[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER KABUTO - EPISODE 11

Okay, so.

Right upfront, there's not a chance I can say a single thing more interesting or insightful about an Inoue script than Die can. Heck, he probably already has these exact screencaps saved somewhere. Right now, I am Kagami trying to clean the house Tendou already has spotless. But, all the same...

Inoue making the very first scene he ever writes with the main duo be Kagami confessing his love to Tendou after a very emotional experience sticking his stinger in him the night before (This is a literal description of the ending to 10, honest), it's a total power move, to say the least. Barely past the theme song, and Inoue has already willfully detonated the entire premise of the show by making it into one big joke.

There's a sort of confidence to that I have to admire, but it took me a bit of thinking to decide that this is a bit more considered than I had it pegged for at first. Reading Die's thoughts definitely helps. My instinct was to say that this would be like how I feel about Inoue's Ryuki episodes, which is that the main characters become exaggerated parodies of themselves, but much like quite a few of his scripts there, the story gives enough room for seemingly out-of-character behavior to be justified. Sure, Tendou explicitly declaring himself, twice, to be the most perfect human who has ever existed or will ever exist shows a glaring lack of the... relative subtlety Yonemura gives his boasting, but then, when his whole goal is to get Kagami to stop pining after him, it makes sense he'd be even more of a jerk than usual. And for Kagami himself, you know, I can see him feeling a desperate need to have his decision to abandon being TheBee validated after the initial pride of sticking to his principles wore off. So the Tendou/Kagami plot here, I was ready to say it's at best nothing special, but with some consideration, I'm now leaning towards it potentially being nothing special at worst.

The other big reason I figured this was going to another Inoue Ryuki situation for me is that I feel a lot of those episodes worked wonders with the side Riders, and that's very much the case here, too. Daisuke and Gon are two more characters from this show I actually remember feeling a solid connection with, although there's only so much I can say from just this first episode with them. I like Gon because I tend to like most toku kids who are written as adults, and Daisuke is an eccentric, like literally everyone else in this series, but his specific quirks are ones I find endearing. Dude just feels passionate about his craft, you know? I can't hate that in a character. It's telling of how strong an introduction it is when you don't actually get that much detail on them here, and yet it doesn't immediately feel that way, because what is there is executed so flawlessly.

A lot of that, I'd say, is down to Ryuuta Tasaki's excellent direction. I think I said something similar somewhere in Die's Faiz thread, but while Tasaki isn't as inventive or wild as someone like Ishida, he has fantastic intuition when it comes to shooting every little shot to convey exactly what it needs to as well as it can. Ishida excels at atmosphere, while Tasaki excels at clarity. My favorite bit was when Daisuke is disinterestedly laying back on a slide when Gon starts telling him about the nearby hostage situation. Rather than just showing his face reacting to each beat, it's focused on his leg, which goes from lazily hanging over the edge; to firmly planted on the slide, ready to spring into action at the thought of a woman in danger; to right back off the edge when Gon clarifies the hostage is a man. The added emphasis makes the gag at least twice as funny, and smart choices like this are all over the place, such as in how it's shown that Juka is listening in on Tendou and Kagami's conversation later on. Supremely solid work all around.

The question for this episode is one I actually had to put a lot of thought into. With my disposition, I could list a ton of people who I'm always excited to see working on tokusatsu (I will gladly fly the flag for Kobayashi the way Die does for Inoue), so instead, I tried, more strictly, to think of who had the absolute most consistency in quality, and the answer I immediately couldn't stop coming back to was Toshihiko Sahashi. I don't listen to his older stuff and go "you can really tell he hadn't found his footing yet"; I don't listen to his newer stuff and go "you can really tell he's lost that touch"; and I'd struggle to say I truly prefer one of his toku OST's over another. Gingaman, Gaia, Hibiki, Kyoryuger, or whatever else, it's all equally great in my eyes. But then maybe that's just because I'm generally bad at picking favorites? Again, I could've given dozens of equally valid answers to this one!