[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 44 - “AN ASSEMBLY, A COMPLETE REVIVAL, AND YOUR DESIRE”



It’s to this show’s credit – and arguably one of the major reasons it’s so well-regarded – that Ankh’s endgame villainy feels both logical and inevitable.

If watch enough Kamen Rider series (“enough” meaning “a sufficiently large sample size”; there’s no such thing as enough Kamen Rider) you’re likely familiar with the late-stage turn of a major character to the evil side of things. It’s as much a staple as quarterly power-ups and underutilized female characters. Once a year, someone Goes Bad: could be a slow descent into self-negation and madness; could be a split-second breaking point because of a tragedy; could be a horrible misunderstanding; could be a potent metaphor for how our childish dreams of charity and generosity curdle with age into a desperate desire to protect what’s closest to us, due to a society that constantly reinforces selfishness as a virtue in order to pit the masses against each other. (You’re never going to get me to dislike Keiwa’s arc! NEVER!) There’re about 25 variations on it, to an equal variety of narrative quality. I don’t know that it’s ever felt as ridiculously perfect as this, though.

If you don’t buy Ankh legitimately turning on Eiji and Hina to rejoin the Greeed, I don’t know if this show even works. Beyond feeling like the inevitable result of everything we’ve seen from Ankh over the course of the series, the specific events of the last three episodes make Ankh’s motivation crystal clear. He’s said from Day 1 that he wanted the safety of a physical body, and after being briefly absorbed by Lost Ankh, which was his nightmare, he reformed in a world where Eiji can now obliterate the Greeed permanently. For a character motivated entirely by a fear of being harmed by the people closest to him, the idea that Eiji can end his life is going to be the final straw. He’s been turning on Eiji since the start, and the last two episodes are just the last nail in the coffin.

Ankh as an endgame villain is the best thing this show has going for it, and that’s because we’ve watched him change and grow enough to see that there’s more to him, even if he won’t let himself see it. Eiji and Hina know where he came from, what he’s capable of, and they still want to redeem him. The power of that is what makes Ankh’s defection to the Greeed so compelling – we know that Ankh can be more than this, but he won’t acknowledge it.

On the other hand…

It is incredibly difficult to take the rest of the Greeed seriously at this point, and I’m glad that the show barely asks us to. The certainty with which they reflexively betray one another is their most prominent attribute, but after 44 episodes it’s sort of becoming their only attribute. Ankh can barely finish pitching them on collaborating for a single goddamn fight before Kazari loses his shit and attacks him. While it makes for the occasional fun action sequence, the increasingly dull repetition of the Greeed undercutting one another starts to strain credulity; how in the world did they last a single afternoon 800 years ago, let alone potentially weeks or even years? I literally could not have cared less about Kazari tricking Gamel into attacking Ankh by telling him Ankh was going to run off with Mezool, and I only cared slightly more when Kazari got Dino Murdered twice over. There’s not much of Kazari to have ever found compelling on his own to me – no real nobility, and nothing approaching Ankh’s tortured backstory. Kazari was just a scheming jerk, and eventually he went up against a force too powerful to scheme against. There’s a hilarious irony to his deathbed assertion that he nearly Had It All, since, like, had what, exactly? What did Kazari ever do or want or almost get? He was the Tricky One, and then he ran out of tricks. That’s it.

But Ankh! Ankh’s got some fun juice to villainy, and this show’s the better for it.