[Fish Sandwich]

This final episode is particularly special to me. I could talk about it in great detail (and I kinda hope to some day), but rather than try and explain how profoundly moved I was by the way in which a story I hadn't previously been all that invested in tied everything together with such purpose and grace that it pretty much singlehandedly made sense of the entire series for me, I'll instead choose to focus in on impressing one particular point, which was how happy I was to see Gridman using the Fixer Beam.

Back in the original show, to me at least, that ability was the crux of the entire fantasy that is Gridman. Imaging this hero that would go into your everyday electronic devices when they start acting up (a universal frustration for all humanity) and have some epic battle with a giant monster, all so you can get AOL working again, or whatever. For drama's sake, the actual episode plots would obviously involve greater consequences to those malfunctioning devices than just missing out on downloading the latest Doom WADs (or whatever), but that was the brilliant, immediately relatable undercurrent to the whole concept.

This new and different Gridman handled the way the fantastic and the mundane mix very differently, and the way the kaiju fights now seemingly played out in a straightforward Ultraman style was a particular sticking point for me. That slick new design for Gridman didn't even have the panels on the chest that would shoot out the Fixer Beam! It's like they didn't even think that was important!

There are a *ton* of reasons beyond this that I loved and love this finale, and I'm not sure this is even necessarily the unequivocal biggest one, but that reveal that the Fixer Beam, even in the anime version, was actually secretly still the most important thing the whole time -- that the entire 12 episodes was essentially one big episode of the original show -- was just about the best Christmas present I could've asked for back in 2018.