[Fish Sandwich]

I found myself particularly impressed by how good this one is at setting things up. There's a whole lot of extra pressure when an episode has to build up not only the back half of a two-parter, but anywhere between the next quarter to the entire back half of the whole series. But I guess when you're a series as reliably careful in its construction as Gavv has always been, something that hard suddenly looks easy.

This episode has a few very clear themes that tie everything together nicely, even when the individual threads aren't actually intersecting yet. Whether it's Shouma being confronted with the notion that he might have relatives out there or Jiip having a chance encounter with someone who changes his fortunes, there's the idea of meeting new people. Whether it's shooting hoops, fighting monsters, or making political power plays, there's the idea of cooperating to achieve a goal. On the broadest level, it all comes back to relationships, to maybe sum it up with a word. It scales all the way down to a friendly game of basketball, and all the way up to a marriage of convenience shaking the foundations of an entire soceity, but it's ultimately all about different ways individuals exist as parts of groups.

There's probably a small moral about teamwork coming in a week that'll probably be heartwarming and cool, but for the long-term, it's also a great fit for the start of a new chapter that wants to reorient the status quo of the existing cast while also greatly broadening the scope of the story with new characters.

Far from the lonely Kamen Rider he started out as, Shouma is now surrounded by people who all know and accept him for who he is, and who all also know each other now, on top of that, so it makes a ton of sense to let that really sink in by making time for scenes like Hanto handing out thank-you gifts to the Granutes who have helped him out. We're coming off an arc that left the heroes as much more of a unified force than they ever were, and evidently, the show wants to take advantage of that as quickly as possible to create situations that simply wouldn't have been possible even a few months ago.

And of course, while for the good guys, all these changing relationships suggest a brighter future where everyone works together to accomplish things they never could have alone, the bad guys, in turn, get a really dysfunctional, twisted version of that, where there's the chaos of different factions clashing and people who are more concerned with how they can use each other to accomplish things they can't on their own.

Pretty flawless structure, I think. The idea of new villains barging in all of a sudden actually had me a little uneasy, so for me, the biggest victory of this episode -- if it isn't just the continued love PoppinGummy gets, anyway -- is probably making me feel so optimistic about the new direction so quickly.