Power Rangers Super Megaforce Premiere Review

Summary: Power Rangers returns with its best episode in a long while, even without having much substance beyond cool gimmicks and action sequences.

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

The Armada lays siege to Earth, and the quantity of the assault pushes the Megaforce Rangers to their brink. Gosei deems the ready to unlock the infinite power lining the walls of the Command Center, and bestows on them new morphers, allowing them to transform into the Super Megaforce Rangers and use Legendary Mode to tap into all Power Rangers teams of the past. Using their new powers, the Rangers are able to sweep the hundreds of mooks, and with the help of new Zords they take out multiple monsters at once. As Earth repairs its damage from the assault, Troy is determined to find Robo Knight, who disappeared during the events of the previous season finale.

Review

After what’s amounted to a season-long holding pattern with the first season of Power Rangers Megaforce, we’ve finally made it to the true season we’ve been waiting for. Last season paid homage to the simplistic style of the early Mighty Morphin Power Rangers with mostly mixed results, but Super Megaforce promises to build on the characters we already know and throw in the anniversary celebration craziness.

And, well, that’s exactly what we get. There isn’t much to “Super Megaforce” in regards to a plot or character development, as suggested by the straightforward episode title. But, while that general blandness hindered the last season, it’s actually used to good effect here. Essentially, what we don’t get in surprising plot or character development, we do get in excitement, energy, and all-out craziness. Pretty much the entire episode is devoted to the fight sequences, but these fight sequences are engaging and creative.

The Super Mega Modes yield a much more diverse fighting style than before, for one. As pretty as the standard Megaforce costumes and effects are, their fights last season usually ended up being, well, generic. Like I mentioned in the season review, Megaforce thew out a lot of elements that could have played out as fun gimmicks, but it never fully latched on to any of them. Conversely, while Super Megaforce doesn’t explicitly comment on the pirate theme of the new powers, we see the Rangers dive head-first into the more raw and less precise fighting styles you’d expect to come from the pirate idea. Inexplicable as the use of pirates may be in this context, it yields looser and more energetic battles than what we’ve seen before. We get weapon-switching and doubling up, some silliness by way of Jake’s “excitement” affecting his fighting, and lots of the Rangers totally wailing on a veritable army of bad guys. There’s a tinge of the unexpected throughout it, as it’s essentially impossible to predict what moves the Rangers will make next. That means a lot, considering the Power Rangers franchise’s penchant for repetition.

And of course, there’s the Legendary Ranger Mode, which has them able to change into various Rangers from the past. The expectation going into the episode was that the Rangers might just unlock one team change per episode, at least until later in the season. The premiere totally flew in the face of that, though, by having the Rangers rapidly morph between the teams of Samurai, Mystic Force, S.P.D., Ninja Storm, and then a mixed team of Red Rangers from various seasons. Each change is all-too-brief, but we get a fun glimpse of each team’s fighting styles, even if it’s all a bit exaggerated to differentiate each one.

A clever way of limiting use of the Legendary Mode is that it’s “hard to maintain,” and is taxing on the Rangers’ strength. It’s an ingenious way to explain why we’ll only see these modes in brief glimpses–letting us savor those anniversary moments without overindulging or fan-pandering. It also justifies the year-long lead-up to Gosei bestowing the new powers on the Rangers; they couldn’t immediately tap into the infinite power of the Command Center when they were fresh to the superheroics, and needed that year to become experienced enough to handle the abilities. It doesn’t necessarily excuse how much the first season amounted to padding, but it does prevent Gosei from looking like he held back something so necessary. There’s also some hilarious self-parody in the non-explanation for Jake’s color switch for Super Mega Mode (which, in reality, is only due to the source material’s use of the color.) Whether this is the end of it or it becomes a running gag, either way the joke might be the best one we’ve had since Megaforce began.

One thing Super Megaforce could definitely do better than the first season is having more of both a plot and overarching character development. This episode promises the tiniest bit of both, mostly by way of Robo Knight’s disappearance and Troy’s determination to find him (enough to—gasp!—skip school!) It’s entirely likely that this development will fall by the wayside until Robo Knight’s eventual return down the line, but at least there’s promise that we might have something beyond “fight the monsters and win” going on. Andrew Gray is still stiff this week, but he actually seems to be having more fun in the role than previously, which bodes well. The addition of giving Troy a primary arc other than being stoic will hopefully open up new things for Gray to do this season.

Super Megaforce also appears to be playing the “alien invasion” aspect more realistically than most seasons. Well, okay, “realistically” is a stretch, but in the sense that the premiere starts off with hundreds of ships firing its weapons directly into populated cities and buildings, rather than sending one monster a week. Every time the Rangers are fighting, they’re surrounded by dozens of mooks each, showcasing that the villains are throwing everything out right off the top. The show has done this in the past, most famously in the finale of Power Rangers in Space, but bringing the entire invading army down to Earth is usually saved for the big final battles. Are we going to revert back to the “one monster at a time” approach after this? Probably, but it’s nice to see the battles presented at such a scale right from the get-go. We also have multiple monsters grown at a time, which is not entirely unprecedented in the franchise, but again is something usually saved for bigger episodes. The brief scenes of the Megaforce Rangers individually helping pick up the pieces from the Armada’s invasion are also very cool, and play up the rare superhero aspect that often gets lost in all the fighting.

The last scene of the episode is appropriately cheesy, playing up the “humans are great” theme this series is sorta-kinda halfway doing, but it’s saved by simply being a clever call-back to the first season premiere. And honestly, even the corniest ending wouldn’t have ruined the fun this episode turned out to be. The whirlwind approach is probably what makes the episode such a surprising delight, as it throws everything but the kitchen sink at us before we can even catch our breath. It’s not always a smart way to do a premiere, but this is Power Rangers, which has never let itself function like a typical season of television. The question now is whether or not they keep up this level of energy, or if they wasted the excitement for the form changes (not to mention the new zords, weapons, etc.) here. That remains to be seen, but at least at this point we know this season won’t skimp on the fun.

Odds & Ends

• The opening sequences is very cool this time around, even with that maligned name-speaking again. But that’s easily excusable in lieu of, say, seeing the Mighty Morphin costumes, or the superb helmet-roulette sequence that turns into the logo.
• While it was already done in the source material, it’s still incredibly cool to see the gender-swapped costumes during some Legendary Mode changes, particularly in seasons like Ninja Storm and Mystic Force when the gender of the originals don’t match up with the color of the current teams. The use of skirts on the women is an archaic detail that the Sentai ought to have gotten over, but until that happens, at least we can experience the giddiness of seeing the skirts swapped around here.
• That Vrak is in hiding from his own brother out of fear of not being recognized is a creative (and weird) way to write him out, so hopefully we see this plot point come to blows, even if it’s not something that was present in the source material. The new villains, however, are just as bland as last season’s Warstar aliens so far. Oh well.
• Jake’s sillier fighting style in his Super Mega Green form (again, only due to the source footage) kind of matches his personality more than what we’d seen of him last season as the Black Ranger.
• This is a nitpick to be sure, but it would have been nice to hear the morphing calls for Ninja Storm and S.P.D. during the fight. This is all forgivable considering the slam-bang approach to the Ranger changes this week, but hopefully from here on out we’ll see things play out more consistently now that the modes have been shown off.
• Stupid theory/rationalization time: There’s of course the confusion over this season’s place in continuity/the universe given how the characters never knew of Power Rangers and aliens, or how Earth has “never faced an invasion like this” according to Gosei…and yet Gosei makes it clear that there was a legacy of Power Rangers before them. That’s even more muddled by the use of S.P.D. powers, which won’t exist until 2025, and the RPM powers explicitly exist in another dimension from all other series. I still like to hold onto the theory posited in the review of “Mega Mission”, that this war spans throughout all time and space, meaning Rangers from the past, present, future, and in alternate dimensions entirely are able to contribute their powers to the Legendary Mode. Or you can subscribe to the more likely theory: Shut up, because this is fun and awesome and Power Rangers pretty much never made any sense to begin with, so sit back and enjoy it.
• “Earth is fighting back? Well…I don’t like it!” – Our villains for the season, everyone.