[Fish Sandwich]

There's no way I was going to end the series with anything other than more of that slower emotional music from the OST I love so much, so here's the extremely mournful, final sounding Fate of Parent and Child, which, uh... isn't at all in the finale, unless I missed it?

But hey, at least there's the very last track on the second OST, Clear Sky, essentially a deep breath in music form, which just screams of something written to play at the very end of the show... even though it's not anywhere in the finale either. Hm.

Granted, there's a chance I simply wasn't being thorough enough going through, but as far as I caught, neither of these two tracks were even used in the entire series, and if I'm right about that, then man, at least I couldn't ask for a better opportunity to point out why I've been sharing all this music. Kamen Rider shows get a lot of talented composers making very high quality background music; it's something I feel greatly contributes to creating the identity of each one of these shows, and as I stated upfront, Kiva is the exact opposite of an exception, thanks to Tsuneyoshi Saitou. There's a lot of music in Rider I don't really appreciate until I've heard it by itself, and in some cases, there's even some you just don't hear at all unless you give the soundtrack a listen, so in that spirit, since this is the final set of tracks I'm sharing from the OST, here's a link to the second volume's playlist on YouTube, just like I did for the first one. Maybe see if anything new catches your ear some time.

(Note that I said this is the final set of tracks I'm sharing from the OST, by the way. I'm not done with this bit just yet.)

As for the episode, I ended up rewatching it in full once I got to the end of my whole process of skimming through the series, and I gotta say, anyone can argue this isn't a perfect finale all they want, but it might still be the perfect Kiva finale?

There's just so much insanity and heart and stupidity and action and it really encompasses so much of what the show was leading up to it. You've got a character journey as charmingly inexplicable as 753 somehow ending up being (I think?) the first ever Kamen Rider to get married, plotting decisions as frustratingly absurd as Shima still needing to be involved for some reason, a fight scene that ends as amazingly as King getting destroyed by Wataru and Taiga using his own dumb yo-yo finisher on him followed by a combo of Saga and Kiva's own killer moves!

...It's a really packed episode! In a way where it's sort of all over the place, but darn it if that doesn't make it the pinnacle of Kiva-ness. I really do think it's everything a final episode should be in that sense, as backhanded as I'm sure some of this sounds. There is a method behind a lot of that madness, too.

You say the Ixa glove bit doesn't add any further depth to Wataru and Otoya's relationship, for example, but I don't think it needs to. It's the same thing as RabbitDragon in Build – a summation of all that you've seen over the course of the story. Just like the core of that show was how a genius physicist and a meathead fighter were always the Best Match, Kiva beautifully encapsulates how the bond between a father and son transcends time by demonstrating that Otoya will always be there to lend Wataru a hand, literally, even if he's only there in spirit.

The stuff with Taiga, though, I mean, I have to give credit to Inoue for writing Ghost before Ghost again, as the main hero (a young man at the end of a journey to gain the self-confidence to protect the people who matter to him) stops the main villain (a member of a royal family led astray by personal issues stemming from his upbringing) with a hug, but at the same time, I can't claim this part of Kiva's ending really resonated with me or anything.

There are things about it I love conceptually for sure, but my most vivid memory of those scenes, my most visceral reaction, was how thoroughly baffled I felt when Maya told her sons to beat each other up so they could "feel each other's souls". In the moment, it was simply because I thought it sort of unnecessarily undercut the fact that they just reconciled, but in retrospect, it's like... what the heck were you thinking writing that, Inoue-san!? What kind of a message is that to send to the kids watching these shows!? And then the fighting isn't even choreographed like casual roughhousing; Taiga and Wataru are kicking the s*** out of each other there! There have to be healthier ways to vent these emotions, guys!

Still, even that is exactly the sort of madness I expect from Kiva. Maya being alive, too, they even foreshadow that by placing the scene in 47 where she's "killed" directly next to Shima telling Wataru that Taiga didn't have it in his heart to actually kill him. It's like one shlocky plot development justifying another!

Putting aside that more negative stuff (and I mean, really, Taiga fake-murdering people doesn't even bother me), I think I'm also a fan of where Nago and Megumi end up here? It's completely ridiculous and yet surprisingly endearing, and the end of the day, that's our Nago-san! Also kind of a fan of his final boss being Bishop, now that I think about it? On the surface, it seems like just a matter of pairing up the characters who are left to fight, but Bishop sorta had the same kind of unfeeling dedication to his black-and-white code that Nago used to, so you could maybe argue it's like Nago's final triumph over his own weakness to beat him here? Or something?

Anyway, yeah, this finale is 1000% Kiva, whatever else it is. That final minute especially is the absolute most wonderful way imaginable to close out the show. It's like the whimsy that went away during the melodramatic back half came back all at once, AND it's thematically on-point to have Wataru's kid show up. Like, yes. Absolutely yes to the Kurenai family just having to deal with wacky time adventures forever now. Why would anyone say "no" to that?