Kamen Rider Black RX Episodes 44-45

EPISODE 44

♪And another one's gone, another one bites the dust, YEAH!♪

Bossgun decides he's had enough with the show and goes to his death. Crisis decides to launch a full scale attack on Japan -- sending Maribaron to meet with Japan's prime minister in a laughable scene (Golgom this ain't), where she just basically asks "Deal? Or No Deal?" Crisis' attack sends a lot of (unseen) people fleeing the city. Among them, the Saharas. Koutarou stops by and gifts them each something, and it's a rare, rare, rare moment in this series that actually just stops and breathes and lets the characters act like PEOPLE. That's long been such a rarity in this show, and it's one of the show's many, many, colossal weaknesses. A big difference between Black and this show was that Black wanted to depict a more realistic world, it wanted to depict ordinary youths. Yes, Koutarou was mostly business in that show, but we often got scenes of him chilling with his sisters or just acting NORMAL...Black, for as fanciful as it was, would often still feel like a show about people. RX is a cartoon.

Whenever we get a scene of Koutarou's downtime in RX, a scene of a "normal" life, it's always wildly exaggerated -- he's clowning around with Reiko in some chauvinistic way, or he's mugging as the Saharas are lobbing insults around, or he's performing in a comedy duo with Joe. RX is a cartoon, and a soulless one that doesn't want you to actually care about the people in the show. But before I go too far into that, I'll move on to...

The monster of this episode, said to be Crisis' strongest. It's like a robotic dinosaur thing that perfectly sums up not only Crisis, but this show -- random. It just drives home how incohesive Crisis is, and the entire show, really. RX, as a production, has just pulled random shit out of a hat for its entire duration, not caring if any of it works or makes sense or is GOOD. Anyway, the monster is real tough, man, with the Revolcane not even making a dent, and Koutarou has to be bailed out by...the 10 (costumed) Riders.

Could they even attempt to make this team-up not feel like the slapped on, attention-seeking afterthought it is? Between those cheap-ass teases of the past few episodes to just how stupid and random and forced in it all is. Why doesn't Koutarou wonder why these jagoffs don't unhenshin? It's always been dopey to me in these team-ups where they don't want to pay any of the old actors, so they're just in costume all the time. It looks really stupid, guys. Why don't they realize this? Why don't they care? Because the RX production has never cared. Not for one moment.

Random notes:

1) The Sahara parents plead with Koutarou to not be reckless. The dad gifts him with his lighter, with the promise he'll stop smoking until Koutarou returns to live with them. They fear they know he's going to his death. (If this show had any subtlety, I'd say this is the moment they let Koutarou know they know he's RX. But this show has never been subtle. It's in your face and kicking you in the nuts directly.) The Saharas obviously don't know how goofy Crisis is, or how ridiculously overpowered Koutarou is. It's wasted dramatics. Koutarou's never felt like he's had the blade against his throat in this series, as he had many times in Black. I think this episode is probably something assistant producer Shigenori Takatera kept in mind when he made Kuuga -- go watch the last few episodes of that show to see scenes of "hero making his farewell tour to his friends" done well.

2) The rubber face on Bossgun's forehead has looked REALLY shabby the past few episodes. But it's still a better actor than Dasmader. (Tetsuya Matsui has zero and a half facial expressions. And that helmet is way too big for you, you runt!)

3) I cannot watch that scene of the Riders introducing themselves without thinking of what Saban's Masked Rider did with it it. Namely, the amazing goon they hired to grunt "I am Amazon!" for Skyrider.
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EPISODE 45

A pretty dopey episode in which Koutarou decides to shrink himself as Bio Rider, enter the innards of the "strongest monster of Crisis," and destroy him from within, and then fake his own death for good measure.

Idiots that they are, Crisis thinks they're successful, and then decide to turn their attention to the 10 Riders. Maribaron resurrects monsters to kill them. Why do the showmakers think this is interesting? We have 10 costumed heroes that's hard to care about fighting monsters we've already seen killed by the guy whose show it is. And yet Toei returns to this scenario again and again -- and to this day! It's all just so pointless, as thrilling as a stiff and crusty amateur stage show.

Of course Koutarou's just hiding out, waiting to make his move. He hides, in Bio Rider's CGI goo form, within a puddle near the RX Cave and waits to sneak -attack Crisis' revived monsters.

After Koutarou fakes his death, a good chunk of the episode is spent on following the RX Squad and their reactions. I'm not complaining about this, but I'm going to complain about Goro coming back in out of nowhere and seemingly being made a part of the squad. (Jou Onodera must have been like "Ooh, ooh, dad! Please let me be in the episodes with the old Riders. Pleaaaaaaaaase!") This is RX in a nutshell: it's episode 45, we're in the final stages, main villains are being written off, and here's where the show's priorities lie: an extended "humorous" sequence of a panicked Goro running back and forth trying to fight off monsters, using one of Maribaron's magic feathers that will get them to freeze in their tracks. Goro running into battle with a frying pan... Help me.

Random notes:

1) Crisis' "strongest" monster, that dinosaur robot thing, was typically lame and useless in the end, but I thought the effect where he'd turn into a fireball was cool. It's just Toei's favorite fireball effect, but in the previous episode, they have that fireball land, like a meteorite, and skid across the ground, which was done well.

The scene where Koutarou asks Kyoko to call for water, which she does, and it pours onto Koutarou, allowing him to transform straight into Bio Rider and invade the monster is so out of nowhere and bizarre that it made one of my "WTF Moments" on YouTube. The funniest is those shots where it's obviously crew members just dumping buckets of water on Kurata, and he's just taking it.

2) There's a scene where a monster impersonates Rider 1; because the 10 Riders are freaks and don't unhenshin, it's hard for the RX Squad to notice that there's 11 instead of 10. I would forgive this lousy, forced team-up if Goro had approached Joe being like "I think there's two Rider 1s" and Joe replied "No, that's just Rider 2." Hey-oooooooooooo. (Because the only difference between Rider 1 and Rider 2's design is that Rider 2 has a bow on his head.)

3) RX fights Maribaron and scratches her face, which pisses her off -- that old cliche -- and leads her to wear an oversized eyepatch in these final episodes. A bad, unintentionally comical choice.

4) Seriously, this horseshit 10 Rider team-up. WHY?! Look, I know Toei realized at this point that they killed the franchise again, so they wanted to send it out in a "special" way, and Bandai was worried about Rider toys sitting on the shelf, but...is it really "special" when you're doing it so half-assed? Not that any returning actors would improve it, because it's written so horribly. There's literally no reason for them to be here! There's nothing they do that one of the RX Squad* can't do, and they don't even really end up doing shit or adding anything! Koutarou does all of the work, they just stand there as he kills 10+ monsters!

Look, I know Fujioka was distancing himself from the franchise and off making B-movies with Michael Biehn, and Sasaki's private life was messed up at the time. But you're telling me they couldn't have gotten Miyauchi? Araki? Freaking Shunsuke Takasugi, when being a Kamen Rider is his only known thing? They couldn't even get one of them to do a VOICE? And why are replacement voices always so off? They don't even try to pretend it's the same character. It's acknowledgement by the showmakers that it's a sham. So spare us, the viewers.

*As previously mentioned, the RX Squad was probably put on the backburner for the sake of this lousy team-up. And it kinda sucks, since RX was trying to build them up, and using them in bigger ways would have been more meaningful to the show than Koutarou teaming up with a Korakuen show.