[Fish Sandwich]

Hey everyone, guess what time it is!



Time to appreciate how awesome Tsukasa is now that he's taking a break. I mean, the guy shows up, and just by being him, elevates the show to new levels of drama, while also finding the time to give Sougo a Christmas present. Although now that I mention it, it occurs to me that if somebody had shown up to take Sougo to his own past, these episodes would've basically been a Kamen Rider version of A Christmas Carol...

Whatever, I'm getting way off track. The important thing here is that this episode was awesome. It was a much, much needed dose of character development for Sougo, a great way to bring Oma Zi-O back into the plot, and on top of all that most of the other characters got some great moments too.

The fun thing about the character development here is that we essentially keep the same status quo as ever, but the context of Sougo and Geiz's motivations is actually very different from where they were just a couple episodes ago. Sougo is now truly aware of the burden being Zi-O places on him, and is finally taking the fact that he becomes evil in the future seriously, while Geiz has finally reconciled his conflicting desires by being willing to believe Sougo can stay good, yet still being ready to take him down if that doesn't work out. They're still doing what they've been doing, but Sougo has lost a bit of that wide-eyed naivety, and Geiz no longer feels ashamed to be fighting alongside him. Great stuff.

If I were to complain about something though, it's become apparent to me that the Time Jackers are kind of boring. It's not a huge problem, given that they serve their purpose to the narrative, but now that the heroes are actually pretty well developed, it'd be nice to see some of the villains get a little more to do than pick really bad candidates for being king over and over again. Seeing them bail out of their giant robots at the end here, mildly annoyed their plans have failed again, just makes it clear how pathetic they're getting, so hopefully the show does something to change up their dynamic soon.

Beyond that minor grievance, though, I don't have much else to complain about. The action was fun, the insert song was a fun surprise (especially since it wasn't mentioned in the credits?) and well used, Woz was obviously great as usual, and overall it was a good way to end the year. With any luck, Zi-O will only continue to improve like this in 2019.