[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN SENTAI GORIDER - MAZE 1: EMU IS DEAD?



Ex-Aid's a series about realizing that control is an illusion, and that the world doesn't exist to service your narrative. Unlike the hard-fought empathy of Ryuki, or the better-than-the-sum-of-our-parts teamwork of Den-O, Ex-Aid works as a story that allows for both individual heroism and communal sacrifice. It's not about subsuming yourself into a team, or making friends, or even valuing other perspectives. It's about tempering your goals with an acknowledgement of your limits, and harnessing other people's skills to create your own conditions for victory. It's teamwork as pragmatism, rather than anything grandiose or idealistic.

That's why I think Gorider is my favorite Legend Rider project of the Ex-Aid era. It's basically just Celebrity Ex-Aid, which is plenty. The themes in this three-parter veer a little bit from the Egotistical Doctors With Formative Traumas basis of the TV show, into realms a tad more spiritual, but this is still a three-parter full of untrusting jerks who can barely stop trying to kill each other long enough to scheme for dominance. It still feels like Ex-Aid, even with only a fraction of the TV show's regular cast.



This first episode is largely spent introducing our new, limited-series cast, so it makes sense to start with Emu. He's already deep into his run on this game, so there's a ton of disorientation to his introduction, but it's still Emu. He's baffled, but he's eternally trying to marshal Type A dickheads into something productive, mostly through his disarming naivete. He doesn't get a ton of quality bits; partially because he spends the first episode reacting to other, more forceful/famous characters, and partially because he can't explain how he knows so much new information. We can't really invest fully in Emu's stakes, because from minute one we've had information withheld from us. It serves to create an environment full of mystery, but with not enough stability to feel fair.



I mean, it doesn't help that the first person Emu meets is Kaoru Kino, aka Another Agito. (I super love that this special has him refer to himself as Kamen Rider Another Agito, for maybe the first time ever? It's a gloriously stupid name for a character, doubly so if he calls himself that.) If you immediately need to establish that Emu is going to have to play peacemaker/therapist/conscience to yet another group of violent superpowered weirdos with god complexes, who better to spar with Ex-Aid than the man who debuted with DOUBLE SURGERIES? And, yep, Kino spends about two minutes being suspicious of another hero before he tries to murder him, so glad Kino's back. He's really perfect as the dude that takes Emu's aforementioned disarming naivete as a gigantic red flag, since to him, every sweet boy with superpowers is probably a rival waiting to be discovered. Emu's the odd man out, since he's the only member of the team who isn't dead. Well, there is one other teammate who isn't dead, technically...



Kazuma Kenzaki, also known as Kamen Rider Blade But With Jack Form's Helmet! There's too much to avoid talking about with Kenzaki, because it's better left for the eventual reveal, but it's nice to see the actor again. He's not, uh, playing Kenzaki, not really, so that's a bit of a bummer. It's the counterpoint to Emu's role in the narrative (naturally...), where he's subtly steering people towards conflict. It all makes sense for the end of the mini-series, but it mostly leaves a performance that's leveraging the iconography of Kamen Rider Blade (smartly!) without really giving us Kamen Rider Blade.




Not a problem with these two! It's Yoko Minato, Kamen Rider Marika, and Kaito Kumon, Kamen Rider Baron! They are still a weirdly compelling and weirdly toxic pairing! Unlike Kino's aggressive investigation and Kenzaki's curious buy-in to this story's parameters, Team Baron here just... sort of hangs out? There's a melancholy to their reunion that instantly sets them up as the characters I'm most intrigued by. Kaito doesn't give a shit about what brought him and Marika back from the dead, which isn't hugely surprising (Kaito is a very incurious warlord, historically), but he also doesn't seem to be jockeying for control. It's the start of a new arc for the two of them, and you can feel it in their brief scene of exploring the grounds of the park. It's a Kaito who doesn't want to vie for power anymore, and a Marika who's trying to define herself beyond Lieutenant. There's a ton of potential here, and it almost makes them my favorite thing in this episode.



My favorite thing is always going to be Kiriya Kujo, Kamen Rider Lazer. My favorite character on Ex-Aid, and he shows off why in this episode. He's the last to show up, but he instantly snaps this story into focus, pulling together the strands of the mystery with foreboding (as befits Ex-Aid's resident detective) and charm (the way he teases Emu about Emu getting possibly murdered!), and propelling us into our first big cliffhanger: Is Emu secretly the mastermind of this bizarre purgatory? Kino seems convinced, and that dude never misjudges people. We're also at the end of our first episode out of three, so, yeah, I think Kino's natural distrust of other people, and his sense of self-righteousness, has gotten this thing sewn up! We'll find out for sure in the next episode!