I really like Kamen Rider ZEZTZ, but the change up in part two feels like a whole different show.
ZEZTZ is the first of the Kamen Rider series to get a simultaneous release in the international market. In prior shows of recent years you had to wait for the full series before you got a subtitled version. There’s still no dub, but considering Toei still treats their YouTube channel like an afterthought, the partnership with Shout Factory as part of their TokuSHOUTsu line-up has allowed the English speaking world a chance to see the show at the same time as Japan, relatively speaking. You can watch the repeated livestream during weekends or watch the regular posting on their YouTube channel, which is how I watch it with my Sunday supper.
I love the original concept. Baku is an ordinary guy, but every time he tries to help someone he somehow gets hurt. So he can only save people in dreams, where he’s the amazing secret agent Code Number 7…until the day he finds out he’s actually helping people. In the dream world, “Nightmares” are living beings who slowly bring the dreamer’s worst fears to life, even making them happen in the real world. Baku/Seven is given the power of Kamen Rider ZEZTZ by CODE, the Confidential Organized Defensive Establishment, given missions and mission gear by Zero, who speaks to him remotely through his transforming robot. However, there are other people working against CODE, helping the nightmares in their quest to make the nightmares come true, take over a person’s body, and enter our world to cause chaos. In those emergencies, ZEZTZ can enter our world and destroy the nightmare for good. Meanwhile he has to uncover various secrets and find the sleeping Nem, an idol who gets cast in various roles in the dreams with the goal of making them happy. She becomes Seven’s parter in the dream world while a Mulder & Scully style group of cops help him solve “black cases” caused by the Nightmares and fend off CODE’s enemies, one of which is a former cop.
The mysteries were a good subplot as we got “Japanese superhero fights off a Freddy Kruger army”, and I’m totally up for that…which is why I shouldn’t write Nightmare On Elm Street stories. However, saving spoilers for the next paragraph onward (so you’ve been warned), something changed in the last few episodes. Many of the mysteries were revealed…and then someone hit a huge reset button and totally changed the plot of the story. Don’t get me wrong. As of this writing I’m still enjoying it for the same characters, cool dream world effects, and the amazing action. However, I don’t feel like I’m watching the same show anymore outside of the characters and ZEZTZ’s various forms.
Episode 24 and 25 started the show on a new path, and I’m not sure why they chose this. In the episodes leading up we learn CODE isn’t the heroic spy agency fighting nightmare monsters with the goal of protecting people’s dreams and causing their nightmares from altering the real world. Agents were trained from childhood, including Baku and a friend of one of the police officers. They were willing to leave their agents to fend for themselves if required, which they didn’t sign up for. Their enemy, Nox (the aforementioned former police officer), was one of those agents, and now worked with the Nightmares to get revenge on CODE, though there are times he stepped in. Granted he also knew the Nightmares were a threat to the waking world, included torturing children in their nightmares as part of the assignment, and attacked our hero even while stating he wasn’t the enemy…but then not telling him WHY he was acting against CODE in such an extreme measure.
Nox destroys Zero’s robot playtoy, and they treat it like Zero himself died. Except he didn’t, but they still sent Three in his place. Only Three is a total jerk. He even looks like he’s about to turn on Zero in the new intro, though that is not a face I expected to see on him. When Seven starts catching on that fighting the threat didn’t make CODE the heroes, he became a target of Three, sending Five and Six to kill Nox though Baku was willing to continue Seven’s missions, just on his own terms. Five is totally up for that as he believes in the mission above all else, while six (the childhood friend of Nagumo, the “Scully” of the two officers working with Baku) needed her memories reawakened before joining in the hunt for Nox. Instead, Nox kills them, and an angry Baku, using a questionable overpowered source, kills him. Things were already getting dark, ending with Three shooting Baku in the head assassination style.
Then Baku woke up in the hospital. Everything past episode three was a precognitive dream. Somehow he still kept all the dream power ups (because we have toys to sell it was still a dream world), but he had a new start. He used it to stop the other officer, Fujimi (the “Mulder”), from being used by the Nightmares to destroy police headquarters, meaning the event that kept the Paranormal Division open never happened. He knows now that CODE is also the bad guys and wants to team with Nox, despite knowing how fanatic he would have gotten where Baku not currently rewriting the future. Now instead of the Nightmare monsters, Nox, and his mysterious boss “The Lady” as the antagonists, suddenly CODE are the bad guys. They want to either kill or study Nem, since her ability to walk through dreams isn’t just because of her coma but because she’s half Nightmare, when “The Lady” (formerly CODE agent Number Two–no, you shouldn’t be getting Codename: Kids Next Door vibes) was attacked by a Nightmare.
Look, I’m against CODE doing any harm to Nem, either, but somehow the story of a man who can only be a hero in dreams protecting the dreams of others in the style of his favorite fictional secret agents became a story of a shadow government performing morally questionable experiments to save the world, and deciding not to stop there by introducing a rape baby being protected by her mother.
And then there’s Sieg.
It wasn’t enough to have TWO threats to the team of Baku, his slowly involved sister Minami (who from the last episode teaser might be getting her own Rider powers somehow), Nem, and our two now unemployed officers (thanks, Baku). Now we have another agent, Code Number One, who was a criminal part of the early experiments. He was already nuts in the flashback when Number Two was trying to tell them this was a bad idea, but Zero apparently is about as smart as Three is compassionate. That’s kind of sad if you’ve seen Three in action. Sieg, alias Kamen Rider Dawn: the Nightmare Rider, decided he liked the Nightmares, broke away, and now captures Nightmares to fight for his own amusement while The Lady uses them to find CODE to protect her daughter, Nem. Somehow the people who wanted to use a child to destroy the world with an extinction sized meteor are being shown to be the lesser evil?
So what started out as a spy adventure through a dream multiverse is now full with political intrigue, corrupt shadow governments, extremist revenge seekers, and a psychopath who wants to trap the human race in “beautiful” eternal nightmares, somehow brought back into the game due to Baku’s prophetic dreams that boosted his power and gear set early with the training to use them. Like I said, it’s a completely different show. Also, think about the people he isn’t helping. You had a chef worried about the future of his legacy after falling ill and leaving his secret sauce in the hands of his apprentices just before a big event. There was the woman who didn’t want to get married because of her fear of flying only admitting this to her fiance (after a swerve of a potential romantic rival that turned out to be a red herring) after ZEZTZ fought her Nightmare. Even the Paranormal Division got a second chance at officially tracking Black Cases with the power of the government because of the attacks on the police station.
I was totally invested in the dreamworld hero (and I don’t usually follow dreamworld hero shows because unlike ZEZTZ they rarely take advantage of the location and the oddity of dreams). They really took on aspects of dreaming. Baku, as a lucid dreamer, could manipulate the world even as just Seven. The dreams were varied and felt like different worlds even though most of them were in a variation of the real world. It was fun, exciting, and even if CODE turned out to not be the best protectors they were still something to work with. Then they slowly turned evil, not just misguided. Nox and The Lady, thanks to the precog dream reset, are no longer the extremist threat ruining the dreams of others for their own goals and dooming the world to get revenge on CODE, Nox even trying to stop Baku from taking out that asteroid…that would have destroyed as much of the real world as the child’s dream world and using that child to pick off survivors based on what we saw before, and later when the “Demon King” used the nightmares of children who suffered a great trauma as a group host for it’s own attack on the waking world.
Now CODE is evil, Nox was evil but now won’t be somehow, The Lady is still involved, and then we drop this new scumbag into the mix. It’s a new show with new rules and tossing out Baku’s arc of finally being able to help others and possibly using powers he shouldn’t (like the overpowered Catastrom device replacing his usual Capsem powers), as well as the character development for the rest of the characters. Baku has to get everyone up to speed on what happened, but Nem shouldn’t be as close to Baku as she was before the twist happened. I’m not saying they were going to be a romantic paring. I’ll save that for the fanshippers. However, there was at least a close friendship and alliance against the Nightmares. Now that never developed. He told her what happened, but he also told his sister. She was always worried about him but over the course of the show learned what he was doing, that he was safe and still doing what he always wanted to do–help people and make the world better–without the odd side effect of ending up in the hospital trying to stop a child kidnapping or helping an old lady across the street. She’s supposed to change just because he told her the backstory from the dream realm while his body was asleep in the secret closet room?
Come to think of it, we never had an explanation of how that can still exist and whether or not CODE can “turn that off”, or where the heck The Lady is based from and sending out butterflies like some dreamtime Hawkmoth. I do get the reference: “Am I a man dreaming I’m a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I’m a man.” There was so much thought into how the dream scenario worked and now I don’t know how any of this works. Again, I’m still enjoying it, but more because I already like the heroes. There’s still good action, but it’s like Kamen Rider ZEZTZ RX rather than the same show it was before, and I kind of miss the plot we had. I’m not a fan of Sieg, I’m indifferent to full evil CODE when misguided CODE might have been more interesting to me, and it’s just not the same thanks to this plot twist out of almost nowhere.
Part of me wants to go back to the precog timeline and bring on more Nightmare monsters, more Baku and company helping people solve their problems through the dreamworld, and being totally cool and fun doing it, becoming a close group of friends and allies. The show’s still going to be part of my Sunday night dinner plans barring current events, but this isn’t the show I signed up for. Hopefully it still remains a good show. It’s still a good show to begin the international push for Kamen Rider that Tsuburaya was already proving successful with for the Ultraman franchise (I am so far behind on that). I just don’t see the need to change what was already working. At least working for me.
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