[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE EPISODE 37 - “NO ONE CAN STOP IT”



Yeah, boy, the pacing on these episodes… it’s not great!

There’s a franticness to everything that occasionally coincides with the frenetic tone of an endgame arc – everything’s falling apart, the villains are in ascendance, morale is at its lowest – but mostly it just feels like plots and actions are firing off randomly, and motivation is very I Hope The Actors Can Sell This Scene.

It’s not a bad episode, despite the preceding paragraph. There’s nothing happening here that’s outside the boundaries of the series to date. The Ark is doing villain stuff, Team Zero-One is finding strength in one another, MetsubouJinrai is like their dark mirror, and Gai is a gigantic golden five-horned clown. No one’s out of character or a walking plot device. The performances are across-the-board good, and frequently great. There’s a glorious fight scene at the end that is evidence that COVID didn’t affect every department equally. It didn’t suck.

But almost every detail within the episode is one that needed a little bit more space to breathe, or another scene to elevate it. The Ark’s strategy in this one is the weakest element, since there’s almost nothing to be gained from drawing out Thouser. It means that Gai is fully aware of the Ark as an adversary, and neither Gai nor ZAIA is eliminated in the process. The Ark tipped its hand, and all it got in return was calling dibs on the weekly Thouser Destruction. The motivation for the entire battle is likely just the Ark getting a chance to gloat over Gai, but it’s not a great strategy from a normally patient, plotting villain.

(But… I mean, I like that the Ark is enormously petty and vindictive. It was taught to be that by Gai, so it totally tracks that it would take a minute to utterly demolish Thouser, even if – maybe especially if – it doesn’t gain anything tangible. It’s not a machine intelligence that calculated humanity’s obsolescence; it’s a lunatic who thinks we're all terrible and deserve to die. I don’t love how we’re swinging between different levels of efficacy from the Ark, but I do like how it’s not exactly in control of its emotions.)

Fuwa and Yua’s little moment in the hospital is another scene where the actors have enough rapport to find fun notes and heartfelt emotion, but the placement is random and weird. Fuwa has never been the guy to… I was going to say “dwell on the past”, but, uh, that was his entire character for the first half of the show. But he was never the guy to hold stuff against Yua, so her need to come clean and apologize finds a mostly perplexed and distracted audience in Fuwa. (He’s got a lot to do this week as Emergency Morale Officer!) Yua’s overwhelming guilt and shame over the preceding *gestures at entire series* is likewise sort of overblown, since it syncs up with a non-Fuwa plotline from last week. There’s kind of no reason to have this scene happen here? A lot of what she brings up is stuff from a dozen episodes ago, and it’s nothing Fuwa’s even referenced recently. I like the weird beat of Yua needing to unburden herself thanks to Ai’s therapy, but it doesn’t really feel motivated by recent events.

Aruto’s plot works the best, since it’s dominated by gray areas and fun scene partners. I don’t really care too much about the liberation of Hiden Intelligence from ZAIA (it’s fine, but typically random; Gai’s been up to shady shit since minute one, but I guess this was the line that got drawn), but I liked seeing Fukuzoe act as a supportive figure for Aruto. Fukuzoe is 90% comedy relief for this show, and 9% someone for Aruto to embarrass, but I love when shows build an episode around the 1% of a guy like this that is a three-dimensional human being. Fukuzoe cares about Hiden Intelligence, and he’s used to Aruto’s optimism. When he sees Aruto bummed out about the likelihood of Humagears being so advanced that they can’t be constrained by human morality or human weaponry, Fukuzoe’s there to be an employee, and ask his President to be the beacon the company needs; to care more than anyone else. It’s incredibly sweet, and if it’s the result of a plot that feels somewhat haphazardly instigated, I don’t care much. The effort put into the scene by the two actors, leveraging this background joke into something resolute and hopeful, was worth it.

I’m not used to writing up Zero-One episodes this way. (Other shows, definitely, but not Zero-One.) Usually, there’s one main plot, and a couple thematically-linked subplots that spoke off of that. Now we’re into different territory, where it’s harder to see one common theme or emotion across the variety of plots taking place. The action is still good, and the actors are all great (Aruto crushed it this week), but it feels so much less cohesive than I’d like. There’s a grab-bag feeling to some of this episode, where we’re checking in with a bunch of plots without really needing to for the sake of the episode’s story. Like, good content, but not a good episode, if that makes any sense.