Kamen Rider Kiva E44 Review: Changing Fate With Your Own Hands.

Kamen Rider Kiva, Episode 44: Punk - Back to Father

As we blaze through the last episodes of Kamen Rider Kiva... Mio dies last episode and it's not the best exit for her. And finally, the 1986 and 2008 storyline ends up intersecting as we finally make use of a plot device that is actually foreshadowed -- the god dang time-travel door that Jiro has in his basement.

Anyway, the episode starts off pretty well, picking up where we left off in the 1986 storyline. Otoya is hospitalized, and tries to play up the 'power of love' stuff, but Yuri's not having any of it. She's still angry at Otoya for a lot of things. Otoya packs up and goes off, intent on rescuing Jiro and his two stooges from King. The doctor tells Otoya that he can't leave the hospital... and it's... it's Wataru in a doctor's outfit! And he wants to keep Otoya for a whole year, but Otoya just leaves the hospital. Wataru then shows up as a fortune teller trying to tell Otoya that he's in grave danger... but if there's anything consistent in the past 43 episodes of Kamen Rider Kiva is that Kurenai Otoya takes no shits from anyone, least of all some random fortune teller in the street telling him not to chase after a woman.

Wataru decides that he will change fate, and he hunts down Yuri instead. Yuri's basically at her acceptance phase, noting that her relationship with Otoya didn't last long, but she did enjoy it -- and I would complain about abrupt character changes, but with Yuri it's at least not as abrupt as some of the other characters in the show. Wataru meets up with Yuri and basically encourages her to be with Kurenai Otoya and to use her charm and confidence to fight for her man... but all Wataru manages to do is to get Yuri to be confident enough to solidly break up with Otoya, delivering a well-deserved foot stomp in the process.

Maya, meanwhile, is powerless and an exile, and just like her 2008-era self, has a bunch of Fangires gunning for her, all of whom has unfinished vendetta with the former Queen. This week's enemy is the Polar Bear Fangire, who apparently found Maya 'overbearing' as Queen. Okay? In a neat moment, it's Yuri that ends up rescuing Maya, driving the Polar Bear away with her chain grapple gun, and actually sort of encourages Maya to discss things over with Otoya and figure out where they go from here. Basically everyone in the 1986 era is just straight-up convinced that Otoya-x-Maya is the OTP, while Wataru keeps trying to butt into things, and eventually reveals that he is Otoya and Maya's son from the future and he tells his parents that he should not be born because he hurt and killed Mio. That random stupid button from the time-traveling Nago is even a proof that makes Maya believe in Wataru. And Otoya... just straight-up punches Wataru in the face.

It's the self-loathing part of Wataru taken up to eleven. He's just gotten confidence in himself and his status as a half-Fangire, that his powers are his and his alone and he'll live on his own terms... and now he used these same powers to nearly kill Taiga and straight-up murder Mio by accident, and now he's trying to basically commit suicide and erase himself from existence by changing the timeline.

Yuri talks to Wataru a bit and sort of tells him about the man that Otoya is, and Wataru ends up going off to meet Otoya a bit. We get a brief bit of comedy as Wataru proves that he is Otoya's son by showing off the key to their house, walking on tip-toes, and eventually bonding over the Bloody Rose. Because this is Kamen Rider Kiva, we get a bath scene between the two Kurenais as well. But Otoya refuses to let anyone curb his freedom (or cock-block him), not even his own son.

And then it's time for the weekly action scene, and the Polar Bear Fangire attacks Maya. Wataru charges in to fight, and apparently the time door can randomly open to allow Kivat and Tatsulot to swoop in, and Wataru transforms into Emperor Kiva, shocking Maya, and also King (who's holding baby Taiga), who shows up to see this. Otoya also transforms into Ixa, and we get a neat sequence of Otoya and Wataru teaming up with a double punch, a double kick, and then a rise up/wake up finisher. We get a very brief but neat fight as Wataru and Otoya fight each other a bit as Wataru tries to stop Otoya from meeting Maya, but King shows up, easily realizes that Wataru's the Kiva of the future, and tells him that there's an easy way to change the future -- kill Otoya, and then he turns into Dark Kiva and blasts the shit out of Otoya.

Anyway... the time traveling stuff is... it's interesting, I'll give you that. It's still messy as hell, but at least it's the sort of crazy thing that is up Kamen Rider's alley, allowing the two cast members from the two time periods to interact with each other. I'm kind of curious to see how this will pan out over the next four or five episodes; presumably Wataru and the 1986 cast will deal with King in 1986, and then Wataru will return to 2008 to deal with Taiga and Bishop? I'm still not particuarly happy about how they handled Mio's death, or the pretty haphazard pacing of events leading up to it, but ultimately episode 44 is a pretty solid episode taken on its own.

Random Notes:

• The 2008 scenes exist in the episode, but they are very short. It's mostly Taiga being sad in his CEO boardroom and Bishop basically convincing him to murder Kiva, as well as a genuinely heartwarming scene of Megumi, Nago and the cafe master bonding and mourning over Shima and talk about some of his catchphrases like body fat percentage and whatnot. There's also a very short Bishop-vs-Ixa fight that gets interrupted with a retreat. 
• We did get a flashback to Jiro activating the time door, but it's less offering Wataru a chance to change the past, but to just grab a depressed Wataru and chuck him into the door and yell at him to heal his heart. 
• I really could rant a lot more about Mio in my review of the last episode, but I just didn't feel like it, y'know? I'm just kind of exhausted recently. 
• What is Wataru's plan? As fun as it is to see Seto Koji play dress up, as the subsequent scenes show, Wataru would be found out as a fake pretty quickly by the rest of the hospital staff. 
• Why does Otoya even think that Jiro and company are trapped and not, y'know, just straight up dead? Like, we, the audience know, of course, but there really isn't anything in the dialogue that indicates that Otoya would even be aware that this is the case. 
• Did we ever see the hilariously humongous key to the Kurenai household before? Wataru's shit-eating grin when he pulls it out next to Otoya is funny.
• So is Maya far, far more receptive to Wataru in 2008 because she's actually met the adult version of Wataru and knows that Wataru grows up to be a good person or something? The fact that Maya has met a time-traveler from the future really raises a lot of questions. 
• This episode and the following couple of episodes are effectively the biggest argument for why the "King of the Castle of the Demon World" movie is non-canon. In addition to that movie not really fitting in a proper slot in the timeline where Nago knows Wataru's identity but doesn't have Rising Ixa yet; in that movie [mild spoilers] Otoya and Yuri travel forwards in time, and the clearly don't know anything about Wataru in this episode. 
• Know Your Fangires: This week is the Polar Bear Fangire, one of the more obvious repaints in Kamen Rider's history -- it's a repaint of the Grizzly Fangire, which was part of that great human/Fangire lovers two-parter. 
• Jiro really could've sent Wataru a bit further back in time, huh? Maybe around the time Maya and Otoya first met? Hell, change the future so Jiro, Riki and Ramon aren't trapped as whistles bound into a bad-CGI castle!