Recap: Power Rangers Beast Morphers, Episode 20 and Midseason Check-In – “It’s kind of fun to be stretchy.”

Recap: Power Rangers Beast Morphers, Episode 20 – Evox: Upgraded

As repairs to the Cybergate continue, Mayor Daniels confronts Commander Shaw about his son being a Ranger. He reprimands her and asks if she can even fathom the feeling of knowing your child is in danger as a Power Ranger.

Commander Shaw steps toward him and tells him she absolutely does.

Ravi and Zoey come running in ready to go and Commander Shaw introduces her son.

They fill the mayor in on what’s going and he asks what he can do to help. Commander Shaw says nothing.

Ben and Betty say the Cybergate is ready for testing. Nate flips the switch and they can see the Cyber Dimension on the other side. Betty notices something is not right, but she suddenly gets sucked into the gate and momentarily loses all her bones.

Nate says the Cybergate is unstable. Ravi prepares to go in first and takes a beacon with him so the others can follow his coordinates. Commander Shaw says he will not as she cannot risk the lives of any more Rangers.

Mayor Daniels grabs the beacon and says he will. He runs through the Cybergate and makes it through before it shuts down.

Nate checks the beacon and it shows the mayor has reached the Cyber Dimension and they now have the correct coordinates. Zoey says they need some firepower and Commander Shaw suggests combining all their zords. Good timing as Nate’s been working on an Ultrazord combination.

The Rangers hop into their zords and initiate the Beast-X Ultrazord. Commander Shaw orders her son to complete their mission and bring them all back in one piece. She deploys them and the Ultrazord is teleported to the Cyber Dimension.

While Evox’s body continues getting the Morph-X needed to power it up, Mayor Daniels finds his son and unlocks him from his chains.

Scrozzle detects the Rangers’ arrival in the Cyber Dimension. Blaze orders Scrozzle to send in an army of Gigadrones to “Tear those fools apart.”

Devon and Mayor Daniels have a heart to heart talk while hiding from the Tronics. The mayor apologizes to his son for doubting his character and they share a heartfelt reunion.

Evox’s body is complete and he zooms over to meet the Rangers. He shoots at them and promises they will suffer a painful death in the Cyber Dimension. The Ultrazord breaks up and ejects the Rangers and Beast Bots.

They reunite with Devon and Nate says their zords are history.

Just then, Evox finds them and asks if the Cyber Dimension is a fitting location for their deaths.

Cruise hands Devon a new morpher and he morphs. The Rangers charge at Evox, but he shoots at them once and they are immediately forced to demorph.

Evox embiggens himself and prepares to teleport to the real world.

Zoey suggests they blow up the Morph-X tower so Evox can explode right along with it. They need a zord to do that though and conveniently for them, Cruise has checked and the Racer zord is still operational.

While the mayor leads the others to Scrozzle’s lab, Devon and Cruise hop in the Racer zord. They find an underground tunnel beneath the Morph-X tower. But Blaze, in his own new zord, meets them.

Ravi, Zoey and Steel take on Tronics while Nate and the mayor proceed toward Scrozzle. Nate shoots Scrozzle and teleports away. Nate tries to figure out how to stop Evox’s teleportation.

Devon delivers a Cheetah Hyper Strike at Blaze to finish him off. Nate is able to reverse the digitization of Evox, but they all need to get their butts out of the Cyber Dimension or they’ll die as well.

The others hurry over to the Cybergate. But Devon is nowhere to be found. Mayor Daniels gets blown back as the Cyber Dimension explosion bursts through.

Thankfully, Devon and Cruise are able to walk through the Cybergate, perfectly fine.

It’s all happy events as Blaze wakes up as well.

After the election, Mayor Daniels awards the Rangers, Ben and Betty the Coral Harbor Medal of Valor.

Steel wants everyone to take a selfie. But unbeknownst to any of them, Mayor Daniels is experiencing a worrying aftereffect of his experience with the Cyber Dimension.

Episode Thoughts

That was a great midseason finale. Definitely full and exciting. If only the entire half-season was like this.

Good drama, good action. Great character moments. A true climactic event.

I really wish they hadn’t felt the urge to include that stretchy scene of Betty at the beginning right after such a dramatic scene. (At the end, it was alright.) Like, Ben and Betty can be serious for an episode. They don’t have to be the butt of a joke all the time. And not every episode needs to have comedy in it. I think that is absolutely one of the biggest problems with contemporary Power Rangers. Regardless of whether it’s Saban or Hasbro. (Though of course, the team behind the camera is pretty much the same either way.)

The kids watching Power Rangers don’t need to be babied all the time. (This feels like deja vu.) Kids these days are much more sophisticated and connected than the kids of the early 90s (like myself). So Power Rangers does not need to be slapstick all the time or be condescendingly preachy, etc. Other children’s programs aren’t. So why does Power Rangers insist on it.

Anyway, these last few episodes have shown that if they wanted to, Beast Morphers (and Power Rangers in general) could absolutely be more than just a 90s kids show.

These last few episodes also showed that Beast Morphers actually could have intense, dynamic action sequences. The same cannot be said for the earlier episodes in the season for whatever reason.

I honestly think you could skip like half of the episodes so far and just watch these last couple of episodes and you wouldn’t have missed anything or have trouble keeping up. That’s how inconsequential much of the season’s episodes are. And even if they weren’t important to the story or the characters, they least they could do is be fun and enjoyable. But a lot of them weren’t

So my hope for the second half of Beast Morphers is that the pacing for the 20 episodes works better. Space out the fillers with episodes that actually progress plot or give us something interesting and enlightening about the characters. We really don’t know much about the characters, Rangers especially. Except for Ravi who has had the fullest character so far.

The series also needs more dynamic action scenes. Be more exciting. Throw in more explosions. The scenes have been well choreographed, but they look choreographed. If that makes sense. The fights, from choreography to direction, have been so flat and lifeless. They’ve almost been too stuffy and formal in a way that it looks and feels overly choreographed and not something very edge of your seat exciting. Only these last few episodes have shown it is actually possible. So hopefully that continues next year.

The fact that the Beast Bots were treated like crap though is probably my biggest criticism of the season. When the official Power Rangers social media intern tweeted out how the Beast Bots were basically pets, I was so upset. Then in-show, the Rangers treat them as mere tools instead of “buddies”. Obviously Beast Morphers is different from Go-Busters, but the Beast Bots are sentient. They have free will and emotions. Why give them all that and then not give them actual things to do.

Their relationship with the Rangers should be one of the biggest aspects of the season. They’re doing a brother thing with Nate and Steel, but the other Rangers have essentially treated their Beast Bots like nothing. Not even as partners. The one episode where the show “addressed” the way the Rangers took the Beast Bots for granted was not believable because the Beast Bots had been mostly invisible up to that point.

The Beast Bots actually being fully formed characters would’ve actually helped develop the Rangers’ own characters as well. But alas, that didn’t happen. And I doubt it will in the last 20 episodes.

Anyway, Beast Morphers is definitely an improvement overall over the recent Saban Brands seasons. But in such an effort to take itself seriously, Beast Morphers has seemed to forgotten how to balance it out with sincerely lighthearted and fun moments and cool action. Throwing in Ben and Betty (who may be the best integrated, least annoying comic relief in this current era) doing slapstick from time to time does not help.

Also finally, I love getting to see the Tokyo Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel on Power Rangers lol