[toku] Kamen Rider W 33
I confess, the more I watch W, the more boring I find Shoutarou. It's just hard watching a character not develop while everyone else pretty much trundles past him fairly happily, and when the majority of his airtime is just failing I'm very :/. Kamen Rider just needs to have one Tachibana-san, thank you.
- I was kind of brushing this off as a filler arc and anticipating the arc after this one because spoilers has it that Isaka is going to go down in 36, which means that we'll be having a Ryuu-centric arc coming up. However, I was fairly surprised that the show would suddenly spring Kirihiko's sister on us, especially considering that children have probably forgotten who the hell Kirihiko was, it being a good few months down the road.
I don't know what to think of the fact that she knew Shoutarou was W. Her knowing W isn't much of a surprise considering the number of times Shoutarou merrily transformed in front of civillians, but it's just...how much of Shoutarou's current clientele is there because they know that he specializes in Dopants, and the other question is, how is Shoutarou going to support himself if he's actually not getting the normal jobs anymore? Unless, honestly, the entire Narumi agency has been running on Dopant cases this past ten years, by which then Shoutarou is just fucked because there's no way you can support an agency on lost pet cases.
I also liked the fact that they revealed her right off the bat instead of going through the entire shebang of having a male voice on a dopant until they're revealed to be female. It was getting quite ridiculous.
- I know that the show keeps emphasizing on Shoutarou's lack of hard-boiledness, but it's really frustrating to watch him be half-boiled. The entire "I imitate a cat" sequence was pretty excruciating for me to watch, as well as the upteenth time Shoutarou fell for the girl of the...fortnight. I just wish that Shoutarou would actually do some growing for once, just so that I can watch the person I loved in the first two months of W. I'm not even excited at the possible prospect of the Joker Dopant anymore, because Shoutarou just got that bland for me.
Although I will admit that while he was under the control of the Yesterday Dopant, him hitting on Ryuu was pretty hilarious.
- Speaking of Ryuu, I really can't stop laughing when Shoutarou was calling him ~*ojousan*~ and all that. Lolololol his life and the expression on his face when he was talking to Phillip about, "dude, your partner fucking hit on me???" And then he still goes after Shoutarou anyway because he knows that it's important to Phillip that his partner doesn't go off to kill himself like the other three of the victims.
Although it's really nice to see someone actually competent on the show, what with Ryuu managing to cricumvent what would really be a really nasty death.
Ryuu's relationship with Akiko was really cute in this episode too; she was brewing coffee and Phillip was all, "Aki-chan, this is fantastic" and Ryuu is like, "eh, it's passable." And her face was like :/ and Ryuu was :[ and I laughed and laughed and laughed. They make such fantastic siblings, seriously.
- Phillip's research on the whiteboard is really also full of lolz. I think it's kind of endearing that Phillip has so much faith in Shoutarou even if Shoutarou clearly fails. Or maybe Phillip is just really curious to find out if there is luck in Shoutarou's love-life thanks to the incessant failing. It's also really funny how he ended ganging up with Ryuu against Shoutarou to stop them from killing Saeko by basically getting Ryuu to steamroll W.
- I really don't know what is the point of tossing all these potential plot points Wakana's way only for the show to just drop them like hot cakes. Granted, they may be saving them up for the grand finale (I'm expecting AT LEAST the sibling connection to bite them in the ass), but I mean, I would expect the insanity clause to make some unsettling appearance. But it seems that Wakana is perfectly fine now and it's like a re-run of the entire hypnotism shtick Isaka subjected her to. I'm just not concerned with whatever happens to her because she'll just magically snap out of it when the show finds something for her to do.
I like that Wakana still loves her sister enough to keep tugging her out of the way. Although I'm not sure if Sonozaki-papa is actually trying to pit her against Saeko, the show doesn't quite focus enough on the in-family politics enough for me to comment on it.
Man, Leave All Behind is pretty addictive.