Power Rangers Dino Charge: “The Ghostest With The Mostest” Review

Summary: A dual Halloween special and clip show surprises with ample well-written character material and fun.

Recap

Duplicon, the copycat monster from “Double Ranger, Double Danger,” is revived by Sledge. He teams up with Curio and Memorella to kidnap one of the Rangers, use Memorella to copy their memories, and then infiltrate the group. Meanwhile, at a Halloween party, Kendall dresses as Cupid in honor of the new Cupid charger, which will make a monster fall in love with whomever it sees. Chase makes costumes for the Rangers — matching ones, in fact, and they’re all ghosts. So when Kendall sees the bad guys kidnap one of them, she has no idea which Ranger it is — and who the imposter is. Kendall has the Rangers take a lie detector test to determine who’s the fake, and they each answer questions about their past experiences together. Shelby answers incorrectly, lying about why she dressed as the princess of Zandar, not wanting to admit that she went through with it because she found Tyler attractive. However, Kendall realizes that Shelby isn’t the fake — Koda is, because he called her Miss Morgan instead of the usual Kendall all night. The real Koda arrives, having escaped, and the Rangers chase Memorella out, making sure to destroy her before she gets word to Sledge about the base’s location. They take her down just in time thanks to the Cupid charger and their megazords. After the battle, Tyler asks Shelby why she lied, but before she can respond she accidentally hits Chase with her Cupid charger…and upon seeing himself in the mirror, he even more in love with himself.

Review

Dino Charge‘s first holiday special is, in a lot of ways, exactly what you might expect — it’s a clip show alongside some Samurai and Megaforce specials, and it’s more entertaining just by the nature of being Dino Charge. But “Ghostest with the Mostest” is, frankly, a huge surprise — it’s not just “entertaining for a clip show,” it’s actually a generally good episode.

But to understand why, we still have to grasp the uphill battle this episode has to fight. AV Club wrote a great summary in a retro-review of the aptly-titled The Simpsons episode “So It’s Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show,” which I’ll share here:

Depending on your perspective, the clip show is either an exciting challenge or a trial of the damned for overworked, overpaid television writers. Clip shows are unwieldy beasts by nature, Franken-episodes stitched together from bits and pieces of previous installments from earlier seasons willed into life by the angry demands of commerce. The clip show is fundamentally dishonest, pragmatic and cheap, a smorgasbord of lukewarm television leftovers masquerading as a new dish.

So, yeah, fans being annoyed that their favorite show is doing a clip show isn’t a “nitpicky fandom” thing, it’s a part of the business that literally everyone hates. It’s your boss making everyone work later and faster to crank out more product, which he/she hates as much as everyone else, but you just have to deal with it for the sake of the job and the company. It’s the one time the business side absolutely takes over the creative side in television, as it means less things to write and shoot and less time to put into it, and it’s obvious. Power Rangers is an even weirder situation, because it’s already a show that recycles Japanese footage, so doing a clip show of a show that’s already kind of a clip show…well, it’s obviously being milked for all it’s worth. Since the reacquistion by Saban, Power Rangers has been required to do annual Christmas and Halloween specials each year in addition to the regular episode orders, and it’s clear that those additional episodes aren’t really in the budget. (Super Megaforce probably only got away with not doing them because it needed the spare cash to get some old Rangers back, though that’s just my speculation.)

It’s easy to see why the norm is for these types of things to be hastily cobbled together. If everyone’s going to hate them anyway, then why try? We see the trend less and less in TV now, thanks to networks steadily having a better understanding that quality product is, y’know, actually really important. So Power Rangers Dino Charge can’t really ride the usual clip show crest if it wants to keep its status of a decent season of TV, even if the franchise as a whole has had no trouble going to that well in the past.

What we get in “Ghostest with the Mostest” is a lot of fun and joy — which, yeah every episode of Dino Charge is fun. Super Megaforce was technically “fun.” But this episode is fun because it hinges on these characters, who at this point have become so well fleshed out that it’s nice to just hang out with them. The entire premise for the clip show happens thanks to a very clever monster team-up, combining duplicator powers and memory stealing powers, and letting the chaos ensue from there. That really softens the whole “clip show” conceit, actually; we’re seeing recycled footage, but in an environment where hanging out and reminiscing about these Rangers’ greatest hits not only feels natural, but also makes story sense. And to the episode’s credit, there really aren’t that many clips, nor are they overly lengthy. Each one is neatly introduced and evenly spaced out, so the episode doesn’t drag. There’s a reasonable explanation for why they’d be talking about past events in enough detail to justify a flashback, and that makes this feel like a standard plotline for an episode.

In fact, it only marginally feels like a Halloween special at all. Memorella is a vampire-themed monster (and looks really similar to Mystic Force‘s Necrolai), but the vampire aspect isn’t given much attention. And, of course, there’s a Halloween party happening in the background and Kendall is dressed as Cupid for it. But that’s about all, and while I wouldn’t mind seeing Power Rangers go full-on with horror movie parodies, that this doesn’t feel like some one-off special works in its favor.

If anything, this might be closer to what we’d expect to see in a Valentine’s Day episode. That’s mostly because of the Cupid charger, which is a silly gimmick that an entire episode could have been made out of. But instead of making another “Love is in the Air,” Dino Charge does its usual swerve and simply uses it to add color to everything else. It’s a creative weapon, the kind you’d expect to see in a 2000s-era Insomniac game, or latter day Saints Row. That Dino Charge is so direct about their Rangers’ odder powersets, but never uses them as whole-episode gimmicks, encapsulates this season’s character- and fun-centric focus. It also gives us a cute Chase joke in the tag that, again, only works because we know the character so well.

The Cupid charger also introduces an underlying love theme that, while the episode doesn’t hinge on it, it’s certainly its greatest strength. It’s whats most surprising about this entire special — we get full acknowledgement and movement of the steadily moving Shelby and Tyler romance. Power Rangers has been extremely hit-or-miss when it comes to the romances, so it’s been great seeing such a subtle, slow burn of little moments between these two. We’ve seen Tyler get flustered at Shelby not finding him attractive, even though we know she totally does, the latter of which this episode directly references. That’s an important piece of the will they/won’t they puzzle that Megaforce had a hard time with — both parties sense a spark, but convince themselves they can’t be together for whatever reason.

It’s not as if “The Ghostest with the Mostest” does anything revolutionary, or even anything we wouldn’t expect to happen later in the show. So it may be an unfair assessment, but a big part of the episode’s success is that it has such an integral character moment in an episode that, by all accounts, just shouldn’t have had it. If this is anything like previous specials, it may be listed separately on Netflix and not necessarily included in regular rotation reruns. And, of course, this is a clip show, but the entire in-story reason for that clip show — the Rangers recapping memories for a lie detector test — is also used to not only make Shelby confront her feelings about Tyler, but also show that she’s so afraid of confronting those feelings that she actually risks her own life. That’s vital character information, and it checks out considering how her own self-confidence has always been an issue in the show. It takes a lot of gall for the writers to put a major character beat in an episode that the network and distributors may not include in the regular run, but that makes it that much more satisfying to see it happen when it does.

That makes this a weird episode to fully read, because it’s only such a surprise because of the meta details. The episode seems to be taking the British standpoint behind holiday specials — they aren’t technically part of the season’s production and regular airings like most American holiday-themed episodes usually are, but they are still a vital, even game-changing part of the story (think Doctor Who and Misfits.) Despite all that, the episode’s content, even with the clip show and Halloween special conceit, is totally in line with Dino Charge‘s type of storytelling. It’s fun, it’s character-heavy, and it’s impossible to not have a big dorky grin on your face by its end. That certainly makes it a success.

Odds & Ends

• This episode fits really well in continuity here, and throws in elements that are surely going to come into play later in the series. But even still, for the sake of consistency, it’s safer to just call this episode a “special” rather than interrupting the numbering of episodes in the review title, which is why this isn’t Dino Charge #1.15. I’m not a huge fan of doing that, but pretty much every other site everywhere including all the Wikis are doing it, so I’ll follow suit!
• The Rangers trapped in a creepy abandoned building conceit of “When Logic Fails” feels more in line with a “Halloween” episode than this one does, especially with the Scooby Doo gags.
• Seriously, though, how good does Claire Blackwelder look in that Cupid costume? Great costuming.
• Ivan’s reaction to the Cupid charger — implying that he totally thinks Kendall made it so she can get some — is hilarious.
• Likewise, Chase giggling about the Dino Gas charger — you know, the one with all the farting — is very funny.