[Kamen Rider Die]

RIDER TIME: RYUKI EPISODE 2 - “ANOTHER ALTERNATIVE”



Hey, we’ve got (I think) our first-ever canonically reciprocal queer romance in Kamen Rider! That’s great!

Everything else is not great!

It’s miserable, is what it is. It’s got that dumb Amazons thing, where it mistakes Brutality for Maturity. We’re not really exploring ideas with greater sensitivity or subtlety, we’re just watching folks get randomly stabbed to death. Characters don’t exhibit hidden depths or additional facets, they just pontificate briefly before dying stupidly. It’s actually more childish than the children’s show it’s celebrating.

Nothing in here makes a great case for reuniting so many original actors. It continues to miss out on the big, important part of Ryuki – that you have to opt into the Rider War – which makes everything a super-generic Last Man Standing battle royale. There’s no sense of a greater mission to anyone in the contest (Ren, in particular, seems bizarrely undermotivated), it’s all just basic survival. Characterization is incredibly weird, with characters switching allegiances so often that it’s barely worth considering why they’ve picked who they’ve picked to partner up with. It’s weird, how haphazard this all is.

And it’s… god, it’s so hamstrung by an entire episode of You Look Familiar amnesia garbage. There’re a couple good jokes (mostly Shinji realizing much too late that he’s the only good guy in a cast of homicidal weirdos), but it keeps this story from saying absolutely anything new. There are no new ideas in this episode. Tezuka’s romance with Jun is too undercooked to be anything more Laudable Representation, and it doesn’t really square with Tezuka’s character from the TV show. (I don’t recall him being an untrustworthy knife-enthusiast?) Asakura knows what everyone’s deal is, but he’s the one character in the story who doesn’t care what everyone’s deal is. It’s an entire episode of people trying to get back to square one with their relationships, and it’s not super fun.

Whole episode’s “not super fun”, really. By the time Tezuka and Jun were stabbing Third Guy to death for no clear reason (other than TATAKAE, I guess), I basically lost all of my investment in this mini-series. Outside of pure nostalgia (including Shinji pulling out a flawless TEZUKA!!!), there’s so little in this episode to latch onto. The action’s greatly diminished. The direction is okay, but not memorable. Sara dressing up as the Woman of the Beginning is cute, but she’s about as helpful in her explanations and strategies as Mai was on Gaim.

There’s pleasure to be had in this series, mostly from Ren and Shinji being back, but it’s hardly worth all of this joyless brutality.