[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER BLADE EPISODE 23

This time on Kamen Rider Blade: Tachibana shares his love of card-collecting with Mutsuki! Kenzaki shares his love protecting humans with Hajime! And Hirose and Kotaro share their love of basically getting a week off of working on this show!



I don't really talk back to shows I'm watching, but there's a thing from this episode that brought it out of me.

Business Bird kidnaps Photozawa to draw out Hajime. Blade and Chalice end up fighting Business Bird to a draw, who escapes. Photozawa yells at Hajime, who rides off. Kenzaki makes an appeal with Photozawa for understanding, and he rides off, too.

Leaving Photozawa on a goddamn cliff with no way to get back to town. Like, stranded.

Minutes later, Business Bird pops out to restart the fight. It relocates, coincidentally, back to the same cliff where Photozawa was left behind. Chalice, regaining his Category Ace, protects her from a Business Bird attack. He tells her that it's dangerous, and she should leave.

Which made me shout at the show SHE'S ONLY THERE BECAUSE YOU DICKHEADS LEFT HER THERE!

(I know that the show left her there because she'd need to be there for the second half of the fight, but it's weird that Kenzaki left her there without even a throwaway line of "I'll call Hirose to come get you" or something. He just leaves her there! Not great writing!)

It's maybe the thing I'll remember most from this episode (other than that screencap up top), because this one was... y'know, fine! An okay episode.

It felt a little too much in Raising Questions mode, and that's not a blast for me. We're starting to dig into Chalice's situation, the specifics of his weird cards and powers, but it's mostly just the episode explicitly stating Yes His Cards Are Weird. There are weird things about how he can Henshin into different cards' forms, and it is weird that he uses a Spirit card to turn into Hajime. There's no real new information given, just making sure that Kenzaki is aware of all of it. It's a lot of This Will Be Important Later, and... yeah, just not that fun as an episode?

The stuff with him and Amane's Dad, I feel like we already knew all of that? This episode puts it all together in a straight line, but we'd already known that Hajime found the dad, the dad gave him the picture, he felt confused about why someone would value others more than themself, and he went to try and learn why that would be. Like, there's a more deliberate step-by-step process to it all here, but it's not really giving us new shading on it.

The one big positive to Hajime's story this time out is how he and Kenzaki deal with protecting people.

Hajime doesn't know how to process the idea of caring about people. He wants to protect Haruka and Amane, but he's more comfortable doing it without an explanation than really interrogating what he wants to get out of it, how it makes him feel. Like, he doesn't appreciate anyone questioning him, even himself. So he's capable of living with the contradiction of caring about those two, putting himself at risk for them, while still claiming to care about no one but himself. He can hold those two contradictory ideas in his brain by just refusing to think about them at the same time.

So Kenzaki has to get through to a man this stubborn, this obstinate, this Chalice. He's got to find a way to show him that what he doesn't understand about humanity, he's already surrounded by it. And he does it the same way Amane did, by telling Hajime that he believes he's a good person because he wants to believe he's a good person. He's going to help him because he needs help.

It's a typically grounded Kenzaki moral, more concerned with the immediate effect than a deeper philosophy. Kenzaki thinks Hajime is a good guy, and Hajime's in trouble, so he's going to help him. And that weirdly gets through to Hajime, who's maybe been overthinking all this? It feels like we've spent episodes of watching Hajime push back on his kindness, his worry for others, his desire for compassion. In this, it feels less like someone telling him something he didn't know, and more like him finally being honest with himself. We'll see if it lasts!

But that's only half the episode, with the other half being a Mutsuki/Tachibana thing that... I don't know, it didn't really do it for me.

Some of it is Tachibana going into the specifics on the cards that, as much as I love Androzani84 laying it all out on the boards, is not what I want Blade The TV Show to focus on. The minutiae of the magic monster cards that give superpowers to heroic mans... y'know, maybe better left to the imagination? Not that dramatically compelling to me.

The rest of their story is already evaporating from my brain. (In fairness, I probably started watching and writing this way too late to dig deep into a fairly basic episode. Please don't take my snark as a heavy criticism! I'm just punchy from tiredness!) Meet-Cute's ruse to swipe cards from Mutsuki is laughably simple, and does not say great things about Mutsuki's ability to retain his secret identity around a cute girl. It's not a particularly deep storyline, and I was honestly hoping for more from when we teased with Meet-Cute stalking Mutsuki.

The argument that follows her exit, where Mutsuki thinks he knows more than Tachibana, it's both totally in keeping with Mutsuki's arc (he is absolutely going to take his minor success and turn it into terrifying overconfidence) and also a little rushed. Or, I don't know, not rushed maybe, but... too much of an escalation? It felt like an overreaction, even for where Mutsuki's head is at right now. I didn't buy into it that much. It felt less character-based, more plot-driven. It maybe needed a little more space between I Want Tachibana To Be Proud Of Me and Screw You Dad(i). They're too close together in this episode for my tastes.

Yeah, I don't know if it was the episode, or me approaching it not in the right mindset, but it was basically okay? A couple things that didn't work great for me, but otherwise a basic enough Kamen Rider episode. Not one I'll remember, maybe, but not one I'm disappointed I watched. Still had Photozawa, still had that dog up top.



Next time on Kamen Rider Blade: Motorcycle races! Undead Hunters! And maybe, if we've all been very good, something for Hirose and/or Kotaro to do!