Dragon Knight Episode #16: "The Hero of Gramercy Heights"
 

Chris is incapacitated, both from his asthma and from disbelief that Xaviax was able to deceive him so easily. Maya tries talking to him, but it's amidst a new monster popping up and causing trouble for both Kit and Len. Will Chris rise to the challenge and help his new friends?

It was an okay return. Not much meat to the plot, but it was nice to see a Rider besides Dragon Knight and Wing Knight get the spotlight. Though, I suppose that wasn't possible before, given all the Riders up to Sting have been evil... I also greatly enjoyed the fight choreography for the padding of Sting's story. I didn't even notice the Raia suit had a tail coming out from the back of the helmet. Add to that another sprinkling of JTC, and we've got a winner.

Could have done without Len trying desperately to be cool by donning the shades and reflecting lasers off of his Advent Deck, though...

I think the laser deflection is a great testament as to the durability of the advent deck. It also served as a more inventive special effects shot for the digital team to handle, as opposed to the typical stunt work.

Not a whole lot of thought involved to this episode, but it revealed one thing: Sting's deck did in fact have a contract card.

Uh... all the decks have contract cards. Remember when Kit first used the Advent Deck? You don't have access to your beast's power without forming a contract, and with no contract, no Final Vent, which Sting already used in his fight with Wing Knight.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring back to a thread started by PRangerX called "Why was Kit's Deck the only one without a Contract?" which seemed to infer that Kit's deck was the only without a contract beast in tact. This episode showed that that was not the case, and that Sting had to actually contract with the creature.

However, this still leaves one nagging inconsistency, Kit began as a Blank Knight, with no Advent Cards except "Ride Saber", and no emblem on his Deck. However, when we see Chris flipping through the cards before he contracts the deck has an emblem of a manta ray, and "swing vent" is in the deck. This seems to indicate that rather than starting out as a Blank Knight, the deck already featured the rather ugly Manta Ray motiff (just my oppinion of Sting, don't post angry comments). Of course, I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know, I'm just clarifying my last post.

On a side note, I found the robot guard beast to be one of the better tailored creatures on the show. At least not as ridiculous as the creatures that shoot rockets out their chests.

Going back to that thread, I think what he was referring to was that the dragon seemed to be a bonus of that Advent Deck rather than a necessity, as you also just pointed out. Thus far, Kit's deck has a lot of anomalies not present with the stories of the other Kamen Riders.

All of the Riders had to merge with their beasts before they could use the Advent Decks, thus why Len was dead set against Kit merging with the dragon. There was still an opportunity for him to rid himself of the power before that point, same as Xaviax pointed out to Chris.

Well it is a children's show, and as such a few nagging inconstants are acceptable. Perhaps they'll tie up the loose ends later. Or perhaps, as previously posted in the aforementioned thread, it was just a ploy to sell another action figure (which many of us will undoubtedly end up buying:))

'The Hero Of Gramercy Hights' is a good episode. We saw how Xaviax made Chris feel like a hero. This guy is smooth. I hope that he'll get himself killed by the end of this series.

I liked how this episode let us know about Sting's time working for Xaviax. It showed us things from his prespective and went into more detail about how Xaviax tricked him. It was interesting to see the three good Riders finally all on the same side.

I do think it was kind of strange how Chris suddenly didn't want to help Kit and Len. I'm refering to the end of "The Many Faces of Xaviax". It just felt out of left field. But at least this episode gave us reasons why he thought he couldn't help them.