[Fish Sandwich]

Jetman 8-9:

8 is the first episode not written by Inoue, and you can kind of tell. It's an amusing enough script from Kenichi Araki about a diamond monster driving people crazy with greed, including Ako, but the thing is, the plot is *about* that. There's nothing even resembling an attempt at more grounded/soap-opera-y human drama. No real fleshing out of any of the characters, beyond Kaori dropping the polite speech again, but unlike the first time that happened, it's played for comedy here. And granted, it is a pretty funny scene! I sort of don't hate how Kaori's solution to a monster exploiting humanity's materialistic nature is to use her immense fortune to buy a ton of jewels to dump on Ako until she snaps out of it. The only thing that can beat greed is more greed, apparently! So not only is there no deeper drama, there's not really a lesson or anything either. All in all, I had a good time with this one, but it's certainly not a very Jetman-y episode of Jetman.

9 maybe isn't either, being written by Hiroyuki Kawasaki, but it might be my favorite episode of the series to this point anyway? It's an extremely endearing focus episode for Raita, with a lot of smart little details that end up tying the whole package together so cleanly. You've got a fashion-themed monster causing chaos by putting people in outfits that make them act like someone they aren't, and at first, I figured that was only going to be another cute concept for a villain, like last time, but it's actually super thematically relevant on top of that. You see, because the story is all about Raita going on a date with this childhood crush of his, who shows up wearing fancy clothes and trying to seem as high class as possible, even though that's not who she is underneath the outfit. And those two things of course come smashing together for a really exciting climax that also plays off an earlier flashback to Raita's childhood. Honestly, I could sit here praising this one for quite a while. Raita is inherently a fun character simply for being that classic kind of Yellow (he even asks for curry here!), but the episode itself seriously impressed me. It's not necessarily a great Jetman episode, but it's a pretty fantastic Super Sentai episode, I think.