Linkara takes a look at Power Rangers Megaforce, a season that could have been a great anniversary season for the franchise, but turned out to be a frustrating experience for him.
Tropes:
- Actually Pretty Funny: While he admits that Vrak's "Far too complex for you to understand" and Gosei's "There's a simple explanation for that ..." were pretty funny, the fact that Megaforce was overflowing with Hand Waves made them a lot less funny in hindsight.
- Adaptational Wimp: Linkara was not only irritated that the original Mighty Morphin' suits weren't used during the first outing with the Ranger Keys, but when the team finally does use the original MMPR suits, they get their asses kicked pretty easily by the enemy.
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- In terms of Gosei, Linkara mentions that instead of being The Mentor of the team, Gosei really was built by Zordon but as a true 'last resort'. Gosei misinterprets the situation and creates the Megaforce Rangers, and due to only being able to function as a 'last resort', starts just throwing every tool and resource at the Rangers without any restraint.
- The way he saw Emma was as a vapid Granola Girl Cloudcuckoolander, and while he says there's nothing wrong with being a 'tree-loving hippie', she was always talking about how "beautiful the world is, guys" and was easily distracted during their missions.
- Angrish: His maniacal laughing at Robo Knight's Unexplained Recovery in the finale gives away to screaming and shooting a wall with a gun.
- Anti-Climax: Most of the big battles, or at least what were supposed to be big battles, ended up this way since the Rangers were constantly being thrown new Zords and weapons by Gosei and none of the villains ever got the chance to really show themselves as any sort of legitimate threat, so there was no suspense in the battles.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: As soon as the first episode, Emma questions what a Power Ranger is. Cue anger from Linkara.Linkara: Oh, for the love of-! You can't openly acknowledge the long history of the show, and have people act like they've never heard of the Power Rangers!
- Ass Pull:
- Gosei just hands out new powers and weapons and Zords every episode, sometimes because the Rangers sort of "earned" them, but usually for no reason at all. Although Linkara does state that in Gosei's case this would have to be more of a Mouth Pull since Gosei doesn't have an ass.
- Robo Knight coming back to life in the finale with no explanation what-so-ever. It's so much of one that Linkara completely goes insane from it.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- Linkara was shocked and confused when Troy suddenly screams and goes Super Saiyan, before "I am a man!" punching Robo Knight's programming back to normal.note
- Also, when Robo Knight comes right out of nowhere during the finale, even though he was destroyed in a previous episode. He just magically appears without any explanation or foreshadowing, and then disappears again with only Troy noticing he was there (and not commenting on the sudden resurrection). This comes so out of left field that it leads Linkara to suffer a Creator Breakdown for a few minutes.
- Call-Back:
- Has some fun with his own callbacks while watching the finale. He's thrilled when he sees Carter Grayson, saying that all they need to do is give him two guns and a water bottle and he'll single-handedly have this whole alien invasion thing cleaned up in no time. Then he sees Karone and jokes about how she used to be Astronema and asks her if she remembers when she attempted this same plan back in In Space... except, y'know, it being much better when she did it.
- Points out that the super mutants are entirely plausible since the existence of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back in In Space shows that mutation of creatures is not only plausible but has happened before in the Power Rangers universe.
- Character Derailment:
- Linkara goes on a short rant about the "bizarre form of laziness" of the season when the show manages to do this in the first episode! Emma, the Pink Ranger, joked about not wanting to join the team because the helmet messes up her hair, a Call-Back to Kimberly from Mighty Morphin... the problem being, Kimberly was a Valley Girl so it made sense when she said it, while Emma is a BMX-biker nature lover who in a previous scene was wearing a bicycle helmet, so it didn't make any sense coming from her.
- Also expressed disappointment they didn't stick with the whole "prideful to the point of refusing to accept loss" thing they had going for Prince Vekar during his debut, quickly derailing him into a prissy whiner by his second episode and staying with that characterization from that point on.
- Creator's Apathy: He considers "laziness" to be the main theme of the season, with how little effort was put into making it. This is later expanded to "a bizarre form of laziness" where the creators care about innocuous details but overlook huge plot holes.
- He brings up the infamous usage of the Megazord's Japanese name on the power card featuring it, as well as the usage of the Samurai theme instead of the Megaforce theme when the Rangers destroy a monster. For the former, he doesn't really care since it's only a brief glimpse of it anyway and would be a pain to digitally correct every episode. For the latter, he's absolutely livid.
- The season not only constantly uses footage of Sentai-only teams, but the teams are never explained where those powers come from. They also name the teams inconsistently when morphing into them in different episodes. This even though in scenes where the Rangers each morph into a member of a different team, if one of them was in a Sentai-only costume originally it was often digitally edited to be a Ranger from an English season. He also points out that if they had to keep them in, the franchise provided plenty of opportunities to turn it into Worldbuilding they could have easily used but didn't.
- The Rangers get no significant backstory or development, nor does Gosei. He notes the actors had asked for more character-focused episodes, but were ignored.
- The Wild Force tribute episode has Gosei send them to the Anamarium to find the Red Lion Wild Zord. Not only does Gosei erroneously refer to the floating island as Anamaria (the name of the kingdom the island was part of, not the island itself), but he mispronounces it. The episode also has Noah, the Blue Ranger, sense the Red Lion's presence, and despite Cole's actor being in Samurai, they don't call him back for a cameo in this episode.
- He considers the RPM tribute episode "In the Driver's Seat" to be the laziest tribute episode for multiple reasons. For one thing, Corinth doesn't look anything like what it did in RPM, as the episode just rehashes Sentai footage from Go-Onger (which had a machine world as the origin for the Zords, rather than a post-apocalyptic Earth). None of the Rangers or other characters from RPM make an appearance, except for Professor Cog. No explanation is given for why Cog is back despite being destroyed in last season's team-up episode. Linkara also points out that this episode would have been a perfect opportunity for the Rangers to reflect on how their Earth could suffer the same fate as the RPM Earth if they failed to defeat the Armada, and for Orion to appreciate how a devastated civilization has managed to find the strength to rebuild - but instead, the Rangers spend all their time in their Sky Ship chasing after and yelling (through a megaphone no less) at the Turbo Falcon Zord (which Linkara points out isn't doing anything wrong except speeding down a racetrack).
- One episode is titled "Vrak is Back", except that Vrak is pronounced to rhyme with "frock", not "back". Did the writers just forget how to pronounce the name of one of the main antagonists?
- How all the past Rangers take part in the Legendary Battle when many of them don't have their powers anymore. And if these past Rangers do still have their powers and are all around the city in time to take part in the battle, why didn't any of them help before now?
- He also notes the creators at least try to play with the editing to avoid showing Tommy's other morphed forms since he's here as the Green Ranger, but they ignore that the Turbo and In Space teams shared members too and show the two teams together in multiple shots.
- The return of only a handful of former Rangers' actors; apparently the invitations to appear in the episode were only sent out a month before filming. He questions how that's possible when it's obvious the creators knew they would be doing the Legendary Battle right from the start of the season and would have had several months to organize more actors taking part.
- Also during the Legendary Battle, footage of the Alien and Ninja Storm Rangers (sans their Red Rangers) is dubbed over with Kiai from Tommy; the editors couldn't tell that none of the nine Rangers present were Tommy.
- Creator Breakdown: His attempts at reviewing the seasons get progressively more heated and in-depth, and he admits by the halfway point that he kind of lost track of reviewing anything specific about the show and it dissolved into a long rant about everything it did wrong on a fundamental level (no character development, no consistent villains, fight scenes replace actual story). One moment in the climactic battle (Robo Knight returning to the fight despite being destroyed previously and being given no explanation for his return) cuts to video of him losing his mind and going off to laugh maniacally while randomly firing a gun, blowing off steam before collecting himself and finishing the review through gritted teeth.
- Dull Surprise: While none of the acting was really all that good (except for Gia), Linkara singles out Troy, the Red Ranger (Andrew Gray), as being exceptionally wooden and unable to emote his lines. Sometimes when Troy and Robo Knight share a scene, Linkara will even jokingly challenge the audience to guess which of the two is actually the robot! In his wrap-up at the end, he actually spends a couple of minutes specifically on just how little Troy emotes, being the only time in the entire HOPR series where his criticism of the performance includes a monologue with editing clips together.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: He points out in frustration that he has little regard for anyone in the season beyond isolated moments, but does admit to having a couple of soft spots. Gia was well-acted and had a much more distinctive personality beyond the most obvious. And Vrak in Super Megaforce had the only plan against the Rangers that was even marginally interesting and achieved a pseudo-victory with actual tension.
- Executive Meddling:
- In his Dino Charge review, he goes on a tangent that an interview from writer James W. Bates confirmed his suspicions from the previous reviews that Jonathan Tzachor was uninterested in letting the writers give the characters story arcs, or any connections to other seasons despite Megaforce being a 20th anniversary season because in his mind it was "too boring". However, Haim Saban had other ideas for the show, and Tzachor was fired and replaced with Judd Lynn for Dino Charge (even though there's no official reason, Linkara strongly believes that to be the case). Bates even left after Super Megaforce started because he got frustrated from not giving the characters any development.
- Of course, the "twenty episodes per season" mandate of Nickelodeon also played a role here as it did in Samurai, though to a lesser extent.
- Another one revealed in the same interview was that the production staff wanted to get to Gokaiger immediately for the anniversary and skip over Goseiger, but their contract with Toei at the time prohibited them from skipping over a Sentai.
- Fan Boy: Notes during his rant regarding the Sentai-only teams showing up despite not being Power Rangers that one of the reasons he heard for their inclusion was that Jonathan Tzachor was a Sentai fanboy and refused to have any footage altered to keep it the same as the Sentai. He also states that if this is truly the case, then that makes the inclusion of the Sentai-only teams even worse.
- Fanservice: Similarly to his review of the episode "Once A Ranger", Linkara explains how the 20th Anniversary season Super Megaforce does fan service wrong, as instead of celebrating the history of Power Rangers, it just throws random Call Backs and Continuity Nods at the audience as if to say "Hey! This existed!"
- Fan Wank: There's a fair bit more of Linkara's own personal theories and spins on unexplained facts here... but he explains that's only because this season gives so little explanation he has to make up his own to try and make any sense of it. A rather notable theory comes from the "Legendary Wars" finale in which he conjectures that the returning Rangers weren't actually the real Rangers, but instead, physical manifestations of the powers... although he does admit the whole Karone/Astronema "I love being a Power Ranger" line throws a wrench into that idea.
- Flat Character: Notes that except for Vrak and Robo Knight, no one really changes or has an arc. Though he does admit the Rangers' default personalities, while they don't change, still make them more likable than the Overdrive team and consequently he doesn't consider Megaforce as bad.
- Forgot About His Powers:
- Linkara grows increasingly annoyed when the Rangers are shown walking or running everywhere (even showing up late to fights) because they forgot they could just teleport in the first few episodes.
- When the season changes into Super Megaforce the Rangers forget all about the weapons and powers they obtained in the first half of the series, despite all of them being available and intact. This in particular annoyed Linkara since there were multiple openings to destroy the powers and actually justify the swap to the new powers.
- One episode had the bad guys stating with their Make My Monster Grow technology they could enlarge multiple enemies at a time instead of having to resort to only using one. This never gets used again after the single aforementioned episode.
- Frankenslation: This is the first season since Mighty Morphin to integrate two different Super Sentai series. What was done differently was Mighty Morphin utilized Zyuranger costumes as the primary outfits for the first three seasons and used the mecha footage of the two other series to flesh out the story (which required American-made footage with them still in Zyuranger outfits). Megaforce used Goseiger for the first 20-episode season and then blended Goseiger and Gokaiger, the big anniversary season where they switch costumes constantly, for the second season by using Goseiger suits as the base costume and then upgraded to Gokaiger just to upgrade to all the other costumes. Also, the season used Stock Footage of the Super Sentai anniversary paying homage to past shows that were never made into Power Rangers series (pre-1992). It made for quite a headache in trying to juggle all these costume changes. Linkara suggested it would have been easier to keep the Goseiger outfits as they already had a "mystical card" system in play with their motif, which would be easy to modify to include new Ranger powers, rather than complicating it all by switching to Gokaiger just to use a separate device altogether. That, or just destroy the Goseiger powers altogether and make a clean switch to the Gokaiger powers, to avoid the need for switching between the costumes at all.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: In the third instance of Lewis being on camera for this, this is his reaction to Robo Knight's unexplained return in the Legendary Battle, going from Laughing Mad and firing a gun to screaming.
- Granola Girl: He states that Emma is a really obnoxious version of this since she won't shut the hell up about the environment and seems "vapid to the point of airhead status."
- Growing the Beard: Discussed. He states that since the days when the original MMPR was on the air, children's television has become a lot more sophisticated and ambitious, tackling more mature themes, creating more complex characters, and striving to create legitimately emotional and heartwarming moments. This includes Power Rangers itself, which since then has had more substantial stories and characters compared to the often bland and goofy writing from MMPR. He cites this as one of the big problems with both Megaforce seasons, which mostly focus on spectacle and having as many action scenes as possible in place of actual depth or compelling storytelling, meaning it can't compete with shows like Steven Universe or Avatar: The Last Airbender, which have a lot more to offer.
- Hand Wave: This season was wrought with them, with every time this happened in the first two parts he'd insert Vrak's "Far too complex for you to understand", and from Part 3 onward Gosei's 'There's a simple explanation for that ..."
- Idiot Ball:
- Lewis dubs Megaforce!Ernie "The Second Dumbest Person in Power Rangers" for failing to recognize an unmasked but blindfolded Troy.
- He also rolls his eyes at Troy who, when the team is faced with a monster that can use Hollywood Magnetism to steal their weapons, refuses to let anyone try and work out a strategy against it beyond his own "plan" of "Power Rangers never drop their weapons, we just won't drop our weapons next time".
- Not even the "Legendary Rangers" are beyond this, with Linkara pointing out how several of them could reclaim their powers at any time or already have them, but just blindly trust in the new Rangers and don't lift a finger to actually help until the very end (to add salt to the wound, Linkara points out that they joined in against an army of Mooks, which the Megaforce Rangers should have been able to handle on their own, anyway).
- Informed Attribute:
- Gosei stated that he awakens when the Earth is in grave peril. Linkara is very quick to bring up the many, many, many, many times the Earth has been in grave peril in past seasons, yet Gosei did nothing.
- He notes that Gia stated that Emma always knows what makes others happy, but then she immediately ignores people's discomfort to take photos. In fact, her imagining a world without humans while smiling makes her come across as a sociopath who wants to wipe out humanity in his eyes.
- Troy was stated to have overcome great adversity, but it's never seen on-screen nor talked about. Linkara brings up that we did learn about his hardship only through external interviews.
- In general, the whole show's supposed theme of "Humanity can achieve anything if they work together" can be seen as this. Linkara points out that during the entirety of both seasons, it's the Rangers who are doing all the fighting, while the civilians just hide. We see no real evidence of humanity actually coming together to resist the alien invasion.
- Linkara calls bullcrap on Damaras' status as "the most powerful warrior in the universe" seeing as 1.) there was no build-up to it, 2.) he's a servant to Emperor Marvro and not the emperor himself, and 3.) in the very episode he's referred to like this, he's killed by the rangers.
- Informed Flaw: Noah had an episode where his flaw was supposed to be that he didn't have a sense of humor, but the "humor" in the episode was so bad that Linkara couldn't help but sympathize with him.
- It's the Same, So It Sucks: Subverted. While he acknowledges that people hate the Megaforce theme for being almost identical to the Samurai theme, he doesn't mind since he's an admitted sucker for the "Go-Go, Power Rangers" theme and feels that if they're making a cheap knock-off of a song, at least it's a knock-off of a good song. He also notes that given that this is the 20th anniversary, it actually makes sense to use a remix of the original Mighty Morphin' theme since harkening back to the era and history of the franchise is all the more important here.
- Laughing Mad: As mentioned above, his reaction to Robo Knight's Unexplained Recovery involves insane laughter, as he goes for a gun and unloads a magazine before devolving into screaming.
- Merchandise-Driven:
- He had already mentioned the show was pushing this in Samurai, but Linkara goes as far as to scold the makers of this season for going too far in Megaforce, marketing too many toys for any kid watching the show to ever actually be able to afford.
- He also mentions how the marketing department seemed to do a better job with handling the anniversary aspect of the season, including the Legacy Collection, individual Ranger Keys, including one for the American-exclusive Titanium Ranger, and items that were exclusive to certain events.
- Mis-blamed: Discussed. He states that, though in his Dino Charge video, he acknowledged that he heard that Tzachor was at fault for vetoing any character development in favor of just copying the Sentai, as well as flying in multiple celebrity actors and doing barely anything with them, in the end it's hard to pin the blame on a single person or group of people, and you can't really blame one person for all the problems Megaforce had.
- Narm:
- Power Rangers has its own sense of silliness, but he comments that Andrew Gray as Troy never seems particularly invested, making silly dialogue sound worse and what should be epic, intense moments into boring action. His strange, awkward, unmorphed "Super Saiyan" power-up punch when fighting Robo Knight is the highlight.
- To a lesser extent, he points out that since many of the power-ups will slap "mega" or (starting in the second season) "super mega" on the names, it comes off as something you'd expect from a parody of Power Rangers.
- Points out that the plot of episode 17note loses all impact because trains don't have as much of a presence in the US as in Japannote . He points out that not only is the episode the worst of the first season, but the plot doesn't even last until the end of the episode. As he had noted earlier, there was no reason why they had to adapt this episode in the long runnote .
- Power-Up Letdown:
- A minor gripe, as although Linkara didn't actually mind the pirate-themed Super Megaforce costumes (despite the season not being pirate-themed), he did think that aesthetically they were less grand and interesting than the previous Megaforce suits (which were based on angels in Goseiger). He also said the switch in fighting style from martial arts to over-reliance on weapons actually made the Super Megaforce Rangers seem weaker than they previously were. He even states that it seems like it should've been the other way around, with the Megaforce suits being the pirate-themed ones and the Super Megaforce ones being the angel-themed ones.
- The Q-Rex and Legendary Megazord combining is just the Legendary Megazord replacing its arms with the Q-Rex's, as opposed to other times where the Sixth Ranger's Zord actually, you know, combined with the main team's Megazord.
- Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: In a Call-Back to Mighty Morphin', Gosei requests Tensou bring teenagers with attitude. While he does ask for "energetic and unstoppable" humans, which Linkara admits is a much better description than "overbearing and overemotional", he asks if Gosei has actually met teenagers, as "energetic" is not what he would use to describe "the demographic that's forced to get up at 6 in the morning after multiple hours of homework and the regular stresses of puberty".
- Recycled Script: Mentions several times over that he considers the finale of Super Megaforce as a blatant rip-off of "Countdown to Destruction" from In Space, only with everything done wrong. He introduces the finale as "Countdown to Destruction: the Lame Version", tells TJ and Cassie that it's their finale Super Megaforce is ripping off, and when Karone appears he asks her if she remembers when she tried the same thing in In Space... only it was much better when she did it.
- Revisiting the Roots: Like with Samurai, he calls this out on being a bad thing since it's pretty much regressing rather than evolving as a good show should. At the time he finished the Megaforce videos, he stated that this is the main problem of the "Neo-Saban Era" as a whole; children's tv has evolved to the point where they can bring forth a great deal of depth, emotion, and complex story-telling, all of which didn't really exist during the original Mighty Morphin' series. Samurai and Megaforce completely lack these aspects and the most morally complex or sophisticated they get amounts to is standard good vs. evil with a Monster of the Week formula, and they simply can't compete with modern children's television as a result.
- Running Gag:
- A clip of Vrak saying "Far too complex for you to understand" in Parts 1 and 2 whenever there are serious questions about something which go unanswered by the show. Replaced by Gosei's notorious 'There's a simple explanation for that...' from Part 3 onwards.
- Referring to the Megaforce Rangers' nameless hometown as "City Town"note .
- Replacing any of the Ranger's battle speeches into just a generic "Never give up, never surrender!" since Linkara says that's basically all whatever they say translates to anyway.
- Seasonal Rot: Aside from Operation Overdrive, Linkara considers this to be one of the worst seasons the series has ever produced due to poor acting, no character development from anyone, and just how insulting it is as a 20th anniversary season that after so much build-up and hype they put zero effort into the production.
- Sequel Escalation: The video review itself. Prior reviews topped out at around 2 hours or less for the entire season. Megaforce is around 3 hours. This is in large part due to having to analyze so much of the structural problems and how it permeates the entirety of both seasons, talking about the use of Super Sentai footage to the use of non-Power Rangers Super Sentai footage to filming new footage with non-Power Rangers Super Sentai costumes, speculating about unexplained plot points, speculating about the Troubled Production, offering better alternatives to what we got and including retrospectives on how prior seasons knew how to do it right. This is on top of being something of a Grand Finale for HOPR, as while he plans on reviewing Dino Charge, this is the first time he can be considered "caught up" with all Power Rangers seasons.
- Shallow Parody: His ultimate judgment of the season is that it doesn't celebrate the franchise, but is an unintentional mockery of it because it doesn't understand what came before. As cheesy as the original Mighty Morphin' was, it had character and story growth, it understood how to create tension and fear of its villains, and it treated new powers and zords with reverence and importance, and the franchise only got better written as the years went on. Megaforce on the other hand has shallow characters, no consistent story, its villains are jokes who never pose a serious threat, and Gosei gives the team power-ups just because he felt like it.
- Sixth Ranger: Stated the fact that despite the series officially recognizing Robo Knight as an official sixth ranger, in his mind, he shouldn't fit (like the Blue Senturion and Magna Defender, as he doesn't wear a spandex suit, nor does he have "Ranger" in his name). He is also confused that the White Dino Thunder Ranger is considered a sixth ranger (since he was the 5th member of the team, not the 6th), and the Jungle Fury Rhino Ranger was not (and just for clarification, Linkara does not care what Gokaiger stated for their definitions of sixth rangers).
- So Okay, It's Average: Invoked but ultimately averted. Under normal circumstances, while Megaforce as a whole just wasn't very good, Linkara says it really is just weirdly lazy and poorly produced, just a really average season overall. However, because this season was advertised so heavily as the 20th year milestone celebration for Power Rangers, and the fact that it fell so very short of actually celebrating it, it crosses the line from just kinda okay to be one of the worst seasons Power Rangers has to offer (although he still thinks Overdrive is worse).
- Stock Footage: Because each mini-season of Megaforce had its own full season of a Super Sentai to pull footage from (Tensou Sentai Goseiger and Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger), there was an influx of Super Sentai footage, with Linkara feeling like the makers of the show felt like they had to cram as much Super Sentai stock footage as possible into every episode. Linkara says some episodes honestly felt like 90% Super Sentai footage with only 10% original footage, which just ended up being incredibly boring.
- Stock Footage Failure: Mentions that for some reason, the cards that the Rangers use to summon their zords keep their Goseiger names, but says it doesn't bother him (but it did bother a lot of other people), since he'd rather have them focus on the writing than on fixing something as minor as thatnote .
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Probably the first season Lewis has claimed to have almost every character on the show lack any sort of arc and development. As such, all were a waste, from the Rangers themselves, to the villains, to even the comedic side characters. In fact, the only characters in the entire show he thought had at least some decent development were Vrak and Robo Knight. That being said, he did feel the show's transition from Megaforce to Super Megaforce wasted Robo Knight's character development, and that he would have been much better suited to become the Super Megaforce Silver Ranger as opposed to introducing some new humanoid alien to take the role (especially since character development was already too thin to try to introduce a new character into the mix).
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The coda of the entire review; despite this being the 20th-anniversary celebratory season of Power Rangers, there wasn't much thought or planning put into it, resulting in loads of wasted potential.
- Points out multiple incredibly easy ways they could have called back to old seasons with minor lines of dialogue... and just didn't.
- The changeover in powers occurs for no reason when it would have been easy to write in their original powers being destroyed at the end of the first half of the season. After all, that was usually how Mighty Morphin' handled power changes, and it would have served to highlight the danger the Armada posed. On the other hand, why include the Gokaiger powers at all? The Gosei morphers already have Rangers sliding cards into them to morph, so why not have them morph straight from the Goseiger suits into the Legendary Ranger modes by having them use cards of the powers, instead of morphing from Goseiger to Gokaiger and then using a secondary morpher to activate the Legendary Ranger modes?
- While he dislikes the show using suits from Super Sentai seasons that weren't adapted into Power Rangers seasons, if there was no way to get around using those suits, they could have built some backstory from it. They could have explained that these powers were used by Rangers from before the Mighty Morphin' era, or by Rangers from another planet — both are things established to have been done, after all. Or maybe there was a Ranger team whose exploits were lost to history, or they could have met a representative of another Ranger team who gave them the powers. When Orion joins the team, he particularly mentions they could have written that the unexplained powers were from Ranger teams once based on Andresia, and Orion brings the powers with him when he comes to Earth.
- While "Ernie's Juice Bar" is a place againnote , it's an entirely different character and an entirely different location. They couldn't get Lieutenant Stone or Bulk back to own the juice barnote ? Likewise, why couldn't the season have been set in Angel Grove, instead of the nearly unnamed town it is in? There could be a Power Rangers museum, monuments to the past teams, adults who grew up knowing the Rangers.
- The Q-Rex Drill is vaguely stated to have been based on the Q-Rex from Time Force. However, it bears more similarities to the original Dragonzord, so why couldn't it have been rebuilt from that Zord, or the Dragonzord be modified into the Q-Rex? It was never destroyed like so many zords were, it's still sleeping in the ocean last we saw.
- He constantly speculates on plans the showrunners had that they later abandoned, because a lot of plot points seem like they're going in one direction, and then don't. These include killing off Vrak at the end of the first season, extending the tenure of the insectoid villains to last the full season, and destroying the Rangers' powers at the end of the first season. In the next installment, he reveals that some of his suggestions were ideas that the writers wanted to pursue, but Jonathan Tzachor shot downnote .
- Most of the Legendary Ranger highlight episodes were pretty bad, normally lacking any of the original actors from the actual seasons they were putting in the limelight. Special mentioned goes to the Samurai episode; apparently, the original Super Sentai also had an episode dedicated to Shinkenger, which not only resolved whatever happened to the last remaining Nighlok, Octoroo, but also only featured Sentai Rangers that were featured in Power Rangers, yet the producers still threw that out to make their own footage. Linkara is baffled since the Super Sentai practically gift-wrapped the episode for them. note
- Gosei being mentored by Zordon, or the one-off line about him being "of the earth" and that the giant tiki head not being his true form, all go nowhere.
- This Is Gonna Suck: Like with Overdrive, Linkara had made no effort to hide his feelings towards Power Rangers' embarrassing anniversary season. Tweets made before the video's release also indicate this. Both seasons were split into five videos (RPM & Samurai had four), the script was 43 pages (Samurai was 31), and the audio recording was around three hours long.
- Troubled Production: He admits it's mostly speculation on his part, but Linkara looks at the final product and although they had three years to prepare for this anniversary season (ever since Saban had reclaimed the rights to Power Rangers), the final product just seemed very haphazard. This is also part of why he's much harder on Megaforce than he is with Samurai, since with Samurai, it was an uphill battle what with Saban having been out of the game for so long, the season being rushed to meet deadlines, as well as the "twenty episodes per season" mandate that Nickelodeon has. With Megaforce, there's much less leeway due to having had far more prep time and the fact that this was supposed to be a celebration of the past twenty years of the franchise. To note:
- He guesses on multiple scenarios that resulted from this, feeling like the producers either had no intention of using the Tensou Sentai Goseiger footage but were forced to by contract, that they actually had no intention of using the Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger footage this season but felt pressured to due to the anniversary, and/or never planned on using the Legendary Wars at all, since so often plots and storylines seemed created at the last minute or would suddenly change with absolutely no set-up beforehand (the transition from the insectoid villains from Megaforce to the machine space armada in Super Megaforce in particular feeling forced and disjointed).
- Editing seemed to go back and forth on whether they wanted to include pre-Power Rangers Super Sentai costumes that appear. In one episode they carefully replace one costume with another via editing and green screen, and in another, they are just running around with costumes that had no PR counterpart.
- He mentions that he had heard secondhand that the actors in this season more than once begged the writers for more Character Development-focused episodes, but were often ignored, leading to the overall Flat Characters we got.note
- His biggest evidence for this is that Jonathan Tzachor left after this season, with cited "budget issues" and reports of him being overly slavish to the Super Sentai at the expense of the production leads Linkara to guess he was actually fired.
- Two-Teacher School: He introduces Mr. Burley as the only teacher in the entire city. He later brings it up again when one of the students asks where Mr. Burley is while the school is being rebuilt... and there is no mention of any other teachers or faculty members.Linkara: Is there really only one teacher in this entire school? Criminy, not even Angel Grove High had it that bad.
- Values Dissonance: Points out that the episode where the villains hijack a train to sabotage the humans' method of transportation is an example of this. In Japan, trains actually are a very major source of transportation for everyone, so in Goseiger this actually was a great plan. In the United States, however, trains are primarily a major transport for industrial needs. While trains are used by people to get around, it's far less common than in Japan, and even the Rangers (when they hear the villain say they are going to sabotage human transportation) head to the airports first. In the end, all "hijacking the train" does is annoy a handful of people due to making them late, and the villains themselves abandon the scheme midway through the episode due to how pointless they realize it is.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Points out that during the finale, Gosei and Tensou just disappear without any explanation, after one final communication partway through the episode.
- Written by Cast Member: Linkara points out that Jason Smith, who played Casey in Power Rangers Jungle Fury, is one of the writers of Super Megaforce. note Linkara speculates that this is probably the only reason why the episode Spirit of the Tiger even happened, but he is glad that Jungle Fury is being acknowledged as part of the series' continuity.
- WTH, Costuming Department?: He considers Orion's power up to be "the most butt-ugly power-up in the world" because it just consists of an armored vest with the faces of various Sixth Ranger helmets on it, making it seem more like Power Rangers merchandise than anything to wear into a battle.
- Worldbuilding: While he isn't a fan of the Sentai-only teams being used, Linkara points out that if they had to be used, they could have easily used them to provide this by having them be alien Ranger teams or past Ranger teams, both of which were already established to exist in canon.
- X Meets Y: Describes Tensou as a cross between WALL•E and Johnny 5 with the voice of Orko.
