that it's a direct parallel to the also Kamihoriuchi-directed scene in 12 where Hanto and Shouma talked in a dark room about losing people they care about, but it feels like an appropriate and tasteful place to sort of rhyme that scene with a different combo of Riders to me, rather than a lack of creativity or anything.

Besides, there's more than enough going on elsewhere to keep things from being repetitive. A big one is the showstopper final fight with the Vrastum Gear duo, which pulled out every stop imaginable to provide a shining example of how much it can add to a fight scene for the location itself to play such an active tactile role. It seems like something that would break the bank, and indeed, they actually seem to have cleverly scrounged the funds together with tricks like setting it up right at Toei's own studio lot, and by not bothering to go film Dente's scene at his actual cave. Me being me though, I was honestly at least as thrilled just to see PoppinGummy doing a basic Rider Kick. Shouma even showed up to that fight on his bike!

But then, that's not even the thing with Shouma in this episode I liked the most, because the thing about the script I think takes it to that level where I probably wouldn't notice it wasn't from the main writer if I wasn't told is that it's doing the obligatory countless little things Gavv tends to do throughout an episode. Tons of small seeds planted for future stories, including Shouma pretty obviously feeling conflicted about basically breaking Jiip... as opposed to Jiip's new wife, who seemingly wouldn't be interested in him if he *wasn't* broken, which is probably not the healthiest thing in a relationship! So that's all pretty interesting, but it's also the really tiny things, too, like how Hanto interacts with the Gochizo throughout more like how Shouma always has, which, especially with the cute nicknames in the first half, seems like a deliberate effort to highlight how he and the whole status quo of the show have grown by this point. Heck, now that I think about it, maybe it's actually perfect that the chunk of the show where the heroes are all working together more closely has guest-written episodes that feel themselves more closely part of a cohesive whole?