[DreamSword]

Episode 44: Vudo's Deadly Assault

This episode is written and directed by newcomer Shinji Tomita.

And if you have no idea who that is, don't worry, because I barely do myself. The most info I could find is that he's also been a director for BIMA-X.

Given past trends, you might figure that this episode will serve as our fourth and final recap episode, but actually, Tomita ends up delivering one of the darkest and most unique episodes I've seen in tokusatsu, let alone in BIMA-X.

The angle in itself is great: A Rexor hands over Mossa's' battleship to a legion of Gladions and lets them loose on Jakarta; resulting in an all out siege of the city, wherein and unsuspecting Ray is caught in the crossfire and thus is knocked for a majority of the episode.

As such, he, Rena, and a little girl named Cinta end up trapped in an elevator that's due to come crashing into the ground at any moment. Dimas is busy fighting off the horde of mooks, and with the city in widespread panic, no one is coming to save the three who are trapped anytime soon. As such, it's all up to Rena to figure a way out of this mess.

This is so cool for so many reasons. The fact that the mooks get to be a legitimate threat for once is great to see. Their danger not being in their might like most monster of week, but rather their out of nowhere attack ontop of just how frikken many of them there are. By extension of that, we get a look into something that not many other toku talk about: That the heroes can't save everyone at once, and that off screen, people are suffering and possibly dying.

It's also great to see Rena take the lead for once. The result was not a only a highlight in Rena's' own unique way of handling things, but some rather unexpected callbacks. There's a brief callback to the crush she had in the original BIMA, and as it turns out, Cinta is actually tied directly to episode 12 and 13 of BIMA too! You know, the two-parter that featured the Gills Monster as well as Bima pulling a Batman on the CEO of a gas company? Yeah, Cinta is the sister of the kid from those episodes.

The episode is capped off with just how important Bima has become to the people of Indonesia thanks to his heroics, with accompanying montage set to the opening song to boot! And as cool as it was to see, I'll admit that, had I been watching this show as it aired, I would've straight up assumed that BIMA-X had been cancelled or something, given how Rena's' lines at the end very much lend themselves to a "And the adventure continues!" sort of vibe. Thankfully though, this is a decade later, and we all know better as a result. Perhaps the montage was done just to fill in run time?

Anyway, I was super into this episode from start to finish, to the point that I think it's gonna go down as my favorite of the season. If this was any indication at all of the type of stuff that Shinji Tomita is capable of, then I really hope he returns to the world of tokusatsu production someday.