[Tokumonkey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boshusan

I just hope ZaWarudo will stay an antagonist for more than 2episodes in order to keep things interesting.

I'd enjoy that, but I have a hard time believing they'll do it. When he was empowered, he was tied up, indicating that it was against his will. I assume that the show is portraying him as brainwashed, and that he'll be freed from it and ultimately join the Zyuohgers.

I'd love to be proved wrong, but Sentai rarely surprises, and that's the least-surprising path the production team could take.

Then again, I didn't expect quite how dark the scene of The World being empowered was: three Zyumans hanged to death overhead? (I'm not ruling out that they'll turn out to be alive later, since this is Sentai.)

This seemed to me to be an odd episode. I liked the gimmick for the monster of the week, and the whole bit with him and Nalia provided gave us a rare character moment for her. The plot was different enough from other Sentai I've seen that I felt the episode could stand on its own.

In this sense, the introduction of The World felt rushed to me. I enjoyed the battle sequence, for the most part, but I'd've been happier to skip doing a monster of the week and just focus on him. That they rushed it like this suggests the character will initially be pretty thin, and I'm guessing he'll "turn good" very quickly.

I watch the show with a friend, who lamented, "I don't think we're ever going to have a Sentai Gaim." I adored that show because I felt it both subverted the tropes of Rider shows and elevated the quality of the franchise for a year. With Gaim, I spent a year watching a Rider show in which I didn't know what was going to happen next. I very much want Sentai to do something similar, but I have no confidence that it will. Gaim was a show that was written in part for a slightly older audience than has been typical of recent Rider shows. Zyuohger and Ghost both strike me as aiming for a slightly younger audience. (Although Ghost seems to have been experimenting with slightly riskier stories lately.)

I have to talk for a moment, though, about the toys. I can enjoy silly Sentai weapons, like Shinken Gold's fish swords, but The World's fishing rod is a little goofier than I can stomach. I think the show handled it as well as it possibly could've, but at the end of the day, they armed him with a fishing rod. I understand how it works thematically (fishing rod, spear, and gun are all appropriate to a hunter), but good GRIEF. My problem with the flashlight changer is slightly different: the show tried to come up with a cool way for him to activate it, but it's a clunky device, and I found the tapping it against his leg more distracting than cool.

In each case - as it always the case with Sentai - the show has to integrate the toys. Heck, the whole battle sequence was basically, "Let's demonstrate how powerful and desirable the toys are." I get it, I really do - these shows are toy commercials as much as anything else - but I keep wanting a story from these shows, and what happens in that story is generally dictated by the toys. I expect The World to quickly become heroic because Bandai likely won't want to wait on demonstrating the mega-combination of all the Cube mecha.

Zyuohger is the 40th Super Sentai, and many of the cool/easy things you can do with Sentai weapons have already been done. That's even more so when Sentai re-uses a theme, which is pretty much why we got Minecraft weapons and mecha this year. PLEX has done animals over and over and over. This, at least, is animals in a form we haven't seen before. A side effect, though, is that this stuff seems like it's grown goofier and goofier in a way I don't enjoy. I look back at the gimmicks of shows from ten or twenty years ago, and they just seem so dramatically much cooler than what we've gotten recently.

I only discovered Sentai a few years ago, and I've watched nearly a dozen series in that time. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should take a break. When my first response to the pretty-good introduction of a new, villainous senshi is tinged with this much pessimism... that's not good, is it?