[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE EPISODE 14 - “THE STINGER’S RELENTLESS ASSAULT”



Where the first part of this story was about the tragic aftereffects and larger metaphor of Miura’s tragic addiction to cosmic collectibles, this part is about the myriad forces at work making those cosmic collectibles available to the impressionable youth of Amanogawa High School, and the exact shape of the faces that Fourze will be responsible for punching.

The Miura stuff, we’ll get to it, but this episode is all in on the Horoscopes as our new opponents for the KRC going forward. (I think this is the first two-parter with no lower-level Zodiart?) We’ve got Scorpio’s bad-guy glow-up (I love that the Episode after Sonoda’s revealed as a villain, she’s wearing black leather pants to school. Hilarious!), the new Supernova CG end-stage form for the Horoscopes, Libra’s introduction, the Dustards that I forgot to mention last time, and more red-eyed Chairman than ever before. The episode still finds time for fun KRC interactions and the aforementioned Miura story, but there’s a lot of Plot business to get through, to varying degrees of success.

I’ve always liked the idea that the Horoscopes are teachers and administrators at the school? I like the heroes and villains all working within one system together, even if the heroes are unaware of it. (Which, I get that Miura never saw Sonoda turn into Scorpio at the end of the last episode, but he seriously didn’t hear her talking from three feet behind him? That Switch withdrawal was clearly hollowing him out!) It makes the story capable of talking about how heroism and villainy exist in a continuum, and how we become better for having something to overcome that’s intrinsic to our daily life. The Horoscopes are part of the world of our characters, and they need to figure out how to negate their influence without necessarily being able to eliminate them entirely.

Like with Miura here, whose temptation isn’t something he can defeat externally, it’s really only something he can defeat by examining the choices he’s made and making the decision to fight for a better version of himself. It’s the old thing about the hand needing to reach back to the one that’s reaching out, where all the effort of his friends only works if he’s willing to push himself back to wanting happiness. The episode doesn’t make nearly as much room for Miura as 13 did, but it also arguably doesn’t need to? We knew the scope of Miura’s depression, and we already saw that no amount of poorly-written street plays were going to make him change his mind. All we really needed was a scene of Scorpio making an offer, and Miura finally seeing that he wanted his friends more than he needed the rush of power, and it was worth turning his back on his need to fight for his want.

And he did it all as the kickoff to a huge fight at what I’ve always thought of as Toei Stonehenge, a site that I feel like we’re seeing for the first time in Heisei, but we’ll for sure come back to for Wizard and (maybe?) Build. It’s a perfect set for a fight between Fourze and a Horoscope, giving everything a foreboding celestial sheen. The fight itself… mixed bag? I liked that Fourze needed all of his super forms to get the job done, and I think the Dustards are a fun group of star ninjas (???) to beat up as mooks, but you KNOW that I don’t have a lot of love for CG final forms for villains, so, like, half of the Scorpio fights here didn’t click with me. Scorpio’s such a fun hand-to-hand combatant – all kicks and strikes – that giving that up for a CG monstrosity feels like a massive downgrade instead of a clever upgrade. At least there were a bunch of black-suited mooks for Fourze to wallop on!

I think this one worked pretty well, even if the previous part was more interesting emotionally. Miura’s story is split 75/25 over these two episodes, while the Horoscopes are split 25/75, and I’m always going to care more about poignantly metaphorical stories that use toku to explore the human condition than I am a plot-heavy installment that’s mostly about ramping up the danger level for the series while fleshing out the villain side of the cast. I like where it’s all going – Gentarou wants to have a girlfriend, which is something I’m sure isn’t a theatrical experience you can ask your parents to take you to go see right now – but I also liked where it was just fine.