[Fish Sandwich]

(Fish Sandwich also watched Kamen Rider Zi-O - EP35)

Hey, so this episode continues to make it a point to reuse music from the earlier show it's paying tribute to, which means that I might as well take the opportunity to do this again, for old times' sake:

These were the two I caught skimming back through the episode, and someone at Toei clearly has very good taste to pick tracks from the second volume of Kiva's soundtrack. Lots of real good stuff on that one, but then, it's not like Tsuneyoshi Saitou's score for Kiva was ever anything but excellent.

...That being said, they unfortunately seemed to balance it out by using a lot of stock music, which, I mean, that's fine and all -- stock music exists for a reason -- but I've gotten to a point where I can usually pick that stuff out as not belonging immediately, and it takes me out of the story a bit. Totally just a me problem, though.

But yeah, as for the episode itself, it's the beginning of another really special and exciting two-parter I'm going to wait for Die to finish before really diving into my thoughts about. Before I say anything else though, I really am glad Inoue was allowed to do a couple episodes of the big final Heisei Rider show, because there's an argument to be made that it's not really Heisei Rider without the guy. Sure, okay, he stayed away from TV after Decade, but up to that point, he had written episodes for literally every Heisei show except Den-O, and with Zi-O doing this whole block of episodes spotlighting the first half of the era, you couldn't pick a better time to bring him in.

And hey, while they were at it, we even have our old pal Naoki Tamura (TV Asahi) back directing two episodes for the first time since... uh, well, two of Ex-Aid he did, apparently, but most of his Rider work was also from earlier on, including quite a few episodes of Faiz and a couple of Kiva, so that's a connection to Inoue, I guess. He's not someone I can immediately define the style of, but I have really liked the visuals in episodes by him, and since I skimmed through the episode, I can back up Die and say that Yuuko's finger-pointing is indeed pretty magnificent.