[Paladin]

Baku meets Minami, who has become an agent, in a dream. Baku helps Minami with her mission to find a lost cat, but they are attacked by a Nightmare, and he wakes up.

[Frontier]

This week on the adventures of Agent Zeztz...the actual agent is Minami! With Baku being part of her supporting cast in a harmless, hapless, civilian role! And Nem is their mom which...feels like there's a lot to unpack there.

I have to wonder about how Minami sees their relationship to make Baku so useless while she's basically taken all the cool Zeztz stuff from him. Then again, it's probably just how her mind projects protecting him.

Hey it's the Cat Nightmare from the spinoff! Perfect for a Minami-centered arc!

Honestly this is probably the most adorable Black Case with Minami making cat noises and having a tail. Though honestly that probably should've been the first clue as to what the Cat Nightmare actually was.

Welcome to Nightmare Fight Club NOX! Thankfully the Lady is able to give you your driver in the real world + a wolf sword upgrade to let you defeat the Gun Nightmare. Welcome back again for the first time, Kamen Rider Nox!

Odaka still only really cares about getting revenge on CODE, but it seems like he'll prioritize protecting Nem (and maybe Baku) from both CODE and Sieg since they both want her for nefarious ends.

It felt like later in the premonitory dream that Baku could go to sleep on command, but I guess the stress + it being too early means that won't work here.

Good news is that Fujimi doesn't get his old partner pointing a gun at him. Bad news is his current partner is still beating him up, this time for committing crimes because he's not actually a police officer who can get plausible deniability for them!

Kamen Rider Nox commits to his first heroic act of preventing Zeztz from killing the Cat Nightmare...who is also his sister. Sieg altered Minami's dream to make it so that instead of Baku being hurt, it was Zeztz Catastrom killing HER as the Cat Nightmare. And even without the Triple Zeztzer landing full on, he still wailed on her enough to do some serious damage.

WHAT THE @#$%!? Minami WAS a deep cover CODE Agent sent to observe Baku!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?

Next week: The siblings hash it out, the truth about Minami, and Zeztz Orderm!

[JusticeMagnum]

Really liked this episode and finally getting Kamen Rider Nox back was great with a cool action sequence to accompany it. I did find The Lady's threat to Nox if he disobeys interesting since in a blogpost it was mention that the crew were hoping that as the months go they understand "the situation" Nox's in and would recontextualize his actions, So I'm looking forward to getting more info on Nox & The Lady's relationship and how they met.

As for the Minami twist, It's already been established that CODE has manipulated aspects of Baku's life so I see this as a further extension of that rather than anything out of left field and I really want to see what they do with this next week, but I faith that they'll do something good with it, this show has yet to let me down. Also I feel like this may be an instance of Baku's subjective perspective about his vision sorta coming into play here.

[Fish Sandwich]

I absolutely adore that this episode's final revelation is also the very first piece of information it gives you -- Minami is an agent.

There's a cleverness to the overall structure of this one that reminds me a lot of back when Kureha was introduced. You have a fairly straightforward Dreamer plot going on where there's a surface-level excitement carrying things along, but rather than just outright discard that once the twist comes along, the twist actually recontextualizes everything you just saw to be more meaningful than it seemed like at first. A mission like saving a cat, or a scene like Nem asking Minami about her motivations takes on a whole new dimension, and you can go right back and mull over all that stuff a bit and start to see how the story will likely come together even before watching the second part. Absolutely killer episode on that particular front.

Even before factoring that in though, I also enjoy a lot about how that episodic plot ends up playing around with the show's old(?) formula along the way. It *is* an episode that plays out like a classic early ZEZTZ story, but the roles are all out of whack. Baku can't make himself sleep, he's still himself in the dream, and it ends up being NOX, of all people, who kinda does the usual Seven thing of peering into the Mind's Doors and swooping in using that knowledge to avert the bad dream. The simple matter of how weird it all feels is sort of intrinsically fun, but I also like how it allows the show to demonstrate how Sieg changes the dynamic in a more detailed fashion. I appreciate how visual-oriented this show is in general, so it's nice that on top of the way he abruptly changed NOX's dream, we specifically see him interacting with the Doors themselves and all that to really drive home that the previous rules of the subconscious mind don't have to apply when he's around. Even though it's probably pretty significant that Minami's original bad dream was of Baku being hurt! So even there, the episode is kind of drawing your attention away from something really obvious and important to remember in a neat way.

So yeah, I got way into this one. I thought it drew a lot of nicely intense emotion out of Baku, especially, and I'm excited to see how they tie it all together next time.

[Frontier]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JusticeMagnum

As for the Minami twist, It's already been established that CODE has manipulated aspects of Baku's life so I see this as a further extension of that rather than anything out of left field and I really want to see what they do with this next week, but I faith that they'll do something good with it, this show has yet to let me down. Also I feel like this may be an instance of Baku's subjective perspective about his vision sorta coming into play here.

There was no way Baku could conceive Minami being anything other than his sister so that's probably why Minami reacted like she wasn't a CODE agent in the premonition dream.

I've also seen speculation that, much like Lady did for NOX in this episode, Minami is the one that gave him the Zeztz Driver while he slept so he could transform in this episode.