[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 34 - “BEET BUSTER IS THE ENEMY?!”



An entire episode about providing a tragic context to Jin’s pathological inability to have a genuine human moment with anyone, ever, that starts with him at his most annoying and distracting? That’s… a choice!

I don’t really dislike the idea of doing a Tears Of A Clown thing for Jin, in theory, but this is an episode that I don’t think earns its big emotional fight scene. (It came close for me, without exactly making the previous scenes feel worthwhile.) Jin’s just relentlessly annoying in this one, at a completely different level than his normal smirking jackass thing. He’s a manic ball of Getting In The Way, which is saying something when J still exists. Jin’s extra amount of annoyance is eventually revealed to be a coping mechanism for the deaths of all of his coworkers/friends/maybe-girlfriends back when Messiah was detonated, and I just didn’t care a whole lot?

I don’t mind that all of this info was given to us by J, because Jin would never say any of this out loud. I don’t mind that Hiromu’s the one to confront Jin instead of Ryuji or Commander, because the guy you want to knock some sense into a relentlessly annoying clown who is taking too much guilt onto his shoulders is Hiromu, a tactless martyr who could not care less about protecting someone’s feelings. All of that… it’s good. It’s good story decisions. But it’s all in service of something that the show sort of hadn’t built to in any consistent way, beyond flipping a switch on Jin at the beginning of the episode. (Like, deflecting through gaslighting? Yes! 100%! But not bouncing around like a cocaine-fueled improv student!) Jin’s attitude in the beginning of this one feels at about the same level of characterization as when the Puppetroid is making him dance around or run an obstacle course, and that made it incredibly difficult for me to connect with the third act reveal that Jin’s secretly in a lot of pain since he trained Hiromu to kill Messiah.

The problem here is the same one in the Morishita episode: If you have to ramp up a negative attribute of a character into a cartoonish place just to work them back to normal, I am probably not going to feel like this was a story worth telling. If Jin was comedically shrugging off the ramifications of destroying Messiah in an earlier episode and then it was revealed that he was covering with humor, I’d be a lot more into this one. But instead we got a rampagingly buffoonish Jin suddenly having tremendous guilt, and I don’t feel like the show did the work to get there. Too fast, too extreme. Much like Jin in this episode!



IT’S TIME FOR Getting Into Knives!

As much as I wasn’t crazy about the feelings behind the Red/Beet sword fight, I can’t deny that it was exceptionally fun to watch. The stunt performers were tremendous throughout the episode – specifically in Beet’s many Puppetroid-influenced fighting styles – but the duel between Red and Beet was worth a contrived setup to see onscreen. Wish it hit harder emotionally, but it was still a blast to watch.