Power Rangers Super Megaforce: Love is in the Air review

In which the Jake/Gia romance takes a step forward and wacky shenanigans ensue. Here's this week's Power Rangers Super Megaforce review.

This week, I finally give up. Not on the show mind you, I’ve been watching it for over twenty years. I give up on any possibility that the Jake/Gia plotline will be a lesson against “nice guys.” For so long it seemed as though Jake’s crush on Gia was totally unreciprocated. In fact, Gia seemed to be way more into Emma! But slowly Gia has shown more and more attraction to Jake, finally culminating in this episode where it can’t be denied that she is totally in favor of him asking her out.

I will give the writers this, they at least built up to it but it’s still such a waste. It’s just another standard romance plot when it could have been so much more. We could have had Gia outright telling Jake, “Hey, stop being a creep around me.”  I guess I can settle for the moral of this episode being, “Be yourself, be straightforward, and that will be the most attractive thing you can do.” It’s something. Maybe we’ll finally get a Gia-focused episode and we’ll see her side of things, even if they are in favor of her liking Jake.

So this was a comedy episode. We don’t get many of those in Power Rangers these days, the last out and out one being, “The Strange Case of the Munchies.” It’s always a strange getting one of them in a series that by its very nature (spandex, multicolored explosions, toys for weapons) is slightly comedic no matter what. In some cases the humor of this episode totally works, like the rarely seen in modern PR physical comedy of Jake kicking his soccer ball at Mr. Burley and Levira spinning Jake around. Others, like the obviously dubbed over Japanese woman, fall kind of flat.

The episode does augment the comedy with some unmorphed fighting (THANK GOD) and some unneeded padding. Look, I get the need to have close ups on toys but five shots of the Rangers turning keys in their morphers was more then a bit unnecessary. But between all that we do get an interesting tidbit of information, with the monster of the day revealing he remembers Levira from when they were kids. The idea that monsters, at least those in Vekar’s army aren’t just created for the purpose of fighting the Rangers but actually fully grown, adult monsters that had full childhoods and teen years blows my mind.

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The Rangers are carelessly destroying monsters that have friends! Loved ones! What if they have kids? This is the kind of thing Power Rangers in Space sort of tackled and while I’m fairly certain it’s nothing more then a throwaway joke, it at least keeps the notion in the viewers mind that the monsters are people to.

Speaking of which, was this episode supposed to be a tribute to Power Rangers Turbo? It certainly had a wacky enough plot (like all the best second half Turbo episodes did) and even featured a Turbo team change (along with MMPR) but it still misses the mark.  Maybe a cameo from a certain TJ would have made it better. Oh well.

So all in all a pretty mediocre episode but certainly not a bad one. I’m left with two questions however.

  1. Where the hell was Orion? Was he off getting his green card after being hauled in by immigration? Or was this supposed to be an earlier episode of the season that got pushed back thanks to Nick’s wacky airing schedule? Who knows. Maybe he was just sleeping in a locker the whole time or helping Ernie whip up some drinks.

  2. Six million hits on a video of Jake doing some soccer tricks? Really? REALLY?! Look, I work in YouTube pretty frequently as a day job and I know that getting six million hits in just a few hours is damn near impossible, especially for a home video of a random kid playing soccer. So we’re forced to assume that people in the PRU really love soccer or Noah bought all those views in order to impress Jake.

What did you think of the episode readers? Let us know in the comments below!

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Rating:

3 out of 5