Time For Nadira's Dream Date

An episode that's meant to be funny, but is really just stupid. Who out there is crazy enough to write a love poem about their first car? (Who out there is crazy enough to write an episode about someone writing a poem about their first car?) Well, Lucas apparently is. (And Judd Lynn and Jackie Marchand are the answer to the second question.) And Nadira's stupid enough to find it and think it's about her. Ransik's stupid enough to try to get a Blue Ranger-Nadira romance to work.

Look, this episode COULD have worked and been funny, but too much comes at a character's expense and the typical fear of writers going too far. There would have been nothing wrong with Lucas maybe having a thing for Nadira and then it gets blown all out of proportion. It's believable the self-centered and narcissistic Nadira would dive into this scenario. But turning your head villain into a sitcom dad who's hand-wringing and lecturing the guy and giving him tips and coaching him on his date -- it's stupid! And Vernon Wells must think so, too, because he doesn't care how much he lets his accent slip through.

Ransik's not exactly a favorite villain of mine, but I liked him well enough. He was surprisingly good for Power Rangers, and good as a futuristic criminal and a face villain that Timeranger lacked. It's bad enough that Wells softens his performance as the show goes on, but then PR just can't refuse putting him in silly situations; more fear of taking things seriously, more fear of having completely villainous villains. (I'm trying hard right now to block out the stupid thing they end up doing with the character in the Wild Force team-up. Please, don't mention it. In fact, this stupid episode kind of paves the way for that, doesn't it?) The main villain, a supposedly dangerous criminal, a murderer -- I mean "destroyer" -- the freaking Clarence Boddicker of 3000 shouldn't be putting on muumuus or going Al Bundy on the boyfriend of Nadira/Kelly. In fact, I think it would have been funnier -- and actually stressful on Lucas -- if Ransik had been played completely straight in the scenario. That's a predicament for your hero! He really needed only one scene, where he corners Lucas and is like "I don't like you. You and your friends are out to get me, to ruin me. But Nadira likes you. Treat her well or I'll feed you your beanbag." (I checked with both broadcast standards and practices and the FCC and they confirm you can say that on a TV-Y7 show.) See?! Keep your villain villainous, man.

As is, it's just a bad sitcom script. Right down to the Time Force having seen a rerun of My Name Is Earl in 3000 and knowing the way to make Nadira dump Lucas is by having him make himself disgusting, just as Catalina did to make Randy lose interest in her.

Move over random episode about knights and dragons, I almost think this episode of the show might be the worst one, just for how dumb it makes Ransik. This episode is kind of like a throwback to what PR did to Sentai back in the day -- taking the footage and writing just nonsense goofery over it. Because, believe it or not, the Timeranger episode this one is based on...is the episode where the others find out about Ayase's illness. They take that episode and turn it into a dumb Three's Company! That's SO 1994 PR...

Seriously, though, a poem about a car? Only Ninninger would reach heights as dumb with that episode about Yakumo being in love with his lawnmower.

Time For Reflections of Evil

In this episode, Nadira comes up with a plan which puts to use all of the remaining available footage from the unadaptable episodes of Timeranger. Well, that's what this episode is! She gets a monster that hops into a mirror world to trap the Rangers and make them fight a variety of monsters they supposedly already defeated, but is really monsters from episodes of Timeranger that were too talky or pointless to be adapted. This thing's, like, eight Timeranger spliced into one.

The head monster, the main focus of the episode, comes from that Timeranger episode where Naoto is reliving the same "OCTOBAR" day over and over, Groundhog Day-style. It's kinda sad that Time Force didn't just adapt that. Eric, after having so much focus in the 20s, has really gone AWOL from this show, it's weird.

It's sad that they try to tie in Lucas' narcissism into this episode -- ha, ha, the dude who's obsessed with mirrors will come to regret it after this mission, eh? No. Ha-ha says the writers who were too lazy to ever come up with something meaningful for Lucas.

I'm not going to mention that I think it's weird that this show, based on a work by Yasuko Kobayashi, featured an original scenario taking place in a "Mirror World" one year before Kobayashi wrote Ryuki.

Time For Time For Lightspeed

Meh, mediocre team-up with Lightspeed Rescue. Not that Timeranger VS GoGoFive is any great shakes -- it's seriously one of the more underwhelming versus movies in a sea of underwhelming versus movies -- but this thing's just going through the motions in terms of story, but cranking everything else to 11. Villains are large and hammy, the action is Koichi Sakamoto going insane. A lot of noise, little substance. While I think the Lightspeed Rescue cast seems decent, I still wouldn't want to watch it since I like GoGoFive so much. It would be really difficult to get past how ingrained that show is on me.

A couple of things to note. In this, Trip recognizes the Lightspeed Rescue. In Time VS GoGo, only Tatsuya knew who the GoGoFive was, with the others being like "Who?" It made sense that the ones from 1,000 years into the future didn't recognize them, and that was actually kinda funny.

This episode ends with the Time Force gifting the Lightspeed Rescue their cop uniforms, with the Lightspeed Rescue gifting the Time Force their jackets in return. A little weird, but it beats giggling awkwardly at each other for the entire duration of the ending credits as seen in Time VS GoGo. Also: the Time Force uniforms are probably made from material not yet invented. Timeline tampering! Time Force, you're supposed to be fighting this stuff. Who do you think you are to be so reckless, the Timeranger?

Time For Beware the Knight

What a piece of cacadookie. Random. Stupid. What was the thinking behind it? It's one of the only episodes to not be based on anything Timeranger -- not a storyline, not a fight scene. It's all original. Was this episode an experiment to see how the PR production could fare without Sentai? Because the answer ain't pretty.

In tokudom, there have been some dumb ways that heroes have received power-ups. Some just grunt until the Bandai Gods hear them and grant them a new toy to fight with. If you're Faiz, your sworn enemy Kaixa will just throw it in your lap. If you're a loser like Blade's Dadebada, you're eagerly waiting for Karasuma to Fed-Ex it to Kotaro's place. If you're Time Force, you get some big fancy super armor by defeating a CGI dragon and a knight. Wait, WHAT?!

No explanation! No attempts at writing a story here. We just start with a couple of knights -- one white, one black, I don't know how the writers came up with that -- fighting over a box. Where the hell are we? WHEN the hell are we? If you're asking that, you care more than the writers. These two assholes are fighting over a box. The black knight wins and celebrates by going and attacking the city. The Rangers are involved, and Wes tracks down the black knight's cave clubhouse, where he beats the CGI dragon who's sleeping one off there. He finds the little Hellraiser cube that the black knight won in his battle and opens it, where the white knight appears and tells him that he has a pure heart, so he's earned the contents of the box -- the Power of an Ugly Power-Up. This thing out-uglies Quantum Ranger's power-up, all it needed was some rollerblades.

They really couldn't come up with a storyline here? Like...the fucking show is about time-travel, you can't slip in a line that these knights were fighting way back when and fell through some magic time portal into the present? Why the fuck am I having to watch and type about knights and a Power Ranger getting a power-up from them? To quote my frenemy Titsu from Dekaranger -- nonsense.

And sadly? As shitty as this episode is, it could have worked with some minor effort. The idea of a hero from the present who's fighting with technology from the future also getting assistance via armor from the past? That's kinda cool, and a fun thing a time-travel-related show should play with. (And that the scene with Red fighting using the Fire Warrior armor is filmed in a kind of samurai-way makes me think of how cool a design which would have implemented a samurai-esque look would have been.) Highlighting what we already know, that Wes has a big-heart, it makes sense to reflect that by giving him this power-up, which he earns.

On the bright side, there's a lot of cool night shooting and night battles, but something about the episode just feels like such a cheap, quickly-made afterthought. All of the actors look like they're in a rush and don't feel well. I'm really thinking this episode was shot over the course of one night, and I'm not even joking. I have a feeling the writing session went a little like this...

Producer: OK, so we're one episode short of the full 40 were promised the network. Whaddya got? What's left from that funny little Japanese show?

Writer: Well...we used all we could from that. All that's left is a crappy little clip show.

Producer: Clip show? What is this, the '70s? Who the fuck does a clip show in this day and age?

Writer: Apparently the Japanese.

Producer: Christ. Well, it's still too early for a clip show. And if that's not bad enough, we got Bandai wanting us to put in a toy.

Writer: What?! C'mon, man, we just wrote in that stupid looking origami motorcycle. Yeah, our boys in FX were up all night splicing that shit into the Japanese show's crummy CGI landscape to make it look like it belonged.

Producer: Well, guess what? We're all going to pull an all-nighter until we come up with something.

Writer: Shit...

Producer: Hey, you wanna hear the dream I had last night? I was back working on Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. I was in some weird white knight's outfit fighting some black knight over a box. You were there, actually, you did some sort of backflip over a dragon while delivering a pizza -- imagine that, a pizza in...

Writer: Hold it! That's our episode right there.

Producer: Get outta here...

Writer: No! That story of your dream was crazy, inventive. It gripped me. I don't want to let this feeling go, we gotta go do this episode ASAP! Do you believe in destiny?

Producer: Whatchu talkin' about?

Writer: Just yesterday, I was in the storage room. I figured we probably need to do one of those "We gotta save money, so some old monsters are coming back!" episodes soon. Anyway, in the corner, I found two boxes...Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog armor. Guess the colors.

Producer: Get outta here!

Writer: It's destiny! This is going to be an awesome episode! I want spontaneity, I don't even want to script it -- we're going to go out there tonight and film the whole thing! We're gonna show them we don't even need no stinking Japanese footage. Whoooooooooooooooooo, USA!

Producer: How much coke you on today, pal?

Writer: Not as much as our cast is going to need to film this little adventure all night long!

Producer: Right! I got some calls to make and...you promise you can get it all done in one night?

Writer: Where there's coke, there's a way.

Time For Undercover Rangers

An inconsistent episode. The strongest part of it is Jen, upon seeing a wedding, realizing she doesn't feel the same way about Alex as she used to. Both she and Wes come close to admitting their feelings for one another, but they're always interrupted by something in a tiresome, sitcom-y way -- at this stage of the show, just commit to the situation, writers. This interruption shit kept happening in episode 22 -- shouldn't we be beyond this type of stuff?

As in Timeranger, both are arranged to work an undercover case by the others so they can get closer, but the cases are both just wastes of time; in Timeranger, it's a forgettable one-off villain with a cult based on the fear of the millennium. Here it's a goofily-depicted case -- Frax just read a comic from the '40s, saw the Charles Atlas ad and based his whole plan of enticing-weaklings-with-promises-of-strength bit. He's really turning them into robots for his army, but it would have been better if Frax were taking the people hostage as human batteries for his robot, Toranza-style. Both are meant to be funny and lighthearted, the focus on the awkward undercover work by Red and Pink, but...in Timeranger it doesn't work because Nagai thinking he's amazing and Katsumura not playing comedy well, as well as the Tatsuya-Yuuri relationship never working, no matter how hard they force it. In Time Force, it doesn't work because they just go too far with the stupidity.

And in Bandai-pulls-stuff-out-of-their-ass news... This episode forces in the debut of a new, ugly toy that's exclusive to this show. When the Rangers are being beat up for no good reason, Alex transmits a message to Wes that he needs to protect Jen, so he sends him this really unimpressive, PR-can't-pull-it-off-with-its-no-budget-and-2001-CGI hover bike thing. Pink sees it and goes "Cool!" and, no, it's not. Isn't it a little late to be introducing new toys? (Guess not, because the next terrible episode brings in an even worse PR-exclusive.) Alex ex Machina does Bandai proud.

Wes and Jen infiltrate Frax's cover by posing as nerds -- it's kinda funny that Wes is basically wearing Tatsuya's outfit, the plaid shit. A secret dig? I like to think so.

In news that interests only horror nerds like me, the main musclehead goon of Frax's is played by Chris Durand, who was Michael Myers in Halloween H20 -- one of the best guys to play Michael Myers.

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.

Time For Fight Against Fate

This episode and the next are the same blueprints as the Timeranger episodes, but they're actually a little more meaningful. Alex joins the Rangers in the present to tell that that the future's been altered, especially by Frax breaking away from Ransik and building his own robot/mecha/zord/whatever-you-choose-to-call-it. After a very brief "Good to see you, Alex, we thought you were dea-- destroyed!" Alex wastes no time getting things done. He's a gruffer, no-nonsense guy than the other four remember. A result of wanting to quickly set right things going wrong in the future? Maybe. But I also think his having a near-death experience changed things for him.

Nobody likes the new Alex. He's bossing them around, criticizes the way they do everything. He's blunt and has no filter. He thinks they've gotten way too lax working in 2001, working with Wes. That might be true, but it's also true that they work better that way, and that Wes' influence has been a change for the better. I certainly buy the five Time Force Rangers becoming so close and a loving family than I ever did the self-centered-seeming, rarely heroic, grump-ass Timeranger. Alex decides to take charge as Red and cuts Wes loose, going against Doc Brown's teachings and letting him know his father will be dying from the injuries obtained by Ransik, and that Wes needs to take over his company as history says he will.

Alex runs the Time Force the way R. Lee Ermey would and pretty much everyone hates him -- Jen included. And here's where Time Force has a leg up on Timeranger; in Timeranger, nobody even really knew Ryuuya. He was the Captain, sure, but they had never interacted with him. They met him as a hologram and as Lila impersonating him, but they didn't KNOW or have a history with him. (Especially since three of the four were new recruits.) Here, the four Time Force have a history with him; they've worked with him, they know him. One of them is engaged to him! So when Alex pushes out Wes, who they've all come to like and whose light demeanor has rubbed off on, they're not happy about it, but they're welcoming back an old colleague and superior. And when Pink, in the middle of the battle, seeks Red's advice and calls him Wes? A MUCH huger impact and shock (especially for the others) than when Yuuri slipped and called Ryuuya Tatsuya. Because we know there's a relationship growing between Wes and Jen and Alex is aware, having already seen a Polaroid of Wes kissing Jen on the cheek.

Meanwhile, Wes stays by his father's bed while all of the guys from his dad's company scramble to figure out their next move. Eric is shown to be extremely concerned for A. Collins' well-being. In Timeranger, Naoto's concern was hard to figure out -- another reason why I thought maybe Naoto needed to be Tatsuya's brother. Here, Eric just seems really pissed off that he failed at his job and wasn't able to protect Mr. Collins.

Alex is in such a rush to stop Frax and his robot that it creates a problem that I have with a lot of time travel stories. We've seen Alex in the future keeping tabs on EVERYthing happening in 2001 -- he even sees Frax beginning to build his giant robot. He knows so much of what is happening, is able to travel back in time, so why doesn't he travel back to, like, the day before Frax finishes his robot and kill him there or destroy the robot? We know in Timeranger he's not really out to stop Gien or Gien's zord, because he's pretty much arranging things to guide Gien and use him to alter history to his liking. But Alex isn't an asshole and is a character that makes sense, so that's not the case here. Still...if he's able to time travel so easily...the question stands, why wait to pop up on the day things will be going to shit? Why not a day early? See what bullshit time travel stories can cause?! ARGH!