[Fish Sandwich]

You know, OOO has always been the Rider show I think of when I think of episodes that take forever to get to the theme song, but lately it feels like Revice is on track to challenge that throne. Over five minutes this week! That's as long as OOO as its longest, and I'm pretty sure it's not even the first time Revice has gone that long before the opening. It's also probably happening for the same reason as OOO, where the show has such a huge ensemble of developed characters with unique motivations, and so many different plot threads intertwining, that it's hard to find a good "hook" moment to pause on right away. Like, if you want to get the viewer up to speed on what everybody is doing, it's sort of inevitable that episodes end up edited this way. And you know, all these characters really do have fun things going on right now!

On a very shallow level, I'm still in love with Holy Live and his silly Ghost-esque stock footage transformation. (Even when he's supposed to be running, which is as tokusatsu hero as a tokusatsu hero can get.)

I appreciate how much work the show has done since the very very early days to build up Sakura's own personal journey, and between that and Yukimi explicitly being one of the insiders on the secret Igarashi backstory, you can very much tell how serious Kinoshita is about his stated desire to write strong women. (And I mean, this dude clearly adores writing Sakura. It's hard to complain.)

George is a wonderful presence as always, and it seems like part of the rapidly changing status quo in this stretch of the show might end up being him coming into focus as more of a straight good guy, considering how much genuine concern he's been showing for other human beings lately.

Ikki and Vice continue to have a solid dynamic too, of course, but that's probably something to talk about more next time.

And then you've got Olteca, who apparently just has the backstory of Bruce Banner. Go figure! Although now that I think about it, your average Incredible Hulk story might not be that far removed from Revice's basic concept... huh. Anyways, yeah, Olteca's still the worst! It's really telling just how aggressively terrible he is as a person that it doesn't even feel like this reveal of how he became who he is now is meant to make you feel the slightest degree of sympathy for him. And that's fine! It's okay to just have a bad guy who's bad, and Olteca has been excelling at that for a while now. Like Vail said, the guy just smells like a demon, you know?