Wednesday, April 11, 2018

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.

6 comments:

  1. We are coming close to the promotion of a new megazord toy

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  2. Man, I do agree with you that this is indeed a very good episode in so many ways. What they manage to achieve with Jen is so unusual as far as Power Rangers writing tends to go.

    Sadly, you did actually remind me of why Time Force never quite left as much of an impact in my heart as most other Sentai generally did for me. And it's the comedic style you mention here, which is so prevalent throughout Power Rangers, including Time Force. The tone is always so wonky and fighting against itself. It always made it hard for me to ever take Power Rangers seriously enough to truly love it. I guess what I'm saying is, if the staff isn't going to take this show seriously, then why should I?

    At least with Timeranger, it kept a fairly consistent tone. While yeah the show could get a bit dry in tone, I never felt Timeranger was uber serious like many claimed. In fact, I often found Timeranger to be a pretty goofy show, lol. I mean, you have a cast of heroes who are essentially young "normal college kids," trying to take on a mafia from the future, and so they come up with crazy disguises or take on everyday jobs to try and get into places and outsmart the criminals. Sure the show can get serious, and the best plots are often flowed through from that. But overall, it's a pretty silly show I feel. But despite Timeranger being both serious and goofy, I still felt it was still fairly consistent in tone, and I felt the staff did take the show quite seriously. So I was just able to swallow this show down a lot better.

    I don't mean to discredit Time Force. But man, I remember watching it the year after Timeranger aired. And all I could see it as was just "Timeranger, but different, and with very distracting back and forth tone." Which is a shame, cause "Jen's Revenge" does indeed have A LOT of very genuinely good moments.

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    1. I was kinda surprised as I went along that Time Force gets to a point where it DOES feel freer to ease up on sugar-coated goofiness. By the time Eric/Quantum debuts, the show starts sticking closer and closer to Timeranger, saving most of the goofiness for just the comedic episodes.

      So, it's a shame that this episode and the Future Unknown episode fell so early in the production; they would have been so much stronger if they were approached the way the Time Force crew approaches the later episodes, and with the cast having further developed their chemistry.

      I don't really see Timeranger as being as intentionally goofy as you describe it. It DOES have a sense of humor and isn't afraid of comedy, but it still is mostly a serious show. Not, like GARO levels of seriousness, though, where it's just ridiculous and stuffy and self-important.

      I always had a theory that maybe Timeranger didn't push things as far as they wanted, and didn't dive deeper into more of the character stuff because of Kamen Rider's return. I always thought that maybe the plan was to have it be as serious as it wants to be, but they lightened it up once Rider was thrown back into the mix, ESPECIALLY something like Kuuga, which was such a strange new format and trying to present itself as a drama and realistic.

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    2. Yeah it definitely would've been nice if this episode was a tad bit later. Gah, it's kinda frustrating. xD

      I don't think Timeranger is intentionally goofy. But a good portion of it came off quite goofy to me, regardless of the staff's intentions, lol. But yeah, as far as Sentai in general goes, it's certainly a bit more on the serious spectrum as far as the franchise's offerings go. When I think of "serious Sentai" though, Changeman and Maskman immediately come to my mind.

      Timeranger tended to take it's time with it's stories ep by ep. And I wonder if maybe it's cause of Jun Hikasa? I've always felt Hikasa approached his shows as like a wannabe Takatera. Takatera often used his early episodes to quickly explore and figure out his cast of characters, before getting into the meat of things. I feel Hikasa attempted the same thing, but I feel he never really quite grasped the approach. Cause in Timeranger's case, you quickly get episodes focusing on all 5 heroes. But after that.... well, we do get more. But they seem a tad bit more confused. I don't think they're necessarily bad. But it often kinda gave me the impression that Hikasa was kinda just letting Kobayashi, the cast, and the directors figure things out.

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  3. Speaking of the Wes/Jen romance, I admit that I do still feel WTFed over the fact she fell in love with Alex's ancestor. Then again, who can blame her?

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