[Fish Sandwich]

I'm gonna be way meaner to this one than I want, but my gut is telling me the story here doesn't quite click together in a way that's very satisfying. The whole twist of finding out what's *really* going on with the Dreamer and all, it's great for how it puts the events up to that point in a new light, but even though it changes the context of the plot in a way that makes things more interesting than they were before, I think it might have failed to accomplish changing the emotions of the plot in the same way?

I just didn't get much resonance out of anything by the end, which sucks to say. Baku's self-doubt doesn't resolve in any particularly climactic manner, and his interactions with Miyuki almost seem to suggest limitations to the show's format when it's probably important to be suggesting the potential instead, this early on. I thought those second and third episodes built a really strong engine with the idea of a hero who has to confront people's deepest desires, both conscious and unconscious, and learn to understand them in ways they might not even understand themselves, but it didn't seem to amount to much this time? Miyuki ends up solving her real life problems mostly because she decided to tell her new husband about a bad dream she had, which kinda inadvertently means the bad dream saved the day as much as ZEZTZ did? Obviously it's important that he stopped the capital-letter Nightmare, but I'd sort of hope that, even if they only really meet within a dream, Baku himself could form a more impactful connection with the people he's helping. Maybe those people could even help him in some unexpected way! Might make a good story!

So yeah, I think there's a lot that maybe needs to be ironed out still if the show wants to do standard two-parters focused more around guest characters than an overarching story, but A) I don't actually know yet if that *is* the format the show will stick with, and B) in spite of everything I just said, this was still an episode that was entertaining enough, all things considered. I did especially like the action setpiece at the end. It gets a little wonky looking at points, but that's the part of this one where I felt the show actively trying to expand what it can do, because all that plane stuff is the sort of sequence I feel like Kamen Rider would ordinarily not even attempt as part of just a regular TV episode.