Power Rangers Super Megaforce: United As One review

Is the Super Megaforce team the biggest bunch of inconsiderate assholes of all time? I would argue yes. This team openly antagonizes each other and outright fail at doing the job of protecting the world.

Now one might say, “Oh, they’re just teenagers. Teenagers act that way!” The problem with the Super Megaforce team is that it isn’t portrayed in a negative light. Gia, Troy, and Jake outright telling Orion to kiss Emma when he’s so clearly uncomfortable with it is shown as nothing more then a joke. We also get Emma abandoning saving the city to help a kid fly a kite. I get it; it’s a super cute moment. But is helping a kid fly a kite going to mean much if the city is blown up? Or Orion taking SUPER MEGA pictures of Emma while they’re trying to stop the monster…where is this team’s priorities?

We’ve had Noah thinking human/alien relationships are gross (despite his acknowledgement he wants to get his hands on Orion’s spaceship if you get what I mean) and the Rangers openly making of fun of Jake’s crush on Gia when she’s right there. This does not endear the Rangers to me. It makes me annoyed with them. It’s my continual frustration that in the right hands all of these moments could be played for some genuine character moments but they’re played off as jokes that do more damage to the characters then bolster them up.

“United as One” also commits one of the greatest sins a Power Rangers episode can do in my mind. Shooting original footage to simply do the plot of a Super Sentai episode. It’s a waste. If you’re going to reshoot so many scenes anyway (as this episode did) why not just do your own plot? Oh right, because that would take effort and it seems that in the past few weeks the Super Megaforce writers gave up and decided to just do wacky plots of the day instead of celebrating the history of Power Rangers or setting up the forthcoming “Legendary Battle.”

Again, these are plots that would have worked better in Megaforce to establish the characters. We have less then ten episodes to the end and we’re still fooling around. Get it together Super Megaforce.

Not to say this episode didn’t have a few great moments. Emma taking the center stage and leading the main plan was a refreshing change (seriously, the lack of focus on the girls has been ridiculous). She even got to pull a gun out of a wedding dress and shoot the monster of the day. Did it make a lick of sense? Not at all, but it was so badass I’ll let it go.

In that same scene we have Orion damn near wetting himself at the thought of having to kiss Emma. You could read this scene a number of ways but I’ll choose to believe that Orion is gay and I’ll hold on to that until the show outright proves me wrong. We also get another moment of Emma and Gia longingly looking at each other, proving once again they are totally dating. If you’re wondering why I’m reading all these characters as some form of LGBT, it speaks volumes about the lack of representation in the media.

So this week’s legendary mode was Dino Thunder and they seemed to get everything right up till Troy yells, “Dino RAMPAGE!!!!” (Archer did it better). Not to be that guy, but it was called Super Dino Mode. How do you get basic attack names right but then mess up one of the mode names? Oh right, they’re lazily translating Sentai scripts. Got it, effort is hard. How about this? Instead of needlessly reshooting fights with the Megaforce suits, you could have reshot this fight and included MMPR Pink. If only.

I wanted to like Super Megaforce. I did for a little while. Episodes like “Spirit of the Tiger” and “Silver Lining Part 2” were damn good, but the last few episodes have been falling back into the lackluster field Megaforce dominated. Please turn this around Super Megaforce, I would really like to not hate you.