[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE EPISODE 21 - “OBJECTION! THE TRIAL”



Aw, this was cute, and also sad. A Kamen Rider Zero-One hallmark!

The cute part was, obviously, the Zero-One Does A Phoenix Wright of it all. Switching the show up to a legal thriller for a couple episodes is a great use of the Job Battle format, playing with genre and tone a bit. It’s still a superhero show that’s interrogating the intersection of humanity and technology, but now it’s also a courtroom drama with investigative elements! And those elements are so corny in their conception that it adds some much needed levity to this eventually-dark story: Bingo, the heroic Humagear defense attorney, convinced of his client’s innocence; Ishinori, the smug and shifty prosecutor; and the possible culprit outside it all, working to destroy the accused’s only chance of freedom. It’s quaint, the whole thing.

But all of that quaintness is in service of a deeper question about Guilt and Culpability. Aruto finally learns that the Humagear rampage of the last few episodes wasn’t some new scheme by MetsubouJinrai, it’s a conscious choice by the afflicted Humagears. (I honestly thought he’d already figured this out?) With all this on the table, it paints the Humagears in a different light. Sure, they’re being mistreated by humans – maligned, insulted, even assaulted – but they’re meeting that mistreatment with murderous rage. Is that justified? Or are the Humagears escalating situations unnecessarily?

It’s a fun concept to explore in a legal setting. Aruto sees the Humagears’ rampages as down to human intolerance, but the Humagears are still opting to rampage. If you got called names by someone on the street, I’m not sure it’d be considered justifiable if you tried to murder that person? There’s an ongoing story in here about how hate begets hate, to the detriment of all involved, and this is the point where Aruto has to confront his own blindspots. Fuwa tells him flat-out that the only fix for Humagears trained to hate is to re-train them to not hate. If they’ve only seen the worst of humanity, show ‘em the best. But it’s always going to be their decision which input to value more, just like Fuwa had to decide for himself. In the meantime, you’ve got Humagears meeting hate with more hate, and it’s not making either side look good.

What did look good, however, was this week’s action! In so much as I remembered it! Fondly! The mid-episode team-up between Vulcan and Zero-One was a real highlight, and maybe my favorite action sequence of this arc. From Assault Wolf jumping in from out of frame to grab Zero-One’s ax in mid-air, to the Raider pulling a stick of dynamite from its head (!!!) to create a distraction, the whole fight was enormously clever and constantly exciting. The late-stage fight with/around Thouser was solid, but it was great to see Aruto and Fuwa team up once again. I miss the AIMS crew feeling even vaguely relevant to these stories!

I did like this whole episode, though. It’s goofy to start, but it never loses the seriousness of the stakes (I really appreciated Aruto saying right after the opening credits that it’s callous to treat someone’s legal defense as a game, because it 1000% is) or the darkness of its central dilemma. We’re in a story about the toxicity of hate, even if it’s dressed up like an Ace Attorney spoof. That’s pretty interesting stuff?