[Fish Sandwich]

Kakuranger 14-15:

14 continues the streak of the show really wanting you to know how totally cool and amazing the Jusho Fighters are. I don't know why this is sticking out to me so much more than usual. Obviously Sentai is all about the merch, but the sheer amount of reverence these things have been getting just feels strange to me for whatever reason. Youkai are now basing their plans entirely around their ability to defeat them, and the Kakurangers themselves talk about the things like their arsenal was totally understocked before they came along. It's just some cheap clones of the robots you already had! They don't even combine! I don't even know when you guys learned the technique to summon them because Sasuke just gave the order to use them in 12 like it was some secret weapon you always had! It probably sounds like I'm complaining, but honestly, all this weirdness jives perfectly with the kind of show Kakuranger is. A show where a visit to the doctor for a stomach ache can end with nurses storming into the room with comically oversized scalpels and syringes, and new enemy commanders are punk rockers who make their presence known by manifesting images of terrifying giant skulls in the sky. There's an energy to it all that makes it hard not to have fun with whatever the show wants to throw at me.

Especially when it throws an episode as good as 15 at me! Geez, that was spectacular. I think this is the first time an episode of this show has really gotten me dramatically invested in the plight of the heroes, but that's not much of a surprise when the plot takes the training wheels off like this. So, new bad guy leader Junior launches his goon squad on a mission to destroy the Kakurangers once and for all (after warning them about how dangerous the Jusho Fighters are, of course), and he does not play around. Our intrepid gang of bumblers are lured into a forest and promptly hunted down one by one like animals, resulting in an episode that's at maximum tension nearly the entire time. I can't even really analyze much of what I saw because I was way too busy being on the edge of my seat to even process it that much. I didn't even consciously realize how much I was getting into things until almost the end. And what an ending it is! That is how you do a cliffhanger, right there. I am beyond pumped to see the back half of this.