[Fish Sandwich]

So, just to say a few things about Exdream real quick, it's like a 12/10 on the name, to begin with. It's evocative, it's simple and elegant, it obviously fits the whole "m/mu at the end" pattern that only Plasma broke for reasons I'm still not clear on... pretty much perfect; don't even want to imagine calling the final form anything else now. The new belt and Capsem, I'm mostly ambivalent towards, but the suit itself is also everything I could've hoped for. I like how it goes back to being relatively restrained in terms of detail, and love that the one thing majorly altering the silhouette is as wonderfully playful as having ZZZ written on his limbs. That is exactly the kind of thing I expect Kamen Rider to do with the suits that I haven't really seen from ZEZTZ until now, but what's even better is that it pulls it off in a way that doesn't clash with this show's usual aesthetics.

It makes a good showing here in terms of what it has to offer the show, too. Perhaps deliberately, we don't get much of a sense here of any tangible boundaries that exist to its powers, but given the whole slant of the story, I can understand why the choice would be made to present it as Baku just kind of being able to do anything he wants now. Like, the whole idea is that dreams make limits fade away, right? The idea that Exdream can confound enemies with visions of them achieving their dream of victory over ZEZTZ is particularly cute, but on a broader level, I especially liked the whole visual association with water? From how ZEZTZ enters the world of dreams at the start right through to how he defeats DAWN, it's a cool superhero-kinda way to incorporate another bit of classic symbolism, since water's whole transient quality means it's historically been strongly associated with the unconscious mind.

As is typical for this series, the episode is a visual powerhouse just in general. The big Rider throwdown has that crazy anime quality to it only Sugihara can bring with copious amounts of extraordinarily well-considered compositing work, of course. I also love the strong impression made by the montage of Sieg accumulating sins while also accumulating worthless wealth within a tiny box of a prison cell he can't truly free himself from.

And it's a good thing I do love the way those visuals make me think about Sieg, because his role in the episode is where I start to feel a little lost for the first time in a while with this show? It feels strange how little his backstory here affects the way I view his character? It also feels strange you'd never understand you're watching him kill his own father without the dialogue when that isn't how this show has ever worked, but also, maybe that's the secret? The visuals don't emphasize that fact because it isn't actually important? The problem I'm having is that I'm unsure what specifically *is* important to take away from that sequence. I don't think the intent was necessarily to reveal all there is to know about Sieg, since we only see one more part of a life that's clearly been through many starkly different phases. But even accepting that in of itself, I was still left feeling that whole philosophical debate part of the conflict between him and Baku ends up more flat than it ought to be for such a climactic point in the story. There's some good dialogue in there with stuff like Baku questioning how much of Sieg's madness is even his own, but it doesn't feel like it rises to the same crescendo the physical conflict does.

Or at least, it felt that way to me. There's also the whole question of whether or not this is *an* ending or *the* ending to DAWN's storyline, and how that would affect how satisfactory it is, but I'm not going to waste too much time trying to factor that in right now. I think Sieg ended up being the weak link here, but the weaknesses I see there aren't really enough to drag everything down around it. Honestly, that bit with Fujimi standing up specifically because he was told to sit down is probably worth the whole episode just by itself, and that's ignoring that it's a nice scene for Nasuka on top of that.