[Switchblade]

Once again, I'm really impressed with how Saber is pulling everything off. I wish we'd gotten a bit more backStorius before this point, but as a writer myself I can totally relate to both Storius and Touma's final arguments coming down to "there are no original ideas" vs. "stories make people happy" (but, you know, with swords). It's a pretty neat idea on its own, but as someone who studied literature in college it also amuses the hell out of me that Storius would have been absolutely foaming at the mouth, Isaac style, at how much of the history of literature is just people writing their own versions of other people's stories. Definitely a lot of bonus content in here for English majors (or, I suppose, Japanese majors?).

Really good fight scenes this time around, too. I still don't believe that anyone is going to really die, especially given early Saber's proclivity towards fake-out deaths (I will be so disappointed if the final episode doesn't include a scene with all of the tertiary Riders piled together in that one bed in the Northern Base). Still, some of these fights were impressively brutal; I think I've finally found the one thing I'll remember about Durandal after this show ends.

And finally, I want to take a second to say how much I love the setting for Touma and Storius's final showdown. It's really rare to see new locations in Kamen Rider (e.g., the exterior of Storius's base being a formal Smart Brain lab and the spot where the head Inves used to hang out, among many other things) and I do not recognize this little converted cistern throne room that Storius has set up for himself. It's definitely a found location and not a set, but it's not one that I remember seeing before and I appreciate that (probably far more than Touma does, given the episode-ending "This is Sparta!" moment).