TV

Ranger Ranker! #10 – Power Rangers Time Force

The One That’s in TIME!!!

We’re back! In TIME! No long preamble about my inability to keep a consistent schedule, let’s just jump right on in to more Power Rangers! In TIME!

Let’s Talk About TIME!

About halfway through Power Rangers Time Force, the opening sequence changes. In the new sequence, there is a spinning clock motif, and clips of the Power Rangers in various historic-themed situations – an old-west saloon, a samurai fight in a forest, a kung fu fight at a Chinese temple, and such. “Ah,” you might think, “this is the fun time travel implied by the title. This must be a fun romp through time featuring adventures in all sorts of thematic time periods.” Wrong! You fool! These are all clips from the same episode1 – one in which the monster Cinecon uses his magic director’s script to change reality, sending the Rangers into different types of genre movies.2 The actual show mainly just takes place in The Year 2001, where the Time Force Rangers are ostensibly stranded for the majority of the season. The actual occurrences of time travel occurring are:

  1. The mutant criminal Ransik travels back in time via a time-traveling prison, and the Time Force Rangers follow him in a timeship,3 which crashes.
  2. The mutant Commandocon opens a Time Hole to dinosaur times to find the Quantasaurus Rex Zord, and Wes and Eric follow him back, then return before the Time Hole closes.
  3. Katie accidentally falls down the stairs and into a random Time Hole to help a ghost.
  4. Alex travels back from the year 3000 in his own timeship to be a big jerk to everybody and then go home.
  5. The Black Knight somehow travels forward in time from medieval times by unknown means for unexplained reasons. Also there is a dragon.
  6. Wes sends the other Rangers back to the future to protect them from the finale, but they come back for hero reasons. Then they go back to the future again forever.4

Remember that Time Holes are just a thing that happens in the Power Rangers universe – that’s how Kimberly got sent back to Wild West Times back in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Taking that into consideration, the Rangers pretty much only intentionally time travel themselves to the present year of 2001 and then back, with a slight dramatic back-and-forth in the finale. Wes and Eric do travel to dinosaur times together, but that’s more of a teambuilding exercise where they learn to trust one another than any kind of Time Adventure.In any case, the idea of time travel is mainly used in this season as a corollary to Destiny. There is a predetermined track that history is supposed to follow and everyone is meant to follow it too. Repeatedly throughout the series characters are meant to accept or fight their fates, and the mere presence of the Rangers in 2001 is changing the future in unknown ways. Unknown because while people complain about it a lot, it never really comes up and it seems like the future is just getting changed willy-nilly anyway. Should we expect well-defined time-travel logic from a kids’ superhero show? Of course not. But should we laugh at Alex every time he grimaces into a viewscreen and sternly state that “the future is changing…”? Oh, most definitely. So everyone synchronize your clocks and let’s get ready to jump into the Time Vortex because it’s time for…

Adaptation

The year was 2001 and every media property was cribbing off of The Matrix. It’s all cool shades, spinning cameras, and slow-mo effects as far as the eye can see. Plus, the numbers in the year were mostly zeroes! That’s cool, right?5 Into that world comes Power Rangers Time Force.

Plot

In the year 3000, crime has been essentially eliminated. The sole remaining criminal is the mutant leader, Ransik. Alex, the Time Force Red Ranger, is able to capture Ransik, but during transport, their convoy is ambushed by Ransik’s followers, who I guess are also remaining criminals who didn’t get mentioned before. Ransik makes his way to a prison containing all of the imprisoned mutant criminals and kills Alex, just days before Alex was going to retire and marry Jen Scotts, the real hero of this season. Ransik takes control of the prison and activates its time-travel functionality, which is a thing that future prisons have, traveling back to the city of Silver Hills in the year 2001, where there is no Time Force and Ransik is free to run wild and take over the past.

Meanwhile back in the future, Time Force officer Jen, accompanied by her three teammates, Lucas, Katie, and Trip, take Alex’s set of Chrono-Morphers and commandeer an untested Time Force timeship, following Ransik to the past. However, the Chrono-Morphers are all locked to Alex’s morpher, which is linked to his DNA. Conveniently, they encounter Wes Collins, a spoiled rich boy who happens to share Alex’s DNA because time reasons or something. They use him to unlock the other morphers and begrudgingly allow him to join their team, becoming the Time Force Rangers. Premise established, the Rangers fight against the army of mutants that Ransik releases from the future prison.

Meanwhile in the present, Wes’ emotionally distant businessman father, Mr. Collins, establishes the Silver Guardians, a private defense force that protects anyone who pays them. Mr. Collins is all about money, you see. The leader of the Silver Guardians is Eric Myers, Wes’s friend/rival, who acquires the Quantum Controller, a Time Force device that got sent back in time and holds the powers of the Quantum Ranger. Eric thus becomes the Quantum Ranger and acts as a rival Ranger to the main Time Force Rangers.

+3001 pts

Music

TIME FORCE! TIME FORCE! TIME FORCE! TIME FORCE!Seriously, I love this opening and its dedication to just shouting out the name of the season as much as possible. Five stars, no notes.

+1000 pts!

Fights

As I said before, there is a distinct Matrix-y vibe to the season. This applies to the fights somewhat, with a lot of motion blur and slow-motion. There are also some big, big guns, in the form of the V-Weapons, which combine to form an even bigger gun, the Vortex Blaster. The other primary weapons of the season are the Chrono Sabers – twin swords that can be joined together to form a lance, like Darth Maul’s lightsabers. Also, they look like hands of a clock! Because TIME! So a lot of the fighting ends up being this fun dual-wield swordfights, which I enjoyed. Overall, it’s an interesting vibe, with a distinct feel from other seasons.

+638 pts!

Miscellany

I mentioned last time that it was kind of weird that the Rangers were kind of a paramilitary organization, and that’s kind of true again this season. However, in this case, the Rangers are essentially rogue operatives, who ran off on their own without the support of Time Force. Of course, once they actually get to the past, Captain Logan pretty much just goes along with everything they do, sending the Megazord and other various support devices. Then Alex comes back, revived somehow due to time shenanigans and/or not actually getting killed in the first place, and for some reason gets to be the secret super-boss of Time Force.6 I do think that makes it a little more interesting, because it’s not like the Rangers have the unlimited resources that Lightspeed Rescue seemed to have, they’re actually a little on the back foot, at least at first. Also, why exactly is Time Force (the organization) time-themed in the first place? What even is the point of them having a Time Arch and sending stuff through time when it seems like they’re just a normal future-present law enforcement agency? They don’t actually seem to police the timeline; it kind of seems like they just are normal police.

Cumulative Score: 5037 pts!

The Good Guys

The four non-red Rangers are all Time Force officers set on their first big mission – to transport Ransik to his life of imprisonment – when they get ambushed and wind up chasing Ransik 1000 years back into the past to the present year of 2001. There, they meet Wes and eventually Eric, who become the rival Red Rangers of the present day, fighting to protect the city of Silver Hills7 from Ransik and his prison full of evil mutants8 

The Rangers

Wes Collins (Jason Faunt)  

The Face

  • Color: Red
  • Zord: Time Flyer 1
  • Signature Weapon: V1 & Chrono Sabers
  • Strength: 5
  • Smarts: 1
  • Coolness factor: 1

Wes is the heir to a huge business empire, currently run by his father, Mr. Collins. He’s lived his whole life spoiled and taken care of, but also is apparently an accomplished fighter, able to hold his own against Ransik’s minions. He’s kind of a slacker, and often has a lack of perspective on the world, and he bristles against the destiny set in store for him by his father’s plans for him. Eventually, he chooses the Rangers over his father, running away from his life to choose his own fate. Ultimately though, he and his father are able to reconcile, with Mr. Collins revealing that he’s proud of Wes for choosing to do something for himself for once in his life, because honestly Wes was pretty much a screwup before meeting the Rangers.

Lucas Kendall (Michael Copon)  

The Wheels

  • Color: Blue
  • Zord: Time Flyer 2
  • Signature Weapon: V2 & Chrono Sabers
  • Strength: 5
  • Smarts: 5
  • Coolness factor: 100

Lucas is an ex-racecar driver and he is soooooooo cooooooool. He’s a suave ladies’ man and kind of in love with his own face. He ends up temporarily dating Ransik’s evil daughter Nadira due to a case of mistaken identity in which Nadira intercepts a love poem that Lucas wrote to his racecar. Post-season media implies that this relationship may have been picked up again in the future, because Lucas is just that cool. 

Katie Walker (Deborah Estelle Phillips)  

The Muscle

  • Color: Yellow
  • Zord: Time Flyer 4
  • Signature Weapon: V4 & Chrono Sabers
  • Strength: 1000
  • Smarts: 10
  • Coolness factor: 10

Katie is the heart of the team, showing the most empathy and thoughtfulness and emotional intelligence. She also has genetically enhanced super strength and is able to lift a car with ease. She’s never directly involved in a romance plot, but she keeps being romance-adjacent – she gets transported into a romantic musical dance number when Cinecon transports everyone into different movie genres, and she falls down the stairs into colonial times to help a ghost gain the confidence to confess his love to the girl that he likes.9 She also usually ends up being the one to shepherd Jen and Wes’s awful romance plotline, for better or for worse.

Jen Scotts (Erin Cahill)  

The Brains

  • Color: Pink
  • Zord: Time Flyer 5
  • Signature Weapon: V5 & Chrono Sabers
  • Strength: 10
  • Smarts: 15
  • Coolness factor: 50

Jen is the strong, confident, competent woman, forced to rely upon the feckless idiot man-child. And she is so very, very angry about this, all the time. She is ostensibly the leader of the team, though Wes takes it upon himself to take charge all the time. And for some inexplicable reason, she ends up becoming attracted to him, despite/because of him looking exactly like her dead fiance from the future.10 In the end, she is forced to return to the future without him, leaving their star-crossed, time-crossed romance behind, but she does also break off her engagement with Alex, so… *shrug*

Trip Regis (Kevin Kleinberg)  

The Tech

  • Color: Green
  • Zord: Time Flyer 3
  • Signature Weapon: V3 & Chrono Sabers
  • Strength: 1
  • Smarts: 100
  • Coolness factor: 1

Trip is an alien – a Xybrian – and as a result has an assortment of psychic powers, including telepathy and telekinesis. He has a tendency to be the butt of the joke in the team, due to his awkwardness or unfamiliarity with humans. He’s very naive and trusting, and he tends to give enemies the benefit of the doubt, like when he helps Notacon escape from Ransik’s service or when he conscripts Nadira to help deliver a baby, leading to her epiphany about humans not being so bad after all.

Eric Myers (Daniel Southworth)  

The Wildcard

  • Color: Red, but like, a cool Red with Black accents
  • Zord: Quantasaurus Rex
  • Signature Weapon: Quantum Defender
  • Strength: 10
  • Smarts: 10
  • Coolness factor: 10

Eric was an old friend of Wes, but unlike Wes, he was raised in a poor family and has had to struggle all of his life to get all of the benefits that Wes was just handed. He becomes the leader of Mr. Collins’ Silver Guardians when he recovers the Quantum Controller from a random archaeological dig11 where it had been launched backwards in time from the future. He’s a fairly angry person, but he has a soft side for his birds and for children. He’s a loner, only allying with the Time Force Rangers out of circumstance most times, but he holds a grudging respect for them and for Wes. In the end, Wes gets handed the leadership of the Silver Rangers due to nepotism, thus proving Eric right about everything. Wes does graciously offer to let Eric be his partner and co-leader though, so that’s ok I guess.

The Team

I like the design of these suits a lot. The arrow design is dynamic, and the bracers and shinguards are suitably futuristic-looking. The jaggedness of the Quantum Ranger design is fun, too. It’s a little cheap to use a heart design for the Pink Ranger outfit, but what are you going to do, I guess. The team functions really well together. The four future Rangers are already a team when the series begins, and Wes is at least usually capable of taking orders, though he does have a tendency to be a problem when left to his own devices. Eric does his own thing and has his own team of completely expendable Silver Guardians to get exploded, but when once those guys are all downed, he is generally professional and cooperative, though he does complain about it, as is his prerogative.

Ranger Ranker:

  1. Eric – He’s just so adorably cranky all the time, it’s the best. When he gets sent into the movies, he ends up in a Tarzan-style jungle picture, which is just the worst and he’s miserable the whole time. +3591 pts
  2. Jen – Technically, she’s the first female leader of a team of Power Rangers, and it’s only undercut by Wes being special and having everything handed to him some of the time. +3038 pts
  3. Lucas – Sooooooooo coooooooooool +2850 pts
  4. Katie – She’s the sensible one, but she has fun with it. Solidly middling. +2027 pts
  5. Trip – I sometimes feel like sometimes the show doesn’t like Trip very much. That’s it, that’s the thought. +1846 pts
  6. Wes – The Red Ranger has a tendency to be handed everything just for being the specialest boy, but this time it’s textually acknowledged! +1533 pts

Overall, I actually do like everybody on this team a lot. There are no real frustrating or boring characters, and Wes manages to avoid being too annoying because he’s actually held accountable for his childishness. Everyone basically likes each other and functions professionally as a team. It’s all this kind of cozy, competent vibe that’s really pleasant to dwell in.

“Time For Time Force!”

The lesson that I have learned from this series and this morph sequence in particular is that DNA is Magic. The Chronomorphers begin the series DNA-Locked to Alex’s DNA, but Wes conveniently shares Alex’s DNA to an acceptable extent to unlock the morphers. It’s never explicitly stated that Alex is directly descended from Wes, but that’s probably because it makes the love triangle between Wes and Jen really weird as soon as you apply any thought to it. Anyway, the morph sequence involves an exploding strand of DNA, which is somehow energized or something and gives the Rangers their Ranger powers. There’s also a bunch of numbers zooming around in the background, because I don’t know, it’s Matrix-y or something.
Overall Team Score: 3000 pts!

With Special Guest Rangers:

Lightspeed Rescue

Vypra has returned! Despite being absorbed into Queen Bansheera’s body at the end of last season, Vypra has apparently been buried in a lovely grave with its very own tombstone. But this means that she can somehow come back from the dead! Which she does! And she goes directly to Silver Hills to attempt to rob the museum. She is foiled, however, because although her new ghostly form can pass through the glass case surrounding the Solar Amulet, she can’t make the Solar Amulet intangible as well to pull it through the case. So she leaves and convinces Ransik to heist the Solar Amulet for her, which they will then use to summon the Super Demon Quarganon to destroy all humans.Fortunately, the Time Force Rangers are met by Carter Grayson from Lightspeed Rescue, who has been tracking Vypra. He gets the band12 back together to join forces with the Time Force Rangers and stop Vypra. They fail, of course, and Quarganon is summoned. Fortunately, the combined forces of all 12 Rangers13 is enough to explode Vypra and Quarganon.

Gear

Time Force Badge

It’s very shiny. They keep holding it up and it goes *shing* and everything. Also it can put monsters into indefinite cryostasis to be stored in the Rangers’ fridge, a function which otherwise requires a giant cylinder room if they do it in the Time Traveling Prison that Ransik occupies.

+500 pts

Quantum Mega Battle Armor

Eric gets to be the special boy who gets the power upgrade this season, and his special upgrade is the unstoppable power of Roller Blades. The 00’s were just a better time.

+756 pts

Battle Fire

Meanwhile, Wes also gets a special upgrade, but it’s some kind of medieval-knight-based fire powerup that honestly might just be a rework of an unused Mystic Knights of Tir na Nog Season 2 design. So says the foremost MKoTnN scholar on the internet.1415  

+28 pts

Zords

Time Flyers

The Time Force Megazord is made up of the five Time Flyers – jet-like Zords that are never actually piloted on their own. It has two configurations – Mode Blue, which uses the Time Jet as a gun, and Mode Red, which uses a sword and a shield made up of Time Flyers 416 and 517 It also has a Jet mode, which can use Cyclone Defense to fly around in a circle and make a big tornado.The two configurations system is an interesting variation on the format, and I like how they have different fighting styles. However, the plane theming is pretty bland with basically no differentiation between the different vehicles.

Coolness of Planes

1-5. They’re all the same dang plane and you can’t convince me otherwise. +0 pts

Time Force Megazord Mode Red

Main Weapon: Time Force Megazord Saber

Finishing Move: Time Strike – Two extra blades come out of the Time Force Megazord Saber as the Megazord slashes through the enemy. Then the side blades form a clock that ticks towards 12:00 as the enemy is frozen in time and then explodes.

Time Force Megazord Mode Blue

Main Weapon: Time Jet (Gun Mode)

Finishing Move: Time Blast – The Time Jet Gun charges up and shoots them real real good.

Total (group) score: +1202 pts

Shadow Winger

The Shadow Winger is sent secretly by Alex in the future from his secret dark room of secrets and turns into the Time Shadow Megazord. Possibly it’s also controlled by him? It’s not entirely clear. It’s a jet, but also like a ninja or something and it has cool twin armblades.

Coolness of Ninja Jet Thing

Pretty cool honestly! It’s like a moon-powered ninja or something! And also a robot!

Score: +589 pts

Shadow Force Megazord

The Shadow Winger can combine with the Time Force Megazord to form the Shadow Force Megazord, and it also has a Blue and Red configuration that is gun-based and sword-based respectively. The gun is this cool giant rifle that can freeze the monster by shooting the numbers of a giant holographic clock at it, which then turn into lasers and blow up the monster. The sword is a sword and it makes a big clock in the air that it slashes through, which is significantly less cool, but I guess the lead Ranger of the episode does a cool flourish with a control-sword in the Megazord’s cockpit at the time, so there’s that.

Score: +666 pts

Quantasaurus Rex

The Quantasaurus Rex, or Q-Rex was the most powerful Zord ever made by Time Force in the future, but it was lost in a time travel experiment. It turns out that it ended up in dinosaur times, so Ransik sends a monster back in time to get it. Wes and Eric follow him back and Erik winds up gaining control of it using voice commands through his Quantum Morpher.

Coolness of Animal

RAWR! BIG DINOSAUR GO BRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Q-Rex Megazord Mode

The Q-Rex is perfectly functional as a big bitey dinosaur, but it can also turn into a humanoid robot with a tail that has a missile launcher for a hand and can fire cyro-lasers as part of its Max Blizzard finishing move that can freeze monsters for cryogenic storage.

Score: +993 pts

Transwarp Megazord

The Transwarp Megazord is a big yellow robot with a hammer for a hand, and it uses that hammer to bonk all of the Zords and the Stratocycle into the past via the time arch. It just winds up and spins around and hits them so they fly down this track into the big time portal that Time Force just has. It’s great and this one time when Cinecon is using his movie magic to control reality, it somehow hits itself back through time to join the fight because Cinecon thought it would be cool. And it is, he was right, no notes.

Coolness of Giant Robot

I love this robot and it has never done anything wrong in its robot life ever the end.

Score: +1289 pts

Mentors/Allies

Captain Logan

Captain Logan is Jen and the other Time Force Rangers’ superior. He’s not particularly helpful – in the beginning of the series, he can’t really do much other than send the Zords back in time because it turns out that Time Force’s time-travel capability is limited to the one (1) giant time traveling prison, the one (1) semi-functional Time Ship, which the Rangers stole and crashed, and the giant Time Arch, which is only used for Zords. Later in the season, all of the actual Time Force responsibilities are taken over by…

+100 pts

Alex Drake

At the start of the season, Alex is about to retire and get married at the same time so it’s extra-super-tragic when he extra-super-tragically dies. But he comes back somehow and it’s not entirely clear whether he was only mostly dead to begin with or whether the Rangers’ actions in the past somehow changed the future so that he was only mostly dead to begin with. Either way, he suddenly becomes Time Force’s secret dark boss with a secret dark control room where he observes everything. Captain Logan even defers to  him and everything, so it seems like he’s Captain Logan’s superior now? He temporarily comes back in time with a second Time Ship to take over Red Ranger duties from Wes, but he’s a big jerk about it and everyone wants Wes back, so he instead lets Wes be Red Ranger after all and also uses future technology to save Wes’ dad’s life after he was attacked by Ransik, because the theme of the season is Choosing Your Own Destiny, which apparently in this case means meddling with past events with disregard for the timeline stability that is YOUR ENTIRE JOB AND MOTIVATION.

+404 pts

Circuit

Circuit is a robot owl and he is extremely self-conscious. On one occasion, Circuit assumes that everyone hates him and runs away, endangering the Rangers because he is the only one capable of calling in the Zords from the future. But apart from having all of the robot emotions, he’s actually a pretty tolerable robot by Power Rangers standards, and is actually kind of cute. I’d keep him next to my bust of Bubo.

+308 pts

Random Citizens Lightning Round!

Mr. Collins

Your classic “stern father who never paid his son any attention and is too busy with all of his business business to have emotions” archetype, but with a bonus personal defense force capable of fielding a gigantic megatank. He’s secretly proud of his son underneath it all though.

+413 pts

Dr. Zaskin

Dr. Zaskin works for Mr. Collins’ company, Bio-Lab, and is the chief scientist in charge of researching and adapting all of this future technology that keeps showing up. Of course, he doesn’t know anything about all of the time travel stuff and is just going about his job discovering all of these advances that aren’t supposed to exist for another hundred years. Just casually making world-changing discoveries out of nowhere and thinking that it’s all completely normal. He also has an adorable daughter who Lucas ends up having to bodyguard for due to adorable child hijinks.

+507 pts

Eric’s Birds

Eric has some birds that he’s nice to, which is how you can tell that he has a heart after all despite his gruff exterior. He gives them to his neighbor girl child when he’s feeling all mopey and almost leaves town after Mr. Collins is injured by Ransik. Which is symbolism for Eric feeling all mopey or something. Literary analysis!

+377 pts

The Baddies

The Big Bad: Ransik – Mutant Mastermind

Ransik is a mutant, created as a byproduct of all of the genetic engineering that happens in the future. Rejected from society due to his looks, he becomes enraged by humanity and is determined to wipe them out for their cruelty to the mutant race. He becomes a leader to the mutants due to his ruthlessness, power, and ability to absolutely chew through scenery. Seriously, the guy pretty much never speaks in a volume lower than a yell and is an absolute delight to watch every time he’s in a scene. He is heavily deformed, and due to a past encounter with the venomous mutant Venomark,18 his flesh is constantly, painfully mutating further, requiring him to take a blue serum that is definitely never portrayed as a drug metaphor. Despite this, he is incredibly formidable, able to pull weapons out of his body,19 making him impossible to disarm. He is never even physically bested by the Rangers in battle. All of their efforts are barely able to scratch him, requiring Wes to blow up his Battle Warrior Armor at point blank to even do any damage. He eventually surrenders voluntarily due to his love for his daughter, Nadira, who had learned to accept humans and wanted to break the cycle of hatred between humanity and mutantkind.

Ransik is one of the best villains that the series has had, right up there with Rita Repulsa and Astronema. He’s got a great energy, he’s a ton of fun to watch, and he’s a real threat, managing to take out an experienced Ranger right out of the gate. He effectively sets up one of the main themes of the season – that of anger and hatred, and how they create a vicious cycle of violence. Mutantkind has always been hated by humanity, leading to mutants being rejected by society. This in turn leads directly to the mutants revolting20 and attacking humanity, which only leads to more hatred. Ransik’s personal anger at humanity leads to further hatred at pretty much everything, particularly robots, which causes tension with Frax and sets up a cycle of betrayal and revenge that escalates the villainous conflict later in the season. Nadira inherits her father’s hatred of humanity, but it is through her and her reconciliation with Frax and acceptance of humanity that ultimately breaks the cycle and brings down her father.

Score: +9582 pts

Henches

Frax

Late in the season, it is revealed that Frax was once a human named Dr. Louis Ferricks, who created the serum that Ransik takes to counteract Venomark’s venom. Ransik killeddestroyed Ferricks, who only survived by turning himself into a robot. Now renamed Frax, he would join Ransik’s crew to bide his time and destroykill Ransik when the opportunity arose. Ferricks’ humanity is thought to be long lost, replaced by murderous robot emotions, but when Nadira ultimately empathizes and forgives Frax/Ferricks, Dr. Ferricks’ human head metaphorically appears in Frax’s tummy and encourages Nadira to embrace her newfound empathy, right before Frax is robo-lobotomized. +2800 pts

Nadira

Nadira is Ransik’s vain, shallow, fashion-crazy, airheaded daughter. She likes money and shopping and evil and she is the only person in the entire world who Ransik cares about. As mentioned, she has a turn of heart in the end after witnessing the beautiful miracle of birth. And by witnessing, I mean that she single-handedly delivers a baby in a clothing store changing room, so maybe she’s not as useless as she puts on?

+3760 pts

Gluto

Gluto is like a mutant whale mobster or something? He’s basically the comic relief slapstick member of Team Mutant. I think the show forgets that he exists sometimes, because at the end of the show, the Rangers comment that they’ve captured every mutant except for Ransik and Frax, but Gluto’s just been there the whole time doing whatever whale mobsters do and no one seems to care.21 During the finale, he cryogenically freezes himself so that he doesn’t get caught up in the chaos of the final battle, and it’s unclear whether anyone ever comes back to get him after everything wraps up.

+275 pts

Fodder

Cyclobots

The Cyclobots are robots that sprout from handfuls of nuts and bolts. You can tell that they’re robots because they make silly running-in-place robot movements whenever they stand still. They fall in that nice sweet spot of looking threatening without looking completely unreasonable to fight without being morphed. Plus, they’re not horrible, disturbing mistakes of nature, so that’s nice, right?

+2103 pts

Monsters

The monsters of this season are mostly mutants, with a few robots thrown in for spice. Also they’re criminal mutants, which you can tell because many of their names end in the suffix “-con.” You know, like convicts. They’re all in prison is the point. Anyway, mutants came about due to all of the genetic engineering that they do in the future, and they look all monster-y, so they tend to be persecuted by society. As a result, many of them end up turning to crime, but you would not be blamed for thinking that maybe they should stop naming themselves after all of the crimes that they’re planning to do. It’s all very trenchant social commentary.

Monsters that are Good (according to me):

Notacon

See because he’s not a con, get it? Get it? Anyway, Notacon was imprisoned due to petty theft, which seems pretty harsh, but I guess that’s kind of the whole metaphorical thing about mutant persecution that the show almost kind of brushes up against.

Miracon

His big villainous plot is to get up on a building and use mirrors to shine light into peoples’ eyes and cause traffic accidents. Oh, also he can imprison the Rangers in the mirror dimension I guess. And he reverses the polarity of the Time Shadow to make it turn all evil. But the mirrors in eyes thing, that’s downright despicable.

Cinecon

I’ve mentioned him a bunch already in this article because he’s just great, but his whole thing is that he’s an evil movie director who is able to warp reality using his scriptbook and he just spends his whole two-part episode having an artistic meltdown over all of the havoc that the Rangers are causing to his carefully crafted script and all of the notes that Ransik and Nadira force upon him to prop up Nadira’s ego.

Mechanau

Mechanau masquerades as “Mr. Mechanau,”22 the proprietor of the Super Strong Gym, a gym featuring a miracle Super Strong Protein Powder that will instantly make you able to lift huge weights. Obviously, the powder turns out to be evil – it’s all a plot by Frax to turn regular humans into robots. You can tell that they are robots because the affected people do the silly robotic running-in-place thing that the Cyclobots do, so apparently that’s just an unavoidable thing that robots do.

What About Bulk and Skull?

[Distraught Sobbing]

THE FINAL SCORE

We now begin the completely transparent scoring system, where I give a value (in Pts) to each of the major elements, and I also get to decide what those are. And also how much they have accrued in Bonus Points(pts) up to now.

  • The Team:  750 Pts 
    • Individual: 500 tPts I really like everyone on the team. Even Wes, in the end. 
    • Together:  1000 tPts They function really well together as a team. All professional and the like, as if they actually like each other or something.
    • Leader: 250 tPts Jen Good Wes Bad
  • The Zords:  200 Pts
    • Individual: 10 zPts The individual Zords are pretty samey and don’t get a lot to do on their own this season.
    • Megazords: 350 zPts Having the two Megazord modes gave a nice bit of variety to things this season
  • The Villains: 6000 Pts
    • Leader: 6500 vPts I could watch Ransik chew scenery for another several seasons.
    • Henchmen: 3000 vPts None of them really live up to the highs of Ransik, but can you blame them?
    • Fodder: 500 vPts beep boop
  • The Monsters: 1200 Pts Despite a lack of shared visual theming, there were a lot of standout monsters this season – I had trouble just picking a couple Monsters That Are Good this time.
  • Story: 3500 Pts Really fun and compelling all the way through.
Sudden Dramatic Points Right at the End

2000 Pts – This season is altogether fantastic. It has an amazing villain, great team chemistry23 and a strong twin theme of changing your fate and breaking the cycle of hatred and violence. I really like how in the end it’s Nadira choosing to forgive and embrace humanity that ends the conflict, rather than the Rangers just beating Ransik in a fight. Nadira, in a way, is the one who really changes Fate by stopping this seemingly unstoppable cycle.

After converting the base score(Pts) and bonuses(pts) into Power Points (PPs), totalling all the scores for each section and normalizing the results according to the secret formulae that definitely exist and are not a screen to get me out of having to think about scores ever at all:

Power Rangers Time Force: 24859 Power Points (PPs)

Let’s see the rankings!

Power Rangers Seasons, Ranked

  1. Power Rangers in Space 24
  2. Power Rangers Time Force: 24859 PPs!
  3. Power Rangers Zeo25
  4. Power Rangers Lost Galaxy 26
  5. Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers Season 327
  6. Mighty Morphin’ Alien Rangers28
  7. Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers Season 229
  8. Power Rangers Turbo30
  9. Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers Season 131
  10. Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue32

I liked this season a lot, it turns out! A huge improvement over the previous one. I’m sure that Time Force is going to be one of the seasons that I keep returning to in the future.

So that’s it for this installment of Ranger Ranker! I hope you’re enjoying this feature because I’m not going to stop making it. In other news, who else is excited for Power Rangers Cosmic Fury and the return of David Yost as Billy Cranston next month? I’m in super anticipation mode already. But in any case, be sure to come back next time for The One Where All the Red Rangers Come Back (Except Rocky)