“Defeating the Megid, With a Flaming Tenacity”

The Sword of Logos continue in their attempts to capture Touma, who is also struggling with Yuki’s demand that he be more ruthless and show more resolve in dealing with the Yeti Megid.

 Zigg’s Thoughts

Toshiki Inoue, is that you? The former Kamen Rider head writer was somewhat infamous for his trademark style of writing characters with an almost pathological inability to communicate with each other. At its best this led to darkly tragic situations, but at its worst it just made you think everyone involved was an immature self centred idiot. I’m fairly sure I don’t need to tell you which side of that line Saber comes down on.

Really, the entire ‘Touma vs the Sword of Logos’ plotline is riddled with errors, and what’s more they’re errors on both sides of the conflict, so we don’t even know who we’re meant to be pulling for. Yes Touma is clearly right about there being a traitor in the Sword of Logos, but that’s information only we the viewer are privy to, and in-universe he certainly seems to be putting an unreasonable amount of weight into the last words of a man who, lest we forget, killed his best friend!

Meanwhile, Rintaro and allies just come off as utter boneheads throughout. His immediate conclusion that Touma has switched sides just because he tries to prevent the killing of the Yeti Megid is one of the most head-slappingly dumb things we’ve yet seen in the show, which is quite something. Let’s not even talk about his confident declaration that “there is no traitor within the Sword of Logos”, conveniently forgetting that this entire sorry state of affairs began with not one, but two separate members of the organization betraying it! Furthermore, isn’t the entire reason they’re trying to bring Touma in because they think he’s a traitor? The conflict is so obviously forced that it’s actively undermining the credibility of the characters involved and the sooner they can wrap it up the better for everyone involved.

The other notable thing about this episode is the ending, which is so head-spinningly moronic I have trouble believing it. Theoretically, the entire push-pull across these two episodes has been between Touma’s desire to save the life of Ms Editor, contrasted against Yuri’s disdain for said life and his insistence that Touma’s resolve needs to be stronger if he’s to have a chance of defeating the Megid. That Touma found a way to save the innocent human life and still destroy the monster should therefore be a moment of powerful vindication for him.

Except…Yuri reveals he arbitrarily has the power to do that anyway, thus completely undermining the entire point of the story and rendering the past two episodes (say it together with me kids) completely pointless. I cannot overstate how bad and anticlimactic this writing is. What is even the point of this revelation, except to act as an awful joke and to provide the writers with an easy as hell getout for all future stories involving human transformed monsters? It makes Yuri look like an even bigger jerk than he was before, and it makes everyone watching feel like idiots for even daring to give this show the benefit of the doubt for a single second.

Random Observations

• As if he weren’t camping it up enough, Legiel has started playing Castlevania style ominous organ music.
• Ren is still weirdly agressive and shitty in a completely different way to his normal shittiness.
• If you suspect a teammate surely the first thing you’d do is lock them out of your secret base right?
• The CGI for Yuki’s ‘Shadow’ form has already run dry and so most of the fight scenes in this episode are done with the classic man-in-a-black-suit, which looks fine but extremely underwhelming.