[Fish Sandwich]

Jetman 48-49:

48 is where Inoue really starts to push the show towards its ending, and since this is Jetman we're talking about, that means he's mainly focused on pushing one of the romantic arcs towards its conclusion. In this case, we've got three people who have feelings for Maria in three extremely different ways. Radiguet considers her to be of great value as a possession, and using his new powers, he tries to make her into a truly perfect puppet, bestowing her with vampiric abilities that are also gradually turning her into a bestial creature with none of her own identity left. Maria insists she's willing to give anything for the strength to defeat her enemies, but this turn of events doesn't sit right with Grey, who loves Maria for the beauty he sees in who she is, rather than what Radiguet wants to make her. It also doesn't sit right with Ryuu, who loves Maria for who she was, and would still do anything to be back together with Rie. In typical Inoue fashion, this is emphasized as strongly as possible, as we also get to see Ryuu head to a birthday dinner early on here. It's Rie's, of course, and Ryuu is completely alone at the table. He's good at playing it off around the team most of the time, but the poor guy has been seriously hurting the entire series, and a scene like this (that, once again, really doesn't feel like something you'd normally see in Super Sentai), I honestly think it's a great way to remind the viewer just how deeply Ryuu feels all this stuff. In a show with this much *drama*, it's not easy being in love, and it only gets that much more painful when Maria turns him into a vampire monster slave too, which makes for a heck of a cliffhanger. An episode that ends with the star of the show screaming with glowing red evil eyes and fangs is the kind of thing that will make you come back the next week!

(There's also a fight with a new giant monster robot thing wrecking the city, which serves the purpose of isolating the rest of the team from Maria and Ryuu, but the episode weirdly glosses over this whole thread, to the point that 49 just kind of skips explaining what exactly happened to it after trashing Great Icarus. I guess it just left?)

So obviously, heading into 49, it's the usual grim scenario. Maria is still going around sucking people dry, completely apathetic to the monster she's becoming, and now Ryuu is in the same position. But it seems like there's some hope! After all, Grey comes to the conclusion that it's best for Maria to be in human hands again, clearly a decision inspired not only by how awful the Vyram lifestyle is treating her, but by his own development back in 42. So that's good, and what's even better is that Ryuu manages to reclaim control of himself through the power of love. And if it works for him, then maybe it'll still work for Rie too? ...Well, I guess draw your own conclusions, because I prefer to not spoil too much about these episodes, and I don't know how I can talk about the resolution of this one at all without giving everything away. Suffice it to say, there's a lot of emotion packed in here, and some suitably huge twists and turns for some of the last episodes of the show. It's another very definitively Jetman episode, in the way it chooses to give dramatic context to the typical good vs. evil struggle of a Sentai show. There's something I remember reading about back when I was doing the Zenkai Tour, and I'm glad I had this pointed out to me, because I wouldn't have noticed on my own: Ryuu never transforms at all in this one, and I think that says a ton by itself.