[Fish Sandwich]

I'm not gonna lie, my eyes were getting a little watery by the time everyone was sharing that cake.

We're only five episodes in! It's not okay to provoke that sort of visceral emotional response from me this early! Or rather, it shouldn't be okay, but Donbrothers found a way to make it work. There have been great episodes of this show so far, but I feel like it's alright to go ahead and say this week was the show's first true masterpiece?

I generally try to avoid making hyperbolic statements of quality, but I'm finding it very hard to fight the urge to call Toshiki Inoue a straight up genius right now. (Which goes to show how the emphasis there was on "try".) I mean, this is the episode he came up with to unite this team outside of battle for the first time. That dang cake was what he decided to land it on. This episode was so, so good.

I had pretty high expectations going in, based on both this show's existing track record, and the aforementioned fact that Donbrothers has held off on getting everyone in a room together for a month. There was no way it wasn't going to be a big deal, and immediately, it felt like it. As soon as Tsubasa is doing his internal monologue, starting with mirroring that "I'm a natural-born ____" line yet again, we're off to a great start, and this episode, on the whole, does a fantastic job demonstrating the value of Donbrothers' extensive use of narration from the characters. These are crazy, weird people, with a ton going on inside their heads at any given moment, and giving the viewer that direct insight into their thoughts helps immensely in building the cast up, while also making it just barely possible to even keep up with the manic pace of their lives. The escalation of the plot here is beautiful. It keeps hitting these points where it feels like there's more than enough material to carry an entire episode, stays in that spot for a bit, and then keeps adding more and more, getting louder and more bombastic, until it builds up so much noise that it's impossible not to take note of the meaningful contrast of how peaceful it becomes when these five completely different individuals truly come together for a single purpose for the first time.

And the thing is, I adored all that noise. It's moderately amusing when Tsubasa tries to bluff his way out of his situation by claiming to have a crush on Haruka. When Haruka is that eager to reciprocate, for equally false (and completely self-interested!) reasons, it starts being downright hilarious, and it just keeps going from there. That was the overwhelming feeling I had for most of this episode -- just how proudly it puts the madness of the protagonists on display, and how entertaining that was, just for its own sake. But what elevates this into being a legitimately great story in my mind is that the madness isn't for its own sake. This whole plot is playing out under Tarou's roof, as if telegraphing how he's going to be the thing that brings these disparate egos together, and sure enough, he eventually manages to do that... even if it's only after furthering the madness himself.

In the process, Tarou's continued naysaying of other people's flaws maybe exposes his own problems yet again, but as per usual with his hard truths, he really isn't wrong that everyone in that room was only thinking about themselves. It ends up being a great episode for Tarou, further defining his enigmatic character, even giving us a super concise mission statement for what he hopes to achieve in life, including both the "how" and the "why". And thanks to Tarou, this episode is able to smoothly shift from over-the-top comedic antics to something much more sensitive in tone. It's sort of an insane turn in the writing, on paper. Tsubasa announces out of the blue that today happens to be his birthday, and that changes the course of everything, just like that. It probably shouldn't work, but it feels so darn genuine I couldn't help but love it. More than anything he's said or done up to that point, it cements how sad it is that Tsubasa is currently living his life on the run, making him out to be not simply a cool fugitive, but a vulnerable human being, bummed out about the misfortune he's fallen into. It's not at all hard for me to see why all the tension between the group ends up evaporating in that moment.

And that's the trick about why this episode ended up getting me as emotional as it did. It wasn't just that I thought it was a beautiful moment when everyone put aside their own problems to do something nice for Tsubasa; it was how beautiful I thought it was that the show decided to make such a tender moment the occasion that marks the first instance of these five people sharing a room at the same time. It doesn't end up being about the need to fight evil together, or anything like that. It's just these four weirdoes all putting aside their differences for the sake of making a single person feel a little less like s*** for a day, and the sentiment of that is wonderful.

I really can't say enough good things about this episode. Just as an example, I neglected to explicitly mention in there how much I liked both Haruka and Tarou finding common ground to empathize with Tsubasa, for completely different reasons. And then, you know, if I could pull myself away from the character drama for even a second, I might be able to talk about how the action scenes in this show are so much fun in their own right. (I continue to be surprised how much I like Don Zenkai-Oh, especially.) I wouldn't want to make it sound like the actual tokusatsu parts of this tokusatsu series are unimportant or anything, but, man, when Inoue is turning out character drama every week that is simultaneously *this* unorthodox while also being *this* high quality, simply trying to dig into why I feel that way always seems to give me more than enough to talk about on its own.