Power Rangers Super Megaforce #2.13 “The Grass is Always Greener…or Bluer” Review

Summary: A body switch that should provide ample comedic material falls flat and fails miserably in the biggest missed opportunity of the season.

If you have not seen this episode yet and don’t wish to be spoiled, don’t continue reading. It’s not like we’re MEGAFORCEing you to, or anything.

Recap

Jake asks Noah to take his place when Emma wants him to come with her to take photos at a butterfly sanctuary, which Jake regrets agreeing to. They are interrupted when a monster named Trancefercer attempts to switch bodies with an Ambassador, but when the Rangers interrupt, he switches Jake and Noah instead. The two live their lives in each other’s bodies, and Noah works to perfect a double-key Super Mega blaster. It overloads against another monster, so he decides to enlist everyone’s help to complete it. He ends up creating the Super Mega Cannon to destroy the monster, and the Rangers fight against Trancefercer once more. Noah and Jake are able to defeat him and switch back. After the monster grows, the Rangers unlock the Legendary Ninja Storm Megazord and defeat him.

Review

At a certain point, there really isn’t any excusing Super Megaforce. The post-hiatus episodes have been almost solely lighthearted comedy episodes with little-to-no plot progression, and these reviews have harped over the frustration of this season’s pointlessness. But at least if we’re going to get a comedy episode, make it funny. And if there’s an opportunity to do something with the characters, even the slightest amount, then the show has a responsibility to go for it. “The Grass is Always Greener…or Bluer” fails by all accounts, and still manages to throw in extra Super Megaforce weirdness and unusually bad production for good measure.

The plot of “The Grass” bears a strong resemblance to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers season 1’s “Switching Places,” where Billy and Kimberly (and Bulk and Skull) switch bodies and deal with the hilarity. I decided to watch the episode after viewing “The Grass,” and really see if Super Megaforce is all that bad in comparison. To be honest, “Switching Places” is kind of terrible, even for an early Mighty Morphin episode. In fact, there are lots of problematic ramifications of that we could talk about (to say nothing of the gender stereotype jokes, and the unfortunate implications of David Yost portraying a valley girl in light of the now well-known behind-the scenes homophobia the actor faced.) But overall, aside from Yost and Amy Jo Johnson’s portrayals, it’s a pretty bad episode, with horrendous pacing, awkward editing, and virtually no plot outside of the one gimmick that doesn’t do anything for the characters.

The thing is, almost the exact same could be said about “The Grass.” Azim Rizk and John Mark Loudermilk are fine with the material they’re given, but the pace is off-kilter and unbalanced from the start, the action footage is awkwardly spliced and edited, and the plot is all over the place without doing anything for the characters. The problems are a bit different from the Mighty Morphin iteration, but they’re all there. That means this episode of Super Megaforce is on the same level of an early episode of season 1 of the franchise from over two decades ago. That itself is a dire problem for a franchise that had embraced change and growth for such a long time, in a season that was supposed to represent all the ways the show has grown and changed throughout its iterations.

So, let’s break it down. Jake and Noah switch bodies, and there’s a brief bit of shenanigans with the gimmick before it pretty much strictly becomes Noah’s story about making the double blaster. The good is that it sort of tracks with past Noah plots about him failing at something and having to regain his confidence. That Noah doesn’t immediately have a confidence crisis this time, and instead immediately turns to his friends, could be subtle callback to the muddled lesson he sorta-kinda learned in “Blue Saber Saga,” and optimistically, that’s the case. But it’s hard to pull that subtlety out when the episode spins off the rails at every other point.

The Rangers fight two monsters at varying points, cramming in two separate plotlines and haphazardly entangling them with the main plot. Switching bodies apparently helps the team “work together” to build the Super Mega Blaster, according to Noah, even though that situation would have played out exactly the same way without the body switch. The Rangers use more Legendary powers from a a Sentai that was never adapted for Power Rangers (“Legendary Dragon Powers” from Dengeki Sentai Changeman) instead of using actual Power Ranger powers we haven’t seen much of, like Lightspeed Rescue or Time Force. There’s an Ambassador someone is switching bodies with who is never mentioned before or after his introduction. The Rangers unlock the Ninja Storm Megazord and quickly dispatch the monster before we can blink, despite not using or mastering the Ninja Storm powers (not unlike the Mystic Force Megazord’s appearance in “Blue Saber Saga.”) We have four–four!–“triumphant” final strikes with different weapons every time. Orion is the most swiss-cheese-brained Sixth Ranger since Tommy was Green, missing out on nearly all the action because he was “repairing his pod” and “didn’t hear his morpher.” Nothing makes sense, the choices are generally lazy, and it ends.

At least “United As One” and other pointless comedic installments were fun. “The Grass” takes what could be a hilarious and/or insightful affair and somehow makes it a chore. As cheap and kind of sexist as Mighty Morphin‘s “Switching Places” jokes are, it gets the most out of its actors in its brief time and exaggerates their oppositeness for comedic effect. “The Grass” doesn’t go for cheap gags, it goes for boring ones. Jake and Noah respond to each other’s names! Noah-as-Jake raises his hand in class and confuses Mr. Burley! Jake-as-Noah tells Mr. Burley that Jake is smart! Gia finally kind of hits on Jake, but he’s not in his body! Yeah, real hilarity ensuing here.

If it sounds like I’m being unusually harsh, it’s because I am. Reviewing Power Rangers means understanding the limitations of the show and what it’s truly aiming for (toy sales.) But Super Megaforce has gotten harder and harder to forgive for what’s amounted to laziness; there’s such a wealth of history, plotlines, characters, and Sentai footage that could be tapped into, and each week there are more and more missed opportunities. This episode could get some leeway from being written by David Schneider, in his first Megaforce outing and first solo outing on Power Rangers in general (his Samurai scripts were always co-written.) So, there’s always a question of his experience with the show and characters…but even then, the main plot of this episode should be easy to at least get silly Power Rangers humor out of it. And while “The Grass” overall isn’t much worse than sub-par Super Megaforce material we’ve already seen, the plotting is what’s most atrocious. It’s nice to see the show attack a different structure, but unfamiliar territory doesn’t work for every story–as evidenced by different structure working in “United As One” but mostly failing in “The Perfect Storm.” In this case, “The Grass” is a mishmash of different plotlines, goals, and conclusions that don’t match one another.

There’s also, as usual, lots of weird and bad choices. The Rangers teleport in to save that superflous-but-somehow-important Ambassador, and we get a slew of slow dissolves intercutting mooks and Transfercer falling out of the building. It’s totally out of place in Power Rangers, an example of both the weird pacing and the awkward editing. I’m not sure who’s at fault, the editor or the director, Charlie Haskell, but considering Haskell has directed some of the best episodes of the past ten years (including RPM‘s tour-de-force “Dr. K”) it might be worth chocking it up to a bad script and bad season context throwing everyone off. Gia eyeing Noah-as-Jake is all kinds of confusing, too; is it implying that she thinks Jake is hotter when he’s acting like Noah, which means she only doesn’t like Jake because he’s kind of stupid? Because that would actually be a really awesome development. Or are we saying their relationship actually did progress after the non-starter that was “Love is in the Air” and we just didn’t realize, and she did mean to hit on him but briefly forgot it was Noah?

There are just so many things this episode could have done well that it didn’t do at all. Considering the Gokaiger story this was adapted from had the Green and Yellow Rangers switching bodies, the conscious decision to switch Noah and Jake instead was likely because Rizk and Loudermilk are the two strongest actors on the show. They also have the most defined characters, and even then they weren’t given much material to work with, other than Rizk combing his hair and Loudermilk holding a soccer ball. If there’s nothing more to say about the characters, then why not switch Jake and Gia? Gia hasn’t had her own spotlight episode in…ever, actually, which is completely insane. Use a body switch to play around with their relationship that the show pushes hard without doing anything with. If we absolutely had to switch Noah and Jake, then we could still play around with the Jake/Gia relationship by clarifying what’s going on in Gia’s head when she hits on Noah-as-Jake. Why not do anything with anyone?

Maybe if “The Grass” had come earlier in the run it wouldn’t play like the mess that it is. But after such a long string of episodes that provide next to nothing, there’s a limit to what can be written off as “a breather” or excused as “it’s just fun!” Technically, by getting the Super Mega Blaster and the (extremely rushed) Legendary Ninja Storm Megazord, we’ve had the most plot progression happen since “Silver Lining.” That’s pitiful, and to think that we still have a good seven episodes to go is not exciting. There’s hope that it will pick up towards the end as seasons often do, but saying the road has been rocky getting there would be incorrect. A better word for it summarizes Super Megaforce as a whole: disappointing.

Odds & Ends

• Super Megaforce really likes its instamorphs, and does them differently every time. This week: Jake and Emma have a whispy cloud aura around them as then morph while running.
• Big pet peeve: Unnecessary flashbacks to scenes we just watched. It’s blatantly obvious when Trancefercer switches Jake and Noah, so why do we have to see it happen in flashback two minutes later?
• Mr. Burley is teaching Astronomy now, part of his in-depth science curriculum involving Biology and Physics, too.
• There are some fun jokes about Pluto no longer being a planet…which might actually end up being undone, making those jokes lose relevance in record time.
• On that note…the American education must be failing pretty badly when these sixteenish-year-olds don’t know we’re in the Milky Way galaxy or how many planets there are in the solar system.
• I like the brief use of Alien Ranger powers to escape, showing the Legendary powers used for tactical maneuvers and not just fighting directly. I’ll ignore the fact that the Alien Rangers weren’t exactly ninja-themed like their Kakuranger counterparts were (the escape is very ninja-esque and the stealth move is why those powers were chosen.) I’ll also ignore the fact that Power Rangers could have edited in a Ninja Storm transformation in its place, since they actually are ninjas and it would add some relevance to unlocking the Ninja Storm Legendary Zord. You have to ignore a lot of things to enjoy this show.
• The Legendary Ninja Storm Megazord is the strangest yet, what with all the ninja stars sticking out of every limb. And the little mini-ninja bots for the final strike are…odd, to say the least.
• Non-sequitur, but Hulu’s captions identify Jake-as-Noah when speaking as “Blue Jake,” which is cute.
• Emma verbatim says “Isn’t life beautiful?” as she takes photos of butterflies. You adorable, painfully underdeveloped character.
• “With two Rangers switched, they will be easier to destroy.” Ehhh…there’s a big flaw in your plan, bud.
• “So you failed. And you’re proud of it?”
• “Try standing in my shoes!”
  “Actually, those are my shoes.”
• “Yes! And I got my brain back!”