This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. Find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
This is the review of Ultraman Zet Episode 4, which I'm calling Ultra Charged, and
I have a lot of topics this episode, and I'm gonna try to speak about them all very quickly
so that the runtime of this episode is closer to 10 minutes than it is closer to
15 or 20 minutes, because I'd like to keep the episodes a little bit shorter. Before I go on,
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yeah, without further ado, I will go into talking about
Ultraman Z Episode 4, which features collectible kaiju parts, spinning straw,
into gold, and monster metals, so here we go.
I find it interesting that coming from a hard sci-fi or science fiction
perspective, you had budget cuts from the last episode and talking about
securing budget to make things better, and then here in this episode you have Yuka lamenting
Tobacco that the higher-ups, whoever the brass are, over
storage, refused to follow her designs specifically, and therefore they used a bunch of different manufacturers
to make Windham, and it makes Windham run less efficiently and take five?
No, I think it's four days total to charge its batteries for five minutes of active duty, which is crazy.
However, it is reasonable that this sort of thing would happen because I come from the United States of America, and here, good old Uncle Sam
loves his war machines and
Congress people who, I think, yeah, Congress is the whole thing, it's both House and Senate, anyway, yeah,
Congress people will make sure and fight for them to have bits of a weapon, its platform, or
you know, a plane or a tank or whatever built in their city or their state, so their constituents will be happy that they got them,
you know, a job building weapons in their area, and
basically because it's so
messy and you have people who work for weapons factories going into the government, you have people who work for the government going to
weapons factories, which you could call that a conflict of interest, I think, very fairly.
They spread it all around and they have, I would think, different companies in different states that all contribute
parts to our war machines here
that are used by the US military, and I wonder if there's maybe a little something, I think that's a realistic depiction basically in
in a set of what goes on with the military industrial complex or weapons that are created, and I just found that to be kind of curious.
All right, moving on. Not-so-nocturnal Telsadon or Teleston, I found it interesting that Teleston was
active during the day. I thought it was gonna have a larger plot relevance,
but really it just seems like its fire sack or its, you know, its engine, its Kaiju engine is the thing that is keeping it active
during the day, even though it's a nocturnal creature and
they had to overcome it, and that's about it.
So I thought I was gonna turn into something really cool, and it was just kind of a small thing. It wasn't bad.
It just, it didn't go the way I wanted it to. Moving on.
Blinking Kaiju. I love the fact that it is Teleston, right? It's not Tesladon. That's a different one.
Tel-Tesladon is, oh never mind, that's Musk. Anyway,
Teleston blinks, and I love it when the Kaiju blink. Not all of them blink in the show so far, but the ones that do, it's great.
In the original Ultraman from 62, in the first episode you had Bemular, or Bemler.
He did not blink, but a couple episodes later, Nieronga blinked, and Nieronga's horn is a thing that's active in this episode and plays a big part in it.
So I'm gonna come back to that in a minute or so.
Let's see, next topic. Oh, Yuka's Kaiju collectibles. Ah!
It is weird and gross and strange and interesting that Yuka collects Kaiju parts, and she was all excited about it.
Yuka collects Kaiju parts, and she was all excited to get Teleston skin samples from, what was it, from Windom's fingers?
That was gross. And again, fun.
And it really fits this vibe that she has of being like a mad scientist but not an evil one.
And yeah, it's very interesting. It's very interesting how they define or portray her character,
and what she does with that and what that means for her character, and it's just kind of cool.
Kind of cool, kind of weird, but you know, it's memorable for sure.
This lady loves Kaiju to the point that she's collecting their corpse parts. That's nasty. Nasty business.
Anyway, I love when she goes to Bako and he gives her, like, he shows her that he's reusing a grate from a duct cover or vent cover or something from,
from your boy Sevenger, and how he's repurposing this thing into something, you know, bigger, which that ties into my theme of spinning straw into gold,
which is a reference to Rumpelstiltskin. But what I'm saying is he's taking something that could have been trash
and he's giving it a purpose and using it for something it wasn't originally designed for, and that is something that is,
I don't know if it's a theme in the episode, but it's definitely a subject, an idea covered in this episode
and kind of broadly by the fact that we've got your boy, so I love Bako giving that wisdom over,
and it's just, it's so cool, and it was such a cool scene, and it was such a, it's like, there were no Kaiju in it, you know?
But it was still a really cool scene and, like, it shows the strength of the storytelling here,
that they can just tell stories about these people and their struggles, and it's awesome.
But anyway, speaking of, you know, spinning straw to gold, Kaburagi takes corpse parts kind of like Yuka,
which I never realized before that there's such a, you know, a parallel between the two of them,
and he uses them and I guess turns them into Ultra Metals and, like, whatever that green goo is that he uses in his machinery,
and yeah, that's kind of interesting, but he has his own Zetriser, which I don't think I had noticed that before.
I know he had, like, a weird gadget or two, but I don't remember seeing him with a Zetriser specifically,
or maybe just the angle on it looked weird, so I didn't quite recognize it,
and he's got his own little door into Z-Space or Ultra Space or whatever it's called that he gets to go through,
and he does his experiments in his, you know, forging of the Kaiju parts into, you know, the metals,
which, you know, like I said, very interesting, and I think it's kind of odd,
like, is it because he has a Zetriser that he's able to enter that space,
and is it Ultra Space or is it, you know, Dark Space or Monster Space or something,
because I'm pretty sure they have something like that, you know, an antithesis, an antithetical, you know, force in space,
as, you know, because there's the Ultra One, there's the non-Ultra One, or whatever, which is, I think, just darkness.
Sorry, I'm not super familiar with Ultraman, so I'm inelegantly sharing that idea.
So, Naronga's Horn is the thing that's used to accelerate the power or the charging of Windom, which is cool.
It also cooks the rice pudding or whatever it is that Haruki has in Yooka's fridge, and that's just funny.
Like, it's funny there. It's cool that it's a callback to a couple episodes, or, you know, the previous episode, I guess,
where she put the horn in there, and it's just very interesting storytelling because it's layered,
and I wonder if what they did for different characters is say,
all right, we're going to have all these things at play with all these different characters,
and just kind of said, like, we're going to have these five things happen with this character,
and we're going to sprinkle them throughout and then have them develop over the course of episodes
so that there's something, like, variety in each episode, but it also is like this layered sort of storytelling
where there's this thread you can follow for each character that has these things going on,
because I think that's really cool. So it's cool, like, mechanically in the show,
but it's also cool for the actual storytelling of the show, and I really appreciate that.
Kaburagi coming into the fight and adding the frills from the... what is it? Whatever.
I don't know what it's called, but the Godzilla knockoff Kaiju that they have was really cool.
And I'm just, you know, I'm very curious about what the plot is and what the plan is going through again.
I'm having a hard time remembering exactly how Kaburagi functions.
You know, obviously he's an antagonistic force, but, you know, how and to what purpose and to what end,
and how does all his little things that he's doing achieve that?
It's interesting because, you know, I said play, he's kind of messing with things and seeing how they work,
which is kind of what people or kids do when they play, right?
So a couple things. Calling out the Ultra Fusion mechanic. Oh, is it Demarit? Ah, yes.
I will get back to that in a few moments.
So when Zet tells Haruki that they need more speed, he does it in the most unnatural toy advertisement way he possibly could.
I think the dialogue is... the dialogue does not need to be slaved to the toy ad,
because all he had to say that would sound much better is, Haruki, we need more speed.
He could even say, let's switch to Alpha Edge and then show Haruki using the new metal to switch to,
or, you know, that was last episode, using the metals and the riser to switch forms.
That sells the toy right there. The visuals sell the toy and Haruki, you know, yelling whatever he yells for that.
And Burning Scarlet's for Beta Smash. I don't remember the other guys and their call-outs.
But, I mean, just doing the transformation sequence, I think, is enough visually to make it look cool and look appealing
and to have somebody want that. I mean, not to mention things that they're going to do later in the show.
They've got three or four Zet risers total that appear in the show, and I think that's enough. I think that's definitely enough.
Just saying Ultra Fusion doesn't make sense because they're already fused. And honestly, it takes me out of it for a moment,
because I think, well, what does he mean, Ultra Fusion? Are they doing something new?
No, they're not doing something new. They're just doing what they've always done. So it just detracts from me.
Yoko is flat on her back in Windom, and she is wanting to... she's desperate to help Zet and Haruki.
She doesn't know it's Haruki yet. So she does this cool thing with the air jets that Windom has all over his body.
And from laying flat on her back in the mech, basically the air pushes out of all the different ports,
most at the shoulder, neck, and head, and then diminishing from there on down to the heels.
And basically Windom rises by hinging on his heels or its heels until she's at a standing position,
then she runs off and joins in the fight. That was cool. It was a really cool visual flourish,
and it was a lot of fun. And yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
And then the last thing is the monster medals, which in another episode or two,
I have something I want to say about the Zetriser itself and the whole medals thing,
but I'm going to hold it off for now and just say it's interesting to me. Like I was talking earlier,
there's the Ultra medals, there's the Land of Light, and then opposing that is the Land of...
I don't know if there's an actual Land of Darkness somewhere, if there's M78 is the Land of Light and M87,
or 8-7M is the Land of Darkness or something like that. But that could be the case.
And there is this dark force using the Zetriser in... what's this guy's name? Kaburagi.
And obviously he's the one forging the monster medals. And I guess if there are Ultra medals,
it stands to reason that there would be monster medals to counter them as a universal balance type idea.
And it makes me wonder just from, again, this show isn't hard sci-fi, but it has hard sci-fi elements in it.
What is the function of an Ultra medal that's not being utilized?
And how do you get the essence of an Ultra into an Ultra medal?
And then I guess the same question for a monster medal. What is that? What is the function of that?
I don't know. It doesn't really matter because it's a cool thing for the toys and for the show.
And it makes better Kaiju or different Kaiju. I guess it's really the same Kaiju.
They're just recycling them for previous things, you know? Anyway.
So, yeah, that's all my thoughts for this episode of Zet. I'm looking forward to the next couple.
I'm a little frustrated that they're releasing them in such rapid succession,
but they're making way for Ultraman Blazer, which I suggest that you watch
and you look at my first thoughts on the preview of it,
because I also talked about the context of the Zet dub as well,
because the two things exist in the context of each other and it makes sense. Just go listen to it.
I hope you enjoyed that. Go to MJMunoz.com to leave any questions, comments, or other feedback you might have.
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