[Tokumonkey]

While I've overall enjoyed Gavv quite a lot, this episode was a quiet letdown. More than anything, it felt like our showrunners'd had enough content for 1.5 episodes, and this episode was the .5. The previous episode did almost all of the interesting stuff.

The passing-of-the-baton-to-the-next-Rider just... winked too hard, I guess? I was reminded that this is, fundamentally, a show aimed at children. The final Rakia scene underscored this: I suspect that this was added at the last minute because Rakia's death, with the rest of the cast never knowing what happened to him, would have been too sad. "I'm not lonely because I have a hero-powerup parfait to keep me company" is a *deeply* weird note to hit.

The most interesting moment of the episode, for me, was the moment when Hanto offered a nonviolent ending to Liselle and Jeebh, and Jeebh *almost* went for it. Jeebh has struck me for a while as one of the show's unfulfilled creative intentions: it's felt like they'd intended to do something interesting with him, but never quite decided on what.

The internal logic of our heroes just leaving Liselle running around in the human world is... not apparent to me, beyond the showrunners thinking "maybe we'll tap her for spin-off stories." We'd established that she's master-villain powerful, she enjoys other people's misery above all else, she's utterly callous to human death, and I always suspected she'd kill Jeebh if he ever seemed entirely happy. Heck, they were hinting in that direction just a couple of episodes ago.
Instead, Jeebh sacrifices his life to save her, and I guess that works in an anime-story-beat sense, except their relationship was super-unhealthy.

As to Masaru, I guess the showrunners figured out a little too late that the "hey, turns out I'm your half-monster nephew, and by the way, your missing sister was turned into MSG for addictive monster candy" was too awkward a conversation to air, probably because of the many very uncomfortable questions it raised, and what kind of monster is going to ask actors to try to make that conversation work on-screen?

The final fight scenes continued to be pretty inventive, but the gimmick for the Gavv-Lango battle was iffy: it was fun at first, but the weakest form being the one to defeat the final villain defied all genre logic. We're not given a reason for why Gavv, in Poppin' Gummy form, could defeat Lango when all his prior powerups, *including the one that had "killed" Lango before* failed, beyond "I've got relationships to protect, and you don't" with a side order of "Hey, the base Rider design was pretty cool-looking, wasn't it?"

So here's the end of the show's intentions. They never got around to doing anything interesting with the two broken halves of Hanto's master, or what that could imply for a different broken, hito-pressed character. We never learned how Lango survived his previous defeat, although we did at least learn that the showrunners would continue updating depiction of the villains during the show's closing through the penultimate episode.

Still, I enjoyed Gavv for 49.5 episodes, and the last episode serving as, IMO, a relatively weak denouement only sours it a little. It was a fun (and remarkably dark) ride, and the snack-themed suits were charming in a Gaim sort of way. Next week, we'll see whether Zeztz will be as much fun.