Power Rangers Ninja Steel Episode 20 Review: Helping Hand

This Power Rangers Ninja Steel review contains spoilers.

Power Rangers Ninja Steel Episode 20

I have dumped on Ninja Steel a lot this season. It’s no secret. The last few weeks (minus the election episode) especially I’ve really torn into the series. So what happens when this episode comes along which isn’t awful? It isn’t great, the plot with Sarah’s mom has zero subtly whatsoever, but for Ninja Steel it’s just batting a thousand.

A teenager and her mom get into a disagreement?! Conflict?! They both admit they were at fault? I was just waiting for the episode to drop the ball but they really hit a home run with it. Oh sure, it’s one point in a losing game but credit where credits due. 

The end with Victor and Monty stealing the Ninja Stars is also a neat little twist. I genuinely wondered if they’d just end the episodes with the stars and try to use them to get famous. Nope! Galvanax shows up and steals them all with Victor and Monty as well! That’s a great cliffhanger and sets up some genuine conflict. It’s probably the closest the show will ever get to my wish of Victor and Monty becoming stars on Galaxy Warriors.

Of course there’s problems with the episode. Somehow they were always able to make Ninja Stars no problem up this point but this week they just happened to need a super charge? There just happens to be a comet that will more than likely give them a new supply of Ninja Steel next week. The Ninja Nexus thing exists to explain the plot.

These problems actually signify the larger issues with Ninja Steel, even in a decentish episode like this. It has serious ingained issues baked into it from the start.

It’s nice to see Victor and Monty actually heavily involved with the plot now but for a large portion of this season they’ve done pretty much nothing. Its great Galvanax is making awesome fourth wall breaking jokes now… But he’s done next to nothing all season. Victor and Monty do more than he could in nineteen episodes. That doesn’t make the guy seem like a threat, it makes him look like a clown shoes.

So yeah, the set up for the finale was fine enough. It’s actually one of the best episodes of Ninja Steel yet. But with all the issues that have come before it robs this episode of getting a higher score. Ninja Steel is just fundamentally broken and it would need to do a ton of work to get itself on the right path.

Much of that will include ditching the magical Ninja Nexus thing, stop over explaining the lessons of the week, make the villains genuinely menacing, embrace the concept of Galaxy Warriors, actually let the Rangers have conflict, and stop having Victor and Monty operate on cartoon logic. That’s only the start and I doubt Ninja Steel is capable of doing that.

If Ninja Steel and Super Ninja Steel are a semester of school, it just got a C. That’s great! But it’s been getting F’s and D’s most of the year and it’s going to fail the class with that average. Still, it’s got a little over its run to fix its issues but it can’t mess up. They have to start getting A’s and B’s every week. Is that possible? Next week will give us an idea.

Here’s Shamus Kelley’s idea. Make Victor and Monty the stars. That will earn rave reviews every week. Follow him on Twitter!