[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O EPISODE 3: "OUTLAW MOMOTARO"




A fun episode about partnerships, and how they need balance and respect in order to be successful.

I can 100% see why Kobayashi revisited the Ryotaro/Momotaros partnership in OOO with Eiji and Ankh. It's such a fun story to tell, with this Odd Couple energy being applied to tokusatsu extravagance. Ryotaro and Momotaros are forced together by fate and bad luck, and they need to find some way to control Momotaros' more... visceral needs against Ryotaro's sweeter nature. The friction of that is so compelling, and it gives this episode so much spark.

I mean, not a ton going on in it otherwise? The stuff with Airi continues to be the same sort of distraction the cafe scenes were for most of Ryuki (and the DenLiner already has a meal car! You don't need two restaurant sets in one show!), where I'm not sure it's really telling us stuff we don't already know about Ryotaro. The weird inclusion of the Airimirers... I mean, I hope it's going somewhere, because right now I find it pretty dull.

The big guest-star for the week (Sid from Gaim!) is another neat look-in at the concept of partnerships, where it's less about mutual respect than it is about leveraging someone else's skills for your benefit. Yamagoshi is a hilariously underachieving scumbag, and it's smart to follow up the tragedy of Tetsuo with an Imagin host who is maybe less sympathetic. (Although, yeah, there's that band photo I'm sure we'll come back to in the second part.) It's some nice variety in the types of stories you can tell with imagination monsters from the end of time who grant wishes.

Yamagoshi's arc in this one, though... again, not a lot to it? It's funny, and it goes down smooth, but it's mostly just here to highlight how badly things are going between our ostensible heroes.

I think a big part of the success of the Ryotaro/Momotaros story in this episode is down to how uninvested they both are in the series-arc stuff so far. There's no driving goal to either one of them, and that boredom is causing problems. It's a function of the show giving the weighty hero stuff to Hana, which is unbelievably smart. She's the motivating force, the one who is on a mission, with Ryotaro and Momotaros just sort of around? It allows them to be more inquisitive (like Ryotaro is with Owner here), which is great for exposition, but it also keeps them from getting too wrapped up in anything that'd drag down the show's fun. Ryotaro shows up when he's supposed to, but is mostly just going along with someone else's requests. Momotaros is just here to fight and finish his contract, and he's not concerned with anyone besides himself. They're in this story about imagination monsters from the end of time, but the story isn't really about them yet.

That ambivalence to the Imagin invasion is key to everything falling apart for both Ryotaro and Momotaros. Momotaros is tired of being cooped up on the DenLiner and getting berated by Hana (when all he did was nearly destroy Ryotaro's muscles and bones!), so he jumps at the chance to take over Ryotaro's body and team up with Yamagoshi for gangster beat-ups and some light heisting. Meanwhile, Ryotaro is starting to resent being Momotaros' human hot rod, and he's treating Momotaros like more of a pest than he probably should.

(I loved that, when Yamagoshi suggests ripping off the gangsters, Momotaros asks if his cut will be 9350 yen. I'm assuming that's the money he took from Ryotaro to pay for his new clothes, and it shows a level of guilt from Momotaros that he'd probably never express. It's a small touch, but a necessary one.)

It's an episode about these two characters, Ryotaro and Momotaros, needing to understand what they both bring to the table, and needing to understand why they're even at that table. As it is, you've got a monster who's sick of being treated like an unwelcome roommate, and a man who's sick of feeling like an obstacle. Going to be interesting to see how the two of them figure out how to work together!



THE BAGGAGE CAR

-Hana's so good in this one. Another actor would maybe come off as nagging, where she's being too cruel to Momotaros, but he both totally deserves it (there is no sense of personal space when it comes to him and Ryotaro) and never seems too offended by her anger. The shot of Momotaros getting caught by Hana, going "The nosy girl!", and then immediately getting punched in the face... fantastic. The beat of her realizing she actually just punched Ryotaro's face is a super funny button. Of all the relationships in this show so far, the one I'm most here for is Hana/Momotaros.

-The sound design changes up with this episode, as MomoRyotaros, the Momotaro-possessed form of Ryotaro, drops the Momotaros VA from a lot of the performance in favor of Ryotaro's actor just changing his voice. I massively prefer it. I didn't mind it the other way (which still gets used for fight scenes and the like), but I love the confidence of the show trusting in the actor's performance to sell the changing circumstances.

-There's another dude on the DenLiner! He would not like a coffee to go! I'm assuming it's the same guy we saw briefly at the end of Episode 2, but either way: certainly more to come on that thread.

-I 1000% do not care about the Airimirers. At least there's only two of them now, hovering around a disinterested-but-polite Airi. Maybe in another couple episodes there'll be zero!

-The Owner scene is great, if only for the adventure-genre message of Please Don't Sweat The Details Right Now. It's asking the audience to put character ahead of plot, and that's completely my taste in Kamen Rider. I appreciate his outlook on storytelling!