[Locke]

So after taking a break from Black - no reflection on the show but with a forum like this I'm almost discovering new shows daily and I lack the focus to stick with a single show when so many new shiny ones are being thrusted at me. I watched episode 16 and it did a lot the series hasn't so far, and I feel the need to address the series as a whole up to where I am. Inb4 "judging on only sixteen episodes?! I watch the whole series four times before I make a judgement, even if I hate it!"

Firstly, the plot, there is none. About four of these episodes have been plot focused, if that, and although there is the vaguest of hints that all of these of the week episodes are leading somewhere, unless it all comes together soon then I'm still gonna say this is still badly paced. Like worse than Wizard paced and OOOs paced.

Plus the shows tone is really all over the map, from a story perspective it seems to take itself deathly seriously but then as the show is trying to construct an engaging mystery, we have Kotaro with his seeming superpower to just turn up at the right time, place and moment like whenever Mighty Morphin would jump cut from American to Japanese footage, in a goofy series you can shrug it off but here it seems somehow so much more ridiculous. Plus, it's so...campy and unashamedly so but yeah it kinda feels like the one person not in on the joke, is the show itself. You can't take a very adult premise, stick a goofy costumed monster in the middle and act like that shit is cohesive.

Right now these sixteen episodes can be summed up by 'dudes in bed sheets, dry ice, unrelated mutant, made up science, oh Kotaro didn't have the strobe transformation that means he wont win this fight...oh there is the strobe fight, the mutant is dead, mutant has no relevancy to the story, but it's dead, so I guess the end then'.

I mean it's action heavy enough to balance this, I suppose, featuring surprisingly larger quantities of action than pretty much any of the modern series I'm watching, and it's really well done action but, there is always a but.

Sniper, whose name was barely mentioned in the episode so Sniper he is, kinda made me realise how...boring Black is. I mean don't get me wrong, the action is well done please don't focus on the negative, but Black has no new forms, no weapons, no secondary Rider, no real human support character. Most modern Riders are overkill with too many forms, pointless secondary Riders, along with those and the episodes pointlessly stretched out into two, it feels like the Heisei series have everything Black needs and shows like OOO or Wizard or whatever could probably take a few pointers from Black. I guess it's lucky I have been consuming this show so slowly because I assume it'd get really boring, fast.