[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O EPISODE 34 - "THE PIANIST OF TIME"




I swear to god, I feel like this show is trolling me. Not a day after I write a whole bunch about how excited I was for the new Yuuto/Kohana team, and how excited I was to see some real movement on their shared dilemma, HA GODDAMN HA, I get this episode. It's one where Kohana and Yuuto share (if memory serves) absolutely zero screentime, and where their shared dilemma is addressed with, to quote Reverend Lovejoy, "short answer 'yes' with an 'if', long answer 'no' with a 'but'." Literally everything I loved about last episode got chucked out the window, and what I'm left with... well.

I liked the ending? There's a sweetly pure idea about memories being both sacred and illusory. The idea that forgetting people can be like a death, but that we remember things we've forgotten all the time. No one's ever really gone, as long as we're quoting prolific voice actors. Someone can disappear for ten years, and then rekindle a connection to the world in an afternoon. It doesn't take a lot. It's a tragedy, to be forgotten. But it's not really fatal, not really the end. If we stay true to ourselves, and reach back when someone reaches for us, it can all work out.

The rest of the episode I found largely lifeless and dull, and I'm not completely sure why.

Some of it is because, like a lot of problems I end up having with Den-O, it takes forever to explain what the hell is really happening in the story, and then it rushes through the exposition because there's no time left for subtlety. Every flashback scene with Piano Man and Coma Man was, honestly, pretty abysmally acted and written. The dialogue is just this guy shouting all of his thoughts at a stranger, and the performance is him SHOUTING ALL OF HIS EMOTIONS. It reads as nearly psychotic, instead of as two kindred spirits finding a connection. And that accident scene! I was not meant to laugh at it, I'm pretty sure? But, man, come on. Coma Man dashes in front of an oncoming car like he's secretly two dogs standing on each other's shoulders and wearing a sport coat. It's a ridiculous moment, and it nearly sunk this story for me.

The regular cast is weirdly deployed in this one, with special disappointment for how unintegral Kohana is. There's a scene where the DenLiner crew reacts to her new form, which was funny, but she's largely irrelevant to the Imaginvestigation. She doesn't do anything that helps Den-O save the day, and she disappears from the plot about halfway through. Her aside, it's really just some Urataros smooth-talking (one scene?) and a little bit of Deneb possessing Yuuto to keep things lively. The rest of the episode is a lot of piano playing, and not much story.

Yeah, god, this one bugged me. I don't mind a story that wants to take it down a gear, I guess, but to abandon the electric storytelling developments of Yuuto and Kohana to do a story that's About Yuuto without really featuring Yuuto... it made this one really unimpressive to me. Some nice thematic stuff at the end, but the nuts-and-bolts of this one were nowhere for me. Was not anticipating the show working this hard to let me down! A+ trolling!



THE BAGGAGE CAR

-The thing I laughed the hardest at in this episode were the insert shots of Urataros playing the piano with hands that are way thicker than Ryotaro's. Does Ryotaro retain a bunch of water when Urataros possesses him? It would make a sort of sense...

-Mostly didn't care about the fight at the end of this one (the Imagin has, like, an army inside him why?), but I'm pretty sure that office building got used in a good Ryuki and/or Blade story for a fight. That is, uh, that is how into this episode I was: fondly half-remembering Blade and Ryuki fight scenes.