[Fish Sandwich]

EPISODE 13: "Suspicion"

In spite of a lot of things, I really like these episodes. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

At this point, Kuuga has finished what is effectively its first "season". In that first quarter, the show accomplished a whole lot of what it set out to do, and it came to a spectacular conclusion in a two-parter so epic, they even changed the music for the episode previews. Moving into the second quarter, a few things have changed. First of all, the visuals for the opening are updated, in ways that, if I'm being honest, are maybe less well-timed to the music, and also just plain... weird, in some cases. What does Negative Ichijou's cameo appearance every episode add to the series? I don't know, but get used to seeing it for a while.



There have also been some shakeups in the staff. From this point on, Takeyuki Suzuki is credited as producer alongside Takatera, for reasons I can only speculate on. From what I've heard, Kuuga's production could get messy early on, so it's likely Suzuki, who was one of the people clamoring to bring Rider back in the first place, was put there by Toei simply to get things running more smoothly. This information probably won't be that relevant. What's of very immediate importance, however, is that these are the first episodes of the series by a guest writer, and it's none other than Toshiki Inoue. A name that strikes fear into the heart of many a toku fan, which is why it's maybe worth noting Naruhisa Arakawa is explicitly credited with "series composition" for Kuuga, a rarity for a Rider series. I think part of that is just to signify how heavily involved Arakawa was with the series' development, but from what I understand, one of the main purposes of that job is to look over all the scripts in a show from multiple writers and make sure they all gel together well enough, making whatever edits are necessary to that end. Which would mean the show's main writer approved enough of the finished product, so Inoue must've done at least a decent job, right?

Well, things get off to a really good start for me with the opening scene. It establishes how hard Sakurako is pushing herself by opening at night, gradually moving the camera over to a nearly full pot of coffee, at which point we fade to the morning, with the pot empty, and only then does the usual timestamp appear. It's a slick half a minute that once again conveys all its information with zero dialogue, especially thanks to Hidenori Ishida's usual great direction. The rest of the cold opening goes on to establish that Jean's crew over in Nagano have found a bunch of ancient rocks, which will certainly be one of the plot points in this episode! So, uh, right away, the thing I'm saying I like is actually also one of the first signs of how sloppy this two-parter is. I don't think having it be like this is some unforgivable sin, but a cold open is generally best used to establish, as quickly and concisely as possible, what the main dramatic crux of an episode's story is, and it's not really the rocks, nor is it Sakurako.

After a moderately amusing, but even less purposeful, check in on Pole Pole, the episode starts to inch closer to its actual point by showing what the cops are up to at the moment. Mainly, further increasing their options against the Unidentified Lifeforms by making bullets containing the same stuff as those gas grenades. I can't stress enough how simultaneously adorable and cool it is watching these guys try to find weapons to fight the supernaturally strong Grongi using only things that are conceivable in reality. There's such a fundamental contradiction there, and the fact that they have to struggle so much for even the tiniest edge makes it that much more satisfying when one of their boring, utilitarian gadgets ends up getting the job done.

After all, the Grongi are a real menace. Even after suffering something of a loss a few episodes back, they've simply replaced the Whiteboard with the slightly less sacred Grongi Abacus, and are chatting it up in their latest hideout in another beautifully strange Ishida scene that decides to make sunshine scary, with swaying camera motions that deliberately let glare in and out of frame, briefly obscuring what's happening each time to create the effect of watching something like a half-remembered nightmare, with dialogue about as coherent. The important thing to take away is that this story's monster, Me-Biran-Gi, is heading out to sink his piranha-like jaws into some hapless civilians. Yikes.



See, this is why it's so easy to get behind the police in this show. Who wouldn't want to see the Grongi taken out? Well, as it turns out, there is one such person, and he watches the vicious slaughter of an entire boat full of human lives with surprising indifference. This is Junichi Chouno. He thinks what the Unidentified Lifeforms do is great, because humanity is worthless anyway. He's so into the way they're tearing up our good-for-nothing society, he's even gotten himself a tattoo similar to the ones all Grongi have showing their animal motif. Chouno has got some serious problems, and it probably shouldn't be a surprise that he ends up in police custody, where the main cast start getting tangled up with him.

An interrogation with Ichijou and Sugita reveals, well, most of what I've already said, and also that he's been spending his life drifting from part-time job to part-time job with little purpose, which might start to give us a hint as to what his motivations are. Tsubaki also shows up, having had to ditch a promising day of cruising around in his sports car with a hot date just to make sure Chouno isn't actually a Grongi. Things get a little more complicated when it turns out Chouno, while not a monster, does in fact have a bad case of... something.

Well, hopefully we'll find out what that is soon, but for now, it's cliffhanger time as Kuuga faces off with Biran.

THUMBS UP COUNTING CORNER

We definitely seem to be in a pattern now.

Total thumbs up count: 27+0 = 27

EPISODE 14: "Omen"

The conclusion of Kuuga's initial fight with Biran has a few neat things to talk about. We get one of the first real examples of how this show is going to treat form changing, now that the introductions are over, with Kuuga realizing the best way to avoid getting eaten alive is to use Titan Form's armor, which works great right up until Biran thinks to just bite where the armor doesn't cover, meaning it only took until Titan Form's second appearance for the show to start undermining its primary function, but still, Yuusuke was thinking tactically there. Thankfully Ichijou is there to help out with the new gas bullets, which, amazingly, work exactly as intended, and force Biran to retreat. It's a cool fight scene, and Titan Form power walking has some more interesting direction by Ishida, where it's shot at a low angle and deliberately lets water splash onto the lens as Biran tries to land a solid hit. I guess it adds to the impact of each blow or something, but mostly it just looks neat.



Yuusuke heads back to the hospital with Ichijou to have his bite wound checked out, which gives him a perfect excuse to go talk to Chouno about what his whole deal is. I figure I should talk about that too.

I was ready to hate these episodes with a passion in retrospect. This plot was one of the ones I've always remembered most vividly from Kuuga, but I couldn't recall if that meant they were any good or not. I mean, Inoue writing a story about a guy who idolizes the most depraved monsters in Rider history? It sounds like a recipe for disaster. So I'm more than a little surprised to say that, despite some hiccups I'll be going into in a bit, I think Chouno's plotline succeeds far more than it fails.



The premise here is very much in line with Kuuga's themes. It's a show about, among other things, the value of optimism, cooperation, and perseverance, so having a character that's a cynical loner who's given up on his life, and humanity as a whole, it's a solid way to explore those concepts. Yuusuke tries to get to know Chouno with his usual light touch, a scene that has a great rhythm to it. It doesn't feel exactly like how Arakawa would've handled it, but it continues a trend of Yuusuke refusing to ever outright tell someone they're wrong, with him even agreeing it's impossible for people to know exactly how someone else feels, only to reassure him that we can still sympathize with each other anyway. The fact that this doesn't have an immediate effect on Chouno also shows the episode is smart enough not to make Yuusuke into some perfect being who can easily fix everyone's problems with how right he is, which would've been grating. He leaves Chouno with the simple opinion that if you're alive, you might as well enjoy it (this is actually one of Joe Odagiri's favorite moments in the whole series, by the way), and heads off with Ichijou, leaving Tsubaki to take a much harder tack with Chouno.

Tsubaki, a coroner, a man surrounded by death every day, does not have the patience for Chouno's attitude that Yuusuke does, and simply takes him to see the corpse of one of Biran's victims, to see if he can still romanticize dying afterwards. The story really comes together here, for all its faults. The simple moment of Chouno nearly vomiting clears up so much about his characterization. He's been wishing death upon people, saying he doesn't care about his own life, saying the Unidentified Lifeforms "get it" because they're getting rid of all the "worthless" people. But all of that has been from a distance. Like, he literally watched that boat massacre from a safe ways away. This is a man who's been drifting aimlessly through life without ever finding a real calling, who's started blaming the world for his problems, reducing all the horrific killing going on to some trivial way to get back at everyone. The knife and the tattoo, all of it, it's just about the image. And that's why Tsubaki hands the knife back. He knows Chouno is never going to use that thing on anyone, because the problems Chouno actually has are not the ones he claims to have.

It's honestly a great scene, and I wish I could say all this makes the story worth the trouble it took getting here, but I can't deny the issues here, either. Most pressingly, the episodes don't go into Chouno's backstory very thoroughly, and that can make it easy to misinterpret his character. A lot of viewers probably won't make the connection that him bouncing from job to job is motivation to have a grudge against society, and the show's refusal to define his illness will probably lead those people to assume that's why he's so grumpy, even though Tsubaki spells out the illness will threaten his life if he ignores it. Chouno isn't depressed because he has an illness, he has an illness because he's depressed. Because he can no longer be bothered to put in the effort to fix his problems. The lack of clarity, I'd imagine is a result of Inoue trying to mimic Kuuga's style of minimalist storytelling, and not quite getting it down. The ending is similarly unsatisfying for this reason, with Chouno running off after realizing Yuusuke saved his life as Kuuga. The basic idea of him feeling fear for his life (in other words, a desire for survival) at the hands of a Grongi is there, but a few extra lines from him or Yuusuke could've worked miracles to tie the story together more.

The other major issue with this pair of episodes is its use of subplots. Unlike the brief, effective check-ins the show usually does that advance overarching plot threads while clearly being secondary, here, pretty huge chunks of screentime are devoted to events that don't have any immediate effect on what's happening here and now. Jean's story in this two-parter, if we pretend it doesn't continue in the next episode, ends with him miserably failing at his task of delivering some rocks when the rocks turn into a bug and fly off. It's a funny scene, don't get me wrong, but it's a lot of time spent on something that will only pay off in the future. Time that could've been better used fleshing out what I genuinely believe to be a strong plot with Chouno.

This is where we wrap back around to my talk about the staff shakeups. This is more stuff I'm not thoroughly informed about, but I've heard Arakawa can be slow with his scripts, and that Inoue is, conversely, great at meeting deadlines. It's possible a lot of the issues here stem from Inoue being brought on rather suddenly, and having to figure out how to write episodes of a very unusual show in a short time. Entirely speculation on my part, but if that were the case, I'd feel more forgiving towards these episodes. Regardless of why, though, we got the episodes we got, and they are absolutely not the show's best. But, in spite of all of that, I really like them. They're sloppy, unkempt, and bloated, but there are still a lot of scenes and moments I found myself loving.

THUMBS UP COUNTING CORNER

The extra wait may not have the same dramatic impact as last time, but it does have Jean getting in on the thumb action. That's just as good, right?




Total thumbs up count: 27+2 = 29