Kaiketsu Zubat: Episode Eighteen Review

Ken Hayakawa runs into love, jealously, and deception in Bubble Love in Peril! 

In previous episodes of Zubat, viewers have seen victims of all varieties. There were men, women, and the elderly. It’s only natural that episode 18 has children falling prey to The Black Whiskers Gang. I don’t know about others, but intentionally hurting innocent, adorable children is uncalled for and downright cowardly. Haven’t they heard the cliché “why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

The method of trying to kill these children is creative though. Usually, it’s very forward, but here they use flowerbeds and a donkey to emit their poisonous gas. It still doesn’t make it alright to target children, but their killing methods are improving, as sinister as that sounds.

While doing his little dance with the assassin, killer person, Hayakawa does his special American Football skill he called the Mole Kick. It wasn’t actually a kick though. He used his hands to swat the football into the ground only to have it come back and attack Mr. Football. Really, his attack should have been called the Mole Swat or something.

When Hayakawa says the leader of The Black Whiskers Gang is secretive and then shortly after Mr. Kurisu makes an appearance, I knew right away he was the leader. It wasn’t that hard. The gas was in the flowerbed and the flowers were supposedly planted by Kurisu; connections anyone? Although I do have to say, I didn’t expect Shirano to actually be the person who planted the flowers.

This episode also seems to focus on making Shirano look bad. I don’t mean to use so many clichés but, “It’s the boy who cried wolf” and “It’s jealousy rearing its ugly head.” I could go on, but I think I made my point. And, of course when Shirano gets hurt, he asks Hayakawa to leave and get him water only to be gone when Hayakawa returns. It’s not very original, but he has people to save. He gets kidnapped and then put in a cave that has water rushing in, so what does he do? He starts playing with bubbles. I guess that’s okay when it was the bubbles that got him found.

Finally, we get to see Zubat struggle and get his butt kicked before winning, which is a new twist to a familiar tale, but not enough to throw loads of compliments at it. It was a typical Zubat episode, but I expected nothing less. I’ve learned not to get my hopes up; you may be surprised one episode, but disappointed the next.

Every Wednesday The Tokusatsu Network staff members review every episode of a tokusatsu series. To see previous episode reviews, visit our Reviews page.