[Fish Sandwich]

Definitely an episode of Saber that's moving a lot of pieces around... as if they aren't all doing that... but what I'm saying is this is one of those episodes that definitely feels distinctly like a transition more than anything.

You've got Storious carving out a slightly new role for himself as the final villain (barring any surprises), which was honestly one of the weaker parts of this one for me. His new look and silly extra evil voice are good fun and all, but despite digging into the show's backstory, I don't feel like I have a much better grasp on what his particular motivations are. There's some great stuff with him that hints at that -- I do really love his Maki from OOO style raving about the beauty of endings as he gleefully dances around while fighting Desast -- but it feels like it stops just a step or two short of being something greater. How upset I can be about that is mostly a question of whether or not those last couple steps happen over the next few episodes or not. Storious is a guy who loves his schemes, and I love him for that, so I'm happy to have him in this position, but just like the late Master, he's gotta prove to me there's a reason the show's big villain needs to be him specifically right now.

Granted, being the original root of basically all the conflict in the show's entire canon DOES give Storious an inherent claim to final boss status. The other big aspect of this episode is a big ol' infodump from Tassel, and just like I said about 28, Keiichi Hasegawa is a writer I sort of trust to make Deep Lore Exposition still feel entertaining in its own right. It's good to have these events that are fundamental to the story finally laid out so clearly going into the last stretch, letting us see those characters firsthand for a bit, and the fact that is specifically Tassel talking about this stuff adds a lot to those scenes. I've said before how neat it was that the show slowly started teasing his significance, and it's really all coming together right now. We get to see a lot of real emotion from him here as he describes his life story; it feels very personal, and you get a retroactive sense of just how and why he was so fascinated by Touma he needed to rave about him to the audience week after week. And I always love it when episodes of Saber make other episodes of Saber even better looking back, so you'd better believe I really enjoyed this part of the episode!

It's a bit harder to get into what's going on with the heroes in all this, as there's nothing too fresh or new there, but all that material is still very true to all of them. The usual big declarations of friendship; little things like Kento looking depressed all over again hearing about Touma disappearing; Ren desperately but unsuccessfully attempting to think hard about his life; all that stuff's fun, and so is the big party that opens this one.

The other really interesting thing in this episode is Desast, of course, whose low-key existential drama continues to be a highlight of the show, and this was a huge spotlight for it. The whole point of his character was to be a wildcard, but he was so wild that he defied even the expectations of what that usually means. At the start, it seemed like Desast would be a character to go around stirring up conflicts with anybody he saw in an effort to find excitement and purpose in life, but as the show went along, even that quickly became boring for him. So now we've gotten to this point where he's truly a character who has nothing, so like, of course he'd pick up the sword of literal nothingness to become a Kamen Rider. It's all presented so casually, but honestly, that just fits Desast all the better. It's not like some big Chaser redemption moment for the dude; it's just the latest stunt he's pulling to keep himself occupied for a bit. The only hint of true meaning Desast has to cling to is his friendship(?) with Ren, something so tenuous it comes with a question mark. They're teasing some big ending for him next week, but whatever happens, I've gotta say I'm seriously just unironically rooting for Desast's happiness at this point, and that's a testament to how engaging his character has been in his relatively sparse appearances.