[Kamen Rider Die]

MASKED RIDER AGITO EPISODE 39



Look, I know some big, serious stuff happens in this episode. Kino tracks down the still-injured Ryou, faces off against Agito and G3-X, and we get a big TV-series debut of Exceed Gills. (Still don't like that suit!) It's all done very well, with some great flourishes. (Kino keeps Ryou at gunpoint while he's fighting Agito and G3-X!) And, yeah, it's a nice framework for the episode to go into what humans think of Agitos, what they assume about them. It's smart. But, like, come on. That's not what anyone should remember this episode for.

The biggest improvement over Kuuga, for me, is how much the comedy in Agito lands. Sometimes it's big, broad physical comedy, the kind of wacky-faces-and-mugging you'd expect of a kids' show, but a lot of it, the best of it, is all rooted in character. It's a great gag that Omuro doesn't know who Shouichi, the star of the show, is. But it's a better gag because that's a dude perennially on the outside, never getting the whole picture or the whole story. While the rest of the cast is fretting about monster attacks and crazed antiheroes, I'm pretty sure Omuro is heading home to play Zelda and fall asleep on the couch. Houjou and Ozawa scenes kill because we know that Houjou's going to find some way to spin his never-ending defeats as some weird moral victory, and that Ozawa has zero patience for his schtick. It's great, how the character development necessary to tell a season-long story can be leveraged to have me laughing my ass off.

Behold Hikawa.

Just, the "Hikawa suspects everyone in the cast of being Agito except Shouichi" runner, amazing. Amazing. Never got sick of it. Wouldn't have minded if they'd done ten more versions of it, with Hikawa eventually thanking Taichii for his service as Agito. I don't know if I'm supposed to read Hikawa's obliviousness (literally everyone in this episode knows but him and Omuro!) as stubbornness, or what, but it's an insane story for this show to do. Like, this is their square-jawed hero, the pride of the Metro Police, and he just cannot figure out that Shouichi is Agito. And they keep piling on the jokes at his expense! I love it. I love that they had enough confidence that viewers would go along for the ride, that it wouldn't ruin Hikawa or G3-X or anything, that you could do all of that insanity and then close it off with a brutal fight scene where Shouichi has a gun pointed at his head. It's... it's like this series got a swagger to it, where crazy tonal shifts are handled deftly, where any type of scene they want to try is within their grasp. (Okay, maybe not every scene. The shot where the Child Of Light pitches forward 90 degrees to bond with Ryou? Hilarious, and so cheesy.) The storytelling feels confident and assured, nailing the basics so they can take a few big swings here and there. It's making for some surprising and fun episodes.