[SPLIT LIP]

Hmmmm...

My interest in this show has slowly been dipping. Before last week I was ready to quit, but last week was decent enough, and this week had good...

But they shouldn't have pulled the mini-apocalypse card if they weren't goign to do it right. At this point, nobody should be resting. Nobody should be standing around. The word has fallen apart, and yet life continues on like the worst problems are a bad day at school. Mai is well and truely a useless load at this point. All the secondary characters have plummetted in significance. Kaito I swear gets more and more painful just to watch. He's an actor clearly comfortable playing a certain character, and while it's not obvious what it is, it's clearly not the one he's being told to play.

The fight between Zangetsu's was going really well until that ham-fisted, bullshit flashback before Takatora's final strike. If this show is going to be so smart, it shouldn't treat us like we're that dumb. It's that pandering, juvinile method of storytelling that demands we get a flashback to events we've never seen just to remind us of the painfully obvious. We didn't need a cut to Takatora's past, we didn't even need to cut to his face. They're brothers, we get it. That alone means any pulled punches are obvious.

Seeing the helmet shatter was... odd. And crap. It wasn't a real busted helmet, just effects, which sucks. I've been chopping at the bit for unhelmeted/broken helmet scenes, and this is what we get? A brief, terribly done glimpse with Takatora doing a silly face? He should've been, like, standing on the edge of the pier, helmet half-broken for real, with a subtle expression for a moment before he falls backwards.

It feels like for a show that's pace was utterly breakneck for so long, it's fallen back to typical Kamen Rider "only one thing of real significance happens an episode" and it's given me whiplash. It's still not bad, but it's so much less than what it was.

Dissapointed. Massively let down.