[Fish Sandwich]

I really like that the resolution this two-parter reaches is also just reiterating the very first thing we ever knew about Minami -- she's Baku's family.

It's more of the fun of the structure I was talking about last week. The cleverness of the first part is in how it distracts from a truth it tells you upfront, and the cleverness of the back half is how it distracts you from a truth you've known since the first episode of the show.

The story itself is actually remarkably simple, at the end of the day. Minami's involvement with CODE as Seventeen is certainly a new bit of lore that will likely connect to further revelations down the line, but nobody really has an arc here that doesn't end right back where they already were. And again, that's also the beauty of the story -- that Baku ultimately makes the same choice Minami already has to reject that change to their status quo -- but that does make the narrative seem ~maybe~ a bit thin, if you're only looking at the plot beats. Baku doesn't end up needing any super particular or surprising impetus to reach that climax, and it's almost kind of weird how upset he gets in the first place? I kind of wonder if that's also part of the point -- that his hatred of CODE has become *too* strong, and it prevents him from seeing Minami's side of things sooner -- and that's also a thread that will be relevant to future events.

And it's no surprise I would wonder about that, because another thing I really liked about this one is how heavily it reinforces how much everything in this show is liable to come back around in some way. That recent scene with Minami's necklace being revealed as exactly what you could've guessed based on the last episode, the meteor thing that's another Baku accident we've heard about before, a good meaty scene between Fujimi and Odaka that, just like so many other scenes here, makes good of use of flashbacks to rub in how all the things we've learned before got us to where the show is at now.

It's funny, because I think this two-parter is kinda more than the sum of its parts, which is the exact opposite of how I described some of the early episodes of ZEZTZ. When I stop to think about it, there's honestly maybe not a whole lot going on compared to a lot of the stories this show has done, but on top of what is there being handled well enough, it also gets to benefit from existing in this much larger context of the whole series. Perhaps I've just gone soft at this point, like I inevitably do with Kamen Rider. Even the debut of Orderm, you know, it's the same of thing as Plasma and Catastrom where it's only sort of clear what exactly even causes ZEZTZ to gain that power, but at this point, I honestly actively hope that trend holds true for any future upgrade forms he gets too? There's something fascinating about how willing the show is to present these things on a purely emotional/thematic level first, and then address the logic later.