[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZI-O EPISODE 18 - “AMAZING! TIME! FUTURE! 2022”



There’s a scene in the middle of this episode that worked astonishingly well, and it almost has me liking this episode.

I mostly didn’t? Hat Woz is a fun idea, but he ends up imbalancing the show in ways that make it basically The Hat Woz Show (Featuring Sougo). He adds some complexity and menace to the series – so much so that I’m not at all sure why you still need three Time Jackers – but it comes at the cost of flow and pacing.

Geiz and Tsukuyomi more or less disappear from this episode after the first act. Uncle’s not in it at all. Woz is left to be anxious and uncertain, which is sort of a bummer. (I like the show stretching his character, but I miss his over-the-top sycophancy and thinly-veiled wisecracks!) Swartz’z plan is clever in the conception, but pretty standard in the execution. There’s a lot around the edges of this one that just feels like an early episode with a new coat of paint, but missing the parts I enjoyed. It’s just Hat Woz, doing a Hat Woz plan. Most of everything from Kamen Rider Zi-O got put on the back-burner.

But that scene with Sougo and Shinobi! That was worth a bunch of dull plotting.

It’s a fun way to redefine what Sougo hopes to achieve as a Kamen Rider, now that Dominating The Earth In A Good Way is sort of problematic. He needs an outlook that’s less about magnanimous control, and more about what he hopes to achieve in saving lives.

Shinobi’s a guy who can’t wait to be a better version of himself, so he risks becoming a monster today. He doesn’t have faith in his ability to reach his potential, so he resigns himself to someone else’s strategy. He’s too focused on his present, and what that lacks: power, mostly, but also a sense of purpose. He could work hard to become the best version of himself, but what if that never happens? What if this is as good as he gets? Why not take the Time Jackers up on their offer to make him so unbeatable that it doesn’t matter if he’s terrifying the very people he hoped to inspire?

It’s a problem that Sougo can empathize with. Sougo’s someone who looked at his future as too bleak to move towards. But Geiz helped him realize that the future is what we make of it. If you surrender to fear and anger, yeah, future’s gonna be a pretty dark place. But if you work to achieve your goals, and stay a good person, maybe the future can be what you’d dreamed. Sougo’s fighting as Kamen Rider Zi-O to give people like Shinobi the chance to meet better versions of themselves in the future. He wants them to see that their choices are theirs to make, and that nothing’s set in stone.

So it makes sense to have Hat Woz as the villain of the piece. He’s like Woz, naturally. He’s someone who sees people as completed stories; their arcs a single-sentence description. Shinobi’s trying to make his own mind up, while Hat Woz is waiting for the inevitable to finally occur, so he can move on from this chapter. It’s Shinobi’s moral conflict running up against someone who knows how every struggle will resolve.

Worse, if it seems like things are taking too long, he can just force the outcome he wants. Woz always came off as someone who was willing to contrive an environment for someone to make the decision he wanted. Hat Woz just straight-up forces confrontations until he gets his prize. It’s villainy, but the fun part is in how little it’s different from Woz’z normal schtick.

Overall, yeah, not a huge fan of this one. The Sougo/Shinobi stuff in the middle was great – so great – but the rest of the episode felt clunky and too Hat Woz-centric. (I really can’t believe that they ended last episode with Geiz Is Hat Woz’z Savior, and then Geiz is gone from 75% of this episode.) I know that Hat Woz is a big new deal for the show, and the Future Riders are part of his story, but I was a little disappointed how much this story sidelined Team Zi-O.