[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.DYNAZENON EPISODE 12 - “WHAT WAS I ENTRUSTED WITH?”



It’s fitting, for a show about how we help each other be our best selves by working together and caring about one another, that the final episode is really two halves working in unison to conclude our narrative with the balance of grace and bravado that defined it.

The first half is all thrilling declarations and city-scale pyrotechnics, as our heroes reconcile with our villains and power through to a better tomorrow. It’s the best part of the fight to me, all of those little moments between the Kaiju Eugenicists and the Dynazenon team. Juuga relentlessly exposits his motivations to Gauma, who is no longer willing to accept responsibility for Juuga’s obsessions or resentments, and answers Juuga’s accusations with a rousing uppercut. Mijuna can’t see past her failures into the possibility of change – the ultimate irony for the Kaiju Eugenicists, their continual stasis from 5000 years ago to the modern day – and Koyomi accepts his role in denying her her dream, while also liberating himself from the need to live his life for someone else’s freedom, learning his lesson from Episode 10. And Yume and Yomogi are of one mind, pulling together in the same direction to make sure their friends are supported in the same way those friends supported them. It’s this show’s whole ethos brought to life, where the people around us right now are more important than the mistakes we’ve made, or the ways we’ve been hurt in the past; it’s a hand helping you up, rather than pulling you down.

And then Gauma dies, because he sort of has to. He’s like Dynazenon – a part of the story that was here to heal a group of people, and that’s done now. Gauma wasn’t revived to pilot a robot or defeat kaiju or reunite with a princess, he was revived to get a second chance at making friends. He did that. These people didn’t need him to follow their credo or push others away, like the Kaiju Eugenicists did, they just needed him to let them in, and care about them in return. This was his Episode 10 story, but as the entire series: connecting with a different group of friends.

I like that for Gauma, in the end. I liked that this was a show that took four human characters – Yume, Yomogi, Koyomi, Chise – and blew their tiny, personal stories up into grand Giant Robot adventures, while it took Gauma’s expansive multi-millennial story of epic tragedy and monster apocalypses and turned it into a story about a guy who missed having friends. The inversion of that formula between the poles of this story, that worked for me. I’m good with that.

And I’m especially good with our extended epilogue, that looks at the loss of Gauma as nothing to run from, because that heartbreak just affirms the characters’ ability to appreciate what they have. It’s not about life going on, it’s about letting the good and the bad change us into people that are better prepared to help ourselves in the future, which allows us the strength to help each other. It’s individual pilots combining into something bigger than themselves, which is a metaphor I think we all could use these days. I’m glad this show made it feel so precious and earned.