[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE EPISODE 34 - “THIS IS HOROBI’S WAY”



The villains on this show… boy, not my favorite?

For the first time in a long time, we’ve got an episode without Gai as the antagonist – a role I was incredibly tired of him occupying – and it’s at best a lateral move. Horobi’s back on his bullshit, which is smirking and saying God Told Me To, and I don’t find much of interest there. Horobi should come across as either an impassioned zealot or a charismatic cult leader, but he might as well be a DX toy that only plays its two or three recorded lines. Every strategy is just some watery hate machine telling him to go do villainy, and then he does it. It’s the repetitiveness of Gai’s one-note Blowing Aruto’s House Down thing, but without even the smarmy hateability of Gai’s performance.

And it’s… like the Ark stuff is so distractingly hollow that I hate to see this show regressing back to it, even if it’s just to deconstruct it in the next episode. The Ark is supposedly destroying a sinful humanity to create a world that’s safe for Humagears, a plan which requires the destruction of:

-humanity
-Humagears who like humanity
-Humagears who are useful as weapons against humanity or other Humagears
-Humagears who are nearby
-Jin, once

It’s a robot death cult whose M.O. and stated objectives are so diametrically opposed as to be instantly satirical, and yet we’re still having them as a main plot! In Episode 34!!! Jin’s return from the grave was a breath of fresh air, since it had a baked-in rejection of the first act’s The Ark Wills It routine. Horobi’s schtick was tired twenty episodes ago, and I care for it even less now.

This show’s success has maybe been in spite of the antagonism of your Horobis and Gais, not because of them. The best villain this show has – and the one whose complicated, nuanced menace is as fresh now as it was in the premiere – is society itself. When this show wants to ask unanswerable questions about the ways we view one another, or dig into the difficult work of helping each other succeed without losing our own perspectives, it’s as tense and poignant as any other show’s endgame. Whenever this show needs to have someone for Zero-One to detonate, I feel like it’s paper-thin and unconvincing. Horobi’s from a dumber, more binary version of this show. I sincerely hope the next episode treats him that way.

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KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE SO-DO AI 06: TRILOBITE MAGIA



On the topic of repetitive villains whose motivations are stock and virtually irrelevant: it’s the Zero-One mook suit!

I think the Trilobite suit is pretty neat. It’s just a Robot Skeleton, but that’s an almost perfect idea for a starting point. The MetsubouJinrai takeover turns a Humagear inside out, so here’s this black suit with silver bones and musculature. It reads real well from a distance, and looks menacing as it lurches in a group. Really solid mook suit!

And a decent one-box SO-DO figure! You know the drill by now: bunch of stickers, extra set of hands, no weapons, no base. All of the stickers were large enough to stick over the raised detail, and nothing was hard to maneuver. Since you might end up stickering a half-dozen of these guys, it’s a pleasant enough experience to repeat.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE

I’m going to be at Chicago’s C2E2 convention tomorrow for some work/networking stuff, and I’ll probably be out pretty late. I really doubt I’m going to have time for an episode post, so we’ll be tackling 35 on Saturday, most likely. See you all then!