[Locke]

Finished my watch through of Build. Maybe it is exactly because of the length of these shows, but my final thought seems to almost always be "I dunno how I feel, to be honest". And I am once again here to say, I dunno how I feel about Build really, to be honest!

Like, reviewing these shows on a weekly basis, episode by episode, is one thing, but trying to review these seasons as one collective piece, especially with a show like this which goes through specific arcs. It is just quite hard to do, because I feel like any point I make can easily be contradicted, if you zoom in on a part and isolate it out.

Overall, I would say Build is a surprisingly mature story for a toku show, that uses the magic undo button in a beautifully tragic way, as a final bow to send the show off with. I love that it is a show with genuine cause and effect and genuine permanence. Yet, overall, I would say it is also true to say it is a story they've chosen to build around conversation driving weekly cliffhangers, and I mean this in the worst possible way. Generally whenever something becomes too inconvenient for the writers, they’ll just try and reframe past events to suit the status quo as it is right now, hoping you just won’t think about it too hard, and I personally find that kinda insulting.

Like don’t get me wrong, when things actually click into place and get actual proper, genuine, pay off it is usually always extremely satisfying. Which is why it becomes complicated talking about these seasons as one collective thing, because there were spots throughout the show that I would have told you that Build was the best Kamen Rider season ever, and my absolute favourite Rider of all time.

But that isn't the feeling I finished the show with. I would say overall, this show is just sorta alright, even with these crazy highs in mind. Which feels crazy to me even! If I had gone back a few weeks in the past and asked where I landed, I’m not sure I’d have believed myself. But again, that is the difference when talking about these things as one collective, completed thing, not just a series of moments.

I am someone who loves a show which respects the time the audience invested into it, rewarding those who pay close attention to all the little details they are fed. I feel like this show spits on exactly that kind of viewer. What starts as a wonderfully rich and ambitious from the ground up story, soon devolves into a mess of constant retcons, gaslighting you into the idea that the narrative isn’t bumbling all over the place, rather each bumble is actually an intentional duking move. “This is all some sort of cerebral masterwork, we promise!” The show pleads, but I see you for what you really are: an overambitious, overreaching, narrative mess. A show where the writers constantly force themselves into self made corners, and the only way they seem to be able to get out is reversing previously important narrative beats from earlier in the show and pretending that was always the plan. It is like the Lost of Kamen Rider.

It feels an especial shame, because I loved the cast, and felt like they did some serious heavy lifting throughout. It felt like they really empowered their actors to go to special places with their performances during the show's most powerful moments. Build is a genuinely great drama on its own, even outside of its toku bits and pieces, far removed from the screaming at the sky shounen melodrama that punctuates much of the toku space.

I liked that the show wasn’t afraid to kill people off to raise the stakes, in ways that never felt like cheap shock grabs. The problem though is it starts with a pool of villains really too shallow for the length of the show to start with, and then by the half way point with villains being killed off or going through redemption arcs and so on, it did make the back half of the show become a little tedious.

It suffers from exactly the same skirmish and run holding patterns that plagued the first half or so of Kamen Rider Drive. You gotta have Build fight someone every week so they can sell toys, but when the half a dozen remaining villains all are still required for long stretches of remaining narrative, these fights cannot ever have meaningful conclusions, and so you are just going through the motions.

One of the main ways they try to address this is through extreme shounen power scaling problems. I mean in the most technical of senses, sure, it is kind of an explanation to explain why the same characters are colliding every week, but trade wins and losses, and always find some way to escape at the end but it is just weird to have action scenes like this in a show full of cause and effect, and choice and consequence. If you're a named villain, you're basically immune from this show's themes entirely and I think that is truly awful writing.

And it is an especial shame too, cause I think the action in this show is largely great! Older Rider shows can feel a little dated with a heavier focus on dudes just doing roundhouse kicks and flips, and modern Rider shows can often suffer from the opposite issue, drowning their shows in razzle dazzle, to the point where there is barely any real action, it is just dudes standing still flinging CG bullshit at each other. Build is about as close to a perfect meeting in the middle as I’ve found in the Rider space and it is honestly just pretty wonderful.


On a purely practical level, I do think a lot of its scale, ambitions and ideas completely buckled the budget, and even within the toku space, some budgetary corners seem to have been cut here. That said, there is very clear artistic intent that I think drags this show out of the muck, even as the budget groans and strains. Inspired choreography, imaginative uses of the various varieties of power sets here and just a very handsomely constructed show, you probably aren’t going to find much better action within the Rider space, but it is let down by the writing and context that is packed in around it.

So yeah, overall, for me, Build was at its absolute apex when it reigned in the scale, and honed in on exploring each character’s individual sins, and what lengths our characters will go to achieve atonement, if not out and out forgiveness. And for me, Build is at its absolute worst as it pulls yet another twist out of its ass it never intends to pay off. At times I loved it. At others I wanted to rip my hair out in frustration. But I have to say, I did think the ending was pretty perfect in the context of this messy show. So there is that.