[Switchblade]

And here's where the wheels just completely come off the wagon. With no more episodes left so W can have peak Christmas sales, Decade careens to a complete car crash of a finale.

I'm not sure how things went so wrong with this show. Losing the original writer obviously hurt as Aikawa either left no notes behind or Yonemura just didn't care about them. There's really no attempt to wrap up any of the plot threads that the show has established. Decade's plot has had a number of central mysteries from the start: who was Tsukasa before he lost his memory? Where did his powers come from? What is causing all these worlds to merge? Who is Narutaki? What is the deal with sea cucumber? All of those things went unanswered. Instead we spend the last few episodes running around after a brand new villain while characters continue to give Tsukasa vague orders about what he was supposed to be doing. Also, the real Kamen Riders apparently are here, too, which adds in so many questions about what the AU worlds even are that the show doesn't even pretend to answer.

Everything about this feels like the writer just gave up on anything making sense so he threw out a Hail Mary and promised resolution in the movie. And that ended up so badly that it resulted in two of Decade's more infamous moments. The first is that Japanese parents were so pissed off that Toei re-edited the last episode for its repeat airing that it just finished by replaying the big fight from the first episode. The second is that we got that trailer. The trailer for the Decade movie that aired with this episode ended up being complete bullshit. By the time the film came out it was completely rewritten and re-filmed, so that not a single thing in the trailer actually appears in the final movie and nothing from the original cliffhanger is followed up on.

It's such a shame that the show just completely imploded at this point, as a good, satisfying ending surely must have been possible.