Power Rangers Dino Charge #1.16 “No Matter How You Slice It” Review

Summary: An episode with good intentions doesn’t stick the landing and muddles what should have been a very simple message.

Recap

Poisandra and Curio tease the prisoners by pretending to open their cages, and a monster named Shearfear snips their “bond of friendship,” turning them into bitter enemies. Sledge sees this, and sends him down to due the same to the Rangers. After a fun sand dune adventure, Shearfear attacks, snipping everyone’s bonds except Koda’s and Riley’s. When he attempts to snip Koda’s the scissors break, and he retreats. Riley, Koda, and Kendall try to get the Rangers to rebuild their friendship with team-building exercises, but it doesn’t work. Instead, Kendall devises a way to reverse the effect using a piece of Shearfear’s scissors. They realize that Koda’s bond couldn’t be cut because the Rangers are more than friends to him — they’re his family. So, Riley and Koda let themselves be outside as bait, but when Shearfear tries to cut Riley’s bond, the scissors break — it’s actually Koda, as the two switched clothes and put on wigs. Kendall uses the scissor piece to create a new charger, which Koda and Riley use to restore the Rangers’ friendship just before getting on a bus to depart for their respective homes. Their friendship restored, the Rangers team up using the Ptera Charge Megazord Para-Raptor formation, and take down Shearfear and the Vivix Zords. Meanwhile, Riley thinks his parents and friends forgot his birthday, but discovers that the Rangers threw him a surprise party, complete with a video birthday message from his family.

Review

You can’t have a Power Rangers season without talking about friendship. It’s the one thing any kid anywhere can understand, so it’s par the course for a team-centric kids’ show to go to that well over and over and over. “No Matter How You Slice It” is another in a line of ridiculous monsters with literal-minded powers like making glowing tooth pains and stealing backbones, this time literally snipping the bonds of friendship.

These types of monsters only work as well as they cause character growth — the strongest of these episodes, “The Tooth Hurts,” used the cavity monster to build Riley’s understanding of Chase, and thus our understanding of them. “Knight After Knights” certainly played things more for comedy, but to its benefit, because that meant it only needed to expound a little bit on Sir Ivan to work. “No Matter How You Slice It” is a much weaker installment in these terms, in that it doesn’t offer all that much beyond the expected implications. They aren’t friends anymore, so they hate each other, and the Rangers that avoided the snip have to make them friends again.

Where they episode fails, kind of catastrophically, is how it presents and resolves this. For one, losing their bonds of friendship immediately makes the Rangers completely shrug off their duties and leave town. While that certainly amps of the tension, it’s a bizarre leap — the implication is that the Rangers don’t actually care about saving the world, and that they’re only Rangers because they’re friends with the other Rangers. That doesn’t make any sense in the context of these characters, frankly. If this were a spell that made them progressively less and less caring, it would make sense, but because we have a monster who literally, visibly snaps a bond of friendship…well, it’s pretty clearly spelled out what’s happening. The rationale here seems to be that by losing the ability to form a bond of friendship, the Rangers lose their ability to care at all, but that’s not really how the episode addresses it, nor does it jibe with the show’s ideals of the greater good. They ought to still have the desire to fight monsters because that’s their job, the trouble would be that they don’t play well with their teammates while doing it. You shouldn’t only be doing the right thing because you have friends, right?

This is one of those things that sounds absolutely ridiculous to nitpick, I know. But it’s an instance of the show building some rules — again, literally snipping the bond of friendship is about as straightforward as you could get — and then not following them for the sake of artificially raising the stakes. That doesn’t fly in a season with otherwise consistent, character-driven writing.

The other flaw isn’t so much a problem as it is just disappointing. “Knight After Knights,” even as it played the cowardly Rangers mostly for laughs, taught a valuable lesson about what it means to fight and care for people, and how that, in turn, is the source of your courage. “No Matter How You Slice It” tells us that friendship makes people not be jerks, and comes full-stop there. The Rangers don’t rebuild their bonds of friendship — which in this world is something that is a literal, tangible force — they just get “cured” with “science.” It’s not unprecedented that Kendall builds a device to reverse the effect, but there’s such an ample opportunity to show an actual rebuilding of friendship. What made these people care about each other? The episode inadvertently suggests that the only reason they’re friends is because they’re on a Power Rangers team, and that’s definitely not true. We could have seen the Rangers explore what they like about each other, and how their appreciation of their own similarities and differences have made them better teammates. Instead, they fail at a couple of trust exercises, and become friends after being shot with guns. It’s a very Power Rangers resolution for sure, but it’s a disappointing one.

Where the episode excels much, much more is the idea of friends as family. Koda has consistently been the best-written character, broken English and all, and that’s likely because his characterization rides the line between simple and complex and always strikes an emotional chord. He’s the one Ranger with no family or life outside of being a Power Ranger — a lonely existence, except for the fact that his fellow Rangers are his family. Koda represents every outsider so far from home that it may not be possible to go back, but found another new home that welcomed them. Not every family need be of blood, and that’s such a vital lesson for kids who feel alone or estranged, and especially ones who come from broken homes and could find other communities to embrace them.

Riley’s a less extreme case, in the same boat of the other Rangers. As the episode makes clear when everyone’s getting plane tickets, they’ve ventured far from home to be superheroes. This aspect of being away from their families, which was also shown in “Rise of a Ranger,” adds really nice color to this season, giving it a much larger, even epic feel with pathos. It also emphasizes what this episode seems to be getting at — that this particular group of Rangers, more than many others, are building a family more than just a team. They aren’t all there yet, of course, since their bonds could be snipped. But it’s clear by the end, with the Rangers essentially standing in for Riley’s family at his birthday party, that’s the path these people are headed down.

That’s a beautiful aspect of any superhero team to showcase — that no matter how they were brought together and how different they all are, they’re still there for each other in a way strictly-social groups wouldn’t be. Families see the best and worst in people and annoy the heck out of each other, but still love each other deeply. The Dino Charge Rangers are in a place in their lives where they only have each other, and becoming a real family is the natural evolution of their friendship. If only this episode seemed to have a better understanding for how to present that without squandering it.

Odds & Ends

• In another instance of Power Rangers basically doubling as a virtual tour of New Zealand: I had no idea it was famous for sand dunes, and now I absolutely want to visit the Giant Te Paki Sand Dunes. I’ve been dune jumping in Outer Banks, NC before, but wow…the NZ dunes must tower over them.
• Poisandra and Curio as playful BFFs is very cute.
• When the Rangers are doing their team building moves, Ivan covers his collar when he’s next to Shelby, implying he thinks she smells.
• Keeper update: He, uh, stands around as the Rangers quit their jobs. At least Chase is respectful enough to apologize to him directly.
• Not really sure why, but Koda and Riley switching clothes is so charming  and funny and weird.
• Oh snap, the purple Energem is already being discovered? This show is really ramping up for the end.
• Riley’s incredulous “How do you turn the lights on in here?” in regards to HQ — which is a really good question — is hilarious.
• “You can’t hurt me, I’m made of pillows!”