Recap: Kaitou Sentai Lupinranger VS Keisatsu Sentai Patranger, Episode 45 – Looking Forward to Christmas

Sota from all the way in Episode 14 invites Sakuya and the rest of the Pats to the school’s Christmas party. Sota wants to have chicken so Sakuya says he’ll prepare a Christmas chicken feast for him with the help of an awesome French chef.

Over at the GSPO, Jim Carter has found a match that shows Ganglers’ human forms are of people who have gone missing. They continue searching and find more which means that the same must have happened to Satoru.

But Keiichiro has a thought. He searches and finds that the missing people used as Gangler disguises were all reported missing at the same time in the city. He wonders if maybe people were specifically kidnapped to enable their forms to be used as disguises. They decide to look more into the possibility.

Meanwhile, Sakuya begs Tooma to help with the Christmas party. Noel says he’ll go to Paris to pick up a delicious cake.

While grocery shopping, Sakuya tells Kairi that he wanted to do something nice for his two senpai and the kids. He feels that Keiichiro and Tsukasa need something to cheer them up now. Kairi thinks that’s a nice gesture.

Just then, Gangler Samon Shakexutanthin begins rampaging nearby.

Samon steals everyone’s chicken so they can eat salmon instead. He stuffs everyone’s mouths with grilled salmon which both Kairi and Sakuya think is delicious. But the Gangler still has to be stopped.

Sakuya morphs and takes on Samon and Podamans. Samon says Japanese people should eat salmon for Christmas. Sakuya says chicken. They battle.

But Samon wins this round and he leaves.

Samon makes a public broadcast announcement that they will attack anyone who dares eat chicken. They’ve even raided local chicken stores.

Sakuya and Kairi go around to chicken stores and they’re all the same. Samon and the Podamans raid every single one of them.

Back at Jurer, Sakuya refuses to have a Christmas without chicken. It would be like New Year’s without mochi. Noel arrives with the French cake and says it would be like a seaside restaurant without ramen.

Noel tells Sakuya that Samon isn’t perceptive. He is using the Piece Une Faim de Loup to enhance his chicken smelling senses.

Sakuya has a favor to ask of Noel; go back to France to get chicken. Noel hops in his train again, has a GSPO France employee waiting with chicken in a cooler and returns back to Japan.

Serving chicken to the kids will just put them in danger from Samon though. But Sakuya has a plan and he turns to Tooma. Tooma understands and asks Sakuya, his aerobics senpai, to protect him.

They set up a roaster out in the open to lure Samon there.

Kairi and Umika are hiding nearby. Umika thinks Sakuya is such a nice guy to go through all this trouble for the kids and his senpai. Kairi teases Umika’s seeming to soften to Sakuya. She slams the suitcase shut on his hand as Samon arrives.

Sakuya thanks Tooma who takes the roasted chicken and runs. Sakuya and Noel morph to take on Samon.

But Samon presents some nice salmon recipes which also double as attacks on Sakuya and Noel in a frying pan and in salt.

Sakuya and Noel say that while salmon is delicious, chicken is for Christmas!

The Lups arrive to take Samon’s Piece when Sakuya and Noel are able to knock him down. Both Kairi and Noel go Super. And together, they all finish off Samon.

Goche fishes Samon’s safe away and embiggens him.

The Lups take it from here and they hop into Siren LupinKaiser and X Emperor Slash. Samon asks Goche for some extra help and she embiggens some Podamans armed with salmon blades. Samon tries some salmon cooking attacks, so the Lups get some help from Lupin Magnum.

They finish off the Podamans first before combining into Victory LupinKaiser and deliver a Good Striker Present from Santa-san finisher.

Later that night, Sakuya and the Lups excitedly serve up a delicious Christmas dinner for the childrens which includes both chicken and salmon. It’s a good combi.

Tsukasa arrives with a present. But Keiichiro is running a little late as he’s still back at the GSPO.

Keiichiro remembers the time, but as he scrolls down the list of missing people, he spots a familiar name. Yano Shouri.

He clicks through and finds that it is Kairi’s brother. He then gets an instant rush of memories and everything seems to fit together. Kairi’s brother, Umika’s school being near the location of the mass disappearances and Tooma’s fiance disappearing as well.

Then it just clicks. He can’t believe it.

Episode Thoughts

So this was definitely the big breather episode after the bombshell events of last week. And at first I was like What is even going on right now. It’s an episode about chicken for goodness sakes. But as the episode went along it was actually a pretty great episode.

First of all, I liked that they separated Keiichiro and Tsukasa from everything that was going on with the chicken. Obviously they can’t just ignore the fact that they’ve realized Satoru might have died. So having them continue to work on the lead that they found was a good idea.

That allowed the whole chicken side of the episode be able to continue without being some kind of emotional whiplash with all the heavier stuff that was going on back at the GSPO.

And the whole salmon vs chicken debate (I didn’t know there was one! Lol) reminds me of the Chick-fil-a commercials where the cows encourage people to eat more chicken (at Chick-fil-a) instead of beef burgers lol

It was nice to call back to Sota from episode 14 and use his connection with Sakuya for this Christmas episode. The plot of the episode itself is actually not bad at all. And in the more serious aspect of it, Sakuya wanting to do something nice for not only the children but his two senpais who he admires so much and can see that they are obviously in my sad place right now, is really a great gesture on his part.

I also kind of love this episode because the Lups were pretty awesome here. They were actually very nice, uncharacteristically so. lol. It was certainly a little out of character for them to be so nice with Kairi having no problem grocery shopping with Sakuya and Umika maybe starting to warm up to Sakuya and his crush and even Tooma having no problem helping his aerobics senpai. It was a little jarring, but in a great way. And it’s Christmas, after all.

And of course, the huge cliffhanger. Has Keiichiro actually pieced everything together? I must say, it was a very exciting moment. The fact that he was able to maybe get the biggest break ever thanks to his relationship with Kairi was pretty great. While I was hoping Tsukasa would be the first one to figure it all out (technically, she was), I think the way this final scene played out here really worked well. We’ll see what happens in two weeks.

So I guess after the events of the last two episodes maybe it really is finally time for the Lups to start warming up to the Pats and be so… Lup-y all the time. We’re obviously at a point in the series where it’s time to set up the eventual official team-up between the Lups and Pats. So this is a good episode to start and again, it’s Christmas after all!

Regarding the human disguises of Ganglers, kidnapping humans specifically to be used as disguises, but not killing them would make more sense for our little kids show. While I actually prefer the morbid, dark version of the story, I guess we’ll go with this instead. And that’s alright as long as they do it well.

Overall I very much enjoyed this episode. I might have gone into it with low expectations wondering what in the world is going to happen on a chicken episode. But it actually turned out very well. Maybe one of my favorites. And the big cliffhanger was pitch perfect.

4 thoughts on “Recap: Kaitou Sentai Lupinranger VS Keisatsu Sentai Patranger, Episode 45 – Looking Forward to Christmas

  1. That was very great Christmas episode. We can see Sakuya’s true nature, as he wants to cheer up both kids and his sempais. And indeed, Lups are also more warming up to Pats.
    But when Keiichiro fand info about Kairi’s brother, I was scared a little…
    I’m afraid, later it won’t be so cool…

  2. Samon didn’t thing wrong even Lupins didn’t want to deal with him right now.

    also LOL Noel go between french and japan by his train.

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