[Fish Sandwich]

In which Bamba tries to explain to executives why Lupinranger VS Patranger was a bigger success than they think.

Anyways, this episode was inexplicably not by main writer Junpei Yamaoka, which may explain why it doesn't at all connect to last episode's ending, where Kreon was pitching the idea of teaming up with the Ryusoulgers to Wyzul. I say just pretend he decided offscreen that was against his values as an entertainer and enjoy this one for what it is, which is quite good.

An episode of Super Sentai mixing the vocal talents of Hikaru Midorikawa as one of the franchise's most delightful villains with a wide array of shoutouts to the arts, including an extended homage to Shakespeare... look, unlike Wyzul, I've got a heart, and it's telling me there's no way I could possibly not like this.

I wouldn't say it's quite the best of the best, unfortunately. It would need a little more meat to the story for that. Some kind of interesting character arc, or a good twist. Instead, when you get down to it, it's a pretty standard monster of the week plot. But this one is all about the presentation. I'm going to go ahead and give a lot of credit to director Hiroyuki Katou for the appropriately inspired visuals in a lot of this episode. Some of it is just fairly standard Ryusoulger direction (which is still nice), but the showy parts feel like it. Wyzul and Ryusoul Red's showdown especially makes great use of the idea that this is happening on a stage in-universe, with my favorite touches being Wyzul's wirework, and Koh walking to the top of a staircase to transform into Max Ryusoul Red, with smoke shooting out to cover him "changing" the way it would happen in a stage show, where it's just two people switching places.



So between all that, and some bonus points for having everyone except Koh in the robots, I'd call this a winner.