EPISODES 45 & 46
Welcome to Super Sloppy Double Dare, I'm your host, Shougo B'Stard. We're getting into some messy episodes here, and the obviously incredibly shrinking budget doesn't help matters.
Episode 45 is really just one of the most unnecessary episodes. Not much of anything happens, the show's totally aware it has six more episodes and, therefore, some time to kill. We waste time on unfunny scenes of Megumi and Shimada -- sent by Reiko to spy on Kitaoka -- trying their hand at being Kitaoka's secretaries, we get scenes of Daisuke moving into the Atori, we get to see over and over and over and over again Yui flipping out at dissolving and being taunted by that clip from Episode Final of Kid Yui telling her she'll disappear on her 20th. Shouldn't final episodes be, like, building up to the finale? This is just Dizzy Batting about.
Keeping up with Ryuki as it aired -- to the best of one's abilities back in the day -- it was uncertain how Ryuki was going to end. Was it going to end on a cliffhanger, leaving Episode Final as its finale? Was it going to do its own thing? Was it going to be a reiteration of Episode Final? And by this point, you realize it's a mixture of the last two -- it's a reiteration, but also wants to do its own thing, for better or worse. (Mostly worse.)
These two episodes have a problem in trying too hard to pretend like they're building up to something -- something big, something shocking, perhaps even character deaths! -- but it ends up going nowhere and being a big fake out. Toujou helps Asakura escape from the police with the promise of a battle -- Asakura deflating Toujou's confidence revealing he's not the one who killed Imperer -- but Asakura falls asleep and Toujou loses interest and moves on. Get outta here. Later, Toujou challenges all of the Riders to a battle and, most of them actually accept, and it...goes nowhere. We only have five Riders, four of which are regulars, rather than write anything new or interesting -- our Riders are all as indecisive as Shinji, so they have no right to mock him -- we'll set up these fake-out big battles that are either derailed because, lol, our Riders are crazy or because they're distracted by the Shear Ghost monsters we have to spam in order to drag things out. (Maybe if those monsters didn't make stupid noises like they're hiccupping, I wouldn't mind them.)
Shirakura's fingerprints are all over some of these attempts at seeming "big" or "shocking," attempts at creating "moments" or being "epic." Like, when Toujou challenges the other Riders to a fight -- with only Ren, Kitaoka and Asakura showing up -- those three get into their own fight as Toujou hangs back, holding a can of gasoline. Now, when I first saw this episode, I thought Toujou was pouring it all over all of the entryways the others took to get into the Mirror World -- I stupidly thought that maybe the show finally remembered that they needed to leave the Mirror World from the place they entered it. So, here I thought Toujou was destroying ALL of their exits, trapping them, and I thought that was just such a genius move by such a crazy character...
But, no, he's just pouring gasoline onto his car only, apparently setting a trap for when they get OUT of the Mirror World and have an explosion occur when Asakura starts up Toujou's car, and...that sucks in comparison. And it also ends up playing just really silly. But I can see Shirakura being like "Ooh, wouldn't it be so cool and thrilling if we could stage this big explosion and it's crazy and you don't know who survives and it would be a cool cheat and a gimmick and, hey, don't I look like a Japanese Geoffrey Rush?" No, it's not cool and, yes, you DO look like Geoffrey Rush. The show's lost its guts, so you know everybody's walking away from that explosion.
Secondly, the show has no money, so the explosion and fire is this really laughably primitive CGI and everyone's overacting and, instead of the cool Hollywood action scene Shirakura thinks he has, it's more something from a telenovela. It's just so damned goofy. (And even goofier that everyone walks away from it A-OK. The next time we see Asakura -- who was not only just burned by his snake's venom, but was also IN the car as it exploded -- is a five-second scene where he pops up, smirking, with just some black smudges on his face, as he hops off screen, onto his next adventure. Crazy keeps ya kickin'!)
Anyway...
Toujou's reliably nutty, but I really feel like they rush his demise just so they can focus on the regulars for the final four episodes. (Maybe cut down on some of those Kid Yui warnings instead, eh?) And Takatsuki's good here -- I love how different Toujou is, having such a swagger when he's challenging Asakura, feeling high from killing Sano, but then being deflated and becoming his withdrawn, creepily quiet self once he finds out the truth. So, he takes it hard when he finds out he's not the one to have killed Sano, and then he takes it hard when Kitaoka bursts his dream, telling him that a person who sets out to be a hero isn't a real hero. This puts Toujou into a tailspin, where he wishes he had Kagawa to get answers from (too bad he killed him), before deciding to just cut himself from the past and start anew. The New and Improved Toujou doesn't make it far, because he takes yet another Final Vent from Ouja and then, while stumbling around in the suffering of that injury, eventually saves a father and son he believes to be Kagawa and his kid from being run over...
I always thought it was a little fucked up that Toujou basically got his happy ending. Look what a sick bastard he is! How much blood is on his hands! And the show rewards him by actually making him a hero! Even the newspaper refers to him as such! It's a bit twisted of the writers, even though it's supposed to be ironic -- Toujou's so warped that he doesn't even recognize that what he did was heroic, he dies still wondering what it takes to be a hero. (His dying thoughts are basically that he needs Kagawa and another chance to get it right.) AND YET...and yet since these episodes had Kitaoka tell Toujou his belief that anybody who sets out to be a hero isn't a hero, well...Toujou didn't save that man and his son to be heroic, so...the show's saying, as far as it's concerned, Toujou IS a hero, so Kobayashi's trying to have it both ways. The episode title is even "The Hero Tiger." So...yeah, it's screwed up. The real way this should have played out is if Toujou -- because he's such a loser -- trips on his shoelaces as he races towards the father and son, being run over along with them. Like, he botched the one actually heroic act he attempted. I guess nobody wants to watch that before a magical girl and/or dinosaur anime, though, huh?
Speaking of heroism, our hero, Shinji, kinda loses face in these episodes. Fearing for Yui, he decides that he's going to fight for her. He lets Ren and everyone else get in his head and begin to think that his vow to never fight and just save people was naive and an excuse and that he hasn't really saved anyone and...that's just bullshit. Shinji's done a lot of good, and he's been down this road so many times, with himself AND Ren, that he should know better by now -- even he's smarter than this. I think he'd be looking for alternative ways to help her, and I think he'd know that she wouldn't want him to go against his principles. You gotta love how deluded Ren is, though. When Shinji's like, "Hey, if this whole Rider fight's all for Yui, what are you gonna do, Ren, if you find out Shiro's just been lying about what he's promised?" And Ren's just like, "Eri and Yui will make it no matter what!" Who's the one who's naive now, Ren?
So we're back at the umpteenth similarly-staged battle between Ren and Shinji, which is used as just a cliffhanger to end on, which is quickly resolved by the next episode's start. Though, thankfully, the motivations are at least understandable and not as contrived as, say, most of the battles in Faiz. Still, I feel like the show should be beyond this point by now. Soooo much of this show's problems in its second half is the repetition. Speaking of which, the preview for the next episode teases, YET AGAIN, a scene of an unconscious Kitaoka with a crying Goro yelling "SENSEI!!!!!!11!!!" Why doesn't anyone realize that they've done this, so it's not the cool trailer moment they think it is? *Sigh* Soooo much of this show's problems in its second half is the repetition.
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