Zero-One: Well, the Zaia president didn't really try to hide that he's somehow behind the attacks on Hiden. Which suggests he's working with MetsuboJinrai. I'd been assuming the basic status quo of Aruto trying to handle the presidency of HI would continue, but this episode made me reflect on how KR story arcs often evolve quite a bit over the season, so now I'm wondering if we'll see Aruto lose the company after all. Though if that happened, how would he keep getting new armor upgrades?
I love the way Aruto talked Oowada around on acting opposite Humagear -- that it's not about what the Humagear gives you, it's about what you put into it that it then reflects back. A nice bit of writing.
Horobi's move at the climax against the Mammoth was a nice touch. It's long been a standard KR trope (at least since
Blade) that the henshin field/mechanism/whatever protects the Rider during transformation, and sometimes they do bits (here and occasionally in Sentai) of the henshin mechanism actually striking at the enemy briefly mid-transformation, but it rarely goes beyond that. But here, we not only had the grasshopper and the scorpion fighting each other at the start of the battle, but we even had Jin summoning the scorpion to protect him from Zero-One's finisher. I wonder if Aruto can learn how to do that.
So why is it that Jin can repeatedly reboot Ansatsu-chan from the backup memory in his Progrise Key, but Aruto always has to start destroyed Humagears over again from scratch? Maybe because he never recovers their Keys, since Jin (or in this case Yua) always steals them. Still, maybe HI should set up some kind of automatic cloud backup protocol for its Humagears so they're easier to restore.
Ryu: The subtitlers last week seemed to think Pricious was female, but I guess it turned out otherwise. Which has happened before, e.g. with Kyuemon on
Ninninger (whose
Ninja Steel counterpart actually was female, Madame Odius). Hmm... I'd been assuming "Pricious" was a play on "precious," but maybe it's "capricious"?
Anyway, I hope the bit with Koh saying "I'm not depressed, just thinking of ways to fight with Max Ryusoul" was just a cover for his real feelings. It'd be far too cursory a way to resolve that if it were true.
Space Dragon had a really eerie and disturbing roar. Really effective sound design -- that was chilling. Overall, though, the creature seemed to be modeled on
SpaceGodzilla, what with the shoulder and head spines. Although apparently it's a reworking of the suit used for the mature Minusaur in the first episode.
I keep wondering -- is Japanese standup comedy really as lame as they show it in
tokusatsu shows, or do the writers just like portraying it that way? I guess maybe since these are kids' shows, they feature the style of humor that's most suitable for kids, cheesy puns and goofy antics rather than anything more adult. But it's a bit ironic that the style of bad puns that were called "old man jokes" (or dad jokes, I guess) when Nossan did them in
Kyoryuger is the same kind of comedy used by younger characters like Aruto in
Zero-One or Canalo and Asuna here (though aren't they, like, thousands of years old or something?).
