7 Thoughts on Kamen Rider Build 3: "Borderline of Justice"

*sighs* Adulting is hard.

1.) Revealing that Sentou's perpetually exhausted assistant Misora had a side job as a a popular idol kinda threw me off, but it's a welcome change.  Kamen Rider's had a long line of sardonic sidekick-type characters like Misora, but for this series they went and gave us Chisame Hasegawa from Negima, which is fine because Chisame's kind of the best anyway.

2.) I was wondering what sort of person Sentou was up til now, and if he was being a Kamen Rider to get his memory back, or for an experiment, or what.  Why he's doing this was an important question, because it decides the kind of story they're going to tell with him.  Either he's not a hero and the story first has to tell the journey of how he becomes one, or he is a hero and the story has time to do other things instead.

Sentou immediately answers he'd rather help people than recover his memory, and right then and there it's decided what sort of Rider he is.   Of course the question now is--what sort of story do they want to tell with him instead?  Part of the reason writers often do the whole "Refusal of the Call" story is to fill time--without it, you run the risk of running out of story and doing a lot of filler.  Or the story revolves around other characters so much the main character doesn't really feel like the main anymore.   It becomes harder to stick the landing, but so far Build is doing a good enough job for me to give them the benefit of the doubt.

3.) Modern Warring States Era!  This episode introduces us to the three main leaders of Japan since it's been split apart by the Skywall, and the one thing you immediately understand in their opening conversation is that they're really into keeping things the way they are.   The way society shifted in the aftermath of the Great Disaster has given them power they couldn't have otherwise laid claim to, and so now it seems only one of them has any interest in uniting the three areas into a single country again.

Of course, we already did the Warring States idea (with fruit and dance battles) so expect them to try to distance themselves from that at least a little bit.
 

4.) I'd bet anything this is where either the final form comes from or a plot device to undo something horrible.

5.) Alright, this is the last time Night Rogue gets to be coincidentally hanging around just as a member of the Build Team (lol) calls a potential lead on who's behind the SMASH stuff.  The last time was hilariously coincidental, but this time just felt silly.

6.) This is easily my favorite Build Form thus far: HawkGatling.  It's visually distinctive without being so over-the-top it distracts from watching the series like literally every Ex-Aid design I ever saw.

 

7.) At the end of the episode, a creepy looking CGI viper creeped up and ate the team's only lead, taking him elsewhere while Build was knocked out immediately after cutting his transformation.  I'm really going to need Sentou to be more careful about when and where he transforms/stops his transformation.   He's starting to look like a clumsy goofball.