[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE EPISODE 48 - “THE GALAXY OF YOUTH”



That graduation scene! One of the best things Kamen Rider ever did.

I like how it foregrounds the dramatic irony of Gamou’s story. He wanted to evolve humanity into something that could take its place in the stars, so he built a school in order to scheme a way that would let him do that, but the school itself became the culmination of his plan; his achievement was there the whole time, and he couldn’t even see it. The evolution of humanity… man, that’s just growing up? The next generation improves (hopefully) on the work of its predecessors, just like Utahoshi tried to explain 18 years earlier. It’s links in a chain, like Kengo’s keyholder (it keeps being narratively important!), until the dream is achieved. Gamou thought he needed to do it all himself, but the reality was that he imparted his wisdom, his drive, and even his dream to these kids, who are going to achieve it in his name. He’d already won, and he didn’t realize it.

Any finale that tries to put the villain into an emotional context with the rest of the cast is a winner for me, and Fourze’s maybe the best example. (Also: Saber, Ghost, Drive, maybe Kiva if you’re feeling generous.) Gamou was part of the same system as the kids, doing his part in their story, and that’s lovely to acknowledge. For all the ways the Zodiarts were using the KRC to power up, the KRC were learning and growing because of the Zodiarts. Everyone’s in the same space (sorry) in high school, for good or ill, and the struggles and conflicts help us learn who we want to be, and how we want to become that person. Gamou wasn’t some outside force of evil, he was a guy who helped them as part of their daily lives, even as he was doing it for the wrong reasons. From a top-level view, he was the leader of a celestial death cult that preyed on the youth entrusted to him, in order to reach the stars by obliterating a nation; from the KRC’s view, he was a misguided man who couldn’t see the value in the community his experiment accidentally fostered. The idea of imparting the same grace and forgiveness that the KRC would give to a student to the Chairman of the school, that’s something special.

I’ll always love that interpretation of the season from the kids that powered through it. It’s a view of high school that’s sentimental without being saccharine – high school is a thing that makes you who you are, and that takes both pain and joy. We grow from our success and our failures; from our happiness and our sadness; from our empathy and our selfishness; from our knowledge and our ignorance; from our heroism and our villainy. The KRC wouldn’t be who they are without Gamou, no matter who he ended up being.

Besides that scene, which is astonishing in its humanity and distillation of the show’s ethos and approach, I thought what was here was solid. It didn’t get in the way, if I can damn it with faint praise.

Kengo’s letter was very sweet, even if you knew that Kengo would 10000000% be appearing again in the episode. (I once again forgot how: Gamou saved him via Aquarius’s power, and Kengo just woke up at home and didn’t tell anyone.) I like the contents of the letter, and how it addressed all of the characters, even the ones you don’t associate with Kengo. I like him saying that the show forgot to do a major Kengo/Ryuusei story, which is a wasted opportunity; also, I think he outed JK? I like that he used his words from beyond the grave to rip on Yuuki’s normally-atrocious cooking. I like that it’s Kengo getting the final word on what everyone means to the show, because Kengo fought the hardest of anyone to become the guy who could get the final word on what everyone means to the show – his journey was the longest, and the hardest, and ended the saddest, because of what the KRC represented to him. I like him coming back in a redo of Episode 1, chiding Gentarou for having the gall to throw away a letter that someone put their heart into, because symmetry is always nice in a finale.

The middle of the episode… again, it didn’t get in the way. Fourze was about kids and school and friendship, sure, but it was equally about the Sakamoto Stunt Show Spectacular, so we get some explosions and sick bike jumps at Kamen Rider Quarry, plus all the major upgrade suits for Fourze and Meteor. It’s a fight that doesn’t mean a ton to me story-wise – trying to give Meteor a moral victory over Leo in a final speech felt forced, but whatever – but it genuinely wouldn’t feel like the end of Fourze without a half-dozen form changes and too many explosions. I think of it as ceremonial, befitting the graduation theme.

But, yeah: the graduation. I love it. It makes me so happy, to see these kids tell their season-long villain that they learned a lot from him, and that defeating him helped turn them into people that he can be proud of, and that they’ll be the people that he always wanted to be. It’s the hardest kind of finale to do, but it’s the only one that would’ve made any sense for this show. I’m gonna be smiling like Gentarou for the rest of the night.