[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 5 - “THE DANGERS OF OVERHEATING!”



I really love what this show can accomplish with such a small cast. The command crew is in, like, one scene; Enter, uh, enters and splits; the delivery drivers get maybe six lines between them. This whole episode is devoted to the three Busters navigating the sides of themselves they usually hide, and that’s about it.

(The Buddyroids are here, too, but… I sort of don’t know how to think about them yet? Gorisaki might as well be Ape Deneb, which I love, while Nick is Accel Momotaros. I know that their relations to their Busters is more complex, which is the theme of this episode, but so far they’re just the fun Robot Imagin. Hard to say more about them yet than that I think they’re funny in this one, and a little sweet.)

The bulk of this episode is Yoko learning that Ryuji has been sheltering her from the battle insanity he gets when he overheats, and it’s treated less like the comedic consequences of Hiromu’s chicken phobia or Yoko’s low blood sugar collapses, and more like a rampaging lunatic who will gleefully terrorize the people he cares most about. It’s… a little dark!

And it’s to the show’s credit that they push it as far as they do. Yoko completely breaks down sobbing, and Ryuji treats the aftermath like a horrifying drunken bender. But the rest of the characters treat it like an unfortunate incident, not the irrevocable shattering of a familial bond, and I think that’s the secret to what makes this episode work. Characters like Gorisaki and Hiromu don’t downplay or minimize what happened with Ryuji – it's for sure surprising and traumatic – but they also recontextualize it as something that’s a condition that Ryuji has been suffering from for years, and he’s strained to keep it from affecting Yoko. There’s no solving it, just like Yoko’s and Hiromu’s weak points. It’s bad, and no one likes it, but it’s a part of who Ryuji is.

It’s a slightly weird message – you could 100% read it as Dad Just Likes To Have A Drink After Work So Get Off His Back – but I like the way the show tries to reframe it as less about how Ryuji’s going to make things up to Yoko, and more about how Yoko needs to be a grown-up about Ryuji’s weakness. She’s not a kid anymore, so she needs to understand that Ryuji is more than just a big brother or a rampaging monster or a Go-Buster or a wiseass – he’s all of those things, and none of them negate each other.



IT’S TIME FOR Red Buster!

…just like how Hiromu isn’t any less a badass action hero that cares about his teammates/siblings, just because he cannot be trusted not to make a social situation worse by opening his mouth, or because he freezes when he sees a cartoon chicken on a billboard and almost lets the Megazord kill two men and steal a tanker of Enetron. He’s more than those screw-ups! Those hilarious, hilarious screw-ups!

(Seriously, great episode for Hiromu being the butt of several jokes, but still detonating the Megazord and being there for Yoko when she needed someone. People are complex! It’s a theme!)