Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Jan 11, 2014 11:17:29 GMT -5
"The train of time:DenLiner. Will its next stop be in the past, or the future?"
KAMEN RIDER DEN-O
SYNOPSIS
(Stick with me--with all the time travel, this will get pretty Moffat-level confusing in short order . . .)
Ryotaro Nogami has the worst luck of any human being ever. Things don't just go wrong for him, they explode into extended catastrophe. During yet another day of trying to help his sister keep her coffeehouse afloat financially in the wake of her fiancee's (Sakurai) mysterious disappearance, he finds a train pass which was lost by a girl named Hana, who is a refugee from a future timeline destroyed by the Imagin. The pass is for a train known as the DenLiner, which can travel to any point in time and space. Aboard the train is the ultra-chipper Naomi and the mysterious Owner, who knows a LOT more about time travel than he ever lets on and is obsessed with winning fried rice flag challenges.
Ryotaro also encounters an Imagin, a creature from the future sent to conquer the past. The Imagin take the form of their target's memories and temp them by telling them that the Imagin will grant any wish. They're actually renegades from a destroyed timeline that want to bond with humans and steal their past and thus survive their lost future.
Some of them, anyway. The first Imaging Ryutaro meets is Momotaros, who generally just wants to fight and be cool. Owing to Ryotaro's unwillingness to speak his wish and Ryotaro's nature as a Singularity Point (a person who retains his memories in the event of timeline changes) Momotaros can possess Ryotaro for short periods of time and together, they become Kamen Rider Den-O.
Soon enough though, the DenLiner and it's crew is joined by three more Imagin: The lecherous Urataros, Super-strong but narcoleptic Kintaros, and hyperactive, gun-toting bratty kid Ryutaros. Also, for a brief moment, there's Sieg, who is almost annoyingly aristocratic. They also find out there's another time-traveling train out there, the Zeroliner, which is crewed by Yuuto Sakurai and the Imagin Deneb. Yuuto, in addition to being able to merge with Deneb and become Kamen Rider Zeronos, is the past self of Ryotaro's sister's fiancee. What's more, every time Zeronos transforms, he destroys another memory of himself, gradually erasing his own timeline.
Eventually, Ryotaro and Yuuto get on the same page and team up to stop the Imagin from conquering the past, and on that hook, we hang our series, and I now pause to show you this supercut of all the henshins from Den-O:
But even with that, there are a few mysteries yet to solve. What is Yuuto's connection with Sakurai, and if Yuuto is erasing himself from the timeline, what happens to Sakurai? Who is sending the Imagin into the past? Who is Hana? What is the deal with the fried rice flag challenges and Owner's spoon collection?
OK, well, maybe not that last one. But all the mysteries, in a rather time-twisty way, do get revealed . . .
SYNOPSIS
Welcome, my friends, to the secret success of the Kamen Rider franchise. Despite only being a moderate success when it was on the air, Kamen Rider Den-O had a VERY long life afterwards, spanning an anime series, eight movies, character CDs, multiple reappearances in the team-up movies (before Kamen Rider Decade hit the scene and could hop fictional "worlds" at will, it was the way to make the crossovers between Rider have some sort of narrative logic--oh look, DenLiner's here!) and it managed to do all this with pretty much all the main cast (that weren't Imagin) getting rolled over to other actors (itself explained with time travel) Japan loves itself some Den-O.
The reason for this is simple: Den-O is a LOT of fun. Unlike most Kamen Rider series, which tend towards being edgy and a little serious-minded, for the most part Den-O is more concerned with the comedy side of things. Momotaros and the good-guy Imagin's relentless bickering and jockeying for position is hilarious, as is Deneb's well-meaning attempts to get Yuuto to not be so much of a jerk to everyone. That plus the tendency towards somewhat board slapstick at times helps to strike a balance when the plot gets a little too twisted and hard to follow (as time travel plots are liable to do) and people are losing memories, shifting into younger version of themselves, or having their futures changed or deleted at will.
Through it all, though, there's a real heart to all of it. Gradually, you really get to care about their weird extended family and all the drama and sentimentality is actually earned (there's a great episode midway on, as Yuuto is coming to the last of his transformation cards where Deneb possesses him at night and tries to get him to make more friends and memories so he won't disappear) and probably that's why the series had such an extended life--people got really invested in the characters.
Sakurai's watch (the only thing he left behind when he vanished) says "the past should give us hope," which is the very thing the Imagin steal from people when they take over their timeline. Deno's main idea is, I suppose, what you have to do to protect the hope of the past as you keep moving forward into the future.
If you're not sure if Kamen Rider is meant for you and your tastes run towards Doctor Who-type stuff, then there is no better entry point for getting into Kamen Rider than this, as it's pretty much a Doctor Who/Kamen Rider mash-up. Things move along a steady clip, it's really funny (and not always "foreign funny," where the humour doesn't really properly translate and it comes across as too broad) and you'll find (or at least I hope you will) that you enjoy it quite a bit, even if you never really thought this was your kind of thing.
NEXT WEEK
10,000 years ago, the last Battle Royal took place, and humans emerged victorious and sealed the Undead into 52 cards. Now, someone has unsealed the Undead and a new Battle Royal has begun. Only two men, using a system that harnesses the sealed Undead as a weapon against them can re-seal the undead and prevent the Undead from winning this Battle Royal. But unbeknownst to them, there's a Joker in this deck, and if HE wins the battle, it's the end of everything.
In seven--Kamen Rider Blade: