rangerBlog - July 31st, 2007

Jul. 31st, 2007

08:44 am - Once a Ranger (p2) - Triumph of the Form

I'm finally catching up on my PR viewing. I suppose I should download the rest of PROO... I quite liked watching Mystic Force in bunches, and PROO had- up through Pirate in Pink, impressed me by not doing Sentai plots. ...the plots it did do weren't particularly good, but they were at least its own, within the shallow uninteresting premise and setting OO allows.

This is part 2 of the '15th anniversary teamup' featuring a potpourri of Rangers from previous teams. Well- okay, from the New Zeland teams, plus Adam, because the fangirls are all gay for Adam. I kinda savaged the first part of this teamup for a series of cardinal sins, failing, shortcomings, illogical and un-fulfilling aspects- and a surplus of slow-motion explosions.

Part 2 was... considerably better, actually. I actually enjoyed this! ...not a lot, but I did enjoy it. (I don't think I've actively enjoyed the perpetually shallow OO thus far, so that means the teamup was better than the series, always a good sign.)

There's a lot to like here! The plot is completely PROO-centric, using the ~~teamup~~ replacement team as a device to tell a story about the team feeling unwanted... but eventually realizing despite what they may grumble about they actually like this job, and have a sense of genuine loyalty to one another. It's nothing cosmic- but it's using a teamup in a new way. There's some cute bits of character interaction- but only bits because this is the episode with the big fight scene. The missing character interaction was supposed to go in part 1, but that was the episode with 3 big fight scenes.

While the 2-parter turned out vaguely pleasingly, it had some problems.

Thrax was a festering sore upon this plot. His anti-continuity 'A Wizard Did It' origin pisses me off. Rita and Zedd's son... from long ago (Or the Sentinel Knight was alive and kicking in 1999 ad Thrax aged real fast.) Not just long ago though- the SK dates from Pangaea. That's um... um... Rita and Zedd weren't born yet.

I'd write it off as time-travel, Rita in Mystic Force seems to requite Time Travel too... but what really enrages me is that I know that time travel wasn't intended for either of them. TPTB just wrote it and didn't care that it was a plot hole. (Sadly not speculation, confirmed as fact via Morphicon.) CTRL+ALT+DEL captured it better than I can;

Someone explain to me why 'anniversary' + 'for the fans' somehow means continuity should matter less. Seriously. I want to know, right now. Why are you doing something 'for' the fans but wrapping it in an intentionally displeasing package?

It's not even that Thrax aged fast (He'd be 10 if Rita was pregnant in T:APRM, which is a common fan theory.) We're not even allowed that-- because we got fucking flashbacks of him existing long ago- long before Rita married Zedd. Rubbing our nose in how bad he un-fits.

...Thrax did nothing in this teamup. He has no personality. he shows up, gets the other Villains to follow him (without trading on his parentage, that's an afterthought name-drop) and dies. No continuity, no personality, no consequence. Bad all around.

Perhaps most irritating- he looks nothing like Rita. He looks like some bastard son Zedd spawned millennia ago. If he were just Zedd's son, there'd be no continuity problems at all- ad no one would much care. He'd just be some loser never-before-seen scion of a one-great empire our for revenge. (A common theme for Sentai and PR teamups.) But making him Rita and Zedd's kid opens up the timeline problems, and the simple logistical problem of how did their kid end up evil and malformed? (They were last seen reformed and good.)

Quite aside from Thrax's distastefulness- (He looks like he was born with severe birth defects, not the badass he was doubtless intended to) the teamup would have been better without him. He was a non-person that ate up yet more time from the actual 15th anniversary guests of the episode. The replacement team didn't arrive because he was Rita and Zedd's son, they arrived because the PROO lost their powers. All 4 teams of baddies banding together and cutting the PROO off from the morphing grid would have been threat enough for the teamup-- and made the whole thing run much smoother.

So, um... the Morphin' Grid is a physical construct under the Earth? Uh... okay? And Alpha 6 is deactivated in a box in Angel Grove, not active on Mirinoi? *sigh* One more side-effect of the so-called 'secret crisis' that had Tommy declare in Dino Thunder that all the old PR teams (which had all been active and re-powered 18 months prior) were no longer available? Whatever. There's now ample implications we got teamups offscreen to match the bizarre DT/MF teamup that the Bandai toyline seemed to imply. FYI, tying all Ranger teams into the Morphin' grid sucks. It was cool for Dino Thunder because... dinosaurs, Tommy, callbackery. Not cool for SPD. Not cool now. Makign the grid a physical thing? Supercalifragilistic-not-cool.

We finally learn why Thrax went to Stonehenge in part 1, via an offhand remark in part 2. Except... it wasn't supposed to be a mystery, it just made Thrax's action in part 1 seem random in an episode that already made us wait 16 minutes for the old guys to show up. A minor gaffe, but it hurt the flow of the plot.

If we'd lost Thrax, the fight while claiming Exclibur could have been with a guardian. That fight wants to have been with a guardian. Oh well, goddess of the whatever was okay.

Hey Tori got characterization! No, no, wait... she got backstory, spoken by someone else. ...wow, Tori kinda got shafted in this teamup.

I have nothign at all negative to say about Bridge. I should, but the fact Spencer made the 'buttery' joke and not him managed to make me laugh.

It's kinda... weird that getting Exclibur had nothing to do with restoring their powers, which happened independently but coincidentally. I'm not... against that per se? But I have feeling those events were intended to somehow dovetail as one, but as the story broke it got broken into two. So we got the powerup and the power restoration... unrelated to one another.

I'm curious why Zen-Aku was juts offscreen while Tyzone was wandering. I wasn't the only one who noticed it, so it's not m imagination. Was he watching Tyzone? *sigh* Seeing a depowered ranger make a deal with that particular devil for power would have been so much more interesting than the teamup we got, even as a sub-plot.

Part 2... was much better than part 1. Easily a B episode. But the crap it inherits from the awful part 1 (like Thrax) hurts it.
And frankly, while I admit that this was a PROO episode that happened to have some guest-stars, but remained always 100% PROO focused... it's a fucking 15th anniversary teamup. We wanted a teamup. We wanted old characters, being characters, not being wire-fu with slow-motion explosions. You gave us a PROO episodet with scab 'replacement rangers' in the background. You could tell the exact same story if Hartford had just hired 5 new guys. No- the new guys would have been given more screen time to establish why the PROO were jealous of them. You Fail at Teamup.

I liked Adam's new morph. It shouldn't please me as much as it does. I think it's because it reminds me of the 2nd set of Turbo morphs. It's minimal in the current style. I hate the elaborate morph-sequences PR spends money on. Stock sequenced blow. The Mystic Force premiere had two solid minutes of stock morph/summoning footage in a row, they need to be short and sweet.

It wasn't as bad as it should have been, given part 1. It minimized its flaws and trotted through a serviceable plot.
I would have liked this episode more without Thrax. I would have had more patience for the PROO if this hadn't been a teamup with old characters.

Impossible-timeline Thrax, Alpha in a box, morphing grid construct, no characterization or anyone... I just wish they didn't telegraph how little they cared. They jam old seasons into the new stuff as fanwank, but they don't make the new stuff part of the greater whole. It's like continuity is forward-computable only, and that alternately saddens and enrages me.

I miss Doug. He cared.