rangerBlog - July 16th, 2007

03:31 am - Once a Ranger (p1) - Failure of the Will

In theory this blog is about Power Rangers, and part 1 of the 2 part teamup is online at jetix.tv, so I guess I should review it.

This was an absolutely terrible episode.

The fight scenes drag on so long that the episode is 2/3 over before the other Rangers even show up. Their reason for showing up- recruited by Sentinel Knight. Yes, including Bridge who is from the future. Adam's history with Rita and Zedd? Not part of the decision. In fact the episode seems to think it isn't important either because Adam learns of it off-screen and doesn't think it's any big thing.

No one reacts to Thraxx begin Rita and Zedd's son like it's a big thing, it's barely mentioned at all. Thrax is an ancient evil, imprisoned in a dumpster, and shot onto the moon (no relation!) that then escaped. (That's not how Dumpsters WORK...) That's now how the timeline works either. I kept waiting for the first hint that Thrax was lying about his backstory, except it came from Miratrix... and slowly it dawned on me that he wasn't... and I became very quiet, and very sad.

I'd like to react to more here- but nothing else happens. The story- the meat of the story we want to see, begisn when the two teams meet one another. And we're gifted by one, two, three fights before that can happen. Long fights. They all serve a purpose in the plot, sort of? You can understand why they're here? You don't get to spend 2/3 of a teamup without the other team appearing. And that means, much as you may love your 10 minute fights with the slow-motion and the exploding and the gentiles doing wire-fu? You don't get to do them if it pushes the first appearance fo the other team into the final act. You fail at teamup.

This is actually an interesting idea for a teamup, strongly PRO-centered with them feeling disenfranchised and replaced. And I might care if that plot- the real central driving plot of the episode hadn't been crammed into the last 3 minutes of the episode. This was one step removed from having Rose announce "Wow, I feel useless and unwanted, that makes me want to quit the team." The emotional problem is introduced simultaneous to their response to it- it's in the same damn scene. No. BAD.

How can something be simultaneously wonderfully staged and utterly incompetent? The fights are beautiful, the Stonehenge set was gorgeous- even the premise was interesting. Heck, I'll go so far as to say the story was good, it just got smooshed by the bloated, irrelevant fights... somehow this ended up borderline incoherent. Nothing got explained, even the things that needed to. The teams never interacted.

This really, really blows. I understand why- you shoot a fight from six angles, and it's the prettiest part of the episode, the part you spent the money on. The temptation is always there to just edit it longer! Put in more slow-motion shots! This is what everyone wants to see, right? The put up with the talking-bits to get the fights? So you steal a little bit of time from the rest of the episode to make the fights longer, and then a little more, and then a little more... and suddenly there's no episode- all you have are bookend scenes around the giant fights that, frankly aren't that important to the plot.

News flash: Kids don't want to see the fights. If they just wanted to see fights, teamup episodes wouldn't be so damn popular. Clearly on some level, kids want to see these characters interact-- and that doesn't mean just the big morphed fight at the end.

Maybe part 2 will surprise me. Maybe it will explain Thrax. Maybe the teams will interact. Maybe it will have decent pacing.
I expect it won't. The flaws of part 1 stem from a Failure of Will, a lack of the discipline required to do the things the episode needs to do, succumbing to filling it with eye-candy like a lapsed dieter stuffing her face at 2 AM, wallowing in the self-loathing pleasure/pain of giving up.

Without a spine, this teamup will not stand, and so it slumps.
And so slumps PR.

...

GET OFF YOUR LESBIAN ASS AND DO BETTER.