[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE EPISODE 15 - “HOLY NIGHT CHORUS SINGER”



It’s an episode that’s mostly about how interests in high school are shaped, nurtured, and potentially abused, largely from the perspective of Hayami and Sonoda, and if it’s not a bad episode – too much fun new info, too much solid teen comedy – it’s also not one of this show’s best.

I feel like the quality of any given Fourze episode is directly correlated to how much the entire KRC gets in on the story, and this one leaves almost everyone besides Gentarou, Kengo, and Yuuki with little to no screentime. Miu and Shun get a portion of a group scene, Tomoko gets half a scene, I genuinely can’t remember if JK actually shows up, yet we somehow still got several Ohsugi scenes – this is an episode with so much Horoscopes stuff to juggle, alongside a deeper cast for our Switch Story that it kind of needed to push more than half of the KRC to the edges. I don’t know if that’s ever going to work for me? It’s noticeable here, for how much it leaves Kengo to carry basically half of the Fourze story, in a way that I’d’ve been fine with if this were Episode 3, but maybe not so much when I know what the rest of the cast can do to plus up a story. Everything in this one feels tilted towards the villains, and I’d just rather spend 22 minutes with the KRC.

The story of the villains is nuanced, though, and it smartly recontextualizes Sonoda’s strategy of Let’s Throw Switches Into The Student Body And See What Happens by showing Hayami’s one-on-one tutoring as the way to better nurture troubled minds and shape them into something more productive. Sure, what he’s trying to produce is a brand-new Horoscope, much like he did in the past with Sonoda when she was a student, but he’s still using empathy and observation to create a curriculum tailored to his student’s needs! I think that’s neat, and it really makes Sonoda come off as the overmatched young teacher she is. Where she’d just hand off a Switch to a moody delinquent, Hayami works with Motoyama to channel his rage into a series of actions that reshape him into a higher being; if it’s not, y’know, good, it’s at least good educational practices.

Motoyama’s little story with the KRC… it’s cute, going this early into a story that makes Yuuki look like a deranged weirdo and Gentarou look like an overbearing pest. Definitely a choice! Motoyama is the Frank Grimes to the KRC’s Homer Simpson, desperately trying to focus on his art while Gentarou provokes him (but in a friendly way?) and Yuuki kind of basically just exists. (He… really does not like Yuuki, despite Gentarou being the one that more actively prevents him from painting. Amanogawa High needs some better counseling for dudes!) Gen has a tendency to make Being Your Friend into your problem, and he’s sort of filling the Sonoda role in this story, by not really tailoring his approach to his subject. It’s the KRC at their most discordant (well, Yuuki gets some solid harmonies from the glee club) for a story about how to get the best out of fraught dynamics, so you gotta start it off with Gen blowing it.

Altogether, it’s an episode that feels slightly imbalanced, but in enough different ways to call attention to itself: Gen’s a little too confrontational, Yuuki’s a little too oblivious, the rest of the KRC’s a little too absent, and we spend a little too much time with the troubling triangle of Hayami/Sonoda/Ohsugi. It all works, thanks to the Horoscopes being interesting and Hayami’s methods feeling character-driven and thematically-appropriate, but it’s still a sometimes grating chapter of the story. Not my fave!