Recap

The ToQgers speculate a little more on their shared past, but before they can come to a conclusion they’re dropped off in a city under the control of a dueling obsessed monster.

This post contains Kamen Rider Den-O spoilers. Fairly warned be ye fanboys!

Aqua’s Thoughts

The sophomore episode of ToQger did little to address the many, many issues we had with the pilot, yet it did flare my hopes at least somewhat in its attempts to keep me watching. The way the characters dress still tells us more about their purported personalities than the way they act and most of the plot still consists of the narrative equivalent of slinging an exploding sledgehammer through a window. The pacing hasn’t gotten any better and taking a page out of Kyoryuger‘s book, the plot is dressed up in vague, esoteric nonsense and wordplay to hide how clichéd it is. Turns out our heroes are in fact not quite dead, no, they merely lost their memories, so they might as well be. The implication that they hail from a world, timeline or reality that was consumed by the Shadow Line reeks all kinds of like a certain very important subplot in that other train-themed toku show by the same writer. Given that Kamen Rider Den-O‘s strength always lay in its characters and delivery rather than in its story — and that the former is exactly what ToQger is so glaringly lacking — this doesn’t exactly look promising.

Yet as I said, on the other hand, this episode did provide enough action-packed and humourous moments to, at the very least, not make me regret watching. The tunnel joke was a definitive hit, and the train-jousting scene overall was great fun. A bit too ambitious for the show’s budget, yet welcome nonetheless. The awkward choreography from last week seems to be gone, although the clear lack of real pyrotechnics certainly doesn’t help us to live with a Super Sentai without Koichi Sakamoto’s directing. The dueling schtick was fun enough to revolve an entire episode around, and switching from a sword battle to a gunslinger face-off as soon as the robots step up to the plate was a fun little twist. Sadly enough, even this fight was nowhere near the hilarity and exceptional action we came to expect from Kyoryuger. It’s hard to get invested in action and jokes when you simply don’t care about the people behind the masks or the reasons why they fight. This episode already felt like pure filler rather than a second episode to ease us into the plot, but luckily, next week’s seems to be a much-needed spotlight episode. The bad news, however… it’s one about Kagura.

Zigg’s Thoughts

Unlike Aqua, I do feel that this second episode of ToQger was a palpable step up from the opener, though I’ll admit it does do little to address the character problem which we’ve taken issue with. Still, stronger pacing and a more definite sense of purpose, along with some fun action flourishes, make this an entertainingly workmanlike Sentai episode..

It helps that we get a lot of the basic framework laid out here, which makes everything considerably clearer and easier to wrap our heads around. There’s some potential in it too, even if the concept of villains stealing people’s emotions was done, er, just last season. Nevertheless, I’m squarely behind the idea of the crew travelling to a different city dominated by a different baddie every week. It fits in with the train theme and allows us some interesting setups for the villains. It also makes them feel much more significant if they’re each dominating they’re own territory. I dug the freaky dueling motif that’s going on this week and in fact I do sort of wish we’d had more time to explore the consequences of such a scenario. As it is, it’s tough to complain when we get a great battle to finish up the episode. The train-top dueling stuff is waaaaay too ambitious for the kind of budget they’re operating on, but the ambition and slapdash enthusiasm is exactly the kind of thing I love about tokusatsu.

Yet despite all this forward motion, I’m still pretty iffy on the most important aspect, the characters. The good part first – their backstory seems extremely interesting, even if it is a pretty blatant lift from Den-O as Aqua stated. Nevertheless, the idea that they’re essentially refugees from a destroyed reality has some pretty hefty emotional resonance behind it and could go some real interesting places if carefully plotted and scripted. But it’s still difficult to care about them because they’re all such personality-less voids. Granted, Hikari shows signs of life in this episode, but it’s mostly to whine, and the group internal dynamic already feels lifeless, which is incredibly worrying considering we’re only two episodes in.It just doesn’t feel like there’s much to uncover about these people, although I’d love to be proven wrong.

The net result of all of this is an episode which completely owns the ‘solid but unspectacular’ cliche. At the very least I now feel we’re on a firm footing with ToQger – the premise is established, there’s one or two interesting threads for us to latch onto and the action has settled into a nice groove. But it’s still lacking life and energy, and that’s going to be the problem that needs addressing over the next few episodes.

Random Observations

• I know we’ve gone on and on about the Den-O comparisons but man, Wagon really is just Naomi isn’t she?
• Speaking of Wagon, she is of course voiced by the evergreen Yui Horie.
• Love the monster design this week. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s basically made up of two giant swords.
• Typically of course, nobody actually *dies* in the duels.
• Every single time there’s a duel in any media ever, I wonder why you wouldn’t turn around on ‘1’ and shoot the other person in the back of the head.
• I’m not going to lie – the end of the sword duel was a legitimately laugh out loud moment. Big kudos to the production team for cutting the music and making it even funnier.