The Flash S06E02 Review: Barry Fucks With Time

The Flash, Season 6, Episode 2: A Flash of the Lightning

I actually watched this episode like, when it aired a month or so ago, but just didn't have the energy to finish editing the draft of the review. 

This episode was... actually pretty neat, and depending on how it's handled, the build-up to Crisis on Infinite Earths is definitely something that I'm a huge fan of. It's a huge storyline they've been teasing us with for literal years, and while part of it does feel like we've walked down this path before (stop Iris from being killed by Savitar), there's a reverence and a sense of us really building up to something, unlike, say, the terrible Flashpoint adaptation, y'know? We get a lot of great acting from Grant Gustin and Candice Patton, though, in this episode, as they come to terms with the grips of morality, and just how they'll keep fighting tooth and nail to save everyone... and the fact that they just recently lost their child doesn't help their mood either. It's all pretty dramatic, which I am pretty much a big fan of. And I do really like that throughout the episode, Barry sort of flips back and forth between two attitudes -- one where he thinks that this might be basically the reason he was given his powers, and that it's always going to be his life on the line before he allows billions to die. 

Of course, that doesn't mean Barry's going to take it lying down, and this episode has Barry zip over to Earth-3 to get the Flash of that universe, Jay Garrick, to give him a second opinion... particularly after an attempt to zip to the future to take a peek causes him to be repelled with (gasp!) a wall of Anti-Matter. So he goes to get Jay's help. Joan Garrick's also there, too, and, of course, she looks like Barry's mom! It's actually sort of undersold thanks to the huge revelations about the crisis and the existential angst that Barry is going through, but I do really love the interactions between Barry and Joan. 

Also, somewhere in the episode we get Joe West's amazing 'resilience' speech. Joe West is an awesome dad, and this speech was pretty awesome even by Joe West standards. 

While all of this going on, the villain-of-the-week is a pretty interesting one. It's not particularly novel, but the idea of a metahuman troubled teen (tm) who is wrongfully convicted, and all evidence points to her being a murderer, and Cecile is very convinced that she is innocent thanks to her own powers, is well-delivered. Her dynamic with the more cynical Joe is amazingly done, and her eventually wanting to open what's basically Daredevil's law firm but for metahumans, is actually a nice, organic direction to take Cecile into. The actual investigation to Allegra Garcia is pretty simple, and the revelation that she actually has an evil (also metahuman) twin called Ultraviolet is sort of a way to make this episode end with an action scene, but it's serviceable. It's certainly a nice break from the endless stream of generic evil metahumans in the previous season, although there's apparently an organization going around seemingly recruiting metahumans like Ultraviolet to their cause. Okay!

And in the background of this we get... Killer Frost trying to understand this silly civilian 'life', alternating from being a Grade-A Bitch to Kamille (she apologizes, though) and being the most adorable person ever as she tries to do this whole 'express myself' thing and turning in a hilariously adorably inept human drawing. It's adorable. I love stories of robotic/anti-social characters slowly trying to figure out society. 

Oh, and Bloodwork's still being built up in the background. He's still being a dick, and his attempts to get funds or whatever, but this ends up with him killing a gangster called Romero when his blood powers spontaneously activate, and his blood is able to... uh... make zombies or something? It's decent buildup. No real complaints here, I guess. 

Ultimately, a very solid episode. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Oodles and oodles of Easter Eggs to Crisis on Infinite Earths, of course, since this half-year's season is going to apparently be loosely inspired by that. Highlights among them is the vision of Barry's death being exactly how he died in Crisis on Infinite Earths, running and dissolving into a skeleton that fades away; and the terrifying wall of Anti-matter going from alternate Earth to alternate Earth, dissolving and disintegrating all they touch.
• The title of this episode is the same with the issue in the Crisis on Infinite Earths issue where Barry famously died. 
• Another huge Easter Egg is the Multiverse Map. The ones on the borders are a bit hard to make out because of the filters, but among the obvious ones are most of the alternate Earths we've been through -- including our Earth, Earth-2, Supergirl's world, Earth-X, the Freedom Fighters' origin, the destroyed Flash-1986 universe, Sherloque Wells' Earth, Breacher's Academy, and a couple of other Wells-related Earth.
• Other than the Antimatter stuff, the Easter Egg that jumps out to me is Thaddeus Brown, the first person to bear the mantle 'Mr. Miracle' and trained the far more well-known Mr. Miracle seen in DC material. 
• Joan Garrick is, of course, the long-running spouse to Jay Garrick, and a very cool old woman in the Flash comics. 
• Allegra Garcia is a minor metahuman with electromagnetic powers that appeared in the pages of the 2008-2011 Titans run, the daughter of the supervillain Wavelength. Her story in this episode is pretty much original, though. 

Kamen Rider Zero-One E10 Review: I Really Want Kamen Rider Dodo

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 10: I am an Actor, Owada Shinya

It's been a while since we've had an episode review of Zero-One, not helped by the real-life break due to sporting events between episodes. This one was pretty neat, though -- judging by the next episode preview, it's the first part of a two-parter, but this one doesn't really end on a tense cliffhanger. The job that the Humagears participate in this time is acting, which... arguably, is one of those jobs that is way harder for a robot to participate in. There's a reason why 'wooden' and 'robotic' are adjectives that reviewers use derisively to refer to bad acting. Anyway, the plotline of this episode is pretty simple. Hiden Intelligence, in an effort to essentially do a PR stunt, is collaborating with veteran actor Owada Shinya to produce a cop movie with a Humagear co-star. It's a pretty simple set-up, and it surprisingly gives vice president Fukuoze Jun something to do as he sort of tags along and helps with some of the gag scenes in the episode. Also, Fuwa is there, because Fuwa is slowly becoming softer and a bit more amicable towards Hiden... and, hilariously, Izu just immediately shows the recording of Yua recording Assassin-chan, revealing her as the public leak. 

Speaking of which, Yua is still working with the mysterious Zaia head, and Fuwa's dialogue basically confirms that, at least as far as he knows, AIMS is not working together with Zaia and it's just Yua doing her own thing. Although it's kind of hard to gauge if AIMS truly is in the know, considering how we only ever see Yua and Fuwa and no one else. 

Perhaps the most adorable scenes, though, is the interactions between Jin and Assassin-chan, who act like two brothers teasing each other as they fanboy over some of Owada Shinya's movies, with Assassin-chan giving us the perfect eye-roll expression when Jin teases him for losing all the time, and insists that it's not loss, it's growth, and then they both try and copy Owada Shinya's scary samurai face. It's adorable. 

As we get into hijinks in the movie shoot, AIMS fights against Jin and the Dodo Magia, who plan to infect Enji. While Vulcan and Valkyrie fights against Jin, we get a fun bit of Izu doing the most hilarious game of poker-face charades to inform Aruto about Metsu-boys attacking. I'm not sure why Aruto didn't call for an evacuation then and there, though. It's a fucking robo-terrorist attack. But it allows Izu to do silly charades, so all is forgiven. There's also a fun bit where the actors are filming a shooting scene, and some explosions from the Kamen Rider fight outside causes part of the set to collapse -- and everyone thinks that it's the special effects team that overdid things. Owada Shinya in particular has a hilariously confused look as he briefly glances at the revolver he has on his hand. AIMS drives Jin off when he realizes that Assassin-chan is missing. Yua and Fuwa have a bit of a confrontation, with Yua basically admitting that her main goal is to bring Hiden Intelligence crumbling down. 

Meanwhile, Assassin-chan, still not quite sure about the difference between actors and movie roles, is enamoured with Owada Shinya's talk about being a 'legendary assassin'. Owada, meanwhile, isn't too pleased with the humagear actor, noting that the robot just 'isn't selling the scenes', and isn't particularly happy about having to work with someone who doesn't understand emotions properly and whatnot. Assassin-chan, letting his hair down and dressed up with a massive bandana and a funky jacket, ends up encountering Owada in the parking lot, asking to be taught 'how to be stronger'. Owada is apparently impressed with Assassin-chan remembering his moves from the samurai movie, and they sort of go through the script of the movie together, leading to Assassin-chan doing a cool, improvised ad-lib. Ironically, Owada's meeting with an aspiring young actor who's secretly a robot causes him to get even more disillusioned with his robot co-star, particularly when Enji flubs an attempted ad-lib. This causes Owada to leave the set, talking about how he doesn't want to star in a movie without any humanity. 

Again, Assassin-chan continues to actually grow as a person, seemingly being angered at Enji's failure as an actor that he decides to assassinate him instead of converting him to Metsubojinrai.net's cause. We get a genuinely cool scene as Assassin-chan goes through a pretty cool transformation sequence pose... and frankly, if we don't get a Kamen Rider Dodo by the end of this series, I'll be thoroughly disappointed. It's amazing how this silly robot dude has quickly became one of my favourite supporting characters in Rider. 

Yua transforms into Valkyrie and faces off against Mr. Dodo, and Jin swoops in to help his little buddy. It's kind of a shame that it's like the third story arc in a row that poor Valkyrie got the short end of the stick, because she quickly got beaten up by Jin and Dodo (the latter apparently gets progressively stronger every time he's recreated) before Aruto goes Zero-One. Zero-One basically fights Jin throughout the episode, with a neat sequence where they trade weapons, while the Dodo Magia unleashes a massive 'extinction' attack that defeats poor Yua. Despite their earlier argument, Fuwa shows up to save Yua, noting that he's doing this because he wants to, and they basically sort of bond over fighting for what they believe in. Awww, Fuwa is showing character growth! It's like last week that he's a one-note angry roboracist. Yua ends up believing in Fuwa and tosses the Gatling Hedgehog key she gets from the Zaia dude to Fuwa, allowing him to finish off Dodo for the third time. Jin, half-frozen from his fight with Aruto, flies off with the Dodo Key.

While the Aruto side of things ends with the quasi-cliffhanger of Owada Shinya exiting the movie production (which I honestly don't care about). I do really like the dynamic between Fuwa and Yua, where Fuwa basically all but says that he'll do whatever it takes to be a loyal ally to Yua, despite her stated mission statement of maybe having to betray AIMS in the future... but Fuwa's reply is a pretty cool "I'll defeat you if it comes to that". The episode ends with the shot of the mysterious CEO of Zaia (who likes the number 1000) in full shot for the first time as Yua reports to him about... the movie shooting? Okay?

Overall, a pretty solid episode. Admittedly I'm mostly distracted by just how adorable Assassin-chan and Owada are, and I really, really do want Assassin-chan to properly become a Kamen Rider some time in the future. I do kinda feel like I don't care about the Hiden part of the storyline, honestly, because both the AIMS and Metsubojinrai storylines for this episode felt a lot more interesting. It's okay, though -- we've had a fair amount of Aruto focus recently, and having a lot of focus on Assassin-chan, Yua and Fuwa (and mysterious Zaia man next week) is not something I'll complain about. 

Random Notes:

• There is a lot of times where the dialogue from the cop movie plays over astonishingly appropriate scenes, which is kinda heavy-handed but also a neat little editing choice. 
• I really feel like there's a missing flashy effect any time someone does the 'Charge Up' function of their weapon. Fuwa doing that elaborate 'fold my shotgun to reload it' really felt like it probably should've been accompanied by a visual effect. 
• It took a while for me to realize, but the actor Humagear Enji is played by Sakimoto Hiromi, better known as Yuya from Kamen Rider Gaim -- and since Gaim was the first-ever Kamen Rider material I watched, that means that every single minor character in that show is sort of distinct in my head. 
• The Gimmick Watch:
• "ZETSUMETSU!" That massive sword-slash-beam thing from the Dodo Assassin really looks like a Rider finisher. 
• "REVOLVER! Progrise Key confirmed. Gatling Kaban Shot!" "Charge rise: full charge! Gatling Kaban Buster!" Yep, I would say that Hedgehog is one of the weirdest powers you could give to a Kamen Rider, but Sento Kiryu's already done that with a fire-engine/hedgehog combination. 
• Among the other Progrise keys we see in Zaia are the Crushing Buffalo (ability: blow), Storming Penguin (ability: hurricane), Splashing Whale (ability: wave), Scouting Panda (ability: search), Trapping Spider (ability: territory), Sparking Giraffe (ability: electric) and a purple lion one that I can't make out. 
• Know your Magia: We don't actually see Jin infect anyone yet, but Horobi hands Jin the Arsino Progrise Key, based on the Arsinoitherium, an extinct elephant relative that looks like a two-horned rhinoceros. 
• Vulcan's second transformation in this episode has a very cool sequence where the bullet he shoots basically tries to drill its way through the back of Assassin-chan's neck, and then Fuwa fucking throat-punches Assassin-chan to do the 'bullet punch' thing he does to transform.
• I really love the little jump Jin does after he transforms. I also really love the "EE E E E E EE" panicked hand-waving and screeching when Aruto unleashes a fierce breath as cold as arctic winds straight into his face. 
• So is there a reason that Yua doesn't use Lightning Hornet in her second fight? 

Let's Play Pokemon Uranium: Part 24: Please Explain Your Plot

The final entry in my Let's Play of the fan-game Pokemon Uranium! This project honestly ended up taking a bit longer than I thought it would, in no small part due to the... interesting way that the story is spaced out in the game. And it's not that Uranium's story is bad or anything. The main concepts are solid, if pretty much similar to most anime and manga out there, and especially for a fanmade game, it's actually pretty neat to see them strike a neat balance between serious drama and light-heartedness. But on the other hand, it really does come through at some points that chunks of the game are created after some others, because particularly in the Eastern Tandor stuff onwards, so much of the story are just given to us in huge lumps of text that could really be streamlined a lot.

Still, again, for a fanmade effort, it certainly is a pretty awesome effort. Uranium isn't a perfect game. It's buggy, some of the gameplay mechanics are a bit questionable, some of the comedy choices don't exactly end up coming off pretty well and the storytelling is a bit wobbly, but all in all I did have a fair amoutn of fun playing through it.

Anyway, enjoy the last huge story dump for the game! I'll probably post one or two post-game segments after this, maybe if/when I play through Sword or Shield (and apparently the internet's like, set on fire because of those games). But this has certainly been a fun trip!

Supergirl S05E02 Review: Cain and Abel

Supergirl, Season 5, Episode 2: Stranger Beside Me

This episode was... pretty neat. A lot of the storylines introduced in the season premiere are still being built up in the background while a majority of the episode focused on some martian drama, and... I'm of two opinions about it? On one hand, Kara having to juggle her journalistic civilian life with superheroing is something that hits quite home as a classic Super-family story. On the other hand. I just really don't feel invested with the screentime we spent in any of the CatCo scenes we go through in this episode. Like, okay, so Kara disappearing and being asked to balance her workload, while Andrea Rojas acts like a class-A bitch boss and William Dey is apparently going around stalking Kara (and will inevitably discover her secret identity), who is built up as this massive shady douchebag, but in a (-gasp!-) huge plot twist turns out that he's a nice dude because he serves in a soup kitchen or whatever... it's all sufficient, manages to tell a story and thankfully doesn't take up too much of the episode runtime, but it's also so bland and I really don't care about any of the CatCo scenes other than the fact that Andrea Rojas is trying to be like a rival mogul for Lena Luthor. 

Lena, meanwhile, gets a couple of neat scenes in this episode, but it's mostly done in her isolated basement as she interacts with Eve Tessmacher, who she has captured and apparently is trying to figure out how to make her tick. Perhaps in a move that sort of cements Lena Luthor as being more villainous than heroic (actions speak louder than ambiguous speeches, after all), Lena ends up shoving the A.I. Hope into Eve through some kooky floating swarm of metallic orbs, making her essentially some kind of a Brainiac-style cyborg creature. It's interesting for sure, and while the introduction of Hope the AI is sort of out of nowhere, I am actually somewhat interested in seeing where this goes, particularly since we get reminded that Eve's working for the mysterious organization Leviathan. Lena rants a lot about how she wants to reprogram humanity and aliens to basically all "do no harm", and it's a pretty neat well-intentioned but ultimately extremely villainous plot. 

But the big storyline in this episode, of course, is the huge Martian lore dump! As J'onn and the rest of the Super-Friends try to figure out whatever the hell's going on with Midnight in the season premiere, they quickly figure out that J'onn's brother Ma'alefa'ak (or, as he's better-known in the comics, Malefic) exists, and a good chunk of the episode is sort of devoted into a little mind-delve as the Super-Friends make use of some technobabble (Q-waves and the Obsidian tech, the latter being a pretty terrible idea) to get J'onn to walk around a visual representation of his mind, allowing him to discover that his brother unleashed H'ronmeer's Curse, a plague that wiped out so many of the green martians that caused him to be imprisoned in the Phantom Zone. There are a lot of holes in this story, like why J'onn doesn't even remember his brother at all. He doesn't get that many answers at the end of the episode because he got interrupted a couple of times by fight scenes, but apparently we're going to delve deeper into J'onn's backstory. Okay. The exposition really could've been better, and I kinda wished that it was Alex or Kara or someone who have actually interacted with J'onn more than a couple of generic dialogue exchanges that had gone with him into the mind-zone, though. 

The bizarre way that Martian telepathic mind works means that Malefic ends up learning and influencing J'onn's mind journey a couple of times throughout the episode, eventually seemingly getting the idea to reset either his or J'onn's mind at the end of the episode. We do get a couple of action scenes starring Malefic and his random White Martian stooge (which didn't last through the episode), but ultimately the action scenes in this episode aren't super-spectacular. It's a pretty neat (and certainly cost-saving!) way to have Malefic sort of cycle through Alex and Kelly as he shapeshifts through forms, which both allows the actresses to act outside their normal range, and also to play up the sheer creepiness of a shapeshifting enemy. Also, we get the confirmation hat James Olsen still runs around in his Guardian outfit

Speaking of James, hilariously, I think the show's poking fun at how they really have no idea what to do with the character for four seasons, noting that James got offered random jobs like becoming a senator or whatever. 

There's also a couple of romantic plotlines, with the Alex/Kelly one being... extremely identikit to the Alex/Maggie storyline in previous episodes. I'm really not trying to complain, but man, Kelly does really feel like she's just there as an accessory, to be the perfect girlfriend, with very little distinguishing traits other than "she's nice". There's the whole "I know which one of these is the impostor" bit at the climax that really felt underwhelming. Just because she's not straight doesn't mean that she can't fall into the same bucket of "bland, generic love interest" tropes. Brainiac's love life with Nia is... a lot more sparsely spread throughout the episode and I think it's dragged on a bit too long, but it's at least kind of a gag-a-minute. Admittedly, love storylines in superhero shows tended to not be my thing, and I might be a grouch about these -- it's just kind of not the most interesting thing when you shove this into an episode that's already pretty slow and consisting mostly of set-up. 

Overall, a somewhat clumsy episode that has a bunch of B-plots I'm not the biggest fan of, but sort of makes up for it by having a decent J'onn storyline, and promising for something huge with Malefic and Lena, at the very least. Otherwise, though, it's pretty run-of-the-mill. Part of it might have to do with my own apathy for some of the B-plot storylines, though. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We've talked about Ma'alefa'ak/Malefic a couple of times in other shows, but we get the revelation that, just like his comic-book counterpart, Malefic is the one responsible for unleashing H'ronmeer's Curse, the telepathic plague that wiped out all of the green martians and left J'onn and Ma'alefa'ak as some of the only survivors. 
• Brainy mentions "Q-Waves", which is a frequency that apparently Obsidian tech has discovered a bit ahead of schedule (I think?), but the only reference I can find for Q-waves is the Q-Energy, a Kryptonite-like energy that appears for a single issue of Silver-Age-era Superman. 

Black Lightning S03E01 Review: Serve Your Country

Black Lightning, Season 3, Episode 1: The Book of Occupation, Chapter One: Birth of the Blackbird

I've been pretty harsh on the second season of Black Lightning, and for pretty good reason, I feel. It's not as bad as the utter clusterfuck that was last season's Flash, but despite a strong start, Black Lightning's second season was marred with pretty terrible management of its side-plots, and generally sort of being nowhere as good as the first season in giving the stories it wants to tell adequate screentime. And as such, I end up being pretty late to the party for season 3.

So we start off season three with... something interesting? The status quo has been shaken as Agent Odell and the ASA is heading this huge cold war against the nation of Markovia as a metahuman arms war sets up, and for the most part, the Pierce family is separated into two groups throughout this episode. Jefferson and Lynn are in some sort of secret conspiracy government base that's all white and ominous, while Anissa (as the titular 'Blackbird'), Jennifer and Gambi remain in Freeland.

And the episode starts off pretty confidently, with a well-shot montage of scenes of random metahumans -- implied to be the Pod Children -- being interrogated by a bodyless voice, before we finally settle onto Black Lightning. And I feel that this is perhaps not the most exciting part of the show. Lots of revelations, sure, but it just feels pretty bland. We get Jefferson, Lynn and Odell sort of discussing their situation, and clearly Odell and the government are being absolute controlling dicks, although Odell is at last nice enough towards the couple because they're useful.

On the other hand, though, both Black Lightning (and his newfound see-through-walls-without-goggles power) and the audience are alerted to Tobias Whale's presence in the facility, and he's not in the best shape since he no longer has his weird magic drugs to keep his youth. The A.S.A. is using Issa, the truth-aura metahumans from season 2, to interrogate Tobias Whale, and we sort of discover that he literally has no idea where the Briefcase McGuffin is, and during the conversation, he ends up revealing that he knows a bit too much -- that Odell was working under direct orders of the President to set up Proctor as a scapegoat and take control of Freeland's metahumans as weapons. This causes Odell to eventually kill off Issa, which is a massive dick move. You'd think trapping him in a government facility would be enough, y'know? Odell was at least kind enough to give Issa a seemingly non-brutal death with a poisoned meal, and he twists his death into some anti-Markovian propaganda when he talks to Lynn later on.

The Freeland stuff is a bit more interesting. We've got a bunch of random plot threads going on that I don't particularly care about -- Anissa's random new AI; random videos of Grace Choi turning into a leopard or some shit (???); Anissa hooking up with reporter Jamillah Olson; Jennifer going around with a hologram disguise and also having to use her powers in secret to let the powers out -- but ultimately, that's all just sort of window-dressing for subsequent plotlines.

The idea that Freeland is essentially being oppressed and plumbed for metahumans, ostensibly 'for your own protection', is pretty interesting setup, and as the ASA brings in Commander Carson Williams to put the police in place and play along with their story, we get to see briefly the curfews and new martial law being enacted. Throw in the fact that Black Lightning and Thunder are essentially MIA, and the morale of the town is at an all-time low.

The action sequence in this epsiode is when the metahuman shelter (more of a prison, effectively, after the ASA took over, where children are forcibly separated from their parents) is attacked by Cyclotronic, a metahuman who once foud himself at the mercies as essentially a living weapon used by the American government, and poor Cyclotronic ends up getting essentially murdered by Commander Williams, himself a metahuman able to mimic other people's powers. Cyclotronic may be a Markovian terrorist, but I do like that to the people in that facility, he probably looked more like a liberator.

We also give Anissa significant focus as she runs around in her alter-alter-ego, the Blackbird (who's working with good ol' Reverend Holt!), who ends up hijacking a bus full of refugees, and with the help of uncle Gambi, ends up breaking through... uh... a force field that the A.S.A. have set up. Okay? I felt like we jumped a bit headlong into crazier sci-fi stuff a bit too much, but I can't say that I'm complaining too much. The episode ends with Anissa having to fight off a bunch of A.S.A. goons and getting knocked out, but spirited away by the people she rescued.

Overall, I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the tonal shift in Black Lightning, particularly compared to the first season -- we're essentially in some sort of dystopia-land where the government who claims to be out for the welfare of the country is all too willing to weaponize the metahumans of Freeland and manipulate them like chess pieces, forcibly drafting them into a war they didn't want, while the other side, the Markovians, is so ambiguous as a threat that they might either be worse (they do have Jace, after all) or be merely an excuse for assholes like Odell to make more human weapons. The setup is at least interesting, and apparently topical to some current events in the U.S. of A? I am so uninformed about American politics that I'll not even try to strike up a comparison. We'll see if the show manages to deliver on its promise, though -- if nothing else, it's a pretty neat mood-setter of a season premiere.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Cyclotronic Man, a.k.a. Ned Creegan, is a minor villain from the comics who originally fought Batman and Robin as the electricity-manipulating villain Bag O' Bones, before resurfacing with a new costume and with additional powers to fight against Superman and Black Lightning in Metropolis. He would later go on to menace Batman, Black Lightning and the Outsiders with upgraded powers as the One-Man Meltdown, and the Outsiders discover that Creegan has been experimented with by the prison staff without his consent. 
• As far as I can tell, Carson Williams, Jamillah Olson, as well as the other metahumans seen in the prologue scene are all original characters to the show. 
• Grace definitely didn't have random shapeshifting powers in the comics, just super-strength and super-healing. 

Let's Play Pokemon Uranium: Part 23: Unending Climax

As we approach the end and grand finale of our Let's Play of Pokemon Uranium, the now-banned fan-game, I ended up having to split up the climax into two parts, one focusing on me taking on the Elite Four... and now I have to split it up again due to the sheer length of the dialogue cutscenes. This one deals with most of the action stuff, and we'll have a second one dealing with the long, long epilogue.

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.