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Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Kiva
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06-20-2021, 09:52 PM
#
636
Kamen Rider Die
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 6,159
KAMEN RIDER KIVA EPISODE 35 - "NEW ARRANGEMENT: FLYING ROSE”
I really wanted to like this episode! There's a thing it does with Wataru that is in my Top 3 Wataru things for this series! But I didn't like this episode!
It's all over the place, unfortunately. Kengo's in one scene to be installed as the new IXA, and then that's all we see of 70% of the 2008 cast. (Megumi! Poor Megumi!) Jiro randomly appears to Wataru to give him the next instruction for his plotline. Yuri's in the most thankless role she's had yet, and that's saying something. The Super Fangire never coheres as a villain, despite an early-episode twist. (She just... she isn't
about
anything. She's just a victim who becomes a crazy power-mad monster. It's not saying anything about this show's themes or plots!) It ends with a bunch of CGI nonsense, and I'll never ever care about that. It's sloppy, and overstuffed, and it lacks a throughline.
All of that would be forgivable if I thought the show landed its big Bloody Rose moments, but I don't think it does.
And I like some of it a lot.
A lot.
The idea of Wataru playing the song his dad always plays,
and then adding more music of his own to the end of it
... brilliant. Such a perfect encapsulation of Wataru's journey, and a lovely visualization of how Wataru draws strength from his absent father. Incredibly touching, and a thrillingly constructed scene.
It just... it just doesn't connect to the rest of this story at
all
.
Wataru's dilemma in this story wasn't that he lacked direction, or that he couldn't live up to his father's legacy, or that he couldn't feel his father's presence in his life. That's all general Kiva stuff, but it's nothing that was going on in the last two episodes. What was going on in the last two episodes was that Wataru had his heart broken, and he was pretending everything was fine. Bloody Rose cracked because he was denying his pain. But this episode has the resolution to that problem be a random confession to Taiga
in the middle of the episode
, and makes the emotional climax something that could've landed at the end of nine or ten other stories. It's nothing specific to this story, and that sucks. It makes a huge emotional breakthrough from Wataru into something generic and perfunctory. It's a beautiful moment that feels haphazardly shoved into this episode.
The Otoya story is sort of the same thing. It's him testifying to his love of humanity, when we're in the middle of a story about him neglecting his girlfriend for another woman. It's a great Otoya moment, something drawn from long-form characterization, that somehow feels dropped in from nowhere. It's possible that you could look at Otoya's story as being about Suffering For Art, what with him looking like Maya's a literal vampire now, but it'd be another random metaphor in an episode that can't keep a coherent theme.
God, I felt so let down by this one. It's getting back into the value of art, the way a family of artists (like, say, tokusatsu writers) deal with their dedication to art, how art has life-destroying and life-saving properties... but all of that comes out of nowhere, when we've had an episode and a half of metaphorical adultery and emotionally-repressed teenagers. It's all stuff I wished the show spent more time talking about, but it inexplicably opted to do so midway through this episode with almost no setup.
Just shoddily constructed. Some good ideas, but clumsily executed. If this was how they wanted to address some of these themes, I'd've rather they stuck to the romantic melodrama.
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Last edited by Kamen Rider Die; 10-02-2023 at
10:35 PM
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