YOPR: 13. Peace, Love and Woe
On April 19, MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: ONCE AND ALWAYS premieres on Netflix. I’m writing about all 60 episodes of MMPR’s first season in the lead-up to that premiere.
If you’d like to follow along on this rewatch, entirety of MMPR’s first season is available for free (with ads) on YouTube.
One-sentence synopsis: Romance blooms between Billy and a character we’ll never see again.
Why it matters: To this point, Billy’s intelligence has mostly supplemented an episode’s story or was used to engineer the Power Rangers out of a jam. For better or worse, it’s put at the forefront here through one of the cringiest meet-cutes ever filmed. When observing things that have aged poorly when it comes to MMPR, Billy’s “otherness” brought on by his high IQ is probably the worst offender. Perhaps I feel too strongly about it as someone who probably related to Billy more than any other character, but in a cast of caricatures, early Bill often feels like the only one who couldn’t possibly be written into a modern episode of Power Rangers because the internet would destroy him. Yost plays him with a childlike charm that’s endearing, and these early lows make the character’s growth over the course of four seasons even more rewarding (and, in fairness, that hindsight could be weighing down my overall opinion of his early condition). But, damn, it still makes for a tough watch when thrown into the spotlight.
Episode MVP: Confused glances. Near the end of the episode, Ernie faceplants into a cake and then he leads a conga line. The camera pans over to Bulk and Skull, whose gazes are the visual summation of how I feel after watching this episode. Billy comes across as unnecessarily pathetic and a cool Monster of the Day (Madam Woe) is wasted in the service of a character who has never appeared on Power Rangers again.
A good quote: “I couldn’t think of a more perfect place to discuss the weather.” – Billy
Rating: 1/5 crushed crystals
