Kamen Rider Kiva E29-30 Review: Rook's Conversion to Christianity

Kamen Rider Kiva, Episode 29: When the Saints Go Marching In - I Am King; Episode 30: Curtain Rising - Kiva's Identity

Sort of an... okay episode? I guess we're actually moving the plot forwards. Mio's sort of asserted herself before the bizarre time-travel two parter, and is very much willing to resume her relationship with the human Wataru, whatever it means with her position as the Fangire Queen... but this rekindled relationship ends up sparking this sitcom catty jealous girl friend storyline with Shizuka. And Shizuka's a character that the show itself forgets sometimes, so it's sort of nice to have her do something? It's just basically her actress over-acting and hamming it up, trying to sabotage a date between Mio and Wataru before cutting back and forth to her posing with like tacky devil horns and ominous lighting. It's sort of all right, I guess.

Meanwhile, as Bishop and Mio have a conversation hinting about the imminent arrival of "the King", we get our Fangire of the week, whose human form is a dude with a funky poncho and a cowboy hat, who goes around murdering self-styled magicians and msytics, thinking that they are real magicians with real magic and stuff. This cowboy dude sort of hangs out in the background as the episode cuts back and forth between this, before eventually climaxing in the third-act battle where he fights Emperor Kiva and manages to survive, telling Kiva that he will be the new King of the Checkmate Four. Is this going to be the motivation of the next couple Fangires, then? King-wannabes?

And we get yet another Megumi storyline, and honestly I think I will dread Megumi-centric storylines if the writers have showed any indication that they want Megumi to be an actual heroine instead of 'knowing her place'. The set-up is kind of all right, when Megumi's younger brother, Aso Mitsuhide, shows up to the Wonderful Blue Sky Group making a massive donation in order to get Megumi to return to their dry goods store and whatever. Now if this brother dude had actually wanted to get Megumi out out of fear that she's hurting herself (and she is!) it'd be a lot more sympathetic and understandable. But Mitsuhide's constant rants about how "mother would have wanted you to live like a normal woman and marry and settle down" is so... shit, I'm not even like a strong feminist or whatever, but it's such a condescending worldview that Mitsuhide repeats every single time that he interacts with Megumi, talking about how she "doesn't understand what's good for you". It's sort of supposed to parallel the Mio/Bishop situation, except Bishop doesn't at least condecend and pretend it's for Mio's good the way that Mitsuhide does.

At the very least, Shima is being his usual vague self, implying that he took the money because, hey, free money, and wihle he sort of implicitly agreed with Mitsuhide, he also tells Megumi to do whatever and shrugs it off. Which is nice! (Nago, of course, is a massive dick as usual and wants to get rid of Megumi ASAP). But when Megumi brings down how she wants to take down her mother Yuri's rival Rook... Shima suddenly gets super resistant at that idea.

Speaking of Rook, he's got a bit of a writer's block (killer's block) because no new games excite him anymore. Go get a Nintendo system, Rook. I think the Game Boy Advance came out at around the year you're wandering at? But for whatever reason, Rook ends up overhearing a mother telling her daughter about St. Sebastian, who went to heaven after doing good deeds and Rook ends up being completely taken in by this story, ng to go to heaven and deciding to do good deeds from now on. Which... ends up with the final scene of the episode, where in his little streak of doing good deeds, Rook ends up transforming into his Fangire self in front of Megumi to stop a runaway truck from hitting a bunch of kids. Dun dun dunnn! Megumi encounters Rook, but it's an amnesiac Rook who's trying to be good! That's actually an interesting cliffhanger.

In 1986, Yuri and Otoya are cleaning their house and Yuri starts getting doubts about whether it's all right to be happy when they are supposed to be warriors, and just like how Megumi insists that her mother is obsessed with being a Vampire Hunter, Yuri has finally sort of shaken off that honeymoon phase with Otoya and is thinking about taking down Rook again. Rook, meanwhile, has started another time trial, hunting down people with sunglasses, and this leads him to fight Jiro in his first return after his kidnap of Yuri. And Rook beats the fuck out of Jiro before stealing Jiro's sunglasses with the most perfect shit-eating smug smile on his face.

Jiro ends up recruiting Ramon, Riki and even Otoya to go off and murder Rook, but at while there's still a sense of "man knows what's best for a woman's life" sentiment, at least Otoya's coming from a place where he's trying to save Yuri from being obsessed with a vendetta, plus 1987-era Rook is still portrayed as this unstoppable behemoth that no one can even come close to hurting, let alone killing. It still sucks that they're completely excluding Yuri from the decision making process, but it's a bit more understandable, I guess? Good intentions and whatnot? We get a pretty cool sequence of Rook fighting Otoya and Jiro first in their human forms, before a Proto-Ixa versus Rook's Fangire form thing, and the 1987-era cliffhanger ends in a parallel with the 2008 one, with Yuri arriving just in time to see Rook turn into Fangire form.

Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic that the writing will finally be a bit better for the female characters. We're getting focus, and we're at least being shown that "men trying to control every aspect of a woman's life" to be at least a bad thing by this episode, but I'm not sure if the second part is going to actually properly follow up on this. it's a decent episode, all things considered, with a lot of neat moments and fun gags. I do have a feeling like we're ramping up at least this leg of the show, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the next four or six episodes will actually conclude with Rook as an arc villain being disposed of (or redeemed).

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One thing that I've always found interesting about Kiva is that unlike most other Heisei riders, Wataru's identity is a closely guarded secret -- even among the supporting cast. Other Kamen Rider shows play hard and fast with the secret identity, sometimes having it be public knowledge or at least a known secret among the main cast, but I think Kiva is one of the few shows where the close-knit group isn't even aware of Kiva's identity. They don't do a whole ton of secret identity storylines, of course, but it does give Kiva a unique flavour where even to characters like Megumi or Nago or Kengo, this "Kamen Rider Kiva" fellow is such a mysterious vampire karate man who shows up to fight monsters insteaed of "my superhero buddy" the way so many other Kamen Rider shows tend to have the vibe of. We're 30 episodes in and I'm surprised not a single member of the 2008 cast has even figured it out! And by the end of this episode, it seems that the dynamic's going to be shifted pretty heavily as Nago and Bishop witness Kiva de-henshining into Wataru -- easily two of the more antagonistic characters in the show.

But we have a whole episode to go through before we reach there. The '80's storyline is sort of just there, mostly because we've seen this exact plot so many times before. Yuri has to be protected from the evil monster because Jiro and Otoya wants to be self-sacrificial and stuff, but any real conversation of whether this very White-Knight-y mentality is appropriate or not is sort of rendered moot by the fact that Rook is able to take on Ixa, Garulu, Bassha and Dogga all at the same time without breaking a sweat, and we know for a fact that Rook survives to 2008. It is pretty cool to see Rook so effortlessly dominating a four-on-one fight, which actually neatly gives us a neat buildup to how theoretically dangerous Rook is to our 2008 characters.

We did at least get the random comedy bit where Otoya and Jiro cosplay a doctor and a lavender-haired patient in the hospital in their attempt to trick Yuri into chasing a fake Rook (Riki in a wig), which is pretty cute.

The 2008 storyline takes a fair bit more screentime. We get this whole continuation to the Shizuka-sabotages-a-date storyline, whcih... it's neat to see Shizuka's actress ham it up, but eventually she realizes what a shit she's doing and ends up buying Wataru and Mio two tickets to a show, admits what she's doing and leaves all happy-like while sort of patting herself in the back. Okay, that's... kinda cute, I guess.

Megumi, meanwhile, gets hurt in her attempt to fight Rook, who straight-up just ignores her as he flips back and forth between his personalities (right, Rook's got that split personality thing going), but the confrontation did put Megumi's arm in a sling, leading to her being confronted by her very pushy brother Mitsuhide, who keeps ranting about how an unmarried woman shouldn't be hurt and how mother in heaven will be disappointed and whatnot. Megumi has sort of been passive-aggressively ignoring Mitsuhide throughout the previous episode, but him bringing up 'mother in heaven' makes Megumi absolutely livid because she knows Yuri hated Rook more than anyone.

To make things worse for Megumi, Shima seems to basically agree with Mitsuhide this time around, even if it's to keep Megumi away from Rook... but they didn't have to be such dicks about it, y'know? Mitsuhide writes up Megumi's resignation and hands it to Shima right in front of Megumi and that's such a gigantic dick move. Megumi, understandably, leaves off in a huff because all of these jerks are deciding what her life should be without even consulting her.

While all of this is going on, we get an interesting meeting between Bishop and the Warthog Fangire and his silly cowboy hat. Bishop hints that the real 'King' has special powers because he's raised by humans (is it Wataru? That's sort of the obvious answer which I do't think the show will go with) and apparently the Warthog Fangire is a Checkmate Four washout, being excluded from their membership due to his ambitions.

The audience isn't the only one wondering about whether Wataru is a King or a half-Fangire or something else, Nago is doing his own investigation too and, uh, this involves him showing up and the writers making the best use of the bath set and the recurring scenes of Wataru half-submerged in milky bath water. When Shizuka tells Nago that Wataru's all moping because of some troubles (in reality a combination of Wataru's interpersonal conflicts with Mio and Kengo) Nago just straight up strips and gets into the bath with Wataru, acting all friendly while talking about how he "wants to see him with his own eyes." Okay, Nago.

Anyway, while the aforementioned Shizuka/Mio/Wataru plot plays out, Megumi is moping at her job, filming for some ripoff David Copperfield magician show called Mr. Redman. Of course the Fangire action happens there, where the Warthog Fangire shows up and kills Mr. Redman while Rook just sort of wanders and shows up there. Megumi charges in to fight the non-hostile Rook, but it eventually devolves to Rook and the Warthog fighting each other.

Rising ixa and Emperor Kiva eventually show up from where they respectively are, and we get an actually dang cool two-on-two fight scene before it devolves into two separate 1v1 fights. Emperor Kiva and Rook is pretty dang cool, and the action is neat. Kiva didn't quite get to unleash a finisher, though, because Rook just laughs and leaves at the sight of 'wake up fever', whereas Ixa, in the midst of chasing down the warthog, gets to witness Kiva de-henshining into Wataru... and we get one of Kiva's biggest cliffhangers!

Overall, the episode isn't bad at all. The whole Megumi storyline is still kind of problematic and painful to watch but it's not over yet so maybe we'll get a conclusion where Megumi manages to properly assert herself? We get a bunch of neat action scenes, some neat little villain-on-villain meetings and a coupe of throwaway-but-neat plotlines involving the show's supporting characters. It's a neat episode and it's definitely building up to something larger, and with us two feet into the second half of Kiva, it's about dang time the plot really picks up.

Random Notes:

• There is a subplot with Kengo being hospitalized, Wataru getting him a guitar and Kengo seemingly not being able to move his fingers properly. Uh-oh! 
• I absolutely love Otoya and Jiro arguing about which one of them is the smart one of the team in all seriousness, leading to the hilarious non-sequitur of Jiro yelling that "my brain has more wrinkles!" at one point. I absolutely love it when the normally-stoic Jiro engages in some ham-to-ham combat with the flamboyant Otoya. 
• I haven't noted it before, but I find the random blush effects that the Kiva team loves giving to Wataru and Mio to be actually kind of adorable and silly at the same time. 
• Know Your Fangires: Our king wannabe is... the warthog Fangire! This one was easy to guess. 
• I do find it interesting that the episode really sort of tries to hammer home that fortune teller victim that the warthog cowboy fangire kills is like this complete fraud wearing fake kung fu master eyebrows and beard and is clearly profiteering off of lies and whatnot. Like, the show hasn't had a problem with Fangires killing just random upstanding citizens, and suddenly now you have this rather long scene establishing that it's okay for this specific unimportant victim to die?
• When Jiro recruits them, Riki and Ramon are apparently manning a shaved ice stand, and the shaved-ice maker is like vaguely Frankenstein-shaped. I love the subtle background gags of random Frankenstein merchandise.
• The Kengo plot gets a bit of a development when Wataru decides to lie to Kengo and tell him that the doctors totally said his fingers will be fine, but is actually hiding the fact that Kengo has some severe damage on his fingers, and a very, very emotional Kengo tells Wataru to fuck off for hiding the information from him. I'm... I'm not sure what's going on with Kengo, really. He's just there, prominent enough to be a head above the likes of Shizuka and Shima, but I'm not sure if there's a point to his character beyond being 'the rocker buddy'. 
• Yuri straight-up split Riki's head open, and is suitably horrified by it. We, the audience, knows that Riki is secretly a Frankenstein monster and he's presumably a lot more durable than the average human, but still.
• Otoya summoning the Arms Monsters is pretty cool. Otoya having to blow some ridiculous horn to do it, though, is so unepectedly wacky. 
• Maya sort of gets a brief role in the 1986 scenes talking to Otoya during his Rook hunt, but otherwise it's not particularly notable. 
• Kivat gets to help tutor Wataru in how to ask Mio out on a date. How did Kivat even know how to woo human women?
• During the fight with the Warthog Fangire, Rook's villainous persona actually makes a more prominent appearance, talking about how Bishop warned him about the Warthog Fangire and how he's an unstable element that has to be removed. It's been a while since we've even acknowledged Rook's split personality, and I've honestly sort of forgotten about it. 
• It has to be hilarious to be Shizuka, who (like us) didn't get to hear the full extent of what Wataru told Nago, but Nago's response? "Take good care of Wataru, he has problems with love and friendship." That's so out of context after knowing that Nago eagerly rushed to be naked in the bath with Wataru.