[Fish Sandwich]

Okay, so I've been leaving my boy Touma hanging for nearly two weeks now, which is really bad timing when his life sucks so much at the moment, but I finally sat down to confirm that, yeah! It's not a lot of fun being Touma right now!

This is an aggressively setup-y episode, so there's only so much to say about it, but I continue to really enjoy the direction the show is going in, even as Saber's weird quirks refuse to go away.

There's just something fundamentally satisfying, probably especially as someone who came into the franchise with OOO and that whole era, about the idea of Kamen Rider actually having to directly save somebody, rather than simply defeating a monster to protect people indirectly. This isn't the best execution of that idea or anything, to be fair -- it's still mostly Touma screaming VERY LOUDLY AND CONSTANTLY about how he needs to save a person, but that's an aspect of his character I find more endearing than anything. He always seems to be taking things like five times as seriously as everybody else, as though he's in a totally different show, and it's sort of cute. (He might be more obnoxiously energetic than Mei at this point?)

It's benefitting the overall atmosphere of the current arc, too, because none of the Riders are in the same show as him right now, in a way. The Sword of Logos crew don't even know the current Megid status quo yet, and Yuri continues to be disturbingly unconcerned with his surroundings.

I'm liking Yuri's aloof nature especially because it rubs in how terrible Touma's current arrangement is. He use to have five whole other guys he trusted with his life who were always eager to jump in to help fight the bad guys, and now he's down to one guy who Mei needs to literally shove onto the battlefield before he realizes he's supposed to be backing Saber up. Touma's not totally alone, but there are points where it feels like he might as well be. I have to imagine the reason Daishinji couldn't feel anything from his sword is very much because Touma's heart is just not totally in this right now.

Still, that was a pretty cool fight scene, though. Once again, I really appreciate seeing a bunch of Saber's forms (especially Brave Dragon!), and it also stays true to Touma's character, in this case. He's not actually that great with a sword, so Saber cycles through a ton of different powers to try and compensate with flashy attacks, as he usually does, all while the much more experienced Slash shrugs them off with minimal effort. It's small bits of consideration like this that make so inclined to forgive Saber for its faults elsewhere.

And to top it all off, this was a Hidenori Ishida episode, so it's also done in a visual style that I quite like. Shingo's introduction right before the theme song especially has his name written all over it. On a more minor note, I also realized during this one I'm instinctively looking at the sword's face when Saikou is talking while being held by his Shadow, so between the writing and the directing and everything, something is going very right with him and his weird character concept.

Not a stellar new pinnacle for the the show or anything, but an enjoyable episode that left me eager to see the conclusion. You know, when it airs... like a week ago, already. Heh...