Recap: Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, Mission 30 – Shut Down Messiah

The Go-Busters come face to face with Messiah and it brings out four Metaroids to fight them off. Hiromu goes straight for Messiah who absorbs his weapon. They lead Messiah into the building and discover he can repair himself. Jin literally busts through the wall and says he doesn’t think this is Messiah’s true form. He sends Hiromu, Ryuji and Yoko to the computer room to destroy Messiah’s programming.

The three, along with the Buddyroids, stumble upon the very lab they were in 13 years ago.

Hiromu sees his mother’s prized dog statue of Gog and Magog as well as photos and belongings of the other scientists who worked at the lab, including Enter’s googles and pictures of European men with French written on them. He realizes Enter and Escape are composite avatars of the scientists and not of just one person.

The realization makes them wonder about the whereabouts of these people now. Usada thinks the worst, but Yoko is still hopeful. Suddenly, Buglers come bursting into the room.

“For now, all we can do is move forward.”

They walk out of the lab and Hiromu tells the Buddyroids to standby in the Buster Machines. They reach the main computer room where they suddenly hear voices. At the central computer, Hiromu’s parents appear.

Yoko’s mother speaks to her as well. They tell them this giant computer is Messiah and the entire base is the brain and they must destroy it to completely shut him down. Messiah can infect any artificial object or machine and if he escapes the subdimension, can infect the entire world by fusing with everything in sight.

At another part of the base, Jin and J encounter Escape and they battle.

Their parents and the other scientists implore the Go-Busters to hurry, but Enter pops in and drops a bomb on them. They might not want to be in such a hurry to destroy the computer. Enter explains how teleportation involves converting matter into data. That is exactly what happened to their families who are now pieces of data which Messiah absorbed that night 13 years ago. Hiromu and Yoko’s parents tell them to hurry, but Messiah shows up and turns a switch off, reminding the Creators that they are only alive because of him.

Messiah hurls the Go-Busters outside to avoid the computer being damaged in a fight. Jin, J and Escape are fighting nearby as the Go-Busters try to comprehend the information they just learned.

Yoko is distraught and Ryuji suggests they fall back and not destroy Messiah yet to figure things out. But Hiromu refuses. He asks them to think about how their parents must have felt to have told them to destroy Messiah.

“If we hesitate here, we’ll be trampling all over their resolve. It’d be the end of the world. We didn’t spend the last 13 years preparing for that!”

Hiromu apologizes to Yoko for not keeping his promise from 13 years ago and the three of them understand what they must do. Messiah approaches them and with the original! theme playing, Yoko and Ryuji take Messiah head on while Hiromu jumps into Ace with Nick and jumps into the base to destroy the main computer.

Enter, in his own Megazord, meets Hiromu on his way down. They take their fight to the ground floor.

Escape and Messiah tag team the other four Go-Busters while Enter proceeds to taunt Hiromu.

Thinking he has the upper hand, Enter says…

“Looks like you’ve wasted the last 13 years after all.”

Hiromu manages to push Enter back.

“I’ll decide whether or not it was a waste. It’s not just me. I won’t let it go to waste for anyone!”

They charge at each other, but it is Hiromu who gives the fatal blow to Enter.

Enter congratulations Hiromu and the Megazord explodes, triggering explosions to the main computer. Messiah feels the effects and the other Go-Busters use the opening to defeat this physical form of Messiah.

Escape sees her Papa being destroyed and runs off.

Still down in the base, Hiromu hears his parents telling him to hurry out. He speeds up the walls of the computer room and out of the base just as it implodes.

Hiromu rejoins the others and Jin tells them they should get going now with the subdimension becoming more unstable. They head to Jin’s hangar.

J asks Jin if they could bring “that,” pointing to… the encased physical body of 27 year old Jin. No, he says, the situation hasn’t changed so he’ll have to stay that way a little longer. They get a call from the Command Center confirming the Marker is ready for them to head home.

The Go-Busters are in their respective Buster Machines. Ryuji looks out the window and at the ruins of the base and salutes the fallen.

Yoko also looks out the window, but feels a hand on her shoulder. Her mother. The feeling of her mother’s arms around her as she pilots the Buster Machine comforts Yoko.

Hiromu holds back tears and hears his parents’ voices telling him to keep looking forward to the future.

Back above ground, Kuroki, Morishita and Nakamura are waiting for them on the rooftop of the Command Center. The maintenance crew cheers when they successfully arrive and Morishita and Nakamura welcome them with a salute.

Episode Thoughts
Well damn!

What an episode. It definitely had the feel of a finale. The stakes and the emotions were incredibly high. While seeing the supposed “big bad” destroyed in Episode 30 wasn’t something most of us expected, it didn’t lessen how big this episode was.

Now I’ve always talked about how I prefer my Power Rangers (and I guess, in turn, my Sentai) to be a little more serious and smart. At the very least not overly childish and condescending like Power Rangers Samurai has been. Kids these days, whether American or Japanese, don’t need TV shows to get dumbed down for them.

That being said, while I love the (sorry for the cliché) “darkness” of something like Power Rangers RPM and Go-Busters, I can also see why the kids might not particularly gravitate toward it. I guess, seeing more serious and darker themes entertains a big kid like me, but not so much the kid kids.

So this is coming from me as a big kid watching a kids show… I absolutely loved this episode. I loved how heavy and emotional it was. And I love how Go-Busters has developed so far.

This whole season, Go-Busters has carried a sort of dark cloud over it in terms of story, or maybe “underlying” darkness is a better way to say it?

Anyway, *I’m referring to the first two episodes establishing these three kids basically being orphaned thanks to a sentient computer virus. For 13 years, they’ve prepared to do battle the moment that virus returned while also hoping and praying their families were still alive.

In this episode, not only did they learn their parents were now gigabytes of data, they had to kill them themselves.

Now that’s dark. And depressing. But heroically tragic too. I have no idea how this episode would’ve played to the “target audience,” but for me, I thought it was excellently done. It really felt like a climax of the previous 29 episodes. Sure we’ve had plenty of fun, lighthearted moments, but there was always that underlying dread that one day, Hiromu and Yoko would realize their parents are truly gone.

But this episode was also very uplifting. You can’t help but think they changed the opening theme just so they could kick it in during that scene this episode to ramp up that emotion. Because it definitely worked. Big time. I was in tears.

Katsuhiro Suzuki and Arisa Komiya were especially awesome this episode, both churning out emotional performances. Them and Ryouma Baba have done very solid work so far and this episode definitely gave them all a chance to show what they’ve got. It also gave the characters the chance to mature and maybe loosen up a little.

The writing and directing really paced the episode well. It was a full episode, but the time went by very fast. It was exciting and emotional and left a lot of fresh new questions for the next 20 or so episodes.

It’ll definitely be interesting to see what direction the show goes in now. I definitely hope the events of this episode will still resonate no matter who the next villain is. I’m sure Enter and Escape are out there somewhere and maybe even Messiah. Or Hiromu and Yoko’s parents. Who really knows what’s in store.

Whatever is coming up, I’m definitely more excited than ever.

4 thoughts on “Recap: Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, Mission 30 – Shut Down Messiah

  1. Yosuke Sakurada Yosuke Sakurada is Hiromu and Rika’s father who was the chief of the Transport Research Center before he sacrificed himself to trap Messiah in subspace 13 years ago. He is the only known scientist to have devised a way to install programs into humans.

    1. This is probably the most painful sentai episode I have seen so far. Even the shinkenger was not this tragic. However this is how it is in real life too .

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