[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 10 - “COLLAPSE”



Fittingly for a series that so expertly balances its teen melodrama heart with its tokusatsu aesthetics, this episode about explosive personal growth and nightmarish self-immolation is more about the way your life only really improves through the steady accrual of small moments; an atomized henshin sequence as reflected through the prism of your daily life.

That’s sort of it, the lesson: just show up, let yourself be open to the world, and you’re more likely than not to turn into the best version of yourself. It’s not a key to unlocking your dreams or anything – things’ll be hard, you won’t necessarily be the You that you thought you’d be – but it’s how you live impossible goals and existential quests for meaning: You meet people; you get to know people; you go to school; you study for tests; you take a shower and eat and all the million little things that make up a day that isn’t about fighting a giant monster that may or may not be the yonic manifestation of a teenage girl’s suicidal ideation. You do the invisible hard work until it becomes the visible upgrade.

On the other hand, the surest way to close out the ability to change and grow is to cut yourself off from the world, to lose yourself in depression and self-loathing. (There’s an entire sequence where Akane’s talking to Anti about kaiju, and she’s basically just talking about herself.) If every other character on this show has been building up scar tissue and memories and bonds, Akane’s been decluttering herself of everything but building kaiju – which is now so rote as to not even require her to acknowledge their existence verbally, turned in like they’re a bit of grudging homework – and sitting in the dark. It’s as blatant a visualization of her tortured and miserable mental state as you could imagine, and it leads to an episode of her giving up on her hobbies, destroying the ability to start anew, and languishing in a shattered dream world.

It’s bleak! It’s a bleak episode, despite the mounting positivity through the Gridman Alliance’s heads-down Do The Work mentality and Anti’s eventual shining upgrade into Gridknight. I guess… maybe melancholy is the better way to put it? I’ve harped on about how much this show reads like a metaphor for the transition of children into adults through the universal crucible of high school, and this episode is replete with examples of how the process becomes the result, while opting out of that process only makes the future seem hopeless. The other kids and Anti don’t know what the future holds for them, but they’re going to face it, and that makes them more prepared to mold their future into what they want it to be. Meanwhile, Akane literally molds the present into a weapon stave off the future, and it’s gotten her nowhere but crushed by her own fear and isolation.

All of that makes for a fight sequence that’s one of the show’s best, where the monster feels appropriately menacing and nihilistic, and the hero feels overmatched, until a former adversary learns enough from our heroes to stop seeing himself as a monster, and start seeing himself as his own kind of hero. It’s a power-up transformation that gives us the briefest hint of sunlight, before the clouds roll back with a broken Akane stabbing Yuta in the chest. It’s a shocking ending, but still with that Gridman mixture of grounded consequences amid the world of gods and monsters. Horrifying, but maybe hopeful? God knows there’s precedent for a monster to recognize that they want to be more than what someone else talked them into…