POWER RANGERS: DINOTHUNDER FINALE COUNTDOWN THE WORST STORYLINE MISTAKES | |
Power Rangers: DinoThunder has been a great season, probably the most mature season of the entire series as well as the best all around. But the season could have been a lot better if they had 5 things: 1. KEPT TRENT EVIL LONGER With this being the United States, and with Disney hovering over the producers and writers, you couldn’t actually have a HUMAN be evil. How un-Disney-like. So of course, all of a sudden, Trent is turned good. The show would’ve had so much more ways to go and a better storyline post-White Ranger reveal if Trent stayed evil. In the Japanese Sentai, the White Ranger, who is named AbareKiller, is evil for the entire series and even dies a bloody death at the end. Now of course we won’t see that on PR, but the writers could’ve have slowly progressed the story to have the Rangers react to Trent being evil, show what he’s capable of doing. They also wouldn’t have needed to make the “White Ranger Clone.” Because PR uses Japanese footage for some of the morphed scenes, they couldn’t just waste the White Ranger footage so they needed to create the clone to be able to use the White Ranger vs Red/Blue/Yellow/Black Sentai scenes. This was a very bad move, and the show would’ve been able to go in a completely different, and better direction if they had kept him evil longer. 2. FOCUSED MORE ON CONNER, KIRA, AND ETHAN You would think that with only 3 main rangers, we’d be able to get to know them better, have more “focus eps” on them. But other than maybe 3 episodes for each of them, we didn’t get any GOOD episodes that focused JUST on Conner, or JUST on Kira, or JUST on Ethan. Character development was not the strongest part of this season, and with James Napier, Emma Lahana, and Kevin Duhaney in the roles, character development would’ve been perfect. It would’ve been nice to see more of their personal lives, relationships. For example, developed a Conner/Kira “relationship” or elaborate on the Ethan/Cassidy pairing. They had all the pieces, but they never put the puzzle together. Next year, it will be even less likely for focus eps since there will be at least 7 MAIN rangers, with 3 or 4 more introduced during the season. 3. LESS FILLER EPISODES/40 EPISODES It seems the writers tended to get lazy. They put in clip shows, pointless episodes, and cheap one set episodes. Before Lightspeed Rescue, PR produced more than 40 episodes a season. Then when Ninja Storm came around, they only produced 38 becuase Disney was too cheap to pay for a Wild Force/Ninja Storm team up, so that was 2 less episodes produced. But this year, there was a team-up yet we still get 38 episodes. Two episodes and the fillers add up to much more time to develop the characters and the story that is obviously there but remains untouched. Once again, so much potential wasted. 4. MORE BACKGROUND Where did Hayley come from? What is the extent of her relationship with Tommy? Where did Elsa come from? Was she good before she turned evil? Is she even human? Who was Smitty before he became Zeltrax? Why didn’t they gradually introduce the concept of Smitty instead of springing him on the audience in one episode? With the extra episodes minus the fillers, these questions could’ve been answered. 5. MORE UNMORPHED SCENES It seemed as though the writing was a lot better with the unmorphed scenes, I guess that’s because the writers don’t have to come up with lines to fit in with the Japanese footage. Of course we need the morphed battles and the zord battles, but we need some unmorphed scenes too. That little need really showed up this season and really made you think that DinoThunder can easily be a one-hour series. DinoThunder had so much potential. In my opinion, it is the best Power Rangers season ever; writing-wise/story, characters, acting, special effects. There were some things during the season that made mesay, “Wait, should 7 year old kids really be watching that?” TOMORROW: THE WORST EPISODES OF THE SEASON |