Time For Destiny Defeated

Wes takes over his dad's company, resulting in...Eric quitting? I don't know what that's about -- we get a scene where he gives his pet birds away to the little girl he lives by, with him saying he's going away for a while. They never really say what the hell this is about, so I'm assuming Eric's quitting the Silver Guardians and moving on. It's pretty unclear and, even if he hated the idea of working for Wes that much, seems a little out of character, because it's an unprofessional move. (He doesn't quit, though; as he's driving through town, he spots the trouble the Time Force are having and morphs and helps 'em out.)

Meanwhile, the Alex-led Time Force is still taking a beating from trying to stop Frax and his giant robot. (Alex is fixated on stopping an energy-dampening device Frax has set up, while the Time Force want to take down Frax. In Timeranger, Ryuuya was trying to protect Gien here, and I hated that whole subplot. Here Alex is just so focused on what he thinks is the best play that he ignores everyone else.) The others eventually turn on Alex and once Wes shows up and destroys the dampening device, they plead with him to just hand over the morpher to Wes. It's more believable that Alex gives in than Ryuuya. Ryuuya was meant to be more villainous and needed to be in complete control to drive his agenda. He's not going to be pushed out of having the power by the others pleading with him. (I kinda wonder if Kobayashi originally intended to make Ryuuya so evil-seeming, or if it was Nagai's smarmy, slimy performance that influenced her. Because there's just so much about Ryuuya that doesn't add up. And, no, that doesn't make him complicated.)

The biggest change this episode makes from Timeranger is...Mr. Collins flatlines. As the nurse scrambles for the doctor, we see a strange orb placed into Mr. Collins' hand, an orb that glows and dissolves into a light that's absorbed into his hand, running up his arm into his heart. It's Alex who, after giving the morpher back to Wes, decides to save Mr. Collins' life. I imagine a lot of Timeranger purists see this as another act of sugar-coating Timeranger by Power Rangers, but I like it. I think it works. I like that Alex seems like an actual person, that he, too, in a way was affected by Wes, seeing how he's made his colleagues better people. Alex had been kind of cynical, had seen history as already been written. Wes' genuine optimism that the future's a blank slate yet to be written spoke to him. It speaks to the Time Force officer he is, that he belongs to a force meant to prevent bad things from happening in the past as a result of time travel. It speaks to him as someone who very nearly died; I like to think Alex recognized the power a near-death experience could have and thought, like Doc Brown, "What the hell?" and rewrote the book by sparing Mr. Collins...

And a near-death experience certainly changes Mr. Collins, who awakens with a brightness in his eyes, a surprising joy. He tells Wes he knew he was done for, but he thought he saw Wes (it was really Alex, administering the future medicine) and decided to fight. He comes out of it a changed man. I'm sure this is another thing cited by people who think it's a softening of Timeranger -- Mr. Asami never became a nicer, better person -- but I think if you can buy Ebeneezer Scrooge changing over one night, you can buy Mr. Collins looking at life differently, especially if he's been as impressed with Wes' decisions as he's claimed. It's another person Wes has had a positive influence on, and that's one thing I like about the character. He's in that Yuusuke Godai or Shouichi Tsugami role of making the people around him better. Tatsuya was supposed to be like that, but Masaru Nagai just isn't likable enough or a good enough actor to sell it. Jason Faunt is. And by Time Force introducing the idea of him opening the eyes of Alex (Ryuuya) and his father, that's another victory over the original, and that alone makes him more successful than Tatsuya.

The episode ends with Jen bidding a silent farewell to Alex as his ship departs. I guess you can take it as she's sad to be parting with him again, but the way Cahill says it and the way the scene is filmed, I totally interpret it as her decision to break up with him.