[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OUTSIDERS EPISODE 4 - “THE TIMELINE GONE AWRY AND ZEIN’S TRUE IDENTITY”



Let’s say you’re writing an action-adventure serial, where two sides are in conflict. On one side, you have an organization that vacillates between malevolent terror and callous indifference, recruiting literally any lunatic they can think of. On the other side, you have a ragtag group of supporting cast sidekicks and reformed anti-heroes. If you planned on doing a twist where the ragtag group is surprisingly the bad guys of the story, I’ve got two writing tips for you:

1) Actually define the stakes and goals of each group in a clear, legible way. The evil organization needs to be stopping a specific, logical outcome from occurring, or trying to achieve a recognizable goal. The ragtag group needs to have a clear threat to face, and a clearly delineated plan to prevent it. We need to know exactly what each side is trying to do – and how they plan to do – for any twist be successful in shocking the audience. You can’t shock me if I never knew what you were talking about in the first place.

2) Do not have Tachibana as the leader of the ragtag group.

So, obviously, pretty big failure on both counts!

We get yet another meandering pseudo-explanation of Zein’s Masterplan this episode, and it continues to be a half-scene shy of actually making sense. I’m assuming this is all some sort of twist on the Ark, where a computer program has decided that humanity needs to be destroyed in order to stop their inevitable evil from spreading, but the way the show tries to lay that out (if that’s even what’s going on here; kinda guessing!) is needlessly obfuscated and confusing. While I want to blame the lack of clarity on a shorter runtime than your average Kamen Rider episode, it’s frustratingly more to do with how poorly this show uses the little amount of space it has. We spend a dumb amount of time with Brain taunting Banno, and Foundation X just sort of shrugging at yet another of their underdeveloped schemes going awry (they literally had no reason to think that Brain would contribute anything, but they brought him back to life anyway, where he instantly defected on them) instead of giving that time to characters like Nico and Horobi trying to figure out exactly what the hell has been going on around them. There’s not a lot of margin for error when you’ve only got about 17 minutes every few months, and this episode is almost wall-to-wall errors.

Like, it’s not even Yuuto? It’s, like, Daybreak Yuuto, from an alternate dystopian future? Then… why? Why even have it be Yuuto, if we’re not really participating in Yuuto’s decade-plus story? And Tachibana is either mind-controlled into turning on everyone in favor of genocide, or just once again betting everything on the dumbest possible horse, and I’m not sure which of those would be funnier to see explored. (The second one, obviously.) I can’t really figure out what these guys hoped to accomplish in the first place, so I’m not sure if this is a betrayal of what they’d said they were working towards, or the culmination of their original plan. Is this what Xross Saber died for?

At least we’ve got Brain, though.

He’s not my favorite guy from Drive (he’s not even my favorite Roidmude: Heart, Chase, then him) but I sort of like how this episode uses him to illustrate the ridiculousness of Zein’s plan/”plan” to destroy all malice from humanity by killing humanity and resetting the timeline. (Very slow shrug with a look of intense skepticism???) If even an inveterate coward and traitor like Brain can eventually find his way to fighting for humanity’s right to exist, there’s no reason to think that the future is hopeless. It’s a cute speech he gives to Zein, but it’s also such a dyed in the wool Kamen Rider concept – he even says that every Kamen Rider should already know it – that I cannot figure out how no one involved in this scheme failed to bring it up before. Like, just the basic Destroying The Malice In People thing… that already sounds like a pretty reckless and weird thing for a heroic group to want to do! How did Horobi and Nico hear that speech coming from Tachibana and go Sign Us Up? None of this works!

It’s not good writing, this episode. It wastes time on pointless humor (Banno! Who cares!), stays about three sentences away from having the stakes of the series make sense, and then makes everyone but Brain look like an idiot. And Brain was never actually that smart that was the joke oh my god this shoooooowwwwww