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.