Kamen Rider Black RX Episodes 31-32

Like the Kamen Rider Agito tapestry, only it tells a crappy story.

EPISODE 31

An episode that's unnecessarily a two-parter. And since they're written by Sagiyama, you know they're not going to play a big role in the big picture. So, it's mainly a waste -- episodes like this bother me, where they act like it's high stakes and important stuff's going down, but it's real just a lotta hot air that doesn't amount to much.

Koutarou's attention is caught when he spots Gatezone pursuing a woman by motorcycle. What's it all about? The woman is an engineer whose honky fiancé, a test pilot, was such a cheapskate he bought them each a strip of gold-pressed latinum from a shady street vendor to make into a necklace (in place of engagement rings). Brought together with a third piece -- which the woman knows is located in Japan, so she forces Koutarou to break into a museum with her to find it (!) -- will form a map. A map to what? More of those damn spiky pillars that are doorways to Crisisville. Where's this map lead, where are these pivotal doorways to Crisistucky located? You guessed it, the rock quarry! Because where the hell else would it be?

I don't even understand the big deal about the map and doorway pillars and stuff. It's not like Crisis is cut off from their land, right? Assholes are going to and fro, especially renegade assholes who turn on Crisis and seek help on Earth. How did this map get split in three pieces and sent to Earth, two of the three pieces ending up with some random street vendor in the first place? (I'm guessing it was the doing of some of those Crisis renegades.) Why is Crisis even trying to stop this woman when she wants to join the pieces and open the door anyway -- just let her be and they'd still have their way! Instead, they chase her and get Koutarou's attention. How the FUCK have these bad guys survived 31 episodes with brains like this? They should have failed and been defeated halfway into episode 1.

I mean, I guess rather than just being a "door" to Crisis' realm, it seems more like it accesses it and maybe begins to merge it with Earth or something. Once the key is put in place, a mountain cracks, and Gatezone inhales and notes that he can smell Crisisland's atmosphere, which causes the woman to choke. So...wait, what do I care? Why am I trying to make sense of this? Hey, if you're not trying, show, I'm not going to try to make sense of you. Moving on.

The woman's pretty useless, too. She opens the door to Crisisville, and the logical storytelling would be that she undoes that blunder by going and removing the key or whatever. And she DOES make the effort, but it's RX who shuts the contraption down before she gets there, and the shockwave of his attack actually hurts her. So...once again, not for the first time rewatching this show, I'm left asking "What was the purpose?"

Just a horrifically pointless and boring episode and I really hate the idea of having to watch a second part of it. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Pointless notes on a pointless episode:

1) The woman learns about the magical component of the necklace from the journal of her dead fiancé. This guy was piloting a plane and his own necklace activated and some funky stuff started happening in the atmosphere -- with him catching a glimpse of Crisis' ship -- and his (model) airplane was destroyed. And yet...he somehow had the time to WRITE ALL OF THIS DOWN in his journal, just seconds before dying. And, somehow, his dimestore journal didn't end up blown to smithereens along with his dumb, awful-acting ass and his dumb Tomy airplane.

2) This episode sees a return of goofball Koutarou, and he wasn't missed. It's also just misplaced and out of character here. He's crackin' wise and making goofy voices all throughout the scene of when he and the woman are breaking into the museum. The scene ends with him punching out two guards and making a little "sorry!" gesture. Who is this? It ain't Koutarou. (And it ain't funny, either.)

P.S. Guys, I really don't want to watch part two. You gotta help me!
___________

EPISODE 32

I literally sat and stared at the DVD for three minutes, just contemplating if I even wanted to put the sucker in and watch this sonuva. That's no joke. There've been a lot of boring RX episodes; there's been one so far that it took me three attempts to finish. But after 31, I just really wasn't interested in continuing this damn storyline.

What's more annoying than episodes like these, pretending to be about something or like they're big events, is the way they just pull things outta their ass. Here, we have Maribaron, who saved the destroyed remains of the map/key thing after RX destroyed the doohickey, who claims it can be restored as long as they can find a pure-hearted kid who wishes on it to go to Crisislandia, and...*sigh* Maribaron sounds so full of shit sometimes, like she's just making things up as she goes along, kinda like the careless writers of this show.

And so we follow the engineer from the previous episode, Yuuko, as she's found and brought back to health by an old monk who lives with this granddaughter. Yuuko is already not interesting, and we spend practically the entire episode with her. It's like they're trying to launch her and this is a backdoor pilot. Koutarou's barely in the first half of the episode, for example, and it's his show! I can't stand when we spend more time with the guest we'll never see again, who won't amount to anything, than with any regular from the show we've been watching.

Yuuko notices paintings around the temples she's at that depict those gnome things found in Crisisburgh. Ever since her dumb dead pilot fiancé left her his magical diary that he was still writing as he was vaporized, she's been investigating all the nutty stuff he's talked about, and knows that these pictures represent a Shangri-La, and that's what the key is supposed to open. Well, Crisisland WAS once the Shangri-La, but Crisis used it up. This isn't the big reveal the show thinks it is, because we were told all of this by Dr. Waldo in episode 3! The monk and his granddaughter are descendants of Crisisfolk, so Maribaron targets the granddaughter to use in her ritual of repairing the key and opening that doorway to Crisisopolis.

SNOOZE.

If you're a fan of this show, maybe it seems like I'm overreacting about this two-parter. It doesn't help that I'm just really tired of the show by this point, but it's also, like...the structure of these two episodes is off, and they're boring episodes on top of it. There ARE worse episodes of toku -- even RX -- out there, but still... I just find this two-parter pretty pointless, and totally unnecessary in terms of what it "reveals" and in the puzzling choice to even make them a two-parter. These episodes just have such a weird flow to them, and they seem like they were slapped together and made just to fill an order.

If I had to say a few positive things about them, it's that I still think Atsuko Takahata gives a good performance as Maribaron. (And she even gets a scene out of costume, which I always think is fun when the villain actors get a scene sans get-up.) Guest actress Midori Nishizaki -- who plays Yuuko in this two-parter -- does a really good job in the scenes where it's Maribaron disguised as Yuuko. And the monster of the week in 32 is pretty cool, a rock monster who at one point traps Koutarou in a cave by making the cave walls come to life, with all of these rock-y limbs coming out and restraining Koutarou. Koutarou gets out of that jam pretty easily...

Koutarou gets out of jams too easily in this show, period. That's a problem with his powered-up forms. In my Black coverage, I mention how refreshing it was to have that show stand apart from the previous Riders, one of the benefits being that it made the odds seem stacked against Koutarou. He didn't have back-up, he didn't have the comfort of knowing that maybe Hongou would come bail him out during sweeps. Black was incomplete, therefore more imperfect compared to the fully transformed Shadow Moon. And look what happened in their first big battle -- Black was killed by Shadow Moon! And now we have Koutarou with these power-ups, and it's never really a struggle -- if the monster's tough, he just becomes Robo Rider and bulldozes his way through. If he's stuck in a contraption, he just becomes Bio Rider and oozes his way through. Nothing's a sweat or struggle for Koutarou in this show. It's predictable and boring.