Zero-One: The scenes with Gai giving token apologies and the others reminding him how to do it right were an interesting insight into Japanese customs, as well as being funny. They have all the rituals of apology worked out in such detail -- yet Aruto and Fuwa still made it clear that real atonement isn't about the ritual gestures, but about the actions Gai takes going forward to make amends.
I like the development that Aruto has lost the Zero-One driver and has to create his own Kamen Rider to go forward into the final phase. I've felt all along that too much of this show was just about Satellite There/Zea doing all the work and Aruto just getting new toys handed to him one after the other. Having the final upgrade be through his own efforts makes him more heroic (though I assume he's just coming up with the broad concepts and leaving it to Izu and Zea to come up with the technical details). It also reflects another Japanese cultural theme I've noticed coming up in a lot of these shows, the idea that sons must strive to "surpass" their fathers (or grandfather in this case) as a rite of passage.
There's a scene where Aruto is defeated and de-transformed midair, it is executed by hanging Fumiya Takahashi with wires on a crane. The problem is Fumiya is extremely afraid of height, so much that he has not taken a rollercoaster before because it is so scary. He has troubles filming the scenes at first, but with the help of his suit actor Yuya Nawata, Fumiya overcomes his weakness and completes the scene satisfactorily in the last camera takes.
It was a nice idea, a dramatic moment, but it was a bit too obvious in slow motion that he was hanging from a wire rather than actually falling. His hair hanging downward was kind of a giveaway, and probably the body posture too.
Kiramager: Man, we're seeing a lot of masked civilians now, even including a title character in Shiguru's J-drama. It looks like that's going to be a recurring story thread, since there was setup that wasn't paid off, and since I saw more shots of it in the preview for next week. It seemed like Shiguru was concerned about how to mend a relationship with a sibling, which got me wondering if the actress in the show is his sister, but that would be weird, since she's playing his love interest.
I wonder why Karantula wanted to get in on the action personally this time. I like these episodes where the Rangers have to devise a clever solution to the problem the monster creates. But it's weird that the solution centered on Mabushiina changing her hairstyle, since I never even noticed before that she
had hair. I only noticed it for the first time when she entered the scene with braids, just a few minutes before it was established why the braids mattered. And
why does she have hair when she's mostly made of crystal?
