[Tokumonkey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Librarian

They aren't going to play fast and loose with the rules in Zi-O. They've been too detail oriented to do that.

...I am gaping in open-mouthed astonishment. The writers have done little but play fast and loose with the rules in Zi-O. Also, I came very close to using scare quotes around "rules" just now.

The plot doesn't make a lick of sense. Oh, they've so far stuck with the "creation of Another Rider robs the actual Rider of their powers and also happens to prevent the enemies they fought" thing, the "only the original Rider's powers can defeat the Another Rider" thing, and the "the Another Rider's defeat doesn't restore the original timeline thing."

However, there's no connective tissue to any of it, and they tacked the whole thing onto a time-travel plot. Close to nothing about time travel on this show makes any sense. The show only acknowledges the concept of cause and effect except when convenient. Our heroes encounter an Another Rider in the present, then journey back in the past to defeat the Another Rider. Since they did that, they shouldn't have been able to encounter the Another Rider in the present... yet they do.

We've seen more than one instance of a Rider getting disempowered, yet remaining in the exact location and position they'd been in - mid-battle - afterward, looking baffled. Everything about how they're positioned suggests "something just happened," but if the timeline had actually changed so that the plot of that Rider series never happened, that just wouldn't be the case. The whole point is that something didn't happen.

The Ranger Keys thing in Gokaiger was always kind of mechanically iffy (Sentai transferring their powers to Ranger Keys is very much like the Superfriends' "Using their various forms of time travel..."), but you at least had a cause-effect relationship. All those Sentai series happened, the former Sentai were just disempowered. Zi-O's direction has so far been that the prior Rider series never happened, and the show's apparently had no interest whatsoever in addressing the implications of that. Regarding that last point, I'm hoping that next week's episode might finally fill in some of that gaping plot hole.

Come to think of it, I think that'd 50% of my gripe with Zi-O: it's not just that there are plot holes, it's that there is more hole than plot.

I know a ton of the show is dictated by the various toy lines (the RKF Ride Armor, the DX roleplay items), but I'm curious as to how much was large-scale directives from Toei. Specifically, I'm wondering if some higher-up decided part of the goal of this show is to ditch all prior Rider continuity, perhaps in the hope of post-Heisei Rider shows being able to share a coherent universe. Pure speculation on my part, of course.

Unrelated: I realized that the images of the W Ride Armor suggest a huge missed opportunity. How sweet would it have been to have Sougo and Geiz merge for the form, with one eye being Zi-O's pink and the other being Geiz's yellow.