Recap: Kamen Rider Geats, Episode 49 – Daybreak I : Here Comes The Highlight! + Season Thoughts

After “Tsumuri” pulls the trigger, we are seemingly taken to another world. One where the events of the last 48 episodes did not happen. Keiwa and Sara are at the soba shop, Neon is doing a livestream and Michinaga is back working at a construction site.

Ziin heads to a temple and approaches a small shrine where he greets Ace. Tsumuri welcomes him and he thanks her for keeping this place safe. She says the world may have forgotten Ace, but she does not want to. She places some flowers at the shrine and Ziin says he too will not forget Ace.

Tsumuri flashes back to the rainsoaked moment “she” shot Ace. Actually, it was darkTsumuri who entered her body and influenced her into shooting him. darkTsumuri mocks Tsumuri for being so easily manipulated.

Sueru says Ace will be reborn into the new world, but he will no longer be Geats. He and darkTsumuri leave to take care of the others.

Tsumuri kneels by Ace’s lifeless body and cries. But Ace suddenly appears to her in a vision. He tells his nee-san not to cry and says he was prepared for this moment.

Ace thanks his older sister for everything and tells her he must get going now.

Keiwa, Neon, Win and Daichi are all shocked when darkTsumuri makes the announcement that Ace has fallen. But the game will proceed and all Riders are to continue fighting until they are themselves eliminated.

Sueru finds Keiwa and Neon who both quickly henshin and they battle. But neither of them is able to have an answer to Sueru’s time controlling power. Michinaga comes storming in, but Sueru uses his power to return the three of them to a time when they had no Drivers. They are forced to dehenshin.

In the present day, Ziin says it is all thanks to Ace that their world is safe now. But Tsumuri corrects him and says the wishes and desires of Keiwa, Neon and Michinaga also deserve to be acknowledged and appreciated.

Though struggling against Sueru, Keiwa, Neon and Michinaga all harden their resolve. They agree that dreams are what help strengthen humans and they’ve learned that through being Kamen Riders. That’s why their wishes will never die.

They all remember Ace and it is at that moment that Ace shows himself to them. The three are shocked when Ace speeds in on his bike. Sueru does not understand since Ace should be dead.

Ace says he is physically dead, but he has since become a god. He explains that he prepared for this moment back when he made a promise to his mother. In order to create a happy world, he needed to become a god. And so here he is.

Ace and Sueru battle. Ace grants the others’ wish and gives them their Drivers back. Keiwa, Neon and Michinaga henshin.

An indignant Sueru tries fighting off the four. But their dreams and desires are just too strong. Ace’s kamisama powers help too. And with a Boost IX Victory finisher, Sueru is engulfed in a huge explosion.

Sueru thinks he’s survived, but Ace bursts out from inside his body to finish him off for good.

Ace signals the start of the new world where everyone can be happy. Ziin and Daichi watch as the Game Masters disappear and the world begins to rebuild. A frantic Samasu demands darkTsumuri explain what’s happening. But Girori tells her the audience has decided it’s time for them to fade away. The future of this era, Girori proclaims, is now in the hands of the people who live it.

Ace speaks with Keiwa, Neon and Michinaga. This new world will not put a limit on happiness. Happiness is only limited by the lengths of your own dreams and wishes and desires. This is the new world they live in and they must ensure themselves that they can find that happiness.

Keiwa, Neon and Michinaga want Ace to be happy with them. But he says they are better off forgetting him. He is a kitsune, after all.

Keiwa, Neon and Michinaga watch as Ace disappears.

Ziin is amused that Ace really did become a kamisama. Anyway, he tells Tsumuri that a new DGP whose mission will be to support people’s desire for happiness with no deadly cost is about to start up. He asks if she would be a Navigator again and she says sure.

After Ziin leaves, Tsumuri looks at the tablets of wishes others have left at the shrine. She sincerely hopes they all come true. And they seemingly have already.

Win has a new punk band.

Daichi wishes for a peaceful human-Jyamato co-existence.

Michinaga wished for delicious meat.

Sara has lots of wishes.

Neon has found her prince charming in Kyuun.

Keiwa enjoys world peace.

Later, Ace enjoys reading all the wishes on the tablets. He says they will all come true as long as you continue dreaming and reaching for them.

Ace is sure this world has what it takes to be filled with happiness.

Episode Thoughts + Season Thoughts

So, what in the world did I just watch?!

And I guess I’m referring to both the finale and the season as a whole. Lol

We’ll get to the season thoughts in a bit. But first to the finale. It really felt like I was watching the final episode to a completely different season. I was like, yes, these are the same characters I’ve been watching for 49 episodes. And yet, it felt like someone took the final episode of the Geats we actually got for the past year and replaced it with an alternate universe Geats finale. You know?

I mean, I guess it fits with the season’s world rebuilding aspect. Just taking apart worlds and timelines and histories and putting them back together again as one see’s fit. Lol. I dunno. But it really did feel so detached from the very bumpy ride this past year has been.

The sort of aspirational, uplifting feeling and message of the finale just doesn’t connect to the rest of the series for me. It felt very forced and disconnected.

Now, on its own, if I were to ignore the rest of the season, I would say I actually liked the finale. I quite like the aspirational, uplifting, dreamy, sentimental aura of this final episode. It’s just too bad it didn’t have a season’s worth of episodes to properly lead up to it and provide the necessary depth to support such a finale.

I’ve been meaning to watch the Geats/Revice movie. But I guess my lingering disappointment with Revice and my conflicted feelings about Geats keeps making me hold off on actually doing it. So I had no idea where the ending song in this final episode came from before I had to Shazam it and found out it was from the movie.

I haven't watched the Kamen Rider Geats/Revice movie yet. So I had no idea where the finale ending song was from. But as soon as "Change My Future" by Koda Kumi started playing, it almost washed away all the meh/negative feelings I had for the season. What a wonderful song. pic.twitter.com/gO8K39kcO9

— DryedMangoez (@dryedmangoez) August 27, 2023

Amazing song! “Change My Future” by Koda Kumi perfectly suits the vibe this episode was laying out. And for a couple of minutes, it softened my feelings for this season and made me actually look forward to watching the movie all of a sudden. The song itself gave me the same feelings I had when I first heard Da-ICE’s “Promise” at the end of Kamen Rider Beyond Generations. (A movie that despite featuring two of my least favorite seasons, I actually enjoyed.)

So by the end of the episode, save for the cameo by our new friend coming next week, I felt as much at peace as Keiwa wished for the world. Very strange, yet somehow comforted by the almost absurdly contrived epilogues of our main characters lol

Season Thoughts

Which brings us to the season as a whole. I guess my biggest gripe is the way the season treated its characters. The on paper premises for each character, both at the start of the season and now at the end, are really solid actually. And I’m referring only to our core four. Or I guess core five, if we were to include Tsumuri. And she does deserve it at the end of day.

But therein lies the problem too. Tsumuri is presented as an integral part to the overall story. Not just to the overarching plot of the DGP, but also with the supposed main plot thread for our title hero Ace. Yet, during most of the season, she was presented more like the typical robot sidekick you’d see on a Sentai or Kamen Rider season. One that can disappear for long stretches of time and it made no difference to whatever else was happening. Then in this last maybe third of the season, it almost felt like the show dumped the weight of a remade world on her shoulders.

In one episode, she is an important character on her own merits. In the next, she is a plot device for some random new twist in the story or to help Ace build up some depth for his own character. It would be a back and forth all the way to this final episode.

And it’s the kind of dynamic that also held back the rest of the main characters and the other 54 supporting characters that would pop up during the course of the season.

Instead of the characters’ own stories and development steadily moving forward through the season, they’d instead stop and start and sometimes even get rewritten. At least, that’s what it felt like.

Stories about wanting justice and world peace or avenging a bro’s death or searching for love and family; Very basic, but valid jumping off points for any character to have an interesting and exciting 50 episode journey. Yet somehow Geats found ways to hold the characters back. Maybe even creatively so.

Instead of Ace, Keiwa, Neon, Michinaga and Tsumuri feeling like a ragtag group of young dreamers banding together to find their happiness and helps others find theirs like this final episode was trying to gaslight (did I use that right?) us into believing, we got them mostly as loosely connected individuals with a business-like relationship. Instead of this deadly game bringing them together into some #OT5-worthy bond, they were mired in a plot-driven roller coaster

Squid Game: Sunday Morning Edition?

Which might be okay if it actually had a cohesive plot.

So back when the season first premiered, it was said that the story would be inspired by Fortnite and Apex Legends. Heck if I know what that meant. Lol. But almost immediately, I was able to make out similarities to Netflix’s breakout K-drama Squid Game instead.

I definitely think Geats took some inspiration from Squid Game as well as The Most Dangerous Game too even. Having people fighting each other to the death for the entertainment of others is certainly a premise that can drive some good story. Zyuohger tried to do it, but certain factors in that season sabotaged any sincere attempt at good story there.

For Geats though, a Sunday morning-safe Squid Game would’ve been an interesting Kamen Rider season.

And I thought that’s what the season would end up being about. Having our core four Riders continually fighting through “seasons” of the DGP to have their dreams and desires come true. Along the way, we’d meet other “players of the week” who would then have their own stories that would in turn help flesh out our core four’s own season-long journeys.

But nope. We didn’t get any of that. I assumed we’d get different winners throughout the season. The novelty of a new “world” being made after each season was something I was looking forward to. But we didn’t get that either.

Instead, it was all about Ace being an ace. He’s the perpetual winner who has thought of anything and everything throughout the centuries. And that’s all in order to find the mama that abandoned him. Welp, he did end up finding her, but then somehow became a throwaway plot point.

Anyway, that’s just one of the many awkwardly executed plot points throughout the season. Unlike how other seasons may like to pull things out of their ass thin air, Geats did the interesting thing of introducing an idea then throwing it into a drawer until they remembered it was there and pulled it out again. That applies to general overall plot points as well as to specific character pieces too.

The season seemed to want to make things more complicated than they needed to be. All the pieces were there. But the show didn’t seem to know what to do with them.

Keep it Simple

Why not just simply focus on one theme. That is, looking at what it is that truly makes people happy. And how people’s dreams and desires help them find and achieve that happiness.

When those dreams and desires are corrupted? People will resort to a deadly Squid Game… er, Desire Grand Prix to make them a reality.

And what is the Desire Grand Prix? It’s just a reality show created by depraved maniacal future people who get a rise out of seeing people kill each other while also depriving others of their right to dream and be happy.

Enter our core four Ace, Keiwa, Neon and Michinaga who each have something they are dreaming of or wishing for. All worthy and noble desires initially, but circumstances drive them to desperately want them to come true. Yet along the way, they learn what it truly means to be happy, while also taking on the heroic responsibility of defending everyone’s right to be happy as well.

And then Tsumuri, who is created without the capacity for dreaming or desiring or being happy. Yet learns of how to do that thanks to her four new friends.

Basically, you control your own future and destiny. You have the power to make those dreams and desires a reality. Not future people. Not a reality show. You! And with the help of your loved ones as well. Family. Friends.

*start playing “Change My Future” by Koda Kumi*

I would have loved to have watched that version of Geats.

Or did I actually accurately describe Geats as it aired the last 49 episodes and it all went over my head? lol It’s very possible. But for the last year, I didn’t feel it. I didn’t get the feels I want to have and look for when watching a Kamen Rider or Sentai season. It just didn’t connect or resonate with me.

And Yet…

I’m not mad at it. It is a very strange season. Maybe it’s apathy? Maybe it’s the season coming after Saber and Revice, two seasons I have very strongly negative feelings for. But for all this season’s faults, I don’t hate it or even feel strongly negative about it. Disappointed, sure. But not frustratingly so.

That doesn’t mean I like or even largely enjoyed the season. And it is surely going to be placed very low on my updated season rankings. But somehow, even if it doesn’t have the same highs like Revice did early in its run, I will still end up placing Geats above it in those rankings.

Aside from the lack of strong feelings one way or the other for the season, I also accepted around the 30s that there would likely be nothing the season could do from then until the finale that would change my mind. And that goes either way again. I decided nothing Geats could possibly do from the mid-30s to the final episode would make me dislike it any more. Nor could it do anything to redeem its shortcomings either.

(Though Kazuto Mokudai and Ryuga Sato dancing to TWICE on TikTok with King-Ohger‘s Yuzuki Hirakawa almost did redeem the entire season for me lolol:)

Wait a minute. How did this TikTok of Kazuto Mokudai, Ryuga Sato & Yuzuki Hirakawa as Michinaga, Keiwa & Rita dancing to TWICE Hare Hare just redeem all of Kamen Rider Geats for me? I love it. 😊
Any other toku and K-pop fans out there? Isn't it fun when the 2 worlds collide? lol pic.twitter.com/2TpUhDVp2C

— DryedMangoez (@dryedmangoez) August 2, 2023

(And again, Koda Kumi’s “Change My Future” closing out the season also left me feeling quite comforted and warm. Lol)

Seriously though, deciding to just hop along for the ride in the mid-30s and not wish (or desire Grand Prix!!!!) for anything more than the season landing safely in the end helped to reel in my expectations and stop me from feeling the need to nitpick and overanalyze every little thing about the season.

There’s of course a lot of fun in being able to dig deeper into a season. Wanting to find profound messages or reveling in wonderful character joys and crying over emotional drama. But perhaps just hopping along for the ride and enjoying the mildly nice-looking view is also an experience worth having too.

And I guess that’s what Geats will ultimately be for me. I don’t hate it. I definitely don’t love it. It could have been something quite great. But unfortunately it wasn’t. And that’s somehow alright.

Of course, regardless of how I feel about the season, congratulations are still deserved for the cast and crew of the show for safely completing production and for the work they put in this past year.