[Fish Sandwich]

There are an awful lot of Zenkaiger plots that can be summed up as "a monster does something that makes people do weird funny things", so this close to the end of the series, it feels like an appropriate twist for the heroes to defeat one of those monsters by realizing the funniest thing of all – the Zenkaigers are already weirder all on their own.

Seriously, that's gotta be the peak for this brand of episode, right? You try to control Kaito and the gang by making them think it's time for a holiday every hour, and then they just come at you decked out for a party, because they've decided their job is so fun it IS the party. That really is the spirit of the whole show, at the end of the day. It's also a legitimate positive message about the value of going into things with an optimistic attitude, and how that can make something fun. Leave it to Zenkaiger to somehow still be telling a proper story even when it's goofing off this much! They even left things on a very classically Sentai-y cliffhanger, too.

A lot of little touches in the execution here impressed me, as well. The payoff of those deliberately drawn-out, repetitive New Year's greetings was fantastic, for one thing. I'm also especially fond of that shot at the start where it's just this long POV of the monster getting yelled at by everyone, which works wonders to sell how upset they are. At first I just liked it because it was funny and cute, but in the context of the rest of the episode, it's also maybe smart for how it conveys that the team is too upset, that they're all awkwardly shoving each other around for a turn in this dude's personal space instead of, you know, actually getting ready to transform and fight?

Not that there's even much point to trying to analyze this one. Sure, the script may make room for all of the above, plus laying the dramatic groundwork for next time with the villains, which is all good and everything, but a lot of the fun of it just ends up coming simply from how elaborate the fight scenes are.

It's that time of year when, ~for some reason~, Sentai shows always seem to remember all the toys that have gotten lost in the shuffle over time, and Zenkaiger is more than happy to keep the tradition going. You've got some nice straightforward Sentai Gear usage, a bunch of giant robots we barely see anymore (including Battle Caesar Robo!!!), and hey, Zox even remembered his little brothers exist! Kind of a shame he doesn't remember more often, because I always thought those two extra forms added a lot of cool flavor to the show. As fun as the pirate shtick already is, it's neat seeing Twokaiser busting out such radically different fighting styles on occasion. Tell me that explosion when he punched Stacaesar's shield wasn't awesome. There's an awful lot of variety to the action this week, so basically whatever you could possibly want to see from Zenkaiger was in there somewhere. Utterly delightful finish to an episode that was already a great time.