And you thought Yusuke is the only guy who transformed inside of a burning church!
And I once thought that Narutaki is the only guy who likes swearing a Rider’s name every 2 minutes! Anyways, Rider 1 and 2 are back and continues to help V3 on how to use his powers and do their own level of badassery before they decided to let the safety of the planet left with the hands of a newbie, I mean, worthy successor.
This is the episode where Shiro and his counterpart, V3 shined the most. The Double Riders are in the sidelines and with that, I can focus more on how Shiro moved in this episode. To be honest, I thought that Shiro will be fueled with revenge when he will face Scissors Jaguar, I was wrong. He is calm and now has this heroic aura in him. This is what I admired in V3 in his episode, he never let his revenge be on top in his head, rather prioritize with defeating his opponent.
About V3’s abilities, clearly we saw his level of being a newbie. He is not aware about the V3 Hopper, a device that will aid him in looking for running bad guys from afar or how he will control his strength in human form and most especially, how to do his finisher! This is the part in which we saw Rider 1 aiding him and perfectly seen in the sidelines and let V3 do most of the job. I liked this bit; it has this sense of senior-junior relationship between the two.
As for this episode, typical Ishinomori dark church plot which as we all know of for those who are uninitiated, if the setting involved churches, most of the time, the priest is clearly the bad guy. This isn’t the first time it happened and this would not be the last. I mean, look at Kamen Rider Kiva, the final battle of the series has something to do with Doujin Bishop playing a church organ inside a church to revive the original King!
My only problem with the episode’s plot is that unlike most Kamen Rider episodes that I watch which involves evil priest and churches, they never played with the mystery aspect much that I loved in those other episodes. It immediately jumped with the conclusion. But I guess there is a reason why they never played much with the mystery aspect of it because the Double Riders will do something great in this episode!
About that, the scene which involves them fighting Kame Bazooka was probably, one good send off for the Double Riders and a good transition between the Double Riders and V3. That scene alone in which they use their full power to defeat Kame Bazooka, fly away from Tokyo was a strong scene, and how they ended was quite a bang that V3 witnessed.
The final message by those two was emotional it has this feeling that they will be gone for a long time and the two trust V3 to protect the world while they are gone. In short, this is officially V3’s show and we will not see the Double Riders till the time it is needed for them to appear.
Overall, the second episode of the series is what I can say, the proper transition between the current Riders and V3. The final scene of this episode alone gave us this assurance that we will not see the Double Riders for a while and that they will have a minor role as the series progress. As for the fights, the fights are really good considering the lack of resources they have back in the day, the really made a good use of the cameras for them to execute V3’s Double Kick.
In the next episode, we will see V3 fight not one, but two Destron mutants! Can V3 defeat a giant fly with a TV stuck in its head or a squid that has two LPG tanks attached in his back?