Power Rangers Dino Charge #1.3 “A Fool’s Hour” Review

Summary: A standard teamwork story makes some slight tweaks and continues to pack in the exposition in another well-plotted episode.

If you have not seen this episode yet and don’t wish to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.

Recap

Sledge finally makes his way to Earth in the present day, after riding a comet back to Earth, intent on getting his Energems back. The Rangers learn that Koda was a caveman that has been around for 100,000 years, the Pleistocene era, because those in possessions of Energems do not age. They confront Sledge and his minions and immediately lose; Tyler spots Fury in the woods and goes after him on a hunch, against everyone else’s wishes. Tyler realizes that another monster was sent to spy on the Rangers and find their homebase. He confronts the monster on his own, while the other Rangers get an upgrade from Kendall called Dino Steel. The Rangers join together and fight the monster with their new upgrades. Tyler, Koda, and Shelby form a Megazord with their Zords and defeat the monster. Kendall emphasizes the need for the Rangers to keep a secret identity, which means Shelby will have to continue to flip burgers in her downtime, to her dismay, but with her fellow Rangers by her side.

Review

“A Fool’s Hour” is the quintessential teamwork episode of Power Rangers. It’s always rather straightforward and plays roughly the same beats every season – someone, usually Red Ranger, goes against the grain, bad things happen, and the team realizes they all need to work together. It’s an easy way for some very simple character development early on that nearly every season has done, addressing the growing pains of the budding team while leaving plenty of room to play with the powers we haven’t yet gotten too acquainted with.

There are little things about this season that are intriguing, even if a bit worrying sometimes. The positives first: for one, there seems to be a clear focus on keeping the plot ever-moving. Aside from some inevitable fight sequences, every single scene in every episode so far has provided exposition or a new plot point; no superfluous comic relief characters or benign subplots, it’s this story and only this story. Megaforce did lots of episodes without any subplots too, but the problem there was how light the actual main plot was. Dino Charge, conversely, has a surprisingly dense and mysterious plot right from the get-go, so it actually needs to power through what it has to keep things from slowing down. So far, it’s working, because no scene feels like filler. Take, for example, that it took three episodes to get a full morphing sequence for everyone (and they’re still time-saving split-screen, not separate.) As much as the obsessive kid part of me wants to see extended individual morphs for all of them, that this season is so intent on cutting out the usual padding really leaves me with high hopes.

More importantly, though, there are reveals and developments interspersed throughout this episode that should be huge, but are surprisingly underplayed. Kendall nonchalantly reveals to the team that Koda is a caveman who has been alive since before civilization, and it’s because people with Energems are immortal. Like a lot of this season’s mythology, that’s friggin’ insane. It’s likely that this is mostly just a plot device to explain Koda’s presence, but there are some big implications here for the story of this season. We even get some (rather vain) character bits from their reactions; Shelby is naively excited about having a great 18-year-old bod forever, and Chase is excited for keeping his charming face unaged. That aside, there’s much left to be explored with Koda, in particular. Has he been isolated all this time? Because he hasn’t even adjusted as well as Brendan Fraser’s character in Encino Man, and he’d have a better handle on everything if he was interacting with civilization as it grew.

Most of our mythology characters, Koda included, are still a mystery. The bulk of the episode is devoted to the Rangers’ first encounter with Sledge (it took three episodes for the main villain to come to Earth — crazy!) Sledge has just been been waiting around for 65 million years before being able to head overand take back his Energems, apparently, which means he surely holds the record for longest engagement in the history of the universe, and darn well better throw one hell of a wedding. Plenty of Power Rangers seasons have had their villains vaguely around for hundreds or thousands of years, but the scope of Dino Charge feels uniquely vast, perhaps because it’s so directly tied to our own history. Sledge, Keeper, and Koda’s sprawling individual and entangled histories are rife with stories, the backstories between the heroes and villains the most rich and important they’ve been since perhaps Mystic Force.

Considering he’s their mentor, Keeper is a huge and somewhat unhelpful enigma so far (the way he pops in for a big taunt and immediately dips out his hilarious), but it seems intentional rather than the bad writing of, say, Gosei. And Sledge…well, Sledge is just fun all around, with the ramshackle bounty hunter motif working wonders, like when he has to punch his shoulder rocket to make it work. There’s a grittier feeling to everything the villains do, from the idea that the aliens are essentially being released from their cells on probation, to the fact that most monsters don’t use teleportation. One big plot point is that Tyler wrecks this monster’s ship, preventing him from revealing their base to Sledge.

The rest is rather standard, with Tyler following a hunch while Chase disagrees, and the team learns a lesson about trusting each other and working together. The episode presents its lesson reasonably well, forgoing answering the question of “is a hunch good or bad” in favor of saying it doesn’t matter, as long as you work together. There’s nothing new here, but some small changes make it feel slightly less formulaic; Tyler shows his intelligence and tactical prowess, not following Fury because he’s obsessed with him, but simply because he deduces there is more to Sledge’s plan. That’s a bit of a departure from what we’d normally get from this story, which is rather well-structured and well-plotted.

Another surprise is that we already have the Rangers completely outmatched and in need of a power-up. Granted, that’s a little worrying — does that mean we’ll be getting copious out-of-the-blue power-ups Super Megaforce-style? — but in this case, it only makes Sledge more intimidating. The Dino Steel power-up is pretty much just a weapons set for the Rangers anyway, but the arm armor that goes along with them feels like another throwback to the grittier, 80s-punk style this season often goes for. We get our first Megazord too; Shelby is the first to call on her Zord by her own accord, which is very cool, and fits in with the idea that she might be the most in-tune with the dinos than the rest of the team. But even more intriguing is that only Tyler, Shelby, and Koda form the Megazord, oddly enough. It’s a surprising decision considering these guys started off as a team of five, but it should force Riley and Chase to do things a bit differently, and break the monster grow/Megazord fight formula. The Zords continue to be a good mix of puppetry and CGI, with the CGI mostly presenting itself when the Megazord needs to do parkour, because of course it does.

One worrying thing is a very, very silly nitpick, but one that may either disappear in a few weeks, or grow to malignancy. With the first three episodes powering through some hefty plot, it’s easy for little details to get glossed over, even with a season this attentive to them. A glaring point here is that Tyler’s communicator is introduced…by revealing that it’s broken, as a plot point. It’s sort of a storytelling cheat, because it reveals something that would be rather important before we even know it exists, sort of like resolving a Checkov’s gun without that Checkov’s gun ever being placed. That little bit is obviously not a big deal, and that it’s the weakest part of the episode shows the quality this season has been putting out. The worry is that it could be a consistent problem if kept unchecked — when focusing on getting through the myriad big things, some little things can get lost along the way, and those little things are what help make up a given season’s personality.

That’s jumping the gun, though, because “A Fool’s Hour” is of the same quality we’ve come to expect, even this early in the season. Dino Charge is completely trekking along with typical Power Rangers tropes, but playing with them and making them something different at the same time. These aren’t the meta subversions or deconstructions we got from the Disney seasons of the show — in fact, Dino Charge has played everything completely straight so far. They’re taking what we know and making slight tweaks, playing with the order, or the pace, or the rules just enough to continually surprise while retaining familiarity. “A Fool’s Hour” is probably a forgettable installment in the long term, but it’s exactly the progression this season should have.

Odds & Ends

• That pesky apostrophe in the title was really inconsistent in marketing materials, and it wasn’t until we saw the title onscreen that it was firmly established that yes, “Fools” is meant to be the possessive “Fool’s”. The problem is the title still doesn’t make any sense. [Edit: Okay, I get it now, guys. It’s referring to the fake hour Sledge left them. I’m a little slow on the uptake, apparently.]
• They have a viewing globe! Like, a literal viewing globe!
• “Walking lollipop” is probably the most apt description of Poisandra anyone could dish out.
• Wrench gets hit and then starts crying about it. These villains are rad.
• I love Koda’s sleeveless denim fur shirt. Love. Love love love love love.
• The way the monsters grow is by having the mooks climb and crawl all over them, which is creepy as hell.
• I like Shelby’s rant about secret identities, and that she can’t use her new ins with the museum to get a better job there. But I also like that all the Rangers are now working lower wage jobs together, in a way that harkens back to Mystic Force or Jungle Fury. Plenty of room for shenanigans.
•  “Smells almost…human.” Bro, you’re on a planet in a city full of humans. They’re literally everywhere.
• “You hurt my hubcaps!”