Recap: It wasn’t a dream.

Welp, I guess I’m just going to have to live with this. Samurai Flamenco is now a bona fide Kamen Rider show in the form of an anime. This was my worst-case scenario come to life. I just can’t see how framing this story in the lens of a legit Toku show, ridiculous exploding villains and all, can do anything but hurt the story that’s been told so far. What made me care about Samurai Flamenco was that he was just a normal guy fighting against a society he sees as corrupt. There was no great evil to conquer, only the small evils that people overlook, the kind that one easily ignores. Now nothing can be the same again. Everything from this point on will be framed in some weird battle against a great evil who can’t think to do anything more than make monsters out of torture devices instead of, Idno, shooting him? Seems like that would get rid of your problem way easier, dude.

Leaving that aside, I will say I was very confused with the direction of this episode. The fight with Hanging Kite seemed to have been simply misplaced in the sequence of events. The only real reason to have it at the beginning seems to be so that there’s a good action scene getting people adjusted to the direction this show is going. It still is confusing when King Torture talks about Hanging Kite in the middle of the episode and then it automatically cuts to the Delta Horse scene. We didn’t really need to see him get summoned if you’re just going to do that anyway. Otherwise I do have to admit that the action is fun. We’re still given no explanation as to where they pulled Flamenco’s weird punch ability from. It certainly doesn’t look like any stationary I’ve ever seen. I’m also pretty confused by the Boiling Rhino scene. How did they manage to contact Mari, get the girls together, and get to the bus before the cops? You’d think someone on duty would have been able to beat them to the punch.

Despite my many reservations, I see a light at the end of this dark tunnel. Initially we see Hazama’s values at work again. Since these people have been warped into freakish monstrosities, who’s to say they have not themselves fallen victim to King Torture’s schemes? That would mean Hazama has been offing people who have simply been trapped in twisted shells of their former selves. With no other way to face what he is forced to do, he simply glosses over it. It seems he might be losing the mindset that made him Samurai Flamenco in the first place. A great job is done to make his appearance in magazines and on television seem very forced, almost robotic. I’ll bet you Goto is going to need to snap him out of his funk soon enough.