[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZI-O EPISODE 29 - “BLADE JOKER 2019”





I don’t know if it’s just the proximity to a Kamen Rider story I intensely disliked, but I thought this episode was just about perfect.

It’s exceptionally funny, which helps a lot. A delightful 20-odd minutes of tokusatsu. Some of it’s fun physical gags, like Sougo and Geiz realizing five seconds into their Henshin sequences that Kaitou has stolen all of their Ridewatches. Some of it’s the thinly-disguised passive-aggression bubbling up in the expanded Team Zi-O, like when Woz gently suggests that Sougo not attempt to puzzle out the proper temporal conjugation for Geiz and Woz’z backstory. But a lot of it is the almost Blade-like energy of this collection of well-meaning idiots, and how success is never that far from failure.

The minute I was like Oh Yeah Blade wasn’t when we saw Amane, which was great. It wasn’t when we saw Hajime, surrounded by photos in his wee little cabin, which was great. It wasn’t when we saw Actual Blade, Kenzaki himself, looking like he’d just had to tell Tachibana that the Puzzle Buffet was closed, which was great. (Not, uh, great for Kenzaki, obviously.) It was when Tsukuyomi asked Sougo what their plan was for finding Kamen Rider Blade, and Sougo realized he’d forgotten to think of one.

That’s the energy I think of when I think of Blade’s series: how continuously bad at this everyone but Hajime was. Sure, Tachibana was an insect-themed dumpster fire, but Kenzaki and Team Blade were never particularly great at their jobs, either. That was their charm, though. They came across as scrappy underdogs, a collection of survivors and good samaritans who made up for their lack of training with a need to do better than they did yesterday, to meet every setback as a learning experience.

The other big part of Blade is how proximity can forge bonds, even if you’d prefer they didn’t, and that’s where Team Zi-O finds itself in this episode. Woz and Geiz are already at each other’s throats, and it’s been maybe twelve hours. There’s plenty of history there (even if I’m certain we’ll discover that Woz didn’t purposefully get dozens of people murdered), and it’s hard for Geiz to let his anger go, because: Geiz. But there’s a point where Geiz brushes aside Diend’s claim that Geiz and Woz are friends by saying that, No, they’re roommates. It’s a tiny detail, and a funny comeback, but I think it gets to the weird sense of found family the best Kamen Rider shows have. It can sometimes be happenstance that puts people into each other’s orbits, and good things can develop from that. Weirdly, even found families sometimes don’t get to pick who’s in them.

This was a great episode for fleshing out the new dynamic of Team Zi-O, as well as Hat Woz’z more direct villainy, but it sure didn’t skimp on the Legend Rider requirements. Amane’s return, and how this episode centered its story on her connection with Hajime, is maybe my favorite Legend Rider decision this show has ever made. (I love her little Heart Playing Card necklace!) It’s sort of the flipside of how we can create bonds unknowingly: what happens when we have to leave those circumstances? Exploring what happened between Hajime and Amane in the years after Blade ended is, seriously, right up my alley.

Less up my alley is Kenzaki’s return, if only for how absolutely bonkers Kenzaki’s various post-Blade appearances have been. Hajime’s return is relatively clean, since the actor hasn’t (to my memory) returned to the character since Blade’s final episode. (He did play a tiny cop dad in a Den-O movie, though!) But Kenzaki’s popped up, like, a half-dozen times, and the Blade suit itself has appeared almost yearly in Phase 2 Heisei projects. I feel like Kenzaki can’t actually mean that he hasn’t used his powers since the end of the TV show, because that is empirically false. While some movies could be considered non-canonical (Heisei Generations Forever, give or take a W Ridewatch), he’s cropped up enough times to have at least one of them be canon, and that’s not even counting appearances in Gorider and Decade. I honestly hope that Episode 30 opens with Hajime immediately calling Kenzaki out on his bullshit.

Other than that, this was terrific. Diend’s doing his normal charming thievery and armchair analysis, as well as matching Tsukasa for post-series sartorial excellence. (That white coat over black outfit! So good!) We’re getting some backstory on Woz and Geiz, but not at the expense of modern-day interactions. The action’s shot beautifully, with the Geiz/Woz/Accel/Birth/Diend fight being especially gorgeous. (I did laugh when Diend’s like Let’s See How You Do Against These Speedy Riders, and he summoned Accel and Birth. Is… Birth considered particularly speedy? Was he thinking of Mach? Mach was pretty speedy!) I like divvying up the cast into Geiz/Woz, and Sougo/Tsukuyomi, since those pairings rarely occur on this show nowadays, if they ever did.

Whole thing was super rewarding. Funny, clever, exciting, and emotionally rich. Very excited for the conclusion!