[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE EPISODE 08 - “COORDINATING WITH HEAVY METAL”



I mean, it’s pretty corny.

Like, it’s for sure a choice the whole production team made for Shun’s big speech. The crux of this story is that Shun – much like Satake’s BAD BOY of a son – is chafing under the demands of his father. But unlike the Hound, Shun deals with the stifling expectations of his father by doubling down on the pressure, forcing himself to be even more stringent in his identity as a good son. Shun hates the KRC because they’re fun, unlike his miserable existence as a popular jock. (Just, like, go with me here. I know how that last sentence sounded.) Shun breaks down at Gentarou’s flippant dismissal of Shun’s so-called leadership skills and strategizing, and tearfully lays out his entire psychology in capital letters.

(Real quick aside: as an actual American Football fan, I found this episode’s specifics on Shun, the team, and all of it to be hilariously distracting. Most of Shun’s physicality in the fight scenes would be more appropriate for a lineman, not a quarterback. Quarterbacks definitely aren’t supposed to tackle people! And Kengo’s description of the QB's leadership and play-calling kind of misses out on the idea of, you know, coaches. The QB, much like basically everyone on a sports team, is supposed to follow instructions and execute according to a coach’s plan. You can gunsling, especially at the high school level, but it’s very weird for this show to suggest that Shun subsuming his own plans in order to follow someone else’s lead is a deficiency in him as an athlete. It’s sort of a crucial skill?)

What follows is a scene of Shun weeping about his dad being overbearing, and football not being fun because of it, and him wanting to have fun, and it is a mystifying scene, tonally. If there’d been a shot of Shun using eye drops to fake tears, it’d make perfect sense in the way the actor plays it. It’s 100% this character having an emotional breakthrough, and the things he’s saying definitely make him sound miserable and self-loathing, but the performance is one of the phoniest things I’ve ever seen. It’s a joke that no one’s laughing at.

But it sort of worked, because Shun’s scene partner is Gentarou.

The thing that makes Shun and Gentarou work as scene partners is that they both have incredibly weird ideas about What It Means To Be A Man, and they’re the only ones in the cast that have that near-psychosis. (JK isn’t gonna care about manliness, the girls all think that stuff is toxic masculinity, and Kengo can relate to the dad stuff, but he ain’t gonna bawl in front of people about it.) Gentarou goes big as the default, and Shun best responds to big, theatrical nonsense. They both view manliness as an intense burden to carry that are thinking about way way way too much, so they’re naturally going to cry their eyes out and connect over making a break with your dad to become your own man. Shun’s phoniness hits Gentarou’s over-the-top empathy and it all feels like it’s the only way this show could’ve landed Shun’s big, dumb story. I like it, even if it’s hard to spend too much time defending Shun’s terrible, terrible histrionics. (It’s real bad!) I think the specific hypermasculine weirdness of Shun and Gentarou as rivals and then dudes forgives a lot of the embarrassing performance stuff.

It doesn’t hurt that the pathway for Shun’s revelation is a super solid KRC adventure. There’s not a lot more to this part than just more of what happened last time – we’re still in Miu and JK steering the Zodiart parts, while Gen, Yuuki, and Kengo find time to duck out for fights. (Tomoko is… around for a lot of it!) Having Shun basically watching a Fourze episode to learn that all these kids are having fun while being heroes is as laudable a plot as you can get this early in a Kamen Rider series. It’s cute, him learning that a real club is one where you’re empowered to be your most honest self, while supporting your friends to do the same. Wrapping it all up in duty and pride is probably all Shun needed to join the team. (I assume getting to wreck the crap out of cosmic monstrosities with a suit of power armor didn’t hurt!)

I don’t know if this is going to be one of my favorite two-parters? I think the formula established here – and refined and enhanced going forward – is one of the most reliable in Heisei, thanks to how fun the cast is to separate and combine, but Shun’s big emotional scene is either terrible, or so terrible it’s great, depending on your point of view. It’s all in service of adding one more KRC member, so the goal absolutely makes it worthwhile, but I think they asked too much of Shun’s actor here. Unless you’re Gentarou, apparently.