Supergirl S05E02 Review: Cain and Abel

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 2: Stranger Beside Me

This episode was... pretty neat. A lot of the storylines introduced in the season premiere are still being built up in the background while a majority of the episode focused on some martian drama, and... I'm of two opinions about it? On one hand, Kara having to juggle her journalistic civilian life with superheroing is something that hits quite home as a classic Super-family story. On the other hand. I just really don't feel invested with the screentime we spent in any of the CatCo scenes we go through in this episode. Like, okay, so Kara disappearing and being asked to balance her workload, while Andrea Rojas acts like a class-A bitch boss and William Dey is apparently going around stalking Kara (and will inevitably discover her secret identity), who is built up as this massive shady douchebag, but in a (-gasp!-) huge plot twist turns out that he's a nice dude because he serves in a soup kitchen or whatever... it's all sufficient, manages to tell a story and thankfully doesn't take up too much of the episode runtime, but it's also so bland and I really don't care about any of the CatCo scenes other than the fact that Andrea Rojas is trying to be like a rival mogul for Lena Luthor. 

Lena, meanwhile, gets a couple of neat scenes in this episode, but it's mostly done in her isolated basement as she interacts with Eve Tessmacher, who she has captured and apparently is trying to figure out how to make her tick. Perhaps in a move that sort of cements Lena Luthor as being more villainous than heroic (actions speak louder than ambiguous speeches, after all), Lena ends up shoving the A.I. Hope into Eve through some kooky floating swarm of metallic orbs, making her essentially some kind of a Brainiac-style cyborg creature. It's interesting for sure, and while the introduction of Hope the AI is sort of out of nowhere, I am actually somewhat interested in seeing where this goes, particularly since we get reminded that Eve's working for the mysterious organization Leviathan. Lena rants a lot about how she wants to reprogram humanity and aliens to basically all "do no harm", and it's a pretty neat well-intentioned but ultimately extremely villainous plot. 

But the big storyline in this episode, of course, is the huge Martian lore dump! As J'onn and the rest of the Super-Friends try to figure out whatever the hell's going on with Midnight in the season premiere, they quickly figure out that J'onn's brother Ma'alefa'ak (or, as he's better-known in the comics, Malefic) exists, and a good chunk of the episode is sort of devoted into a little mind-delve as the Super-Friends make use of some technobabble (Q-waves and the Obsidian tech, the latter being a pretty terrible idea) to get J'onn to walk around a visual representation of his mind, allowing him to discover that his brother unleashed H'ronmeer's Curse, a plague that wiped out so many of the green martians that caused him to be imprisoned in the Phantom Zone. There are a lot of holes in this story, like why J'onn doesn't even remember his brother at all. He doesn't get that many answers at the end of the episode because he got interrupted a couple of times by fight scenes, but apparently we're going to delve deeper into J'onn's backstory. Okay. The exposition really could've been better, and I kinda wished that it was Alex or Kara or someone who have actually interacted with J'onn more than a couple of generic dialogue exchanges that had gone with him into the mind-zone, though. 

The bizarre way that Martian telepathic mind works means that Malefic ends up learning and influencing J'onn's mind journey a couple of times throughout the episode, eventually seemingly getting the idea to reset either his or J'onn's mind at the end of the episode. We do get a couple of action scenes starring Malefic and his random White Martian stooge (which didn't last through the episode), but ultimately the action scenes in this episode aren't super-spectacular. It's a pretty neat (and certainly cost-saving!) way to have Malefic sort of cycle through Alex and Kelly as he shapeshifts through forms, which both allows the actresses to act outside their normal range, and also to play up the sheer creepiness of a shapeshifting enemy. Also, we get the confirmation hat James Olsen still runs around in his Guardian outfit

Speaking of James, hilariously, I think the show's poking fun at how they really have no idea what to do with the character for four seasons, noting that James got offered random jobs like becoming a senator or whatever. 

There's also a couple of romantic plotlines, with the Alex/Kelly one being... extremely identikit to the Alex/Maggie storyline in previous episodes. I'm really not trying to complain, but man, Kelly does really feel like she's just there as an accessory, to be the perfect girlfriend, with very little distinguishing traits other than "she's nice". There's the whole "I know which one of these is the impostor" bit at the climax that really felt underwhelming. Just because she's not straight doesn't mean that she can't fall into the same bucket of "bland, generic love interest" tropes. Brainiac's love life with Nia is... a lot more sparsely spread throughout the episode and I think it's dragged on a bit too long, but it's at least kind of a gag-a-minute. Admittedly, love storylines in superhero shows tended to not be my thing, and I might be a grouch about these -- it's just kind of not the most interesting thing when you shove this into an episode that's already pretty slow and consisting mostly of set-up. 

Overall, a somewhat clumsy episode that has a bunch of B-plots I'm not the biggest fan of, but sort of makes up for it by having a decent J'onn storyline, and promising for something huge with Malefic and Lena, at the very least. Otherwise, though, it's pretty run-of-the-mill. Part of it might have to do with my own apathy for some of the B-plot storylines, though. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We've talked about Ma'alefa'ak/Malefic a couple of times in other shows, but we get the revelation that, just like his comic-book counterpart, Malefic is the one responsible for unleashing H'ronmeer's Curse, the telepathic plague that wiped out all of the green martians and left J'onn and Ma'alefa'ak as some of the only survivors. 
• Brainy mentions "Q-Waves", which is a frequency that apparently Obsidian tech has discovered a bit ahead of schedule (I think?), but the only reference I can find for Q-waves is the Q-Energy, a Kryptonite-like energy that appears for a single issue of Silver-Age-era Superman. 

Black Lightning S03E01 Review: Serve Your Country

Black Lightning, Season 3, Episode 1: The Book of Occupation, Chapter One: Birth of the Blackbird

I've been pretty harsh on the second season of Black Lightning, and for pretty good reason, I feel. It's not as bad as the utter clusterfuck that was last season's Flash, but despite a strong start, Black Lightning's second season was marred with pretty terrible management of its side-plots, and generally sort of being nowhere as good as the first season in giving the stories it wants to tell adequate screentime. And as such, I end up being pretty late to the party for season 3.

So we start off season three with... something interesting? The status quo has been shaken as Agent Odell and the ASA is heading this huge cold war against the nation of Markovia as a metahuman arms war sets up, and for the most part, the Pierce family is separated into two groups throughout this episode. Jefferson and Lynn are in some sort of secret conspiracy government base that's all white and ominous, while Anissa (as the titular 'Blackbird'), Jennifer and Gambi remain in Freeland.

And the episode starts off pretty confidently, with a well-shot montage of scenes of random metahumans -- implied to be the Pod Children -- being interrogated by a bodyless voice, before we finally settle onto Black Lightning. And I feel that this is perhaps not the most exciting part of the show. Lots of revelations, sure, but it just feels pretty bland. We get Jefferson, Lynn and Odell sort of discussing their situation, and clearly Odell and the government are being absolute controlling dicks, although Odell is at last nice enough towards the couple because they're useful.

On the other hand, though, both Black Lightning (and his newfound see-through-walls-without-goggles power) and the audience are alerted to Tobias Whale's presence in the facility, and he's not in the best shape since he no longer has his weird magic drugs to keep his youth. The A.S.A. is using Issa, the truth-aura metahumans from season 2, to interrogate Tobias Whale, and we sort of discover that he literally has no idea where the Briefcase McGuffin is, and during the conversation, he ends up revealing that he knows a bit too much -- that Odell was working under direct orders of the President to set up Proctor as a scapegoat and take control of Freeland's metahumans as weapons. This causes Odell to eventually kill off Issa, which is a massive dick move. You'd think trapping him in a government facility would be enough, y'know? Odell was at least kind enough to give Issa a seemingly non-brutal death with a poisoned meal, and he twists his death into some anti-Markovian propaganda when he talks to Lynn later on.

The Freeland stuff is a bit more interesting. We've got a bunch of random plot threads going on that I don't particularly care about -- Anissa's random new AI; random videos of Grace Choi turning into a leopard or some shit (???); Anissa hooking up with reporter Jamillah Olson; Jennifer going around with a hologram disguise and also having to use her powers in secret to let the powers out -- but ultimately, that's all just sort of window-dressing for subsequent plotlines.

The idea that Freeland is essentially being oppressed and plumbed for metahumans, ostensibly 'for your own protection', is pretty interesting setup, and as the ASA brings in Commander Carson Williams to put the police in place and play along with their story, we get to see briefly the curfews and new martial law being enacted. Throw in the fact that Black Lightning and Thunder are essentially MIA, and the morale of the town is at an all-time low.

The action sequence in this epsiode is when the metahuman shelter (more of a prison, effectively, after the ASA took over, where children are forcibly separated from their parents) is attacked by Cyclotronic, a metahuman who once foud himself at the mercies as essentially a living weapon used by the American government, and poor Cyclotronic ends up getting essentially murdered by Commander Williams, himself a metahuman able to mimic other people's powers. Cyclotronic may be a Markovian terrorist, but I do like that to the people in that facility, he probably looked more like a liberator.

We also give Anissa significant focus as she runs around in her alter-alter-ego, the Blackbird (who's working with good ol' Reverend Holt!), who ends up hijacking a bus full of refugees, and with the help of uncle Gambi, ends up breaking through... uh... a force field that the A.S.A. have set up. Okay? I felt like we jumped a bit headlong into crazier sci-fi stuff a bit too much, but I can't say that I'm complaining too much. The episode ends with Anissa having to fight off a bunch of A.S.A. goons and getting knocked out, but spirited away by the people she rescued.

Overall, I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the tonal shift in Black Lightning, particularly compared to the first season -- we're essentially in some sort of dystopia-land where the government who claims to be out for the welfare of the country is all too willing to weaponize the metahumans of Freeland and manipulate them like chess pieces, forcibly drafting them into a war they didn't want, while the other side, the Markovians, is so ambiguous as a threat that they might either be worse (they do have Jace, after all) or be merely an excuse for assholes like Odell to make more human weapons. The setup is at least interesting, and apparently topical to some current events in the U.S. of A? I am so uninformed about American politics that I'll not even try to strike up a comparison. We'll see if the show manages to deliver on its promise, though -- if nothing else, it's a pretty neat mood-setter of a season premiere.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Cyclotronic Man, a.k.a. Ned Creegan, is a minor villain from the comics who originally fought Batman and Robin as the electricity-manipulating villain Bag O' Bones, before resurfacing with a new costume and with additional powers to fight against Superman and Black Lightning in Metropolis. He would later go on to menace Batman, Black Lightning and the Outsiders with upgraded powers as the One-Man Meltdown, and the Outsiders discover that Creegan has been experimented with by the prison staff without his consent. 
• As far as I can tell, Carson Williams, Jamillah Olson, as well as the other metahumans seen in the prologue scene are all original characters to the show. 
• Grace definitely didn't have random shapeshifting powers in the comics, just super-strength and super-healing. 

Let's Play Pokemon Uranium: Part 23: Unending Climax

As we approach the end and grand finale of our Let's Play of Pokemon Uranium, the now-banned fan-game, I ended up having to split up the climax into two parts, one focusing on me taking on the Elite Four... and now I have to split it up again due to the sheer length of the dialogue cutscenes. This one deals with most of the action stuff, and we'll have a second one dealing with the long, long epilogue.

Kamen Rider Zero-One E09 Review: Extreme Aid

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 9: This Life, Leave it to Me

There were some good parts in this episode, I don't deny, but I dunno... I felt like it being the second part of a two-parter with episode 8 does feel a bit disjointed. Mostly because we really don't get any real follow-up for the Humagear-of-the-week. I'm genuinely really not sure why they ended up just replacing Mashiro-chan the doctor humagear with Dr. Ohmygod Omigoto... when they could've delivered a much, much more impactful episode with either one of those characters stretched over two episodes. Because with Mashirochan we basically have this character who we spent a good chunk of the previous episode building up as the perfect example of a Humagear that fights to protect humans, and then she just sort of becomes a Trilobite and quite literally forgotten by the cast... and this episode's huge climax hinges around Omigoto, who's a literal nobody we barely even get to know of. He somehow survived the hacking attempt last episode with his mind intact, but we really have no reason to think he's like, super dedicated to doctorhood or anything. If we had seen him last episode, or if this was Mashiro-chan instead, it would've felt much more impactful, y'know?

Likewise, while this episode has a lot of great individual scenes, the editing and the plotting is very suspect. Kamen Rider is a show aimed mainly towards a younger audience and I generally give it much more slack than I do with any of the other shows I review on this blog, but in this episode I genuinely was bothered by the way that Yua and Aruto quite literally teleport from the hospital set and the Hiden Intelligence offices pretty much on a whim -- a particularly egregious case is when Yua sees the doctor pushing Fuwa get deactivated, and then show up in Aruto's secret basement-office to talk to him, and somehow show back up in the hospital in the next scene. And who knows what took Jin and Horobi so long as they wander around town doing absolutely nothing.

I'm also not a huge fan of the five-minute crisis where Aruto essentially got bullied and shamed into shutting down all of the Humagear in the hospital. Sure, it leads to an amazing speech by him about how "even if the world despises me, I will believe the Humagear" and whatnot, but that scene is utterly undercut by the completely laughable lack of infrastructure Hiden didn't have. What, they didn't even call the hospital and tell them that, hey, heads up, all the robot doctors and robot nurses are going to be shut down? We only see the doctors and nurses that are shut down as they are transporting patients or whatnot, but what if one of them was doing an operation? What if one of them was holding up a pregnant lady like Mashiro-chan did last episode? There's so much bizarre lack of foresight or thought in that scene, I'm genuinely baffled. The core idea of Hiden shutting down the Humagear only for Aruto to finally decide to reactivate them is a very solid one, and, hell, I'm a huge fan of the vice president being involved in a plotline that's not all petty, but the execution of the shut-down-humagear bit was so lackluster and, in-universe, pretty chaotically done that I'm just not a huge fan.

That said, though, this episode definitely does have a lot of great moments. Yua and Aruto really do manage to elevate the episode with some seriously great character work. Yua's sheer panic and emotional outburst in front of Aruto and Izu is genuinely well-acted, that even Aruto gets taken aback that Yua is allowing herself to show emotion. Her speech about how the humagear are doing their best even after they got hacked, as well as the whole speech about how she feels a huge chunk of guilt thanks to the Giger (we're using that spelling, apparently) being AIMS' fault -- leading to her giving Izu the Mammoth Zetsumerise Key. And as mentioned before, Aruto's determination in believing in the Humagear, and his subsequent "I'll fight, even though I am alone" speech, while pretty much a textbook shonen-hero speech, is well-delivered. I do really like Izu's little speech about Aruto's motivations to Yua, and we cut back and forth between Zero-One fighting alone against the Humagear and the speech about humagears having good will and whatnot.

Jin is still entertaining as he bounces around like a kid with too much sugar, but... I dunno. Horobi isn't quite as bad as some of the more underwhelming Kamen Rider villains (and in any case, this is his second technical episode as a big bad) but he does spend essentially his entire screentime in this episode just yakking about the same extinction speech he made last episode. Speaking of which, I'm also a huge fan of Fuwa in this episode, even if he gets sidelined. Realizing at the end that it was a Humagear doctor that cured him, and the sheer silent "fuck" he has in his eyes is perfect, as is his eventual admission to Aruto that he now have two conflicting memories about the Humagears.

We also get the revelation that the Giger mechs is similar to something that Hiden Intelligence had been working on, a "heavy duty rescue system for disaster recovery". Yeah, sure. It's probably a lot more obvious for people who keep up with toy scans, but I was definitely genuinely surprised when a huge chunk of the Zea satellite splits off, transforms into a giant chunky Gundam spaceship, and was beamed to Earth to serve as a mecha-suit for Zero One. And... and the action scene is pretty all right, and probably one of the better CGI-toys-fighting scenes in Kamen Rider. I did really like the slow, badass buildup of zero-wan-zero-wan-zero-wan-zero-wan theme song in the background, and the whole sequence of Breaking Mammoth stealing the tusk-sickles of the enemy robot and eventually the sheer ridiculousness of Breaking Impact -- Zero-One shoots out a gigantic Progrise Key, then uses it as a surfboard to quite literally press the enemy into scrap. Gloriously silly.

Anyway, there are some really great moments in this episode, and the final scenes are also pretty neat. We've got Fuwa and Aruto bonding (including Fuwa 'breaking' his gut while holding in his laughter from Aruto's bad pun), and after Izu and Yua got a lot of friendship moments earlier in this episode... Izu searches for an evidence of whoever took the incriminating video of the blue-eyed Assassin-chan transforming, and basically finds out that it's Yua... who quickly walks away and denies all involvement like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Interesting, and we might actually get a confrontation between Yua and Izu in the future. Yua gets shafted a lot in regards to action scenes (particularly in this episode and the previous one), but she's easily the most interesting of the characters in the show right now, what with her surprisingly complex motivations and emotional outbursts.

Overall, while certainly not my favourite episode of the series, it's still an admirable effort and one with a fair amount of decent moments within. 

Random Notes: 

• There's another sub-plot about a TV news dude called Mr. Kuichi who is all over-excited as he tells people about hacked Humagear with red Decepticon eyes, and the surprise when we get a recording of Assassin-chan transforming with blue eyes. 
• That Zero-One vs Horobi and Jin fight in the first act is perhaps the first fight in this series that I genuinely felt underwhelmed by. I do always enjoy the STRONK sound made by Horobi's hercules beetle key, though. 
• More Izu goodness:
• Izu and Shester's calm robot staredown in the office is easily the comedic highlight of the episode. 
• Izu speed-trotting into action and does a super-awesome slide to hand the Mammoth key to Aruto is also hilariously amazing. 
• The Gimmick Watch:
• "PRESS! Authorize. Prog-rise! Giant Waking! Breaking Mammoth!" The noise of transformation and whatnot is too noisy for me to make out the text-to-speech, though apparently it's "Larger than life to crush like a machine." Its final attack is Breaking Impact. 
• So, uh, it just has giant versions of the mammoth progrise keys on its arms. With no real explanation other than "well, the toy is meant to interact with them". It's not quite as bad as the stupid Ridewatch faces on the Zi-O mechs, though.  
• Poor Yua doesn't get to transform at all this episode, despite her actually going "henshin!" in the final act. Her transformation and her rescue of the random patients are left completely off-screen. 
• Thanks to the jumpy scene-shifts, I got the impression that poor Fuwa is left in that gurney unsupervised for the entire time until Dr. Ohmygod gets reactivated. 
• While the CGI for Breaking Mammoth fighting against the Giger is all right, the CGI of regular Rising Hopper Zero-One against the Giger is very iffy. 
• Depending on my schedule, I might not be able to do timely weekly reviews of Zero-One for the forseeable future, but maybe this week I'll be able to finish proofreading a bunch of episode reviews of my watch-through of Kiva. Why Kiva? No real reason, erally, other than the fact that it's one of the couple of Heisei-era shows I haven't touched before. 

Batwoman S01E02 Review: Sister Act

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 2: The Rabbit Hole

As we continue with the second episode of Batwoman, we jump head-long into the Kate/Beth sisterly storyline, and it's... it's interesting? It's not the first time that a superhero show has had the hero's missing, long-thought-dead relative end up being a villain (see also: Emiko Adachi, Astra, half the cast of Gotham), but I do think that the way that these first two episodes of Batwoman did go through the expected beats pretty well. The surprise revelation at the end of the pilot is a huge cliffhanger, and a good chunk of this episode has Kate -- and because she couldn't keep her mouth shut, the rest of the cast -- trying to figure out if Alice really is Beth. And as the audience, we know she 100% is, because to pussyfoot out of that revelation would be anticlimactic as hell, but Kate doesn't know that. And there's just that delicious bit of ambiguity when Alice whispers to Kate about how she might be Beth, or she might just model herself after what she read online. That's actually pretty well-scripted.

A lot of "The Rabbit Hole" makes use of this connection with Kate's past not to just establish the connection between Kate and Beth, but also how Kate connects with her father Jacob, her step-sister Mary, even with Luke and Sophia, and it's... it's pretty interesting. There's still a huge chunk of uncertainty to what Kate is doing as the (still-unnamed-in-the-show) Batwoman, and unlike CW's five other superhero shows, Kate doesn't see being Batwoman as her true calling or The Mission for the rest of her life. Sure, she's very focused in solving the Alice problem, and she's not taking the cowl off any time soon, but I do like how she acts pretty dismissive about claiming the title of Gotham's protector or what Batman's presence meant to the city. The episode doesn't shove it down our throats, but we do get enough scenes and background noise (quite literally, with Vesper's radio show) showing that Gotham City is hungry for a new Batman-like figure, while all Kate cares for at the moment is just Alice.

Of course, when Jacob reveals that they have shoot-to-kill orders for Alice, Kate quickly blurts out over breakfast about how "Alice is Beth", and Jacob sort of dismisses it as a particularly crazy fantasy by his daughter, who refused to move on... although looking at the scenes of the flashback to how the two of them coped after Beth's accident, it's not hard to see why Jacob is so unwilling to believe the fact that Beth might have survived -- particularly due to how unrelenting little Kate is in trying to find her sister, and the very tear-jerking scene when little Kate is just crying about why she didn't try harder to save her sister. Survivor's guilt at its finest.

Alice, meanwhile, continues to be in tiptop comic book villain form, quoting her Alice in Wonderland lines a lot more in this episode, set to the backdrop of murdering a bound old couple who now lived in the old Kane house, or to the dramatic confrontation that happens around halfway through the episode near the waffle stop. Alice/Beth is clearly insane, and she's all too happy to throw in doubt and fuck with Kate's mind... while also sending her minino Dodgson to murder the 'spare' sister. What a crazy, possessive lady!

Mary's storyline was seeded throughout the episode as something that was neat world-building but ultimately felt like it was just there to sort of set up the character for later. Oh, she's got an illegal clinic, clearly an interesting locale for a vigilante show. She ends up getting attacked and eventually rescued by Batwoman, which is pretty awesome... but then at the end of the episode, when Mary finally meets Kate again, we learn that Mary's been really trying to get close to her cold, aloof older step-sister but all Kate is concerned about is chasing the ghost of Beth. That's some pretty neat acting.

There's also the climax of Batwoman driving off to save Alice from drowning when her prison convoy got attacked with a bomb, with a neat showcase of Chekov's Bat-Rebreather, but ultimately it's a scene that raises more questions than answers. Is it part of Alice's huge gamble to escape? Is it a third party in play, and Alice just happens to get caught in the crossfire? Something else? Complicating matters is the fact that the final scene of the episode reveals that Kate's step-mom Catherine Hamilton (who's conspicuously absent after the little family breakfast scene) is apparently the one who hired the hitmen to attack Kate and steal the incriminating knife. Pretty interesting twist!

Family's clearly the huge theme of this episode, whether it's the interactions between Kate and Beth, Kate and Mary, Kate and Jacob (both past and present)... but the other parts of the show also work pretty well. Luke Fox is trying his best to live up to both his father and Batman's legacy, pointing out just how gung-ho Kate has been about everything, and he's an interesting 'guy in the chair' supporting character. In contrast, though, I felt like Sophia's storyline was a bit underwhelming. Nothing really wrong with that, of course, and I do like just how hard of a decision it must be for Sophia to move from her loyalty to Kate as an ex-girlfriend or to inform Jacob that Kate might be doing something stupid, but ultimately I find her character a bit too flat for my liking. Ultimately, though, it's still pretty fantastic superhero fare. I wouldn't go as far as to say that Batwoman so far has been like, revolutionary or anything, but it's definitely a very solid storyline and acting so far.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Kate casually name-drops Wonder Woman, which I'm 99% sure is the first time we've ever had any mention of the charactr in an Arrowverse show, other than Themyscira showing up as a cameo in Legends of Tomorrow. 
• Vesper Fairchild name-drops Robin while sarcastically noting that Batman might be at Robin's high-school graduation, confirming that at least a Robin exists in the Arrowverse. 
• Loeb Bridge, is either named after DC comics writer Jeph Loeb, or after the in-universe corrupt police officer Gillian B. Loeb, the commissioner of Gotham City before Gordon. 
• "You have our father's eyes" is taken straight from a conversation between Beth and Kate in the comics during one of their first arcs. The waffles thing is also from the comics, where going for waffles was a significant part of the comic-book Beth and Kate -- the incident that separated the sisters was being kidnapped during a trip to get waffles. 

Kamen Rider Zero One E08 Review: Horobi's Katana

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 8: The Beginning of Destruction Starts Here

So this episode is our very first two-parter, after a series of stand-alone episodes. It's actually pretty surprising, considering a lot of the Heisei-era shows tended to either be almost-exclusively comprised of two-parter story arcs or being completely episodic, and I'm definitely up for it if Kamen Rider Zero-One and the rest of the Reiwa era is a lot more flexible with swapping back and forth depending on the needs of the story. 

That said, though, the setup of this episode really does end up feeling like yet another Humagear-of-the-week, with the guest star this time around being the White-coat Angel Mashirochan, an absolutely lovely Humagear doctor, and in the midst of Aruto's antics, we get to see just how much more effective robot doctors and nurses are -- even if I'm not sure measuring a patient's weight by lifting them up with super-strength is kosher. And honestly, in a job where efficiency is key and where real-life medical staff tend to be overworked all to hell, it's actually a pretty neat bit of world-building for sure.

We get a bit more of comedy as Aruto goes through his failed-comedian routine in the hospital, before Fuwa goes through his routine, talking about how shit robot doctors are and how it makes him feel not quite right inside. He's a racist man, isn't he? Of course, Mashirochan immediately saves a random pregnant woman from falling, just to disprove Fuwa's point. 

While this is going on, we get the return of good ol' Dodo (Antatsu-chan, Assassin-chan, whatever you want to call him -- I prefer 'Dodo'). Horobi apparently recreated Dodo from a 'saved' previous iteration, but Dodo's attempts to hack a Humagear nurse in the hospital ends up being absolutely foiled because of the good security system or something, while Dodo continues to make funny faces. We get to see a whole lot of extinction-themed speeches from Horobi and Jin, talking about the large amount of humans they have to extinct-ize. So they decide to target Yua!

We also basically have the confirmation that Yua's mysterious Man In A Shadowed Room (tm) boss is a member of Zaia Industries, and it is Zaia that has been producing the other Progrise Keys that AIMS has been using. And their latest project is the Giga, a bunch of giant robots that could, theoretically, show up and reverse-hack rogue Magia. They look like a cross-breed between a Gundam and the giant Time Mazine from Zi-O.



The Metsubojinrai.net boys attack the AIMS facility, fighting against Yua, and we get a pretty cool sequence of an upgraded Dodo Magia (he's got swords!) and Kamen Rider Jin (who did get to dash into the Giga hangar and apparently attach a Zetsu-driver to one) fighting against Valkyrie's hornet form. It's kind of poor showing for poor Valkyrie and she does get tossed around a lot in this episode. Normally I would say that it's another showcase of the showmakers of a tokusatsu show using the lady as the sub-par fighter, but I'm not going to make that comparison now -- Valkyrie is outnumbered in all her fights in this episode, and it's not like we get a 'Vulcan/Zero-One is absolutely better'. While Valkyrie is busy fighting Dodo, Horobi steals a bunch of briefcase weapons, including a new toy, the Attache Arrow, which Jin shows off by using to knock out Valkyrie.

And... yeah, as Aruto, Izu and Fuwa show up, and they check up on the Giga, they... didn't think to look a bit further? I guess they sort of make a point of showing that our main characters considered the hack, but it still felt kind of an idiot ball on AIMS' part.

Yua ends up getting a check-up and an arm sling from Mashirochan, and, of course, Fuwa takes this time to go on a rant on those filthy robot doctors is 'bad for your health', causing Yua to snap at Fuwa and tell him to shut up and 'keep [his] biases out of this'. So far, Yua does fall pretty neatly in the pragmatic middle ground between Aruto's robot-love and Fuwa's robot-racism. Of course, it's at this point that Mashirochan randomly suggests that maybe Fuwa could get a brain scan if he's not feeling well -- something she's not about to say. The cast of the show attributes that to Mashirochan's care for her patients and humanity causing her to transcend her programming and her potentially gaining sentience, but it's my personal opinion that Mashirochan just none-too-subtly made a snarky insult at Fuwa's assholishness.

Anyway, after a bit of a check-up in Hiden and a brief exposition dump about how AI might achieve 'singularity' and Fuwa being absolutely ready to shoot poor Mashirochan in the head (even Yua stands in his way), the discussion about Fuwa's aggressive shoot-first-ask-questions-never behaviour gets tabled because the hacked Giga giant robot has escaped and is smashing up the hospital. We get a cool scene of Izu joining the other Humagear staff in saving the patients, which I liked.

The Mestu-boys show up, and we finally get the revelation that everyone was sort of suspecting (Jin was essentially confirmed, but Horobi's a bit more questionable), but not quite sure -- they are both Humagears, and they're hiding their weird ear-mechanical-piece thing under their bandana and hoodie respectively. Horobi does a bit of a katana-swirling thing as he gives a big bad guy speech about how the humagear will inherit the earth after humanity's extinction, before ordering the Giga to mass-hack all of the hospital staff. Some great acting from the very hopeful (and subsequently hope-crushed) Aruto as he tries to plead with Mashirochan, only to have her deliver an absolutely unsettling laugh and transform into a Trilobite Magia.

And then we have an absolutely awesome four-way transformation scene, including a sequence where Aruto's hopper buddy slams in from outer space and stomps Jin's falcon buddy straight into the ground, and the two of them clash around a bit before the henshin sequence is completed. Absolutely love this sequence. The action scene that happens next is also pretty cool, and I love the casual ease of Vulcan's Punching Kong form just charging forwards and knocking two Trilobites to the ground. Eventually we get a 1-v-1 between Zero-One and the Dodo Magia, and we get Izu just tossing Progrise Key after Progrise Key to Zero-One as he goes through the shark, bear and tiger forms before blowing up the Dodo Magia -- pretty cool sequence.

While all of this going on, Vulcan and Valkyrie fight against Jin and the trilobite mooks and they enter The Warehouse (tm). Valkyrie and Vulcan eventually team up against Jin and knock him down... only for Horobi to do a badass walk in and show off his katana again (I can't decide if it's cool or ridiculous, to be honest), talking about the 'day of revolution' and whatnot, before slapping his own Force Riser and transforming into Kamen Rider Horobi. Fuwa immediately recognizes Horobi as the mysterious figure from the tour guide episode, realizing that Horobi is the person responsible for Daybreak, and he goes absolutely ballistic.

While Jin fights Valkyrie and holds her back (we've been having a lot of Jin/Valkyrie fights in these past two episodes, huh?), Fuwa goes all crazy as he gets to see the person who's essentially responsible for all the grief in his life, and he unleashes everything he has, and we get some amazing screaming as he machineguns Horobi down with his toy gun-belt, before unleashing a rocket-fist finisher thing... but Horobi's both the new toy being promoted and also the main villain, and he is, of course, completely unscathed. After a brief usage of the Hercules Beetle key to unleash an attack with his bow, we get a cool sequence of Horobi kicking Vulcan in the neck and then walking away as a ridiculously large explosion eats up the warehouse. We even have some kanji for "Sting Dystopia" show up on screen, which I thought was pretty damn cool.

And the episode ends with the cliffhanger of Fuwa being completely and utterly destroyed (and also ineffective) against Horobi, and the Metsu-boys having both a small army of magia minions and a hacked Giga. Overall, it's going through what's essentially 'oh shit, time to get serious' part of the show as we properly introduce a main villain, and I'm curious to see how things will go for sure. A pretty top-notch episode, for sure. 

Random Notes:

• Different translation teams name the giant robot suits either "Giga" or "Giger". I'll go with the former until we get a more definitive romanization of the Japanese. 
• I kind of feel like the X-Ray segment with Aruto in the very first scene is to quash any theories of Aruto being a Humagear himself. Or at least as a misdirection. 
• The Dodo Magia being reset to its previous, pre-death memory and configuration doesn't just explain how the other guest-star AI managed to survive (in a fashion), but also how Jin lost the character development and doubts he got in the sixth episode, because he was reverted back into the crazy psycho man--child by Horobi when he first transformed!
• I'm not 100% clear if it's the Humagear in the hospital that are just extra hack-proof, or if Hiden Intelligence did a software update for all their Humagear between episode 7 and 8. 
• This episode is a goldmine for Izu doing hilarious things in the background. Basically every time they show up is glorious, but highlights among their antics include:
• Izu's "scanning for laughter: none found" little speedy head-spin.
• Izu pulling Aruto outof sight as he makes faces at Fuwa from a distance, unwittingly smashing Aruto's head into the wall next to him.
• Izu's little jumping away when the Giga's tentacle whips swoop down; and then also moving away before all the chaos of transformation occurs. 
• Izu copying Aruto's thumb-pointing-at-himself in the background when he's all "I'm the only one that can stop you!"
• Izu's over-the-head clapping after Aruto blows up Dodo. 
• Dodo flapping his arms uselessly as he transforms into the Dodo Magia is also absolutely adorable. 
• So, uh... what's up with Horobi posing around with that katana? I mean, sure is cool, but why?
• The 'chan' in Mashirochan's name isn't just a suffix because she's cute -- the Hiden data readout actually parses her name as 'Mashirochan', so it's actually part of her name. The same readout also notes that Mashirochan is "all serene", and has a little paragraph going "She has the name of an angel in white, she is loved by everyone, she is helping everyone, she is". Okay! 
• The Gimmick Watch:
• "Force Riser. Poison! Force rise: Sting Scorpion!" Horobi's transformation summons a scorpion buddy, who stings him in the chest before wrapping its claws and legs all around him. Sting Scorpion's attack is "Sting Dystopia". Unlike the good guys' finishers, Horobi's finishers show up in Kanji. 
• "Strongk! Hercules Beetle's Ability!" Apparently, the ability of a Hercules beetle is to shoot out green energy beams. Absolutely love the actually decent English in this season's toys. 
• We've got a bunch of additional named attacks, including the Flaming Kaban Dynamic (Flaming Tiger + Attache Calibur) and I think we've seen Power Punching Blast before?

Batwoman S01E01 Review: Protector of Gotham

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot

Batwoman is... it's a show that has garnered a lot of press even before it started. And as someone who blissfully ignored and wasn't even aware of the massive flame wars on youtube trailers and comic-book fan sites until five minutes before writing this review, I never really saw Batwoman as an attempt to shoehorn SJW-politics into superheroes, or gender-flipping Batman, or anything of that sort. In fact, watching through the first pilot episode of Batwoman, my reaction was more of "well, this is actually a pretty decent adaptation of the 52-era reboot of Batwoman!" And with Gotham over, it certainly does help to sort of fill in the Batman-TV-shaped hole in my heart.

The pilot episode for Batwoman is, surprisingly enough, an origin story for the character as she returns from her training all over the world back to Gotham City, in a time where Batman has mysteriously vanished for a couple of years. We learn a bunch about Kate Kane throughout the episode, and while her relationship to Bruce Wayne -- he's her cousin -- is brought up a couple of times throughout the episode, unlike Supergirl or Titans, Batwoman is allowed from the get-go to essentially tell her own story instead of being bogged down under the shadow of a bigger hero. There's a neat balance of having Kate Kane become the new defender of Gotham, while also at the same time she also treats the legacy that Bruce has left behind with respect.

The pilot episode essentially isn't super complex. Kate returns from training with strange mentors when her ex-girlfriend Sophie Moore is attacked and abducted during a ceremony in which the Bat-Signal was supposed to be shut down, in a crime perpetrated by a crazy woman calling herself Alice and quoting Lewis Carol's work. While originally training to find a spot in her father's crime-fighting organization the Crows, Kate ends up basically being pushed away by her father from any operation to find Sophie, in a combination of some father-doesn't-really-see-her-daughter-as-competent and Jacob Kane being pretty overprotective.

And the second act of the episode sort of... sets up Kate Kane's little investigation, as she initially goes on her own crusade, breaking into Wayne Industries and meeting nerdy ol' Luke Fox, meeting Alice herself and inexplicably being spared by her, and eventually discovering the Batcave after pressing a button placed underneath a display of Martha Wayne's pearl necklace. We also get to see Kate's backstor, where her mother and sister were presumed killed when Batman was going off to save a school bus, when Batman's bat-line failed to hold the car and caused it to plummet. It's an interesting dynamic of Kate respecting Bruce a lot but hating Batman, but very quickly comes to terms when she realizes the whole story... and ends up deciding to gang-press Luke Fox into helping her root out Alice and save Sophia. Donning a modified version of Batman's suit, Kate finally ends up fighting Alice and her men as Batwoman. Kate herself... has a neat personality? She's pretty low-key and subdued throughout much of the episode, being laser-focused at recovering her friend while also having enough of a sense of humour to do the odd sarcastic jab or two. Her personality is still sort of there, kinda-dour-but-not-gloomy.

A fair amount of the pilot's plot beats feel pretty expected. We get to see Kate Kane being a badass, we get to see the kooky sidekick, we get to see her backstory (including being kicked out of military school for being gay -- the LGBT part of the show is prominent without being too in-your-face about it) and we get to see her fight both outside of the suit and inside of it. As Batwoman, she eventually rescues Sophie and we get a cool sequence of her picking off Alice's men one by one before rescuing Sophie. Alice's plot is pretty standard fare for the psychotic Bat-villains of Gotham City, forcing Jacob Kane to either choose the life of his beloved subordinate (who's about to be thrown off a building), or do something about it and Alice will detonate the van full of bombs in the park. I'm not 100% sure what Alice's motivations are, but it's a pilot episode and I will settle for 'crazy Bat-villain'. (Also Sophie is married to a man at the end of the episode, but at this point I'm just 100% done in terms of love triangles in CW shows)

Of course, the enigmatic Alice's true identity quickly becomes apparent to the audience. Alice let off Kate Kane, and seems to know a lot about the 'daughter that her dad wants'. Plus, Luke Fox notes just how long Bruce had looked for Beth's body and never found it. Eventually, after a certain necklace's gemstone ends up (rather conveniently) appearing in the hilt of Alice's dagger, Kate suspects that Alice might be Beth... while the audience gets straight-up confirmation that, yes, crazy ol' Alice is Beth, who survived the fall and now plots to essentially take over Gotham City with her sister. A lot of this doesn't really fully make sense, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt since we're still in the pilot stage. I just appreciate that they didn't stretch out this revelation for like the entire season or whatever.

Ultimately... the pilot episode's a pretty uneven but interesting one. A lot of it, I feel, stems from the fact that the show doesn't seem to find a right balance on not treating the audience like idiots (like, y'all know what Gotham City's all about, right?) and also delivering massive expositions. There are also some parts of the pilot episode that felt a bit iffy -- Sophie being noted as "the daughter that Jacob Kane always wants" felt like a random detail out of nowhere. Ultimately, though, it's a neat show that feels like a pretty great Batwoman adaptation. It's not without its faults, but I did like what I saw.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We've talked about Batwoman's origins when she first debuted in the Arrowverse's Elseworlds crossover, so I won't repeat myself here. Again, her association as Bruce Wayne's cousin is original to CW, although the storyline of her returning to a Gotham City where Batman is MIA for a couple of years is taken from the 52 storyline, in which Batman and most of his sidekicks are missing after the events of Infinite Crisis. 52 is the first storyline in which the modern-day Batwoman debuted. 
• Alice, a.k.a. Elizabeth Kane, is a major character from the Batwoman stories, and her origin story is relatively similar to how it's being approached here. She was Katherine Kane's twin sister, lost and presumably killed during her childhood, and eventually rising up as a member of an organization called the Religion of Crime. 
• Kate's step-sister Mary Hamilton-Kane is based on Mary Elizabeth "Bette" Kane, a.k.a. Flamebird, from the comics. Traditionally Katherine's cousin, Bette Kane was originally introduced as the Golden Age Bat-Girl (a more comedic, clingy girlfriend type character more than a proper vigilante in a lot of her earlier stories), but was retconned out of existence during Crisis on Infinite Earths, in favour of making Barbara Gordon the only Batgirl. Bette Kane was re-introduced as the vigilante Flamebird (and later Hawkfire), originally starting off as a Teen Titans supporting character before becoming a Batwoman sidekick.
• Jacob Kane and Catherine Hamilton are Katherine's father and stepmother in the comics. I don't think Catherine Hamilton ever does much, but Jacob Kane's role as a more military-minded father that has problems with his daughter is relatively faithful to the couple of Batwoman comics I've read. 
• Luke Fox is presumably Lucas Fox (or sometimes Lucius Fox Jr), son of Batman's classic ally Lucius Fox, better known in New 52 era stories as the superhero Batwing. 
• Crows Security takes its name from the Murder of Crows, a group of special operations soldiers who are friends with Jacob and trained Kate in the comics. 
• Sophie Moore was Batwoman's first girlfriend in the rebooted comics, but was very much a one-note minor character. Here she gets a significantly expanded role. 
• Vesper Fairchild, whose radio show is played a couple times in the episode, is one of Bruce Wayne's many, many love interests. In the comics, she is also a radio host, and was Bruce's love interest in the late 90's and early 00's, but perhaps the most famous arc about her was her death in the Bruce Wayne: Fugitive storyline, where Bruce Wayne was imprisoned for being suspected in murdering her, leading to Batman abandoning the Bruce Wayne persona. 
• The "Welcome to Gotham" sign that was turned into "Hell comes to Gotham" with graffiti is a neat little homage to a very memorable defacing of a similar sign in the No Man's Land comics. At least that's what I remember it from, anyway. 
• The Wayne Towers' Batcave is clearly based on Batwoman's HQ in the comics, being an octagonal room with a tree in the center.
• The password to Wayne Industries' computers is apparently Alfred, a nod to the Waynes' faithful butler. 
• Bruce Wayne's canon in-universe birthday in the comics is indeed February 19th. 
• The movie in the park is, of course, The Mark of Zorro, the fateful movie that Bruce Wayne and his family watched as they went home that fateful night.