[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 48 - “THE TRAP IS SPRUNG”



It’s a real plot-heavy episode of Go-Busters, which shouldn’t be a surprise – we only have two more episodes left in the series, and last episode’s bombshell cliffhanger needs a lot of space to be unpacked – but still took me back a little bit in how relentlessly it focused things on the two characters most impacted by Enter’s schemes: Hiromu and Escape.

Let’s handle Escape first, because it’s the part I was least into. As noted previously, I don’t think much of Escape’s various passions and pitfalls? A lot of it is the actor (I just don’t think she’s very compelling, past the initial allure of her being hot and dangerous), but some of it is how little her progression over the second half of the series amounted to much, narratively. She pretty much went from Serving Messiah to Serving Messiah And Also Hating Enter, you know? Ryuji can wring his hands over the unfair fate of Escape, but even he has to admit in this one that at her best she was still a devoted gun-toting minion of a screaming digital interdimensional skull god, whose last moments of autonomy were spent trying to provide Messiah with the raw materials to conquer Earth once and for all. While it’s shitty of Enter to keep reprogramming her, it’s not like she had a lot to offer either the story or the world before this?

But it’s Hiromu who gets the meat of this episode, even if that meat is less appetizing to me than usual. Hiromu ends this one where he started, but with the added result of knowing that the usual planning of the EMC and heroic sacrifices of the Go-Busters (the Red one, anyway) won’t help solve this problem. It’s a story that sort of touches on the major Hiromu beats – Hiromu’s pathological inability to start by asking for help, mainly and continuously – while closing off any and all possible solutions to the problem of Enter forcefully and non-consensually putting himself inside Hiromu’s body. (... no, I can hear it now.) There’s a bulk of this episode that’s less about the consequences of a trap being sprung, and more about how the trap can’t be unsprung, and it… I don’t know, there were some fun fight scenes, but this was an episode of ticking off possibilities, instead of telling me a lot about the characters.

There’s the potential for some very neat looks at Enter and Hiromu coming up, as this episode ends with Enter becoming a more literal and accurate copy of Hiromu (I just really like the idea of Enter becoming more perfect as villain, and how that thematically contrasts with this show's view on flaws being a part of every person), but I thought this one felt like half to a third of a story. Solid action, and pitch-perfect tension, but it didn’t really give me a whole story to chew on.



IT’S TIME FOR Yellow Buster!

Not a great episode for the non-Hiromu Busters (Ryuji gets some stuff in the Escape parts, but it’s mostly rehashing last episode), but I like that it’s Yoko who first tries to connect with Hiromu, mostly because she’s the other Go-Buster besides him that is completely ill-suited to a technologically complex plan of teleportation and gene sequencing. She, like Hiromu, would rather this be a problem that she could directly confront, but her version of that confrontation is reaching out to Hiromu and trying to be there for him. Unsuccessfully, sure, but it’s still a nice scene.