[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OUTSIDERS EPISODE 3 - “REVIVAL OF THE BATTLE FIGHT AND ZEIN’S BIRTH”



You know things are going great in your direct-to-streaming tokusatsu series when you have to start your third episode with a recap sequence to try and disentangle the ludicrous amount of plot threads in your convoluted and random narrative. Super good sign!

Merited digs aside, I actually sort of warmed to this episode’s focus on its plot/”plot”. I think the moment where everything really clicked for me was… oh, I’ll just show you:



When looked at through the lens of wanting a coherent strategy or a plausible narrative or basic causality or just not feeling like you have a fever when you’re watching it, Outsiders sort of fails. It’s bafflingly incoherent, with a genuine feeling that we are getting 15 minutes of improv from whichever actors were in the building that day. BUT! When looked at through the lens of Foundation X, it honestly all works perfectly... while still feeling we are getting 15 minutes of improv from whichever actors were in the building that day, only on purpose.

Foundation X is one of my least-favorite Kamen Rider concepts, because they have no conviction. I can crab about a lot of season-long masterminds (I don’t want to say Swartz, but: Swartz), but at least they’re dedicated to their machiavellian plotting or millennia-long vendettas. They aren’t half-assing it, or playing the field; these guys and gals are all in on their genocidal nonsense. Foundation X isn’t that, though. They’re specifically about backing every play, hoping some moonshot pays off. They aren’t a shadowy cabal or a den of vipers – they’re a hedge fund. They don’t actually care about what they’re funding, so it doesn’t matter if it fails. They’ll just move on to Plan Q or Plan R or whatever. (Never Plan X, though; it’s too dangerous!)

So a series where Foundation X just spins up another two random dopes each episode – this time it’s Brain, in a non-speaking role, and the hilariously copper-colored Gord Drive – is kind of exactly their flavor of pathetic disinterest. Why Gord Drive and Brain? I don’t know: AI or something, sure, whatever. The strategy is just I Don’t Know How About That, and I’m honestly really enjoying that vibe now. It’s improv comedy rules – Kamen Rider Yes And. It makes me care less about the ridiculousness of the storytelling, because comedies should be ridiculous. This is a comedy show.

Within that framework, I enjoyed this outing with the most inexplicable cast of characters, and cameos where characters would normally be. (Like, George is here for about 20 seconds – I ain’t delving into his arc.) Beyond some half-hearted attempts to give this story some explicable background, the plot is just Nico taking a suitcase to the lab from the Live & Evil & Demons V-Cin, within which sits the operating theater or whatever that we’ve been seeing for close to a decade. It’s a lot of portentous promotion for Zein’s grand debut, and that’s the scope of this thing. Fun to see Nico, and she’s very good with the little amount of space she gets to act, but this is a Zein story, even when he’s not on screen.

Zein’s appearance – and absolutely walloping of Gord Drive – is appropriately epic. I like the suit quite a bit. There’s a lot of that old IXA cleanliness, where it says Order in a way that’s both good and bad. There’s no wisecracking or imperious dialogue – just silence, and then power. It’s a debut that doesn’t even need the Foundation X guy practically weeping in amazement. Zein pulls out Ex-Aid’s game-breaking Muteki power, and then follows it up with Xross Saber’s overpowered magnificence. We get that this is too much power! It looks incredibly cool!

And, like, that’s sort of the way Foundation X works in a story: here’s a bunch of random-ass stuff, and it’ll probably look cool in the end, but they’ll just be back next time because they’ve got a million names on Kamen Rider Whiteboard that they can keep lining through. Yuuto uses Saber’s final form to blow up Gord Drive? Sure! Go with that! Keep calling out names from the audience!