Recap: Power Rangers Megaforce, Episode 5 – United We Stand

Megaforce 5

Emma and Gia are riding their bikes on the trail. Emma wants to show Gia a rare flower that only blooms one day a year. They take some pictures before Gosei calls them.

Megaforce 5

The Rangers immediately head into the city where they run into Vrak for the first time. But he’s in a different form from normal. He sics some Loogies at them, but he appears to merely want to study how they fight. After he sees what he wants, he leaves along with the Loogies. The Rangers laugh, enjoying the moment (?) and Emma and Gia head off arm in arm.

Vrak returns to the ship where Admiral Malkor introduces him and Creepox to Beezara who considers herself royalty that deserves respect. She explains how she’ll use her royal jelly venom to get all human males to become her loyal servants while the females will fight each other.

Emma and Gia happily develop their photos when Beezara zaps them and turns them against each other.

At school, Jake is waiting for Noah to finish what he’s doing so he can head to the soccer game outside. Noah mentions how the alien from this morning was different, he didn’t look like an insect.

Megaforce 5

Suddenly, Beezara brings Loogies with her as she attacks the soccer players outside. Beezara orders the Loogies to take the men to her hive as Jake and Noah alert the others and head down to face her.

Megaforce 5

They morph and fight her, but she sprays them with jelly venom and gets them under her control. The others arrive and Beezara sprays Jake with venom too. Emma and Gia continue to clash and Beezara forces them all to demorph.

She gets the three boys to carry her to her hive. Troy gives Beezara a manicure, Noah massages her sticky feet and Jake fans her while the other men are doing laundry and cleaning the area.

Megaforce 5

Emma and Gia are still being bitchy to each other as they try to find the guys and go different ways. Emma manages to find the hive first and morphs, but Beezara binds her in vines. Gia arrives, but gets swatted away as the guys are blocked from helping thanks to a force field set up by Beezara.

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Gia summons the Landick Brother Headders/Zords and uses them to try and put a dent in Beezara. Emma asks Gia to break her free, but instead, Gia blames her for this whole mess. The guys try to get them to stop arguing and remind how they’ve been best friends since they were six.

They both come to their senses, realizing they must’ve been put under a spell. Gosei tells Emma the power friendship can break the spell, so she does and earns the Sky/Skick Brothers Card.

Emma sticks the Card in her Morpher and summons the Hawk ZordHeadder, Pterazord Headder and Crow HeadderZordwhatevers. She uses them to break Gia free from Beezara’s hold.

The BFFs reunite and fight Beezara themselves.

“United we stand! Divided we fall!”

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They send an Ultimate Dino Blast Beezara’s way to finish off her first life as the men are released.

Megaforce 5

Vrak sends his Zombats to embiggen Beezara and the Rangers hop into their Zords Mechazords and combine into the Megazord.

Troy calls on the Skick Brothers to help form the Skick Gosei Megazord. The girls champion ‘Girl Power’ and go kill the female Warstar alien.

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The Rangers meet up at Ernie’s where best friends Emma and Gia happily announce they are best friends again and naturally never meant any of the mean things they said to each other. (God forbid!)

Megaforce 5

Noah’s reading the newspaper and is surprised to see an article complete with photo of the best buds Emma and Gia having found the elusive flower. Gia appears not happy with her grinning face in the paper, but actually she loves that everyone now know they’re BEST FRIENDS FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Megaforce 5

Episode Thoughts
BEST FRIENDS!

Another okay, passable episode, but maybe the weakest of the five so far.

First off, that enslavement scene was nasty. Like seriously? Noah massaging Beezara’s feet was disgusting and not in a fun way. Eeek.

Even worse, it definitely was not funny.

Emma and Gia’s little fight wasn’t that interesting, but actually made me think about pre-show comments by Saban, I think it was, saying that the Rangers would be from different cliques or some such set-up where they’d have to learn to work together despite their different personalities.

But we got Emma and Gia being BEST BEST FRIENDS FOREVER! And Noah and Jake best buds too. I think part of the reason that whole contrasting personalities thing came up was the whole “Megaforce Season 1 will pay tribute to MMPR” and all that, thus mirroring the group dynamics from Mighty Morphin.

I guess that was quickly dropped, but regardless, I think I might prefer that direction. Five episodes in and we’ve only got pretty superficial character development, if at all (looking at you Troy!).

Acting was pretty meh this episode too.

And are they really going to wear the exact same outfits all season?! I thought we were past that, though I guess Saban undoing a lot of Disney’s progress is not a surprise. But then again, the Samurai Rangers had more than one outfit. Eh, oh well.

How different is Megaforce from Goseiger?
Corresponding Goseiger Episode: Epic 9 – “Gotcha! Gosei Girls”

So, pretty similar storylines. Megaforce used a “spell” to get Emma and Gia to clash while in Goseiger, Eri and Moune were clashing on their own for, actually, little things like what ice cream to eat. But for them it was part of the bigger picture where the three Gosei “tribes” were distinct in their personalities and approach to their responsibilities and they had to learn to work together as a team.

Which makes me think again about how Megaforce maybe should’ve gone that direction since they’ve made each of the Rangers fit a certain high school stereotype.

The slave scene in Goseiger was better too. One, because it wasn’t gross. But it was also funny and evil at the same time.

Now to the footage. They mirrored a scene in the cockpit for some reason.

But what’s becoming more and more obvious is the huge difference between Troy and Alata’s personalities. Best example being in the cockpit during the Megazord battle. Alata’s, I guess, “dainty” or more happy and peppy movements weren’t edited out. So we see him with his hands folded in joy and giving the girls the peace sign.

Megaforce 5
Megaforce 5

We know very little about Troy, but since he’s been pretty stiff and, well, boring, Alata’s mannerisms are that much more noticeable in the Sentai footage.

Alata tells Irian (Beezara) “I’m a man!” when she assumes he’s one of the girls. And that’s definitely part of his personality, he’s all delicate and peaceful when he’s not, well, all hyped up and pissed and screaming his head off as he’s about to deliver the final strike against the monster of the week.

Samurai took both footage and lines from Shinkenger without changing them to match the Power Ranger character. Megaforce has so far written original dialogue, but they are not working around the footage, especially when the characters are even less alike than the originals than the Samurai were to the Shinkengers.

They even included that little argument where Eri, being her happy-go-lucky, kinda airhead self, tries to combine her weapon with Moune’s.

But that’s all nitpicks I guess. Especially for a rather blah episode.




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0 thoughts on “Recap: Power Rangers Megaforce, Episode 5 – United We Stand

  1. now i am starting to miss pr samurai’s cockpit scenes. for all the crappiness that that series had, i laud the fact that they made original megazord cockpit footage for it. so i am rather disappointed they dropped that idea for this season and went back to using all stock.

    1. Yeah, I guess it was because the Shinkenger scenes were too Japanese. Plus, it gave them an extra set of toys to sell (Mega Mode). So it was more out of necessity. With Megaforce, they’re filming a lot more original footage, so I guess the money had go somewhere else.

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