Kamen Rider Zero-One E14 Review: If It's A Wolf It's Mine

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 14: We Are The Astronaut Brothers

So the plotline of this episode starts off when Aruto is late for work, and decides to call in his transforming phone-bike, that gets ejected and launched towards Earth from Satellite Zea, and this absolutely irritates the two astronaut humagear that runs maintenance on Satellite Zea, the titular 'astronaut brothers', Raiden and Subaru. The hot-headed Raiden decide that they've had enough, and they decide to beam down to Earth to give their boss a piece of their mind, interrupting a meeting between Aruto and his flunkies. And it's kinda fun to see Raiden's hot-bloodedness. He might be a robot, but he ain't taking shit from no one, not even his human creators-slash-employees, and it's actually pretty fun to see him chewing the scenery and causing Aruto and even Fukuzoe to cower. 

AIMS, meanwhile, is finally analyzing the kanji of Metsubojinrai, and they realized that out of the four kanji, two of them correspond to the two core members of Metsubojinrai -- jin (speed) is Jin, and metsu (ruin) corresponds to Horobi, and Fuwa quickly realizes that this means that there might be 'bo' (death) and 'rai' (thunder) members of the group... but this conversation quickly gets tabled when AIMS realizes that the fact that Metsubojinrai.net can so quickly react to any Humagear achieving singularity is likely because there's a spy within Hiden Intelligence. 

AIMS goes off to interrogate Aruto, just as the space-bros are giving him a tour of Hiden's space facilities. There is some rather convenient dialogue as Fuwa quickly challenges and outright accuses the Humagear present if they're the spy since anyone working on the satellite would have access to the whole Hiden framework. The fact that Raiden is fond of using the phrase "bring down the thunder" causes the over-zealous cop in Fuwa to come out, and since Raiden's the one Humagear in the world who refuses to take shit from anyone, he gets into an argument with Fuwa immediately.

There's also a sense of this episode being a big more eventful than previous ones. With the Dodo arc over and everyone talking about the 'next move', Horobi even straight-up mentions that they're moving to the next phase and it's time to bring their comrade in. Jin shows up just as Fuwa and Raiden are arguing, shooting his not-a-toy-real-ass gun to steal the good guys' Progrise Keys, because they need it for the quarter-season plot. We get a pretty cool fight and another showcase of Shining Hopper as it zips around Jin's Kamen Rider form, but when Jin tries to hack the astronaut brothers, Raiden pushes his brother out of the way and takes the hit, and uses his hot-bloodedness to straight-up resist Jin's hacking. 

Jin flies away, but also leaves behind the little crumb of information that Raiden is a Daybreak survivor, and we get a brief bit of information dump as Raiden and Subaru gives us a little history lesson -- Raiden was supposed to man a satellite that was supposed to be launched during the Daybreak Incident, but said satellite blew up during Daybreak. Raiden ended up being brought back online to train his little brother to maintain the new model, Satellite Zea. 

Fuwa gets absolutely angry at the mention of Daybreak, though, and he's got a stick up his butt throughout the entire episode... pity, considering the character development he got in the past two episodes. I really felt like the episode could've given us a couple extra scenes showing just how disturbed Fuwa is about Daybreak or something. But he gets so flustered that he even ignores one of Aruto's bad jokes and talks about how he doesn't need laughter at the moment. Okay, emo. 

The Space Bros, to clear their names, end up enlisting Zea's help to help track down Mestubojinrai.net in the ruins of Daybreak. Fuwa, Aruto and Raiden go off to Daybreak, but Jin shows up to greet "Ikazuchi" (thunder). Fuwa's all like "I knew it you're a spy" and Aruto's all like "he's a good big bro he can't be a spy", but turns out that Raiden's been a deep-cover agent who doesn't even know that he's actually secretly a spy all along. There's a pretty twisted bit of his child-like attitude from Jin at this point, giggling about how he's totally getting a new big brother out of it before attaching a Force Riser into Raiden's body and transforming him with the Dodo Key into Kamen Rider Ikazuchi. 

What? No! I wanted my dodo kamen rider, but not like this, not with another character!

That said, though, Ikazuchi is a pretty dang cool suit, and Fuwa goes straight-in with Punching Kong to fight the now brainwashed-into-evil space-bro. Aruto has a neat brief moment of hesitation before jumping in to help in his shark form, but if the past couple of episodes have taught us anything is that the Dodo Key is fucking badass, and Ikazuchi easily overwhelms the two Kamen Riders, knocking off the Progrise Keys from their belts while Jin gleefully collects them. What a scamp! 

Apparently, the keys that Fuwa, Aruto and Jin currently have are enough (no mention of the keys in Yua or Gai's possession, or the Zetsumerize keys in Horobi's table) for Ikazuchi to unleash a beam to Satellite Zea that summons the huge CGI glowing animals, have them all zip around into the Ark, and blow open a hole in Horobi's base and, uh, cause a little chamber similar to what Aruto has in his basement to start 3D-printing Progrise Keys? Okay, that moved a bit fast, but essentially this ended up with the creation of a new variant of the Progrise Key. The Ark's revived through this, and Jin gives a brief little recap to explain things to us. Aruto goes into Shining Hopper mode, but gets overwhelmed from the feedback and Ikazuchi manages to knock him to the ground. Izu slides in and hands Aruto the weapon that Zea constructed in the background, the Authorize Buster, which Aruto uses to shoot Ikazuchi on his ass. Izu and Jin zip in and takes the keys that their factions originally had to keep the status quo the same. 

And then it's new toy time! Horobi tosses Jin the brand-new Progrise Key that the Ark created, but Jin drops it when Aruto shoots him. That's it for Aruto this episode, though, who falls down wounded. Fuwa picks up the brand-new toy, realizes that it's called "Assault Wolf", and with the logic of "if it's got a wolf in it, it's mine!" decides that he's going to transform with that key. And I do really like the fact that Horobi's so certain that Fuwa's not going to be able to utilize Mestubojinrai.net's key, but Fuwa's made a career out of forcing open keys that wouldn't authorize him, and the one-man Force-Riser rips apart the Assault Wolf Key with the hilarious-but-also-appropriate "I don't need laughs, I NEED RAGEEEEE" and transforms into the Assault Wolf form, which looks badass, and the transformation sequence gives us a couple of nice spinning shots. 

Assault Wolf Vulcan faces off against Ikazuchi, two new toys, but Assault Wolf and the power of Fuwa's unyielding anger absolutely overwhelms Ikazuchi, and uses the Authorize Buster to annihilate Kamen Rider Ikazuchi and blow him up. Fuwa falls down wounded from the strain of using his new form, and Aruto and Izu end up retreating, while Horobi and Jin pick up the Dodo Key and retreats as well. Jin ends up feeling absolutely sick at the sight of the death of his buddy Ikazuchi, and it's apparently a sign of him approaching singularity, something that Horobi is delighted about. The kind of fucked-up thing, though, is that I think it's implied that Horobi's selectively grooming Jin's development so that his singularity is directed in hate towards humans, because if you remember Jin's original debut as a Kamen Rider, it's arguable that he was about to reach singularity when he showed compassion and tried to help the voice actor Humagear until Horobi 'reset' him. 

Anyway, a pretty interesting episode. Things are going a bit fast and we do get the feeling like the show's zipping through multiple new toys in a single episode and that there's not a whole lot of breathing room between the debut of Ikazuchi, Assault Wolf and the weapon, not to mention the huge plot revelations. I really do kind of feel like I would've cared a lot more about Raiden being brainwashed and transformed into Ikazuchi if I actually cared about Raiden. The actor's competent enough to give him a generic brash-anime-dude personality, but ultimately the revelation that he's a traitor and his subsequent mercy-kill at the hands of Fuwa don't particularly land that well. It does seem like we're entering the stage in the show where we're getting a lot of revelations in one go, which I certainly welcome! It does happen a bit too fast, though, which is kind of my big complaint. And at the risk of sounding too much like a Dodo-chan fanboy, I really kinda wished that it was him under the Kamen Rider Ikazuchi mask instead of some dude we met 10 minutes ago. 

Random Notes:

• Anyone who knows anything about Kanji or general Japanese mythology in general will quickly realize that "Raiden" has the kanji for lightning that's also found on Metsubojinrai.net. Ikazuchi is an alternate reading of the rai kanji.
• I completely forgot about it, but Gai gets a brief scene talking about how as the Ark guides them, they're reaching the age of a new mythology; the mythology of the Kamen Riders. Ominous!
• The visual imagery of the two astronaut humagear just having to manually dock the giant transforming bike-phone onto Satellite Zea is just so ridiculously impractical, and in a series that have shown that Hiden's technology has teleportation and instant-transportation, is there literally no way for the ground-bound Hiden staff to teleport things back up to Zea? 
• That "oh yeah, the motorcycle" scene perhaps encapsulates the Kamen Rider filming staff's reaction towards the motorcycle in general for the past, oh, dozen shows or so. 
• The Gimmick Watch:
• "Assault Bullet! OVER RISE! Kamen-Rider-Kamen-Rider-Kamen-Rider Shot Rise! Ready, go! Assault Wolf! No chance of surviving."
• Ikazuchi's finisher is "Extinction Utopia!" We actually hear the 'extinction' (zetsumetsu) part of it back when Assassin-chan uses his own finishers prior to the Dodo Key's completion.
• The Authorize Buster's attack is "Progrise Dust!" when a key is actually inserted, it goes "Progrise key confirmed; ready for buster -- Buster Dust!"
• Raiden's actor, Yamaguchi Daichi, previously played Kimura, the alternate-timeline Kamen Rider Verde earlier this year in the Zi-O spin-off Rider Time: Kamen Rider Ryuki.