[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER BLADE EPISODE 39

This time on Kamen Rider Blade: Mutsuki gets laughed at by the child he kidnapped! Kenzaki and Tachibana know what's best for a lady! And Hirose completely saves a story that I despised for its first 10 minutes!




Alright, I had some cereal in the PM for lunch, now let's talk about this episode of Blade.

I'm never going to be a big fan of the U.N.D.A.D. plot. He's a boring character, no matter if he's in a lab cooly explaining to Tachibana why it's fine to assault Kenzaki, or if he's having a sweaty, existential freak-out in an aquarium. (I guess?) The successes in this episode are almost entirely due to the show's commitment to calling out its lead heroes for being paternalistic dopes. I'm not sure what they're going to end up saying from this plot is worth all of this nonsense.

But! There is light at the end of that tunnel, and it's Hirose.

One of the many problems with the U.N.D.A.D. plot is that the only character with an emotional connection to him is Hirose, and she's been completely absent from his story. Tachibana or Kenzaki would bring up his daughter, but it'd be brushed off without much interest on his behalf. But the second the story shifts focus to how Hirose feels about all of this, how it affects her, it's suddenly a lot more interesting.

It's just, boy, pretty much an episode where only Hirose comes out as someone to root for!

Kenzaki and Tachibana both spend the episode Knowing What's Best For Hirose, and I don't think it's entirely out of character. Or, I guess, how they get to being paternalistic dopes has a weird Kamen Rider Blade logic to it. Tachibana wants to make up for his most recent embarrassing failure, and he thinks the way to do that is to find U.N.D.A.D. and... honestly, I'm not sure what's supposed to happen here. He keeps saying that he wants to bring him back as Hirose's dad, and I'm just not sure what Step 2 of this plan is? Even if Tachibana finds him, nothing about U.N.D.A.D.'s recent duplicity and the specific way he took advantage of Tachibana's whole thing make it seem like he's one stern lecture away from reconciling with the daughter he never even brings up. But, like, I don't expect that much from Tachibana, so I'll grudgingly allow it.

Kenzaki's role is similarly understandable, in that he's willing to defer to the more dedicated Tachibana, despite everything I just said about Tachibana and... oh, let's just say the preceding 38 episodes. He wants to let Tachibana redeem himself, and he wants to give Hirose something he'll never get: time with her dead family. Keeping all of this from her, I can see the edges of that decision. Why get her hopes up if things go (more) sideways? Why try and reunite them if he never resurfaces? It's a fraught plan ("plan”), so keeping her in the dark can seem like a kindness.

Except it's all stuff that gives Hirose, the smartest and most capable member of Team Blade, zero credit. It treats the woman who is slapping dudes to get them to focus on their missions as too fragile to be told the truth. It makes her reunion with her dad something she gets no say over, which is especially galling in light of how hard she worked to overcome the guilt of his actions. It's making them the arbiters of What A Family Should Be, and it is all based on a version of Hirose that I don't think we've ever seen on this show. It's super-shitty behavior from two of our heroes.

Thankfully, that's the point the show ends up making! This ridiculous, patronizing scheme of Our Heroes blows up midway through the episode, and they immediately realize how much they suck. There's no sugarcoating it, and Hirose doesn't let them feel like their hearts were in the right place. They absolutely failed her, and the show affirms it. I hate what they did as a viewer, I think it's not fun to watch them disregard Hirose's input, but I do appreciate that she gets to reclaim her story because of it.

It ended up making this a story that I actually really loved in hindsight, while kind-of loathing in the moment. It's an episode full of my least favorite tropes, which is infuriating, but then it's critiquing and admonishing those tropes, which I adore. It makes this a story of Hirose finally putting to rest any responsibility or guilt she feels over her father's actions, while keeping it from needing to redeem U.N.D.A.D. specifically as a character. She gets to decide what her father's memory is worth, not Kenzaki or Tachibana. I 100% admire the choice to tell that story.



Next time on Kamen Rider Blade: Tennouji declares that this is the start of Battle Fight! Tiger Queen (fka Twomi) is not into all of this Undead cultural appropriation! And, if my eyes don't deceive me, we may actually have 100% Team-Up Power!