[Tokumonkey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

I'm gonna be way meaner to this one than I want, but my gut is telling me the story here doesn't quite click together in a way that's very satisfying. The whole twist of finding out what's *really* going on with the Dreamer and all, it's great for how it puts the events up to that point in a new light, but even though it changes the context of the plot in a way that makes things more interesting than they were before, I think it might have failed to accomplish changing the emotions of the plot in the same way?

I felt like the story lacked stakes. This is where the weakness of the dream premise is apparent: there was no threat to the real world at any point in the episode. The opening recap tells us "if the third door opens, the dreamer will be trapped in the nightmare forever," but we already learned in the previous two-parter that isn't the case: if Zeztz defeats the Nightmare after the dreamer is possessed, the dreamer is saved.

The stakes for this one boiled down to "a nervous flier might have to board a long flight." And she doesn't overcome her phobia! She just mentions her nightmare to her husband. We didn't even dig deeply enough into it to go from "I had a nightmare" to "hey, honey, I've had a life-long irrational fear of heights due to childhood trauma, and maybe we should discuss that." As someone who, as the result of a scary childhood fall, lived for years with an irrational fear of heights, this was weak sauce.

This bothers me because many other parts of this episode worked well. Our action sequences felt interesting and impactful. There was a whole motorcycle sequence in a Kamen Rider show! Some of the comedy beats actually landed, and that rarely works for me. Overall, except for all of the action taking place in dreams, this was a good episode.

That exception is a doozy. The scene in which Baku meets the bride in the real world underscored this: Baku's dreaming interaction with the bride translates, in the real world, as a particularly creepy parasocial relationship.