Lupinranger Vs. Patranger Discussion Thread

This episode is pretty bad. It doesn't even introduce Keiichirou's "love interest" properly, just has her there at the start with a lot of exposition about "she's totes been around the whole time, Keiichirou met her weeks ago and they bonded over a shared love of playing the piano!" - something we'd never heard of Keiichirou being interested in before. Then, everyone else gets involved in trying to hook her up with Keiichirou even though it's none of their business. He even explicitly tells Umika that he's not prepared to consider dating whilst the Gangler are around and she's all "but what about poor Mana-chan's feelings?" WHAT'S IT GOT TO DO WITH YOU? If Keiichiirou doesn't want to go out with her, for whatever reason, he doesn't have to! It doesn't help that she's a terrible character, she's the typical "sweet naive romantic rich girl" you can find in almost any drama. The episode thankfully ends with her going abroad, bye bye, don't come back!

The only potentially interesting thing this episode is that in the "dream world", where everyone gets the thing they most want in life, Umika has nothing - presumably because she can't have Shiho who is gone, but this is never really explored. It also seems Sakuya's wish is for Umika to be an idol, which is pretty creepy, like he'd prefer her if she would be a bit "sexier"?

The Good: That final showdown is the best part of the episode. The best thing any show can do is to resolve a conflict in a surprising way, and this show definitely did that. Kairi shooting Touma's body, but taking the shot in his hand like that is nothing short of badass. It might be the most badass thing any red ranger has done in recent sentai. There's no way Kairi is not making a list of favorite sentai reds when this show is over.

I also appreciated the scene with Kairi telling Touma that the monster isn't gonna part with his body, and Touma telling him to do whatever he can, and what's more important is that they get the collection pieces back so that Kairi and Umika can get their loved ones back. Personally, I'd like to think that Aya would still accept whatever body Touma was in, but I guess we'll never know for sure.

I also have to give credit to Touma's actor. I think he's the best actor in the show, and I think he does a great job playing such an obnoxious character.

I also liked the scene at the beginning with the Patrangers discussing how the safes work. I didn't expect this show to get into that. I thought that was all interesting. Doing this scene felt deliberate, as if it had to be for a reason. I hope there's some kind of payoff to it. I would love to get more details and information on this.

As for the action, besides the fight with Kairi and Touma's body, I liked the fact that they used both Cyclone and Blade and scissors. Who knew the male ranger's arm could be swapped out?

I also liked the last scene, with the Patrangers getting on Touma for "pretending to be sick and going out with girls". I thought that was funny...