Hikari Sentai Maskman 24 – The Boy Who Turned Monster

Love and monsters.

In this tale of young love, our lovers are separated because the boy transformed into a monster thanks to Tube. Can our heroes find a way for the kid to revert back to normal?

This episode is obviously filler, and a good one I might add. But before talking about the good stuff in this episode, I should first talk the episode's minor continuity stuff. The episode brought up Mio's pendant thanks to the boy's efforts to give the pendant back to the girl while he is in his monster form. I like this scene since it feels like it ties up the events that happened in the previous episode.

Now for the plot, Tube's latest plan involves turning humans into protists, so that they can have more monsters in their arsenal. They experimented the boy who accidentally discovered this plan; he did end up transforming into a monster but is lucky enough to maintain his humanity. This is when the episode starts to become really interesting. He tries to communicate with humans, only to be attacked by them out of fear. To make matters worse, he can't speak the normal human language that he resorts to pointing things if he wants to say something.

Watching this episode, this is one of those rare Super Sentai episodes that our heroes are not the focus of the episode, but the guest character. To give you an idea, most Super Sentai episodes involving a guest star has equal character development to both the hero and the guest. In this case, most of the character development is on the boy with Takeru's love story serving as means to apply the boy's situation with our hero's current situation. Add the fact that the boy is being rejected by society because of his current appearance, making this episode worth watching.

Finally, how the girl accepted what happened to the boy. It's really touching scene; at first we see her fear on the boy's current appearance until she realized that it is her friend. Because of this confirmation, our heroes learned Tube's plan and is able to stop it. As for how they were able to transform the boy back to normal, the method on how they did it is quite expected. As for the rest of the episode after this, it's your typical Super Sentai fight scene and ends with a giant battle featuring Great Five.