Time For Jen's Revenge

A good episode that I think outdoes its Sentai counterpart completely, but is marred by a few misplaced moments of comedy...

In Timeranger, the monster Mad Blast is an assassin hired by Dolnero to kill Yuuri's police chief dad; her whole family ends up being killed. So when she sees Mad Blast is this week's latest defrosted criminal, she loses it and goes on a rampage that concerns her teammates.

Problem #1 -- Mad Blast is renamed Fat Catfish. I know Mad Blast is no great Engrishy shakes, but Fat Catfish...that's a dumb MMPR season 4 name.

The monster is now a bounty hunter, thawed by the Ransik crew to round up the Time Force Rangers. He also happens to be a notorious criminal that Jen and Alex busted in the future, so that stirs up memories of Alex. (She already had Alex on the mind to begin with.) But then the monster goes and keeps insulting Alex while he's at it, and that begins Jen's rampage. She sees the monster as making the late Alex's work seem pointless; if Alex devoted his life and sacrificed his life locking up scum like this, only for them to be freed, what was it all for?

And then tie into this that Frax has begun to show signs of rebellion, pitting the monster against Ransik, and then orchestrating a meeting between the two, giving the location to Jen so she can interfere and further implicate the M.O.W., making it look like he's working with Jen and ratted out Ransik. This is the first time in a while that Jen's laid eyes on Alex's murderer, Ransik, so she goes berserker rage here...but gets her ass royally handed to her by Ransik. He's mopping the place with her. Characters aren't allowed to die on Power Rangers, and they're never really allowed to bleed, either, but they give Jen what is probably the closest they can come to making her look like a bloody pulp. The others arrive in time to bail her out and she's like a rag doll. All she needs is a night's rest and she's off again to go murderize Fat Catfish, and then maybe go murder the writer who came up with that name.

We get the same showdown, with a lot of the same dialogue, as we get from Time Pink's final showdown in Timeranger, where the four guys (three guys and a gal in Time Force's case) pleading with Pink to not blow the monster's head off with her bazooka, lest she become a criminal, too. The difference is crucial; in Timeranger, Yuuri's in control of the situation (unbeknownst to the others), going further and further until she gets a confession. In Time Force, it's actually more interesting and raw and human; there's no psych-out, Jen's actually overtaken by her emotions, and just as she's about to pull the trigger, Wes asks her what Alex would do. After a moment to control herself, she answers that he would do it by the book. Alex was a good cop, I like that Time Force ties it back to the police theme. In Timeranger, it's tragic and brutal the way Yuuri's family dies, and that she's there to witness it as a kid, but Power Rangers didn't pull any punches, either, by tying this episode together with Alex. We know he's not dead, but Jen doesn't, so the feelings remain. And the entire situation involves not just her loss of Alex, but her seeing all of this as an insult to Alex's accomplishments, maybe her own weaknesses as a cop, maybe even Alex's weaknesses as a cop.

And while there's been hints here and there, this is the episode that first fully introduces the idea of a Wes-Jen romance in the works, in that he stays by her bed throughout the night after she's beat up. While I think their romance is better established here than in Timeranger -- being set up and made clear early on, rather than pulled out at the last minute to forcibly heighten the drama -- it's something that works on different levels. There's some ambiguity in that, sure, Jen thinks Alex is dead, but is she moving on too fast? Is Wes pushing her to get over Alex too soon? But Wes' strong resemblance to him stirs up conflicting emotions in Jen -- this guy who has Alex's face is far more carefree and frivolous -- but being the spitting image of Alex probably plays a big part in her liking him, too. Making the romance a triangle, having the third party being the lost doppelganger brings to mind something like 1932's The Mummy or 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula. Those were stories of loves lost in time, people finding love with descendants or reincarnations of their lost loves. It not only puts the time-travel premise to further use than Timeranger cared to, but it gives another layer and moral murkiness and tension to the Red-Pink romance, which fell completely flat in Timeranger.

It's a pretty strong episode, establishing one of the show's important relationships, but it's shortchanged by a few missteps. The episode ends by making light of the growing romance between Wes and Jen by having Katie and Trip tease them like they're fifth graders, but there's misplaced, stale comedy throughout the episode. Why couldn't the writers be content with having a completely serious episode? No, they're too afraid, so they include some of their crusty, lame-o Squatt and Baboo dialogue for the monsters. To get out of a fight, the monster -- who, remember, is named Fat Catfish -- goes, "I think I hear my ma callin'!" To get out of a later fight, Frax says, "I think I left the teapot on!" Why? Why do they like this stupid level of humor? It really holds this franchise back. If you want to play these things light, you can come up with about a 100 better things to have the characters say. Frax could have said, "Smell ya later!" before he ran away and it would have been stupid and out of character, but still better than "I left the teapot on!"

Maybe those are minor problems for some, but to me, it's really out of place in an episode with this tone. You can have (and need) lighter moments to ease the tension, but they needed to find different ways; mocking the blooming romance and having the villains say stupid stuff undercuts everything else the episode is trying to accomplish. Power Rangers is its own enemy, too afraid to ever take itself completely seriously.