Really SRS Business: A Solbrain Review
The result was a show that tried to amp up the budget and details and special effects thrills of the previous show while injecting a heavier dose of procedural drama and emotional conflicts into its storytelling. A show that was focused on heroes don't just save lives, but save souls as well. That show is Super Rescue Solbrain, and it's a prime example of just how tricky that sequel dilemma can be.
The finale of Winspector left Commander Shunsuke Masaki pondering a weakness with Winspector as a team: They save human lives all the time, but often left the task of saving people's hearts (or, depending on your other translations of the Japanese word "kokoro", their souls and brains) vulnerable to corruption and despair. Now dedicated to fighting crime by instilling compassion and a heavier focus on justice, his newly developed Super Rescue Solbrain team battles more dangerous foes and handles even greater peril than before. Lead by captain Daiki Nishio, aka SolBraver, and backed up by Reiko Higuchi/SolJeanne, Jun Masuda, and their robotic companion SolDozer, this new squad balances out their high-tech emergency response with a heavier focus on investigation and drama than Winspector originally presented.
Whereas Winspector was often focused on fast paced action and crimebusting with Ryouma and co, Solbrain slows the pace down as Daiki often uses his detective chops to interrogate, investigate and peer into the lives of these troubled perps in order to plead for them to repent and change their ways before he ends up slapping the cuffs on them at the end of the day. Solbrain as a team tends to save the in-suit combat and stunts until the very end, and leading to a greater focus on out-of-armor car chases, fist fights and manhunts to deal with whatever hapless foe ends up causing the umpteenth abandoned warehouse fire for the gang to extinguish before the credits roll. The criminals themselves are often faced with moral woes and morally grey motives for their actions. Figures whose lives were ruined by corrupt corporations, ex-cops turned hitmen after seeing rampant police brutality, scientists wishing to make amends for causing a loved one's death - the Solbrain felon-of-the-week tends to get their conscience tugged at by Daiki or Masaki before the action really gets going. There isn't always a happy ending this time around, either: Civilians die, victims suffer emotionally, and it's not always a clear-cut victory for the SRS even when they've done their duty. There's some more nuance than the previous year's show for sure.
And that action comes with a far higher budget all around, with several ambitious ideas to boot. Explosions are bigger, the destruction and rubble are more plentiful, and there's fire a-plenty when the last 3 minutes of an episode kick in.
The suits this time are much more detailed and have a realistic touch to them with their breathing apparatuses, intricate designs and more mechanical feel. SolBraver and his tools in particular really could be seen as futuristic rescue gear, and it's a gorgeous evolution of what was in Winspector a year prior. The show also experiments with more complex miniatures in its first half by providing Solbrain with the massive land/air rescue mothership Solid States I, an impressive miniature packed with water cannons, flashing lights, and even smaller compartments to launch out SRS's cars in some fantastic shots. There's even some impressive early 90's CGI for SolDozer's transformation into vehicle mode. It's clear that Toei wanted to make this show even bigger and better than what came before.
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| Get used to this shot, you're gonna see it a lot for 25 episodes. |
Unfortunately, all this extra polish and drama often ended up making Solbrain a more muddled viewing for me. It starts out strong enough, hitting for the fences with an explosive opener about a man-made UFO looming over Tokyo as Daiki and Reiko stop a berserk cybernetic brain from taking over a young boy's body (I'm serious), but from there the show's plots hit me with a real sense of deja vu. Plots about bunging elderly arsonists duped into crime, mad scientists infecting people with bacteria to clone their identities across other humans, and Daiki being framed for murder by a massive dream hypnosis scheme should be thrilling, but their execution left them feeling like distinctly average Winspector episodes. That slower pacing made many of these tales blend together, which wasn't helped by the show's weird obsession with recycling certain plot points several times across the entire show (there's a bizarrely high amount of Solbrain episodes that can be summarized as 'someone puts on a headset to get cool powers, and then they regret it). It's fine! It's perfectly okay! But it just felt like more Winspector episodes. Like recycled or scrapped plots dug back up. Going from that show to this was hitting me with burnout which only got worse and worse even to the end, but it was at its peak by the midway point of the series.
It doesn't help when the higher budget ended up backfiring on the show as well: The heavier suits made it harder to do impressive choreography compared to Winspector, so the rescue scenes tend to be clunkier and far more repetitive when the suits cannot move nearly as much. The SS-I sequences repeat the same footage constantly, and you slowly see it phased out of the program the further on it went. SolDozer's CGI, while cool, was rarely used after a handful of episodes. And almost every rescue scene ends up being "Some girders fall, some fire is there, we're done." It looks impressive, but it feels less spirited. Indeed, "tired" is an unfortunately apt descriptor for the underlying vibe of the show. Fine, but tired. And that's not something I'd want in my tokusatsu.
Adding to this is the fact that, compared to the previous show, Solbrain has a poor sense of balancing out the cast and fleshing them out that riddles the first half of the series.
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| I'm still thinking about Daiki's all-white summer outfit. Thing is a stain magnet. |
Daiki is a fine protagonist in my book. He's caring and empathetic, a calmer force compared to Ryouma's more hands-on tactics in the prior show. Koichi Nakayama is a fantastic lead, keeping a cool head and delivering "justice will prevail" spiels to felons with gusto between shootouts and suit-up scenes. But he's also the only one in the cast who I can truly say I remember. Compared to Junko in the previous series, Reiko is absolutely wasted as female lead: Her character tends to be stuck in the background, and her appearances as SolJeanne can typically be summed up as "the walking oxygen mask dispenser." Jun, the main lead on the show without any armor to speak of, starts out as a hothead who can handle his own in combat and even gets a few focus episodes to himself, but without any way of holding his own compared to the rest of the team he has a tendency to feel out of place when everything heats up.
SolDozer is barely a character, and one who I think the staff was struggling to use. Since the suit is so bulky and could barely move around, he seldom gets much focus and often is tucked away until he has to extinguish some fires or bust through a wall. The rare times he gets a focus episode is with the even lesser utilized Kamekichi, the robotics expert with Solbrain and a clunky comic relief character at that. It's a shame, too, when there's something adorably slow and clumsy about his personality that I know they were trying to harness. Instead, he and Reiko both feel less like teammates and more like glorified extras in their own show compared to the immense focus on Daiki throughout the series.
At the very least, Commander Masaki is still as charismatic and confident as ever. Miyauchi doesn't miss a beat with this show as the connective thread between Winspector and Solbrain for its first half of the show, and he's still there to provide guidance and support to the crew. He even gets one of the absolute best episodes of the show near the end, centering on a tale of political corruption and revenge that gives our boy an entire shootout and hand-to-hand combat sequence that had me hooting and hollering start to finish.
I think it's safe to say that even the audience at home wasn't as thrilled with this lack of real evolution on the show, as midway through we start to see some significant changes in an effort to breathe some more excitement into the series. The first of these big shifts is in the form of a three-part Winspector crossover to promote the re-release of WSP's Gigastreamer toy. Ryouma, Bikel and Walter all come back in a story about a shape-shifting human experiment victim set to explode from a dangerous bomb inside of him. While Winspector and Solbrain lead writer Noboru Sugimura penned this exciting team-up between Rescue Police Squads, it almost feels out of character in making Ryouma the cold, blunt foil to Daiki's warm heart. The plot centers around Daiki's reluctance to kill their culprit before he can explode, whereas Ryouma refuses to hesitate on planning to murder a seemingly innocent man. The end of this story actually was a solidly somber message about political ambitions and the need to keep fighting onwards. But this is also where the show starts to step out of its comfort zone and experiment with some wilder plots and fresh concepts.
You get some bonkers summer episodes, including one that features SolDozer falling in love with a self-aware Volkswagen Beetle that murders its creators' killers (leading Dozer to struggle with bringing a car to justice), the absolutely insane case of a haunted Nazi painting being used to try and resurrect the Third Reich while murdering several people (yes I am serious, it actually made my jaw drop watching it), and even a tragic episode about an ex-NYPD cop turned guilt-ridden hitman after witnessing his fellow officers assault a black suspect (played by...a Japanese man in blackface...I didn't say it was perfect), but you also get the two biggest additions to the cast: An old friend, and a recurring enemy.
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| An old friend with a far-too-tiny head... |
Episodes 34 and 35 introduce the handy dandy new Pile Tornado weapon, and with it the return of Ryouma once more. This time around he's on duty from Interpol and now decked out in his new Knight Fire armor (a recolored SolBraver suit with a new head) to back Solbrain up intermittently until the series end in order to stop a new maniacal foe by the name of Ryuichi Takaoka, a man hellbent on bringing Solbrain to their knees.
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| "High Gun?" "High Gun!" |
Ryouma's presence is a welcome one by this point, spicing the show up by having him show up on several occasions as a special guest to help Daiki save the day and handle crimes outside of their regular jurisdiction. He's back in character and never outstays his welcome (on the contrary, sometimes he hilariously only shows up at the very last minute). It finally makes for shootouts and fights that don't just resort to SolBraver whipping out his Cerberus Delta tool and instead gives us some fun chemistry between himself, Daiki, and Masaki. While his return was a clear ratings grab, it gives us some plots leaning towards his maturity and advise to Daiki now and then, and there's no denying the suit itself is a slick recolor. While this also leads to most episode climaxes ditching SS-I and further neglecting Jeanne and Dozer, there's at least a bit more variety again with Knight Fire on the case.
Takaoka, on the other hand, is a truly fantastic antagonist throughout the remainder of the show. A man who was robbed of everything, even nearly dying in a family suicide after his father's business was ruined, Takaoka makes it his life's goal to actively destroy Solbrain's mission of "saving hearts and lives." He stops at nothing to make SRS suffer on an emotional level and fail to fulfill their duties, going as far as to permanently alter people's personalities and kill suspects moments after Daiki has arrested them. Masaki Terasoma plays the role with glee as he's randomly dropped into scenes with some weird metal tentacles like some knockoff Doctor Octopus, never missing an opportunity to just go full ham as the show's one ongoing threat. You hate him, and yet you're always delighted to see him being so hateworthy.
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| Pictured: The only three characters this show actually really was about. |
And it's Takaoka's hatred that culminates in three final episodes which bring all of the show's strengths to the forefront. Our heroes are on constant alert as this one madman toys with their mission of saving souls, pitting two families against each other through mindgames and manipulation of a murder that links them together. Its tense, its cruel and Daiki and co shine in their final mission... which ends on a shockingly somber note. I mentioned before that Solbrain doesn't always have happy endings, but its the way in which we're met with a bitter end note that not everyone can be saved. Heroes can't always have a 100% success rate. And it's amazing that they got away with that conclusion.
But at the end of the day it fits with the focus on drama and moral dilemmas that Solbrain was gunning for from the start. And that's something worth giving them props for.
As hard as I am on Solbrain, it's not for it being a necessarily bad show. The first half on its own is fine, but coming off of its predecessor it feels tired and struggles with its identity. The second half, while stronger, still suffers from a poorly balanced cast and the same weaker action and repetitive stunts. As a sequel, it shoots for new ideas but never quite knocks them out of the park. It aims to outdo Winspector, but never truly does so. But its a fine enough show as is. Would I recommend it as enthusiastically as I would Winspector? Not really. But if you were already on board with the Rescue Police concept prior, there's no harm in seeing its second chapter out to the end. It's not fantastic, but it's solid.
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