Power Rangers Beast Morphers Season 2 Episode 8 Review: Boxed In
While a Zord wrestling match keeps this Beast Morphers episode fun, what it does to Ravi is just perplexing.
This POWER RANGERS BEAST MORPHERS review contains spoilers.
First off let’s talk about the biggest thing this episode will be remembered for. Sadly not the unique Zord battle but the mere reference to the Pan Global Games. Originally created in MMPR, the Games were basically the Olympics and were used to write Kimberly out of the show. It’s nice that Power Rangers Beast Morphers remembers they existed and gave us this little nod. It’s a good instance of the show using its own universe and making it feel like it’s all connected, even in small ways.
It’s a shame this is what people will focus on when the Zord fight was genuinely one of the most unique in the series history. Traditionally these fights are cut and paste and rarely go longer than a few minutes. Having a Zord fight take up a whole episode is already rare but then making that Zord battle a wrestling match? That’s incredible!
They keep changing it up, adding new opponents for Devon to fight and just taking it completely over the top. Watching Zords that are usually portrayed as slow and lumbering in a fast paced wrestling match? With all the extra commentary? That’s brilliant and cleverly disguises that this is a traditional Sentai footage burning episode. They aren’t as common these days but in older seasons they’d regularly have episodes that used as much Sentai footage as possible to save on budget.
Usually they episodes were average or fairly bad but this one gets away with it because they lean into the already wacky Sentai footage and just roll with it. I wish Power Rangers (and Sentai for that matter) had more fun with Zord battles like this.
Unfortunately the plot of the actual episode doesn’t match up with the fun of the Zord battle. While it’s good times to watch the wrestling match it isn’t really rooted in an engaging plot. This all comes down to Ravi acting wildly out of character. He’s desperate to see weight lifting and shirks his duties to do so. I’d say this shows a new side to his character but from the very first episode it was establish Ravi followed the rules to a fault. He broke up with his girlfriend because of the “Rangers don’t date Rangers” rule. He hid his art for years because of his mom telling him art was pointless.
Seeing Ravi so blatantly disregard orders feels like it was created solely to generate some conflict. It’s a shame because Ravi was arguably the most fleshed out of the whole team and this just doesn’t line-up with what we’ve already learned. It also doesn’t matter much to the meat of the episode. We don’t see Ravi desperate to save Devon because of his actions; he acts like he normally does in fights.
It’s odd more wasn’t done to tie-in the conflict of the episode with the Zord action. What if Ravi was a big wrestling fan (but hid it from his mom) and that’s why he wanted to sneak away? Then he could give pointers to Devon from a distance? As it is it feels like the already misplaced conflict of the episode is forgotten about for ten minutes and then casually resolved at the end.
This episode is memorable but if Ravi had acted more in character and kept an emotional through line going throughout this episode this would have been an episode fans might have been talking about for a long time… and not just because of a small reference to the past.
Written by
For more from Shamus including original TV scripts visit www.ShamusKelley.com. He’s been a TV writer since 2009 when he created and executive produced the 21 JSR…