[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.DYNAZENON EPISODE 3 - “WHAT IS A TRAITOR?”



A nicely goofy, mostly ridiculous episode, one that foregrounds the same tricky new relationships of the previous team-building episode, but flips things around by interrogating Gauma’s weird reluctance to talk about his former friends, the Kaiju Eugenicists.

That’s my favorite part, throughout this episode: it’s just New Friends vs Old Friends. Whatever cataclysmic terror the Kaiju Eugenicists (and the kaiju themselves) have represented in the past is largely subsumed into this episode’s sunny idiocy, where Juuga’s just like Hey Man Why Are We Fighting When You Don’t Even Know Me to one of the giant robot pilots who’ve thwarted his immaculately-dressed team’s plans, and Gauma’s big secret can incorrectly-but-hysterically be boiled to down He’s Got To See About A Girl. It’s a bright and sort of dumb episode, in the way that the Gridman Universe’s mixture of underreaction and overreaction excels at.

There’s a whole scene of Koyomi running into Yomogi’s boss! It’s just a meet-cute (or reunion-cute, since they went to school together) and it may or my not portend anything major for the plot (Gauma’s mystery woman?!?!), but it’s warm and sweet and just letting you know what kind of guy Koyomi is. (He did not realize he was the "responsible adult” of the group! And he’s so crestfallen when he learns that even Gauma has a job!) This episode does its main job – great big fight against a kaiju – while still providing a mountain of cute moments to fill out its world.

Getting back to the main plot, though, I really love how heated and goofy it was. Gridman played the Akane/Alexis stuff first for terror in its indifferent sadism, and then for terror in its brutal self-negation. Dynazenon latches onto Gauma as the focal point for an antagonist group, which means the Kaiju Eugenicists are a nearly unintelligible collection of puffed-up bullies, laconic beauties, and well-mannered conversationalists. (Also, one of them has a hat!) Getting to know them both personalizes the struggle, by giving them history with Gauma, and heightens it into metaphor, because they’re pissed with each other in such a childish, chaotic way. This is not a bold stratagem pursued with precision, they just hate this guy for burning them, and he hates them right back. It’s the friend group thing of trying to figure out if the guy in your group is toxic, or if his old friends are toxic and he just escaped them. I think that’s sort of a universal adolescent thing? People moving between groups, and needing to figure out how to frame their history in a way that explains their actions? It’s easy to want to just reinvent yourself, but as Dynazenon is fond of reminding us, even 5000 years can’t let us escape the consequences of our past.

It all leads to a rousing combination sequence, a space battle, a rousing transformation sequence, and the possibility that that the Kaiju Eugenicists could resurrect Yume’s late sister. Because what could go wrong with letting the past catch up to us?