[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER BLADE EPISODE 35

This time on Kamen Rider Blade: Kenzaki gets extorted into a date! Hajime goes Full Joker! And two different ladies help us understand our Riders better, because that is the point of ladies on this show and that's not problematic at all!



Honestly, I don't think it's that problematic. The point of every supporting and guest character on this show is to get us to understand our Riders better, so it's not a huge deal if that's all Umi and Twomi contribute. It's just a little funny, to have two new women show up and immediately their story is What Does This Tell Us About The Men. On the one hand, that's the genre, but on the other hand... sort-of not a great look!

You know what is a great look, though? King Form. (How about that segue! Straight from highlighting the difficult gender politics and iffy portrayals of women to the fancy new suit! I am a man talking about women in media and I am killing it!) I think it's pretty great. I usually don't love the whole A Bunch Of Pictures take on suit upgrades (not a fan of Ghost Grateful), but I think the engraved look works pretty well for it. The gold is typically gorgeous, with that bright blue center giving perfect visual balance. I like the heft of it, too. It's a suit that looks imposing without being really ornate or cumbersome. It just looks beefy, powerful. I really like it. Maybe my favorite of the three Blade suits?

I liked Joker's look, as well. It's one I'd seen in the Blade movie, but hadn't talked about that one, either. (I don't know that I talked about any of the suits and... that's what the movies are for! New suits! And I just skipped talking about all of them! Why am I allowed to post on this site?!) It looks properly creepy, with the rictus grin and transparent visor and dangling hooks (little Js!) and asymmetry and inhuman screaming. It's a lot! I like it, though. It feels like a monster that monsters would be scared of!

Getting back to the ladies of the episode, though, I dug them both. They're both doing slightly similar things, interrogating a Rider about their motivations, but they're doing it in vastly different ways.

Umi's the main character for this episode, and she's... I feel like I'll have a better take on her after next episode. In this one, she's a very antagonistic character. She saves Kenzaki, sort-of, but mostly holds him hostage while needling his supposed heroism. It's actually a neat deconstruction of Kenzaki's usual I'm Just Doing My Job attitude, as we get to see what it'd actually look like if he was punching a clock to protect people. He's grumpy and bored in this one, which, yeah, probably what most people look like at some point in their jobs. Kenzaki's not that guy normally, though, and the more he stops resenting Umi's tactics and starts trying to figure out her viewpoint, the more he looks like the very sweet boy we're used to.

They've got some good chemistry, Umi and Kenzaki. It's obviously very charming and funny to see her bossing him around, a superhero who doesn't know how to outwit a teenage girl. (Although, teenage girls are no joke! I'd probably give them the edge over any superhero you can name!) The bit at the end, though, where she tells her origin story and it's basically Kenzaki's origin story, that's where I felt like Umi would come into focus better next time. Here, she's an agent of chaos. But that story she tells, it's Kenzaki's origin, it's just that the lesson she learned was that no one cares. Kenzaki learned empathy, a need to keep anyone from suffering the way he did. Umi learned anger, selfishness, distrust. It's going to be real interesting to see how Kenzaki tries to help her in the next episode.

Also, hey, there's another lady telling a Kamen Rider that his motivations are bullshit! It's Twomi, and I apologize in advance for not having a better name for her. Some of it is that she's the other lady in this episode doing Umi's interrogation schtick, some of it is that I just completely drew a blank on how to shorthand describe her. I like her character! It's just, there's not really a quick hook to her yet.

She's great, though, in her scenes with Mutsuki. He's so full of himself now, gloriously overconfident. In the same way Hajime is using every ounce of his strength to keep his Joker form at bay and failing, it's like that with Mutsuki and smirking. He can't stop luxuriating in his power, his cool card collection (why they aren't in Deck Protectors is beyond me), his henchmen... and then here comes Twomi, kicking his ass and telling him that he's got nowhere near enough resolve to actually be a threat to Joker. She's someone who (apparently) worked incredibly hard to get to the level she's at, and next to her Mutsuki looks like the clueless teenager he'll always be. It's a brief scene, but I liked how she dealt with Mutsuki. Very fun new energy for that kid to deal with.

Speaking of energy, the directing in this one was... some ups, some downs. Overall, I thought it was really impressive for the ways it was regularly finding fun ways to shoot scenes. There's that Henshin Vision shot, where we start from Mutsuki's POV and then run through the Henshin into Leangle punching an Undead. That shot... amazing. So clever. There's a dialogue scene from near the beginning of the episode that had a swell sideways dolly that starts a beat before Hirose gets up and walks to the computer, like she's following the camera. There's that shot through the U.N.D.E.A.D. chamber window on Hirose's dad, then a pan to Tachibana through the other window, literally and figuratively boxed-in. But then there's a half-dozen shaky camera shots, or extreme close ups, or swinging camera moves. It's like, not every shot needs to be a bravura one! It can be too much! Just look at the old opening credits!

This was a fun episode. The new women are compelling, if a little too designed around their male counterparts. (I totally get if this seems like a ridiculous criticism. They're good characters, and they're here to expand our view of the stars of the show. That is what every guest star should do! There's just this little itch in my brain that makes me a little sad that that's pretty much all they are in this episode? That two new women show up and they only seem to exist to comment on the men. I don't know. Probably a non-problem, but it's one I couldn't feel great about.) Tachibana is getting more ridiculous as the episodes go by. It's nice to see that he's also always been secretly seething with jealousy at Kenzaki this whole time, because Tachibana needed one more emotional problem. Things are getting a little more tense, a little less reset to status quo at the end of a story. Good storytelling, fun episodes.



Next time on Kamen Rider Blade: Joker versus Chalice! Amane in danger! And Battle Fight has begun! No jokes! That all looks awesome!