[Kamen Rider Die]

RIDER TIME: RYUKI EPISODE 3 - “ALIVE A LIFE”



D’you wanna hear something really funny? Inoue wrote my favorite Kamen Rider Ryuki episodes.

I’m sure that’s sacrilegious to some/most folks, but I swear it’s true. Ryuki was never a hundred percent my show (Agito and Faiz were way more my speed), but I liked certain characters; certain arcs. Kitaoka was my favorite guy, though, and Inoue did some of the bigger Zolda stories. But the couple that he did that I loved the most were two screwball comedy episodes, 29 and 30.

They’re fantastic comedy episodes, but what I liked the best were that they never stopped being Ryuki episodes. They were still concerned with investigation, empathy, self-discovery, and compromise. They had an abundance of warmth, while never feeling frivolous. It was all the themes of Ryuki, but shot through with an absurdity that only served to highlight the enormity of its goals: to understand another person.

So it breaks my heart to see him also do the worst Ryuki episodes I’ve ever seen.

The only part of this episode that’s even worth talking about is in the final few minutes. It’s just the Ren and Shinji stuff, Ren’s death scene and the aftermath. Everything else is terrible, just terrible. Sara’s abilities never make any sense, nor does her plan. (Why doesn’t she just get Shinji to fight Tatsuya immediately? Why kill twelve other people? Why give any of them amnesia, but not all of them? Why drag back some Riders from the original battle, but not all of them? Why wait until she's completely dead to end the fight, when she could’ve just instituted a shorter deadline at the beginning?) Tatsuya never really comes across as anything other than Ren’s Themes, which is obvious and boring. The reveal that Goro has been waiting to betray Asakura is both inevitable and completely stupid. (Why wait until now, when he didn’t even manage to kill Asakura?) Revisiting Goro’s need to avenge Kitaoka is one more Sure I Guess moment of pointless nostalgia. Odin is an almost hilarious non-entity; you never even see his face! How he’s doing anything, or what he’s doing it for, is never discussed. The whole plot of this three-episode series only exists to delay the one good thing about it, which is such a slap in the face to fans.

Because, man, Ren and Shinji! Why wouldn’t you just build the entire series around their reunion? I get wanting to make it a reward, but why would you make something so miserable that you’d need to reward the audience? Just make something sweet and poignant, like the last five minutes! But over a 90-minute project! As stupidly obvious as Ren Sacrifices Himself For Shinji is as a plotpoint (the main gear for this project was Stupidly Obvious), the actors sell the shit out of the aftermath. Both guys make you feel every second of the past sixteen years, and the missed opportunities that come along with them. If the Tezuka/Jun stuff felt like a hollow excuse for a relationship, these two manage to put onscreen the kind of bond that transcends time and space and life and death and even reality itself.

It’s a shame that those moments exist as the payoff to the most relentlessly mediocre Ryuki episodes I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t begin to guess why Inoue would make something so charmless and bleak, only to resolve it with something so humane and generous. My favorite moment in the whole series is Shinji leaving the big New Collectibles fight between Team Zi-O and Odin, to check in on Definitely Couldn’t Get Eri’s Actor Back So Here’s Eri’s Back. It’s the character realizing that these fights are hollow and pointless, so it’s better to spend your time helping people out, honoring their dreams. Odin’s dumb, and the show seems to realize that. But we still get the fight scene, an obligatory and heartless bit of business. That’s sort of the whole series of Rider Time: Ryuki. There’re moments that say that Inoue has as tight a grip on what Kobayashi was trying to accomplish as he ever did guesting on the TV series, but they’re tiny specks in a tapestry of meaningless fights that the script can’t bring itself to try and justify.

This wasn’t very good.