Headscratchers / Power Rangers Time Force

False Advertising

Time Force seems to be a run-of-the-mill police department that doesn't police time travel at all. Yes, they have some of the necessary technology, but not enough to justify the name. So, why is it called "Time Force."

• Probably to justify the name of the show in-universe.
• To be fair, the Time Force police were trying to prevent Ransik from traveling to the past in the first episode.

Who, who, WHO is the guy in the toy commercials with Ransik?

Like it says. In the toy ads, instead of any of the show's sub-villains, Ransik's sidekick was some bald guy with a Star Trek-ish rubber forehead. Who is he? Was he someone intended for the show but left out? Does he have a name, or even a two-sentence bio somewhere like Transformers non-show toy 'characters' have? Does he even have a toy?! I always wondered what his deal was.

• He could be a different character from a different show. Let's just leave it at that.
• Random character was random. The toy commercials seem functionally disconnected from the show, and I doubt the Ransik actor in that one was Vernon Wells, so it was probably just a random mook for the purpose of having Ransik have an underling - they might have had a Ransik outfit for modeling purposes for the toy, but not any of the other villains, so they just tossed something together.

Finale

So everyone's super sad because they have to leave forever (until the reunion, but shush) and they'll never see each other again, they'll miss each other etc... but why? They have TIME MACHINES, and a whole police system based on them. Why can't they, you know, visit? Maybe they can't stay, but still, couldn't they visit at regular intervals, hang out, party, have pizza, etc. I know Wes shouldn't go to the future, but why can't Jen and co come visit him?

• Most likely, either concerns about further disruption to the timeline (look at the damage that the Rangers caused stopping Ransik in the first place), or simply the fact that, as Rangers, they can't use Time Force equipment for personal reasons.

Why does their being from the future need to be a secret?

Mr. Collins knows who the rangers are, but they keep the fact that they are from the future a secret. Why? There doesn't seem to be compelling reason to keep it a secret.

• Even Timeranger has the same policy. TimeYellow specifically told the Gokaigers to not interact with anyone in the past. That somewhat failed but they did manage to convince Daigoyou to not let the Shinkengers and Goseigers know. In Time Force's case, it's the same reason. They don't want Mr. Collins to get any bright ideas and do something stupid, like causing further disruption to the timeline when things already got out of hand when the future Time Force Rangers showed up to stop Ransik in the first place.
  • Which is all the more reason they should tell him. Bio-Lab (his company) is directly responsible for a number of changes to the timeline. By telling him that they're from the future, and would like to minimize disruptions to the timeline, he could help them do that. The Raimei tank would've never been built, he could've destroyed the future antidote himself after curing the sick, etc.

How the hell did Wes win?

In the finale, Wes traps the other rangers in the Time Ship to send them back to the future to protect them. There, they learn that Wes managed to stop Ransik and his forces, but died as a result. They all decide to go back and help him.

But, in that timeline, how did Wes manage to win? There was an entire army of cyclobots, and Ransik is powerful enough to walk through them fighting as a team - they only managed to win together because Ransik gave himself up. There's no way Wes could beat them alone.

• Ransik is a badass but without an army he's beaten. Wes would die wiping out his forces (either in hand to hand, sacrificing the Q-Rex, releasing the power from his morpher,etc.) then eventually some force would take out Ransik. Maybe the battle would weaken Ransik enough for the Silver Guardians to take him out, or maybe another ranger team would show up when things got bad enough (they've already teamed by with the Lightspeed rangers and a few of the Wild Force rangers are likely active by then) or maybe Nadira decides her father has gone too far and kills him herself? While Ransik was winning the fight the fanbase exaggerates Ransik's power, he was clearly hurt by Jen's shot right before he saw that he'd shot Nadira, so he's not so string as to be immune to their weapons, even when they're demorphed, which means he could be killed off.

Why did they follow Ransik back to the year 2001?

Wouldn't it have just been easier to go back to before Ransik escaped and stop him from escaping?

• Doing so would have caused a paradox, if they attempted to prevent something from their personal time line from happening to begin with.
• It's apparently an unwritten rule in every time-travel story: the only way to protect future timeline is to travel with the bad guy to the exact same past he did, and protect/repair everything the bad guy tries to destroy. Setting your travel to another time allows the bad guy to destroy the past and erase you. For the same reason, when Time Force Megazord is damaged, it is sent to year 3000 to reparation, and Alex sends an untested prototype (Shadow Force Megazord), rather than sending a repaired Megazord from one week later in the future!
• It may also be that they don't have the ability to travel in time precisely enough to 'just' go back a few hours or so.
  • And even if they could, they'd probably be worried about crossing paths with their past selves.

Frax's motivations

• Why did Frax keep acting evil in Power Rangers Time Force after getting some revenge on Ransik? He even stated that deep down humans weren't his enemy, only Ransik's. So why did he go on to keep building giant robots to conquer and cause destruction if he didn't consider humans his enemy?
  • Because he wanted more revenge on Ransik (and to get back to the year 3000), and needed resources to do so. Resources he could only get from the humans.
  • (original poster) But if that was the case, there are lower key ways to get resources than building a Humongous Mecha and destroying the city senselessly. Though in thinking about this, perhaps his time with Ransik corrupted his internal fortitude so that now he too seeks to cause anarchy and destruction just like Ransik.
    • Keep in mind that Frax pretty much went crazy with how much he wanted vengeance, so he was likely not rationnal enough to think straight.

Unused time travel idea

The writers originally planned out to have the Rangers travel through time and fight across different time periods. Then they discovered that Mirai Sentai Timeranger didn't actually feature the characters actively travelling through time: they travel once to the year 2000 AD and stay there. Why didn't they just shoot original footage for it, just like they've done with Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers seasons 2 and 3?

• Every Megazord battle took place in the present. Also, money was probably an issue.

DNA

I'm fully aware that Power Rangers likes to take science and beat it with an aluminum bat; but how, after 1000 years of human evolution and genetic modification, does Alex have the EXACT same DNA sequence as Wes? That's not how genetics work.

• Maybe Alex is a clone?
  • How would that work? Why would they clone Wes, of all people? He showed no heroism before the Time Force showed up, and if we are to believe what Alex himself says, he just took up his father's position, and I don't think Wes would be enough of a narcissist to clone himself, especially up to the year 3000.
    • Who knows maybe Wes did at some point donated his DNA to be used for some kind of project or some person decide to take his DNA without his knowledge for kicks. Anything can happen in a thousand years.
  • Also, back in Wild West Rangers, the rangers' ancestors look exactly the same as their present-day counterparts.
    • Bearing a strong resemblance to an ancestor isn't particularly strange. Sharing the exact same DNA as them is impossible.
    • There have been a few fan theories; Wes is an Immortal and so he genuinely was (or would become) Alex, Wes was Alex's twin brother who was sent to the past and adopted, Trip was able to reconfigure the red morpher so that it would accept someone who was closely related to Alex and shared at least his appearance even if he wasn't Alex's exact genetic double...
    • The problem with that last one, however, is that Wes isn't closely related to Alex. Assuming that, on average, each of Wes' descendants had a kid at the age of 20, that'd make Wes Alex's roughly 50x great-grandfather.
    • In the case of the last twist, the morpher was programmed to accept a relative of Alex's who shared enough of the same genetic markers to give them an identical appearance; Wes and Alex weren't close relatives, but they shared enough DNA in that regard for the reprogrammed morpher to work.

Cryogenic Freezing

• I'm not entirely sure how it's supposed to work as a punishment. They're not conscious when they're in stasis, so wouldn't it just be like you go to sleep, and the next thing you're being woken up decades later (but physically you haven't aged a day) and your sentence is over? Not to mention how the first episode features Ransik being sentenced "for life"; wouldn't that just be an infinite sentence when you remember they don't age in stasis and thus would never die?
  • Consider our prisons: sometimes people aren't sent there to think about what they did and become better for it, they're sent there for good because they pose a danger to the rest of society. Cryogenic freezing is an ultimate example of this: its not so much punishing the criminals as keeping them frozen and locked up forever, away from innocent people. In this case "for life" probably means "never getting thawed, ever".

Reverse severity

• So all the rank and file criminals are frozen solid for things such as reckless driving and stealing vegetables, but the the Big Bad, supposedly the most dangerous criminal in his own era, merely gets put in handcuffs?
  • Considering that every mutant we saw get frozen was refrozen (and often after a battle with the Megazord or the full Ranger team), it's possible that the process of freezing a mutant prisoner in the first place is rather complicated, and they also wanted to give Ransik an actual trial rather than just freeze him without giving him a chance to say his piece.
  • The series opens with Ransik's capture and sentencing, where he was going to be subjected to cryofreeze when the convoy reached the prison. Nadira simply busted him out before the sentence was carried out. The thing about things like the Rangers weapons reducing the various monsters to their toy size - sorry, returning them to cryofreeze - is that those weapons aren't deployed at the time, probably on the basis of giving these criminals the opportunity to be judged. Remember, every mutant that the Rangers fight was already serving a sentence. It's one thing to put a criminal back in prison. It's another thing to summarily act as judge and (functional) executioner in the field.
  • There's also the fact that he willingly surrendered and was clearly remorseful at that point. Freezing him would have just been a bit of a "kick him while he's down" moment.
  • Simply put, they don't have the means to cryofreeze them on the spot, only refreeze released criminals. Keep in mind that Ransik's base is the prison where these criminals were kept and frozen in the first place. And even if they did have the power to do so, it wouldn't paint a very pretty picture if they went around freezing citizens without judicial process.

Misc.

• Why, of all the villains from the previous season, was Vypra chosen to represent them? Not only was Jinxer's fate ambiguous enough that him returning wouldn't create any Plot Holes like her's did, but they had sentai footage of his counterpart interacting with the two teams.
  • Presumably, it was to keep the teamup from being too similar to the Sentai teamup it was adapted. The real question is why did she stay evil? She was betrayed by Queen Bansheera just for failing too many times and Diabolico immediately turned on the queen after she got Loki killed? She has no real reason to still take revenge on the rangers and every reason not to.
• If Alex is Wes's descendant, then why does he not seem to care about his supposedly inevitable death in the finale? Wouldn't that erase him from existence?
  • Apparently they can’t sent reinforcements to the past because the timeship is destroyed. However, they’re sending the Megazord components back in time every episode, each of which has a seat in it.
  • Considering that the morphers are genetically encoded, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to assume that the same applies for the zords in the sense that only the Rangers themselves could use the zords safely; at best they won't work if anyone but the assigned Ranger tried to use them, and at worst... well, probably best not to speculate.

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