[Fish Sandwich]

This is just mean, Zenkaiger! You seriously expect me to come in here and reward an episode that spends most of its runtime dumping on Stacaesar with glowing praise!?

Well only because I like ya' so much...

I mean, it's kind of a win/win scenario anyway, to be honest. If Stacey accomplishes his goals for once, it's an exciting victory for one of my favorite characters. If he keeps failing, it only increases the underdog appeal of one of my favorite characters. There's basically nothing that can stop me from really liking Stacey, is the point!

Besides, having him get humiliated in this manner does fit his character perfectly. He has to lose anyway because he's the bad guy, but simply as a person, he's... I mean, geez, what isn't he? Stuck up; arrogant; proud; prickly; unsociable; haughty... the list goes on. He's the sort of character who is inclined to take any defeat extremely personally, and that means every time he comes back from an episode like this, he'll only have more emotion behind him, and be that much more interesting for it. He's still the perfect anti-Kaito, and I would gladly watch a million episodes of this largely one-sided feud escalating further and further.

(Please fix up his robot though; that thing is too cool to end up in a scrap heap!)

Oh, and that Twokaiser dude was in this one, or whatever? Yeah, I mean, he's pretty alright too. Okay, I kid – this is a solid outing for him as well. First of all, you wanna talk pride, the idea that Zox will stop in the middle of a fight to prove his superior dancing skills is maybe one of the funniest things they've done with the guy yet. And since this show is always so packed, that is but one beat in the middle of a delightfully elaborate showdown between Twokaiser and Zenkaiser that isn't even the climax of the episode. It's got pretty much everything, too. They fight with guns! They fight with swords! Zox gets all big and tries to step on Kaito! The other Zenkaigers even give comically melodramatic performances in reaction to Kaito's faked defeat! You can't go wrong with any of that. Top that off with the second leg of the action with Stacey in the mix, followed by a robo fight with some rather stunning visuals, and you've got an episode with fantastic action all around.

You also can't go too wrong with the writing behind it, either. Again, Stacey is always great, with his complete inability to see outside his own worldview, but this is some of the strongest material Zox has been given yet. Like Kaito points out, it's actually really interesting that his first instinct (or at the least decision he landed on) after being made that offer is to ask Zenkaiser to fight. It makes so much sense that elaborating kinda devalues it, but I don't know, I just like that he did things the showy pirate way rather than tackling Kaito from an alley or something. All his behavior here is so on point, and you can sort of tell that Koumura was a sub-writer on Gokaiger, because he is at max Gokai power the entire runtime – charmingly bold and surprisingly pleasant without exactly being heroic. That line where he tells Stacey to thank him with actions rather than words, too... *so* good! This was a great episode!