[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER KIVA EPISODE 42 - "THE POWER OF LOVE: THE KING'S RAGE”



There are a couple scenes I really liked in this episode that I otherwise found sort of... not great. Luckily, the two scenes are both about the same thing, so it'll be easier to talk about them!

The first scene is near the opening, with Wataru's friends letting him know how proud they are of how he fought back against his depression. It's an incredibly sweet scene of Kengo, Megumi, and Nago cheerfully embracing Wataru after a few episodes of him pushing them away. It's so sweet.

The best part of that scene is Wataru singling Kengo out for a personal apology. He spurned Kengo's offer to be bros, and he wants a do-over. He wants to be friends with Kengo. Cut to Kengo, eyes wet with pride, as he clasps Wataru's hands to say We're Already Friends. It's one of my favorite moments in this entire series. It's maybe the nicest, most gentle thing I've ever seen a show like this do. And it gets to a big thing for this episode that gets explicated in my other favorite scene in the episode.

Otoya's been swiped by King, leaving Maya and Yuri to figure out what to do next. Well, maybe just Yuri, since Maya realizes that pursuing King and taking back Otoya is basically suicide. That leaves Yuri to beg Maya for help in saving Otoya, which stuns Maya. (For a Maya value of "stunned'', meaning her head tilt is a full 10 degrees to the side instead of the normal eight.) Why would Yuri want to save a man who's humiliated and disgraced her? And Yuri says something that, even if it feels weird coming from her, feels universal and true.

Naturally, it's about love.

The Kengo and Yuri scenes are about the same thing: Sometimes love is bigger than the people in love. For better or worse, the feeling of being in love can be so overpowering that logic loses its sway and all that matters is how you feel. It gains a resiliency that keeps it from being broken. Kengo was friends with Wataru when Kengo hated Wataru, just like they were friends when Wataru told Kengo they couldn't be friends. Yuri still loves Otoya, even if she's lost him to Maya.

Maybe that sounds ridiculous? Maya certainly thinks so, even as she's won over by Yuri's dedication. It is a little hard to swallow, considering that Otoya has rarely risen above the level of Vague Nuisance to Yuri. But it sounds real familiar, if you've ever been in love. The idea that people in love can hurt each other and reconcile, or let each other down before swearing devotion... it's a thing! The person you love stops being just them, just their identity, and starts being The Person You Love. It all gets bigger than two people. (Or more than two people!) It has its own weight and size, Your Feelings, and it gets a vote.

So, yeah, devoting a little time to Kengo and Yuri talking about how impossible it can be to turn off your feelings, even when everyone in a relationship is acting like a lunatic... that tracks! That's a neat idea to explore.

That was all I ended up really liking in this episode, though?

The Shima stuff... it's incredibly weird to be devoting a couple episodes right before the end-run to Shima's relationship with Taiga, or Shima's rejuvenation via Fangire magic. If this was a middling detour in the 20s, I don't know, fine. Maybe there're some laughs. Here, it just feels like the show is trying to fill up space before the story really progresses.

That feeling is not helped by a series of Taiga/Wataru scenes that boil down to Taiga asking if Wataru will join the Fangires, then Taiga asking if Wataru will join the Fangires now, and then Taiga asking if Wataru will join the Fangires now. These two actors have solid chemistry (I love how wounded Taiga plays Wataru's continuous rejections), but it's a whole episode to get us back to where we started.

King's abduction of Otoya is a non-starter for those two characters, since it's mostly just King deciding to slowly kill Otoya in a way that a villain from the 1966 Batman TV show would think was unnecessarily delayed. It's a plot that has tons of momentum going into it, but then the show's like Maybe Next Week, and the two actors don't do anything special with their scene. It's just Smug King and Snarling Otoya, and it's a disappointment.

Which... kind of a disappointing episode! I love how much this show is uniting characters in the home stretch instead of the usual Kamen Rider thing of everyone being at each other's throats for the final few episodes, but when it's in the service of weirdly inert plots that focus on fourth-string characters like Shima or my two favorite characters getting lost in magic woods, it's hard to compliment the show for it. There's still some really clever character work being done, but this episode felt like a bit of wheel-spinning before the finale.