[Fish Sandwich]

The whole "It's gotta be mine because it's a wolf" bit from Fuwa has always been so funny to me. I know we've established that *is* a great animal motif for the guy, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one watching that scene at the time thinking "well maybe if that was an Assault Kong Key, we'd know it's for you, ya' big gorilla."

I really love Assault Wolf as a form. Especially because of the more muted color scheme compared to Shooting Wolf, it comes off almost like the gritty and grounded live-action adaptation version of Vulcan (even though he was always live-action...), and it just makes a ton of sense for Fuwa. Also the Progrise Key is a perfect example of something Bandai/PLEX excel at, in how there's that leg of the wolf on the outside that's also the jaw of the wolf on the inside. One part looks like two totally different things without actually changing shape at all. You see that kind of thing on Sentai robots often, making simple transformation schemes feel like they're still accomplishing a lot, and it always really impresses me how clever they can be.

This is an episode of Zero-One I love quite a bit, especially for how much slick setup it does of future things for the show... but that obviously makes it pretty hard to talk about right here and now. Mind you, I still really enjoyed the episode even before knowing how it fit into the bigger picture too, but I feel the best things about it are in how much it's looking forward.

Ikazuchi is pretty great, by the way. I always think of Raiden as being discount Ryuuga Banjou, and believe me when I say that's a compliment. I still remember how weird it was when this new Rider showed up and then immediately bit the dust, too. Like, I don't think anyone knew about him before the episode aired at all? It was a highly unusual debut.