[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OUTSIDERS EPISODE 1 - “MIRROR WORLD’S TREASURE AND OUJA’S RETURN”



Just… just a nonsensical plot, at almost every level.

Let’s start with the Ouja story, since this is about 90% his story, and 10% other Legend Riders. (Very fun to have the first episode of this thing feature literally no one from the preceding chapters, besides the same Zein effect from Episode 0.) The idea, vaguely, is to retroactively (through the use of a post-Ryuki timeline) give Asakura a sort of Tragic Past, where a marginally moral man – Chaotic Neutral instead of Chaotic Evil – is wronged in a way that unleashes an unrepentant killer who works to destroy everything he once held dear. It’s fine, if that’s what you think Asakura’s character needed.

I would vehemently disagree with you, though. A lot of what made Asakura work in Ryuki is that people (Shinji, mostly) kept trying to ascribe some deeper motivation or complication to his character, but he was just a killer, the end. In a story about trying to understand people and see things clearly, Asakura’s point as a character was that he wasn’t hiding any deeper secrets or redeeming qualities; sometimes people are exactly who they say they are. That’s why he worked.

But we get the Fall From Grace bit in the beginning, and it just feels wildly unnecessary. We’re right back to Classic Asakura within about eight minutes, with basically nothing extra to his character to show for it. It’s a time-killing diversion that misses the point of the original character. Worse, it includes one of the dumbest plot developments I’ve ever seen.

So, Nazu has decided to tie up the loose end that is Asakura because he’s planning bigger political moves, and he can’t risk anyone finding out that he was associating with a ne’er-do-well like Asakura. Fine, makes sense. But then he decides to tell this to Asakura BY GOING TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME THAT ASAKURA IS COMMITTING ON HIS BEHALF – surrounded by cameras and witnesses – and basically state his criminal motivations and threats out loud to Asakura. It’s colossally stupid. There are witnesses maybe six feet away, and Asakura just called this guy on his phone. Nazu can threaten to blow up Asakura’s brother’s life to keep Asakura silent, but a half-dozen people just heard every single word of this villainous speech, and there's a bunch of incriminating evidence linking the two of them together. This is dumb! It is incredibly dumb! It almost instantly made me hate this episode, and that’s not fun to say.

Luckily, the additional elements of this story were pretty similarly stupid, but in a different way, so I’m not exactly wringing my hands over my dislike of this episode.

Like, the whole We Need An Advent Deck To Make A Wonder Ride Book thing is… god, it’s sort of what I was afraid this series was going to be. It’s like Kamen Rider Mad Libs, where you could plug in any series of proper nouns – the Timejackers need a Disc Animal to make a Fuestle, so they hire Birth to get it – and it makes about as much sense as what’s on the screen. It fires all the dumb fan neurons in my brain (DIEND!!!) but I can’t sit here in the aftermath and say the storytelling was anything more than getting those fan neurons a-firin'. It’s not trying very hard, and that’s so dispiriting.

I genuinely did not like this episode. There’s minor enjoyment of the Recognizable Element Of The Franchise variety, but, man, I could’ve just watched the trailer and gotten that. I watched this episode, and it gave me an Ouja story that misunderstood why Ouja ever worked, told in the dumbest way possible. I feel like we all deserved more than that?