[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 3 - “DEFEAT”



I haven’t really talked about it beyond noting it in passing, but: these Shattered Glass character designs really started to do my head in with this episode.

It’s Anti’s SG Hot Rod design that made it too distracting to not bring up. I love that design – the purple flame motif on black!!! –and it works great as a signifier of bottled-up rage. The rest of the designs… like, I honestly don’t know how intentional their specific applications are, so beyond saying Hey Utsumi Is SG Ratchet, I kind of don’t feel like reading a ton into it. (Like, I think you could 100% read into Yuta being Cliffjumper, who I want to say was from an alternate/regular reality in the initial SG Fan Club stories? That seems relevant!) The good guys don’t all line up as the good guys here – again, SG Ratchet, pretty much just a sadist – and the bad guys here are kind of just SG Optimus and SG Hot Rod, which… I guess could maybe map out? I don’t know. I feel like it’s a design decision that started from a place of Why Not, and then worked backwards to give it a thematic resonance.

And that vibe, the Anything Goes (sooorry) thing, it’s kind of the whole feel of this very good, very moody, very funny episode? It’s that got that teen ambivalence to it, where the imminent destruction of the city at the hands of a talking kaiju is given equal weight to Rikka feeling bad about not taking Yuta’s call when she had the chance. It’s to this show’s breathless and assured credit that neither level of this story feels diminished in association with the other, where a scene of Calibur anime leaping around town to then fling the teens at the Gridman computer, sits comfortably alongside a nuanced exploration of Rikka’s need to strengthen her connections with people before her default Cool Girl persona leaves her isolated and alone. This is an episode that doesn’t see the difference in stakes between giant battle and tiny terror, and it’s all the better for it.

More than anything, though, this is an episode that lets consequences feel both ridiculous and obvious, so you can just assume that cell phones work in formless interdimensional voids because I don’t know why *wouldn’t* they work in formless interdimensional voids. It’s got that toku magical realism, that teen heedlessness, where no rules exist if they don’t serve the emotions of the cast. We’re in a story that takes nothing for granted, and questions every assumption, which: teenagers. Whole story is built like a teen brain, and I love how that gear matches the toku genre so perfectly. Rikka needs to talk to Yuta on the phone because she couldn’t when it didn’t matter, so now she can. I love it. I love this whole dumb, weird, goofy, sad, earnest episode of monster battles and teen drama.