[StardustWhip]

Ooh, Shout uploaded the episode early this week!

Kinda makes me wish I'd waited to watch it while eating dinner, instead of carefully scrubbing through the stream timeline (and still getting a few spoilers) so I could watch it in the morning...

[Fish Sandwich]

I keep accidentally throwing live grenades into these threads on Saturday nights, so forgive me for not taking the time to properly address each individual point in the responses people have already had, but, in an effort to reduce the damage caused by my imprecise wording when writing directly after watching the episode, I will try to elaborate on a few points a little better, having had more time to process things. (...even if I can't guarantee the wording won't still be imprecise.)

Namely, I want to be clearer that I don't believe any of the specific plot points I'm bringing up are the actual problem? As I already said, Baku thinking the organization he dreamed of somehow became real is probably more sensible than the version that existed in my head, and it's entirely on me for jumping to that conclusion. Likewise, I also personally assumed in episode 3 that we were meant to take him transforming in reality as confirmation that he can, y'know, transform in reality... however, I recall at the time someone in that episode's thread mentioning that still coming off kind of ambiguously, which sort of planted the idea in the back of my head that maybe something intentional was going on there. The same way it currently seems maybe-intentional that this episode is scripted and/or edited in a way that could imply Zero in the dream world and Zero in the real world are two separate entities.

I guess I'm sort of just banging the same drum again, but it's an overall lack of clarity I feel that continues to keep me at a distance from Zeztz. And that's what I mean about feeling like the story is finally starting, too. I realize now how the way I phrased it makes it sound, but when those words are coming out of my mouth, I'm not talking about the pacing of plot twists or stakes or any particular arbitrary metrics for story progression like that. If I instead said this episode was like adding interesting new layers to a structure with no solid foundation, would that get at it better? (I think it definitely sounds even more mean, either way!) The revelations this week are very exciting, but a lot of them are filling in voids as much as they are adding on top of something that already existed. Like, to be as fair as I can, one of the few explicit things about Capsems we've been told is that they have the power to make dreams come true, so NOX saying what he does here is specifically flipping that on its head, so that's one thing I should definitely be giving the show credit for.

Still, there's so much in Zeztz where the show just flatly has not communicated clearly with the audience in these really basic ways that pretty much any story would, and while that's no sin, the danger I see in that ambiguity is that it also becomes ambiguous when the show is doing something on purpose or not. Maybe Baku going along with so much weirdness without questioning most of it is some galaxy-brain thematic thing where it's like someone in a dream doing much the same, for example. But without the show finding some way to sorta flag something like that ahead of time, that could also just be another mistaken assumption I'd be making.

Ordinarily, after an entire quarter of a toku series like this -- after around four hours of total runtime -- I'd have some basic grasp on what the series wants to accomplish, what its themes are, the style, the motivations of its characters, or any very core ideas like that which would help frame my understanding of all the stuff surrounding that core, thus preventing me from wasting my time being a huge buzzkill instead of my normal cheerleading. That's the "story" I'm talking about. It's obvious now Zeztz is starting to bring those things more to the surface, but up until now, I feel like in spite of all the things that have happened, only so much has really been established? I just sorta don't know this show that well, in a way that's pretty unprecedented for me and Rider? I'm confident I've proven over the years how flexible I can be in finding angles to enjoy a toku show from. Zeztz can do anything, but it needs to be doing something, and I need to focus in on that something before I can properly get behind it.