[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE EPISODE 37 - “SELECTING THE STAR PUPIL”



I like Erin, and I think she’s got strong chemistry with Gentarou, but this one’s a little too hard to take seriously, for a couple reasons.

The first one, weirdly, is Erin herself. Like I said, I think she’s a fun character for this series: a poorly-translated American girl who immediately connects with Gentarou’s overpowering enthusiasm, but bristles from his boundless empathy and sense of shared achievement. She is unbelievably self-motivated – her Zodiart form is capable of recovering from any injury and pressing on like nothing happened – but she can’t grasp the idea of teamwork, just top-down leadership. The idea of her interacting with the flat management structure of the KRC is solid, even if elements feel a little derivative of 15/16. (We’re seriously in another story where Yuuki’s exuberance is driving a Zodiart completely insane!) The problem is that her loathing of Yuuki feels even more tenuous and untethered than Motoyama’s did back in 15/16, since Yuuki is at maybe 75% of Peak Yuuki, and Erin is losing her mind. I get that Erin’s under pressure, both externally and internally, but it’s hard to take her seriously enough when she’s flipping out at Yuuki in her very first scene. There sort of needed to be a more gradual build-up, and I don’t think we got it here, which makes the emotional weight of Erin’s frustration hard to give much credit. Yuuki isn’t nearly annoying enough to warrant this, even accounting for the psychological warping effects of the Zodiart Switch.

The other problem is, uh, Yuuki. I know I just said that Yuuki isn’t annoying enough to warrant Erin’s immediate and blazing enmity, but Yuuki is still pretty annoying this episode. I think she acquits herself well enough over the various tasks, and Kengo’s right that Yuuki has a great sense of when to lighten a mood (always, around Kengo, which is why she’s so good at it), but she’s rolling around during a presentation and screaming fealty to a rocket. Again, I get that she’s also under pressure here to realize her dream, but the stakes pale in comparison to how wacky Yuuki gets in this episode.

So, yeah, between a Zodiart who screeches her backstory and a KRC member who is slightly less relatable than the Hayabusa puppet this time out, I don’t know that the main rivalry has enough thoughtfulness to it to allow for real emotional investment, at least from me. There’s still the Gen/Erin stuff, though, and I thought that worked way better, mostly because Gentarou’s able to modulate his performance enough to make some of the heart-to-hearts feel like they’re about two actual teenagers, instead of overly-broad characters. I love seeing Gen get the chance to try and understand an episode’s villain before things get too crazy, and it’s nice to see him once again wager the story’s outcome on the hidden talents of Yuuki. (I… hope she does better here than in the talent portion of the Queen Pageant!) While Yuuki and Erin are hard to believe, Gentarou’s place in the balance always helps to bring things into focus.

And, y’know, there’s also the rest of the cast who… are present! It’s not a story for them, sadly, so we get yet another episode that JK, Shun, and Miu can’t directly participate in; Tomoko is dragged along, without really having much cause to be there; Ohsugi gets a single scene, barely; Kengo’s Cosmic Illness pops up again, after, like 20 episodes of not mentioning it; and the Zodiarts continue to collectively make Hayami feel like garbage. It’s a lot of little bits of business, some more entertaining than others – Ryuusei’s isolation freak-out and old-school cover-up are an episode highlight – but everyone’s so good at their characters by now that they can make even a single scene worth the viewer’s attention. I wish this one integrated everyone more, but some stories are just Gen/Yuuki/Zodiart stories, and that’s okay.

Which: this was an okay episode! I don’t think the tension between Yuuki and Erin was crisp enough to carry their story beats, but Gen smoothes over a lot of it, and everyone else chipped in around the edges. Sometimes that’s enough!