[Kamen Rider Die]

MASKED RIDER RYUKI EPISODE 31



THEY KEPT MEGUMI!!!

Also, we're back to traditional Ryuki here, firmly ensconced in Ripping Yarn territory. There's a good gag or two, but the emphasis is really on delivering an absolutely cracking monster story, with a few different fun turns in it.

I like a good monster story. Ryuki... doesn't do a lot of them. I've sort-of missed them, after watching this series and Agito and Kuuga. I don't think the monsters got a lot of thought put into their schemes, if you could even call them schemes, at this point in Heisei. We're a far cry from Double or OOO, where there'd be hidden motivations and reveals and twists and stuff. It's not really what the monsters are built for yet. They're like animals, and Riders slaughter them like animals. They're something for the heroes to detonate, not delve into or deconstruct.

This one isn't really the kind of monster story I really love, where the monster has some cool way of getting something mysterious, and the heroes need to figure out both the how and the why. Except, it does kind-of do both of those things?

A little girl is the only survivor of a cruise (or something?) that has everyone else onboard disappear. All she says is that a man was there, and everyone was taken by three monsters. Shinji assumes it's Asakura, enlists Ren, and they go out on a heavily-covered-by-journalists trip by the police to recreate the initial voyage and see if they can discover the truth behind the disappearances. (Seriously, it is a lot of reporters for something that seems, at first glance, like a Voyage of the Damned. Literally one person survived the previous trip, and not only are the police letting a few dozen journalists tag along for the follow-up, but also the nearly-catatonic little girl who survived the last mysterious trip. This does not seem like responsible decision-making by anyone, and only that child has an excuse!) Asakura's on the boat, the crew freaks out, people start disappearing, everything points to Asakura... except maybe it's not him? It's not his monsters, and he's basically calling dibs on them, ignoring Knight and Ryuki so he can feed his hungry monsters. Also, the little girl says Asakura saved her?!

There's a bunch of mysteries left over in this one (what happened on the previous trip, most of all), so it's tough to talk too much about the plot other than recounting it. Hard to know how I feel about some of this story without knowing how it ends. Still, I did really enjoy the plot of this one. It's a tense locked-room mystery for most of it, Ren and Shinji running all over a boat, trying to figure out what's going on. There's a real patience to the storytelling, holding off on the monster reveal until very late in the episode, leaving Asakura's involvement an open question. Keeping Asakura largely off-screen helps the story in two ways, building tension for the monster reveal, and also leaving the nature of his connection to Mika mysterious. Even at the end, we don't really know what Asakura did before Shinji and Ren showed up, so every scene with Mika and Asakura is as baffling to us as it is to the heroes. Why isn't she scared of Asakura? Is he really blameless? It's a possibility that seems more likely than the previous time folks thought Asakura had a heart of gold, that's for sure. Things are kept appropriately open-ended in this story, with a few theories and no real answers. Everything's subjective, which is a nice way for Ryuki to do a monster plot.

I mean, in fairness, this is a very Ryuki version of a monster plot. While the monster reveal is a nice surprise, and the how/why hasn't been fully explained yet, this is still a plot about whether or not Asakura can be redeemed. It's not about Mika, exactly, or anyone the monster killed. She's a victim to protect, and a way to ask questions about Asakura. (It's not really a story that does much to explore Shinji or Ren. This is, despite him not being in a ton of it, 100% an Asakura episode.) I guess you could make the argument that basically every monster plot in Kamen Rider is about the Kamen Rider, that doesn't sound wrong to me, but the ones I like do more disguise it a bit. This one managed to get me thinking about the monster's agenda more than most Ryukis, so I'll thank it for that.

Not much else in this one, besides a funny fight over the Ore Journal MacBook and whether it's called Gosaku (ugh) or White Milky (YES), and Yui's cute new hairdo (a million times better than the last 30 episodes, please keep it past summertime). It's an episode that's more-or-less all-in on the monster plot, and it's refreshing to get a full-length monster plot that feels like it's got a couple moves on it. I miss those kinds of Kamen Rider stories!