[Fish Sandwich]

Hey everyone, guess what time it is!



Wait, hold up Woz! I thought you said the history of Sougo becoming Oma Zi-O had disappeared from your book. Were you just lying about that? And why does your book play videos? I get that it's from the future, but like, is it a book or not? I mean, have we ever actually seen the inside of this thing before? Because I never would've interpreted those shots in the opening as being completely literal. Is this thing going to get set on fire by the end of the show, too? You know what? Never mind. It's not time for asking all these questions, I have the entire rest of the episode to talk about.

My feelings on this one are unfortunately not too different from last time. It's a perfectly solid episode, but it left me with a nagging feeling it needed more going on. What bugged me this time was how the show spends any significant amount of time focusing on Geiz's feelings in all of this. He's essentially a completely different character right now, and taking time to give him internal monologues serves no purpose unless it puts his "correct" version's development into perspective in some clever way, which I don't quite think it did here.

The scene where Sougo reflects on their relationship is a little more along the lines of what I want to see, but at the end of the day it's only one scene and I'm such a sucker for Sougo and Geiz's bromance any praise I can give it loses a lot of the impact. One of the things I always praise Zi-O for is how tight I feel the writing is when it comes to making every scene a meaningful part of the story, but unfortunately this is another arc like back with Quiz where things feel notably thinner than usual to me, and maybe even a bit sluggish. One thing I particularly would've loved to see was more emphasis on Hiryuu's role. There was talk in the last episode's thread about him being underdeveloped, and while my instinct was to disagree with that, thinking about it, there's definitely a lot of room to further flesh him out that isn't being taken advantage of here. He comes off to me like he's almost brainwashed or something, but once I realized that plot point only exists in my imagination, I got kind of disappointed.

So yeah, I'm still not totally feeling this arc, but hey, they've got one more episode to tie it all together, and it's not like there wasn't tons of stuff here I liked. Sougo having the Grand Zi-O Ridewatch stolen was especially great. Limiting the use powerups like that get is important to keep the tension up, and this is a good way to go about it.