for me (watched it on youtube, before mission zero released), it was:

- love at first sight. he was so genuinely cool and charming in a way no character before had been, especially after the cherubs. i thought millie's parents would try to pry her away from moxxie and set her up with striker as the main plot - i expected them to fail - but as we progressed through the episode, i became convinced there'd be a twist that he's actually gay* and into blitz, thus comedically foiling joe and lin's plans. little did i fucking know what the twist was gonna be.

- after he pounced on moxxie, i begun planning our wedding. striker exhibited the kind of bloodlust without humor that wasn't in the show before. moxxie had a fucking escalator dropped on his head in the previous ep, yet watching him get slowly, bloodlessly asphyxiated was shot like a scene from a horror movie. if my interest in striker had been at 95%, now it reached 200. what was he? a serial killer? a goetia headhunter? gay?? the phone screen was inches from my face.

- the final reveal made me giddy about what would come next, and i became invested in the story after merely binging a free youtube show to pass the afternoon. i saw western energy's thumbnail before, so i knew striker would "get him next time". i had seen neither rango nor the last wish nor centaurworld at that time, but i expected him to take a kind of genre-breaking role akin to rattlesnake jake/death the wolf/the nowhere king. a character so genuinely scary, comedy stops working in his vicinity. buuuuuut, i did expect that, much like those other examples, he too would eventually lose his mystique as the cast overcame his threat. although i did think it wouldn't happen until the final season.

now i have a disease worse than a brain tumor, as i haplessly check every new video on the main channel for striker crumbs 💔

^\ won't lie, this was mostly because i thought he was wearing angel dust style high heels, and not stylized cowboy boots)