[Kamen Rider Die]

MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 15 - 16



The Grongi story in this one is a whisper of a sketch of a gossamer dream. There is nothing to this one. A Grongi is running people over in a truck, Kuuga catches him and blows him up. That's it. There's a little bit of a feint in the first half, when the Grongi escapes, but he immediately gets a new truck and keeps doing the same thing until Kuuga blows him up again. There's no mystery to what's happening, and no strategy to defeating it. It's all empty calories.

Luckily, the other two threads deliver. The first, obviously: NEW BIKE. I like the design a lot. Way more than TryChaser, which is just a dirtbike. TryGouram (thank you, wiki) is this beast of a machine, regal and dangerous. It looks weighty, menacing. If a superhero showed up on TryChaser, I would assume he got lost on his way to a touring stunt show. If a superhero shows up on TryGouram, I am running for my life because a deadly monster attack is imminent. A big, beefy bike is exactly what I want in a motorcycle-riding superhero.

Bikes in modern Kamen Rider series are, at best, an afterthought. Most Riders just leap into frame to start a fight, or run up to a monster and then henshin. There might be a few scenes, especially in the early episodes, where a Rider shows off their bike, but there's rarely an origin story to where the bike came from. (OOO and Gaim had one, Build sort-of had one.) It's cool to see how big a deal the bikes used to be, how integral Riding A Bike was to these series. I don't, like, miss it in the newer shows. I don't care if Kamen Rider as a franchise has outgrown actually riding anything. But, still, it's cool that Kuuga devoted a full two-parter to Godai's new ride.

Well, "devoted". I mean, there's still the other major part of this story, where we get a bit more insight into Ichijou's dedication to his job. Some if it's because he's honoring his dead cop father (ALL DADS ARE DEAD). Some if it's because that's how his whole family is, where his mother collapses while on-shift as a nurse and then gets out of her hospital bed to continue her shift, even though no hospital on the planet would be okay with her doing that. But, mostly, hilariously, that's just who Ichijou is: someone with the single-minded focus to work on after-action paperwork instead of visiting his hospitalized mother. Like, it's not even as though he's tracking down a dangerous monster, he is filling out paperwork about a monster who just blew up. That is not dedication, that is obsessive-compulsive disorder. That is an illness. It's not some wacky character trait. It's not "oh, Ichijou takes his job seriously." It is way beyond a lack of work/life balance. It is troubling.

I'm scared for Ichijou, you guys!