[Fish Sandwich]

So, pretty out of nowhere, we've got a fourth writer for Saber, Hiroki Uchida, whose previous tokusatsu credits include exactly one episode each of Ultraman X and Orb, and more recently, a few of GARO -VERSUS ROAD-. Not exactly a household name yet, but you never know; we might be seeing it more often in the future.

It doesn't hurt those chances that this is a pretty solid script that doesn't notably clash with the show so far, which probably is worth commending for a new writer. It's not like some standalone Sentai episode you can almost write in a void -- we're over halfway through Saber at this point, and there's a ton of narrative momentum any given script needs to maintain, and this one does that fairly well. I don't think it's perfect, exactly. Certain specific elements, like Touma's poorly explained ~sort of~ solution to fighting Durandal, aren't the best executed they could've been, but if I'm being honest with myself, those are probably more Saber problems than they are Hiroki Uchida problems. None of these things are completely unheard of for this series.

The broad strokes of the plot, though, they work great. I appreciate simple touches like Touma and Rintarou making that promise at the start to get through this that gets called back to at the end, once they have, and of course, it's a good showing for Rintarou himself, which is all you can ask for out of a debut for a new Blades form. You don't exactly see the guy in any new light in this one, since most of that development already happened the prior few weeks, but it builds off that in a straightforward enough way to where it's satisfying seeing Blades kick the bad guys off his lawn after an episode of them smashing up his house.

Whatever flaws the script might have are pretty hugely covered up by Sugihara's direction, though, because he's not new to this, and oh man, can he ever deliver. You want an epic fight at the North Pole done on that weekly episode budget? Sugihara's your guy, apparently. It's a stellar climax, of course, working in tons of digital effects that are clearly cheap and/or unconvincing, but not necessarily unappealing to look at, which is a crucial distinction. I'm not sure how he does it, but Hyoujuu Senki's crazy ambitious debut fight had a great sense of scale, moving to so many different locations and showing off all its different powers.

The strength of his direction extends way beyond that, though, with a lot of more minor touches that I loved. The way Zooous is made to look so utterly vicious when he's smashing through walls and whatnot was particularly impressive. It also dovetails nicely with a touch in the writing I loved, which was him trying to smack Storious, who effortlessly blocks it as the hallway they're both in basically explodes from the sheer force. Just a really neat moment to emphasize how powerful both of those characters actually are, I thought.