Kamen Rider Zero-One E12 Review: Don't Fuck With The Dodo

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 12: The Famous Detective is Coming

I am just a wee bit behind on Zero-One, and I thought about making this a dual-episode review where I review both parts of the two-parter, but then I decided that there's enough uniqueness in both parts of the two-parter that I'd rather split it in two.

After the cliffhanger of episode 11, turns out that the police siege of Hiden Intelligence... was resolved off-screen, with the cops finding no evidence. But there's still a Drive style police team investigating Hiden, though, and if nothing else, they're out to hunt down the suspected rogue Humagear, Assassin-chan... and there's no records in any of Hiden's logs of a Humagear resembling Assassin-chan's appearance being manufactured. Yua, of course, being the wild card that she is, shows up and tattles to the police about the secret lab that Aruto has next to his office, which ends up re-starting the police investigation again.

And that's sort of the crux of the episode, which is... still interesting, but not quite delivering on the whole "company under investigation" that was promised last episode. The crisis ends up feeling a bit more small-scale, with Aruto and Izu panicking because they're making a shiny new toy in the laboratory and it'd be hard to explain to the police. Aruto's attempt to delay the police ends up not quite successful... until the famous Humagear detective Wazu Nazotoku shows up, dressed up like a Sherlock Holmes parody, and apparently all the cops know him.


And Wazu is... he's hammy, and the actor does a pretty great job at over-acting and basically being kind of over-the-top. It's not a style of hamminess that I particularly enjoy, but it's also pretty clear that this segment of his hamminess is at least partly an act to distract Vice-President Fukuzoe and the police, because Wazu's silently sending messages to Aruto, telling him to 'trust him' and improvise a distraction. Izu suggests against this, but we all know Aruto's all about trusting Humagears, so he immediately talks some shit about how he forgot the password to his secret lab, and the password is one of his killer jokes. And then Aruto just takes advantage of the audacity of his ecuse, puts on the Zero-One Driver, jump-authorizes and buggers off as he goes off because he's got "work" to do. He also gets an amazing one-liner, claiming that the Zero-One armour is his work uniform.

Over at the Metsubojinraidotnet's base, Horobi's forced Dodo-chan to shut down and has removed the key, much to Jin's confusion. Isn't it good that Dodo-chan's learned so much? And I feel that while it's certainly not out of character for Horobi to do something like this, it's also something that sort of came out of nowhere, and I kinda wished that we actually did see hints of Assassin-chan being angry or afraid of Horobi in previous episodes. There's a bit of it, sure, in Dodo's brief signs of independence in the first half of the movie director two-parter, but it's a bit too little as far as build-ups go, I feel.

Dodo's apparently evolved a bit too much, though, easily reverting back to his humanoid form, scaring poor poor Jin so much that he hides behind Horobi. Dodo claims that he's mastered assassination, and that it's time he "went independent"... and he transforms the two random Trilobite Magia behind Horobi and Jin into the very first form of the Dodo Magia! We get a cool bit of Horobi and Jin doing kung-fu moves to knock back the dodo goons, but this is enoguh time for Dodo-chan to break free of his bindings, steal the Dodo Zetsumerize Key from Horobi, and transform... into his new form, a completely different looking form with a skull-face and a quasi-Aztec bird head. It's awesome. The fact that he's slowly transforming from a generic monster of the week to a recurring minor villain into something with a unique suit? I genuinely didn't expect this to happen, and the ide of a Kamen Rider Dodo somewhere down the line doesn't seem too much like a pipe dream.

We get a bit of a cool sequence as Jin and Horobi transforms together and we see the CGI falcon and scorpion fly into the sky and fall back down (that poor scorpion) and while we do a bit of cutting back and forth, I am genuinely surprised that they establish that Dodo-Anstatsu-chan is able to handle both Jin and Horobi at the same time. Sure, he's got help, but still. The Metsuboys manage to destroy the goons, but the real Dodo-chan escapes.

On the good guys' side, Izu and Wazu bugger off into the hidden laboratory while Aruto literally boing-boings away from the police cars, giving a speech about trusting Humagears. And we do get a couple brief scenes where Fuwa tries to stop him in his tracks, and I do like the conversation with Fuwa. Seeing Vulcan fight Freezing Bear is neat, and Aruto definitely gets a couple of good one-liners. Aruto eventually gets into the hidden laboratory through a Batman-style secret elevator... and Wazu reveals that he's Izu's "older brother", i.e. an older prototype. Credit to Izu's actor for that perfect robotic "eeeh" face that she holds for a while. That's also the perfect "bitch don't fuck with me" face when she just glares at Wazu's outstretched hand.

We get a brief mation dump about how Wazu was created by grandpa Korenosuke, and was doing something for him prior to his death, and Aruto, of course, instantly believes in Wazu because he's an honest, earnest boy. We get a bit more of a split-up as Izu and Wazu goes to investigate, while Aruto boing-boings aroud and distracts the policemen... and this time, it's Valkyrie who very briefly tries to stop Aruto, but Aruto ends up shutting Yua down by snidely remaraking about how this is apparently Zaia's method of business.

Izu, meanwhile, is absolutely in full tranquil fury mode, telling Aruto how Wazu is a useless shit who spends the entire day walking aroud random old parts of the city and making Izu hold cotton candy and whirley fans. Aruto manages to tell Izu to sort of calm down for a while, but eventually Izu cracks and asks Wazu what the whole point of his nonsense is. Fuwa also shows up, having apparently followed the Humagear sibling duo, and agrees with Izu that what they've been doing is a waste of time.

Except, of course, Wazu's the sort of bumbling-buffoon-that's-actually-smart, so that brief montage of going aroud being a fool is actually him investigating, and he's found out that the warehouse is the hiding place of a Humagear black market gang, and we get the absolutely badass sequence of Wazu mimicking a police siren noise then calmly telling Fuwa to stop a random escaping truck.

Which Fuwa does with a badass VULCAN PUNCH. No, seriously, he just fucking stops the truck by punching it. Bad. Ass.

Wazu then tells us that he's figured out that the reason Dodo-chan isn't actually listed in any of Hiden's records is that because he was stolen and modified from "Matsurina Zed", a quintet of dancing Humagears, and given new faces by the black market, and it corresponds to the amount of times that the Dodo Magia's been defeated. So each time that Mestubojinrai revives Dodo, it's in a new-but-identical body? That's interesting. There's a bunch of contrived coincidences going on here, but it is a detective themed episode, so yeah, why not. The remaining Zed unit is the goal of our Assassin-chan, and of course, we get our third-act action scene.

Dodo-chan shows up to reclaim his brother, and transforms into his monster form (Dodo Mark III, I guess?), and Fuwa goes Punching Kong to protect the innocent Humagear. Fuwa, working with Humagears to save another Humagear? Character development! Wazu also has contacted Aruto off-screen, and he shows up in Flaming Tiger form. But Dodo-chan is so powerful that he manhandles both Fuwa and Aruto easily, and a combined set of finishes doesn't even phase the Dodo. Don't fuck with the Dodo!

At this point, apparently ZEA has completed the upgrade key, and Izu just speed-dashes away, which I thought it's hilarious. While Izu speed-dashes back and forth from the Hiden building, we get to see Dodo-chan beat the fuck out of Fuwa so hard he de-transforms, while he attacks Aruto before he even has a chance to utilize the Mammoth key. Izu shows up, speed-dashing and delivering the Shining Hopper Key... but interestingly, Wazu tries to stop Aruto, telling him that the Mammoth key should be enough?

It's new toy time, though, and the episode ends as Aruto transforms into his first-quarter upgrade form, Shining Hopper. Which wasn't a suit that impressed me when leaks showed up, but boy oh boy, the henshin sequence is just super-extra, isn't it? From the majestic yelling phrases that the belt makes, the two grasshoppers riding on each other, the random bug net, the abs and the grasshopper legs growing and bending into place, and the perfect delivery of "when I shine, DARKNESS FADES!" Yeah, it's one of the more badass super-form debuts I've seen in a while.

And this is where we end this episode. And... there's a lot of great moments in this episode for sure, but I kinda felt like so much of it was rushed. Things like the police investigation genuinely felt like a distraction and serves as not much but a generic backdrop. Meanwhile, the actual detective stuff focusing on Wazu highlights his relationship and quirkiness, and has the characters questioning his trustworthiness and competence more than actually trying to set up the mystery, and I felt that it was kind of underwheling that the mystery was just given to us through an info-dump. Still, between Shining Hopper and Dodo Mark III, as well as the many neat action scenes, it's still a pretty entertaining episode, and we'll see just how they wrap up this two-parter. 

Random Notes:

• In one of the best brick jokes ever, we do actually get a brief scene of Jun Fukuzoe and the policemen trying to go through Aruto's Youtube playlist and figure out which of his many jokes is the answer. Fukuzoe tries Aruto's catchphrase. It doesn't work. 
• Yamashita continues to be the master of hilariously passive-aggressively undermining Fukuzoe, quickly pushing all responsibilities of the situation to the vice-president according to the chain of command. Shester has exactly one line, but that one line is to lampshade how stupid Fukuzoe was for trying to use Aruto's catchphrase as the password. 
• Notably, Aruto's giant grasshopper buddy doesn't make a gigantic hole in his office. Is Satellite Zea able to actually beam these cyborg animals down without property destruction? If so, then I guess Aruto was just kinda being a dick to that one mangaka whose house he ruined. 
• Gimmick Watch:
• "Shining jump! Authorize. Progrise! The rider kick increases the power by adding to brightness. SHINING HOPPER! When I shine, darkness fades."
• Aruto also points the key to the sky to unlock some large digital key lock. And then instead of a grasshopper buddy, there are two grasshoppers, one riding on each other, which gets captured by a hologram net and shoved into Aruto. And we get the explicit sequence of Shining Hopper's abs growing. 
• The text-to-speech in this one has particularly poor grammar, but makes up for it for the perfect, badass delivery of when I shine, darkness fades. 
• Okay, but Horobi's just barely restraining Assassin-chan with a bunch of literal random wires he probably has lying around. 
• That Charge Rise/Full Charge unfolding of the briefcase weapon really looks like it was initially intended to have some sort of flashy effect, huh? 
• Sanjo Riku, head writer of the very criminal/mystery-genre-driven Kamen Rider W and Kamen Rider Drive, was brought in as a guest writer for this episode. It's neat. 
• It's very fortunate for Wazu's deduction that the black market people gave the five Matsurina Zeds the exact same faces, huh?
• Wazu is noted to, of course, have achieved singularity prior to this episode, which is why he's apparently 'just like a human detective'. By which I assume Fuwa and Izu are referring to the fact that Wazu apparently kept all details of the investigation secret until the exact time where revealing it would've been the most dramatic? 
• Dodo-chan's finisher attacks seem to be launching the missiles from his bandoliers, have them hover in front of him for a while, before hitting them with his swords. Okay?