[Switchblade]

Fourze's finale is always a weird one for me. I didn't care for the emotional final showdown with Gamou on my first viewing because I was wrong. A lot of it worked better the second time around and most of my opinions on it still hold true after time three. I still have some issues with it, though, and a lot of them are because I just cannot divorce Fourze from its context. The one-on-one between Gantarou and Gamou? Fantastic. The other big action sequence? Very familiar to someone who watched Power Rangers during the Disney era and was thereby exposed to dozens of action sequences involving slow motion explosions and motorcycles. Everything about Kengo's death and return? See below. This was my third year of watching the shows as they aired and this finale, in particular, is the moment when I started to become very aware of how formulaic Kamen Rider was at the time. This would become more of an issue during Wizard, but it absolutely started here.

On the upside, it was great to see Ran and Haru properly included with the KRC in the final group shot. Also love that Haruto cameo at the end (I like to think that Shun is still fruitlessly pursuing Miu now, 14 years later, and it's really weirding out her husband and their kids).

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Originally Posted by Switchblade

Fourze 47-48

Not technically the end of my rewatch - still have a movie and a cameo to go - but the end of the main series, at least.

For all that they feel like a last minute addition of some backstory, I do like the idea behind the Presenters: a highly evolved alien intelligence that reaches out to other lifeforms via gaudy plastic doodads in order to learn more about the universe. It's a neat concept and it's generally execute well, although I wish it had been brought up at least a little earlier.

The show ends with two major emotional story beats. One of them works for me, other one not so much.

I like how Gentarou defeats Gamou. I'm not sure if I did so much at the time, but going back there's nothing more fitting than for Gentarou to defeat the villain by befriending him. The mini graduation ceremony/beatdown was a good scene that worked so well that even the Rider Girls couldn't ruin it with their bland ballad from the prom episode. I really did feel for Gamou at the end, realizing that he was misguided and that he had inadvertently created a much stronger legacy. It was touching and the show didn't try to oversell it. I used to hate a lot on this ending, but I actually liked it a lot more on a repeat viewing.

Now on the topic of overselling, we get to the other emotional aspect: the death of Kengo. Pretty much everything about Kengo's arc has never worked for me. Obviously it's not going to work now, already knowing how it's going to end, but it didn't work on the first watch either. Sota Fukushi can ugly cry with the best of them, but the show went way too hard into overplaying Kengo's departure and it just fell flat for me as a result. And then the death itself, that part never really affected me. Kengo, Fourze's non-human friend and main support partner, died just a year after the death of Ankh, OOO's non-human friend and main support partner. And Ankh's death, in turn, came a year after the death of Philip, W's non-human friend and main support partner. Philip's death hit me really hard; I actively cried at that scene. Ankh's death hit me hard, especially since there was no immediate reversal. By the time we got to Kengo, all the show got out of me was a "seriously, are we really doing this again?" Hell, if you want a blast from the past, I posted this in the discussion thread for episode 5 of Wizard:

[Inserted in the original post is a quote wherein I am half right about an event from the end of Kamen Rider Wizard]

So yeah, Kengo's death felt like a rerun at the time and it still feels like one now. I know other people find it way more affecting, but for me it's always just an example of the iron grip that status quo had on early-10s Kamen Rider.

I do like the ending overall, though. It's not the strongest in the franchise's history, but it ends in a way that's very uniquely Fourze (when it's not straight ripping off W).

Oh, and before I forget, there is some very Koichi Sakamoto motorcycle jumping in slow motion in front of explosions in episode 48. I got some very bad Kalish-era Power Rangers flashbacks during that scene.

Up next, we jump ahead a few months to five years in the future.

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

As a fan of the Rabbit Hatch, it certainly hurts to see it destroyed. A moon base isn't the kind of thing you can just rebuild when you no longer have a dimensional portal to get there.

As someone whose gateway to tokusatsu was Power Rangers, I always think it's fun to see a good end-of-season base destruction. That's incredibly rare in Kamen Rider, too, so I always have fun with this part.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Allegedly! We never saw what was on the other side of that portal! For all we know, the Presenter is in, like, Iowa. Maybe Gamou was blowing up Japan just to go to Iowa!

As a lifelong resident, I promise you this place is not worth blowing up Japan to come visit, even back in 2012 before the drinking water was carcinogenic.