Episode 2 - "High Five"

Episode 2 – “High Five”

With the origin story out of the way it’s time to start diving into the series. This week it’s an episode that centers largely around Trini and her fear of heights. (Get it HIGH FIVE. THERE’S FIVE OF THEM AND TRINI CAN’T GET UP HIGH!!! LOLOLOLOLOOOLLLLLOLOLOLOL!!!!1111)


RECAP
We start off with Kimberly and Zack watching Jason climb a rope for some reason. Trini arrives and stands directly under Jason and starts barking at him to be careful. If he flips he might hurt himself, Zack tells her to fuck off because all this talk of flipping might make Jason nervous.
Jason tells Trini that she should try climbing the rope but Trini refuses claiming to be terrified of heights (strange that that didn't come up in the last episode when she jumped 70 feet in the air to climb into her sabre-tooth tiger) Billy arrives to disseminate some exciting information (his words) when Jason suddenly lowers himself down and locks his legs around Billy's neck. It's not clear if this was an intentional thing or not. I do know that being that close to Jason's balls is terrifying to Billy who begins to freak out. (Not completely unreasonable when you consider that poor Billy is basically being tea-bagged.) Billy apparently doesn't think of just dropping down and slipping out from between Jason's muscular thighs. Instead he proceeds to run back and forth screaming. Jason also never thinks of letting go of the rope and instead hangs on causing him and Billy to start swinging around in circles dangling from the rope until gravity and centripetal force finally get the better of our heroes and they tumble to the ground (or rather to the strategically placed matts) in front of Trini who is working out. (Apparently she forgot that she was concerned for Jason's safety, perhaps watching Jason molest the back of Billy's skull put her off of the pair of them.)

Just then Bulk and Skull arrive and Bluk burns Jason terribly... ok, so he just calls him a geek clown but it seemed to amuse Skull to no end. The sassy teens exchange words until it falls to Bulk to prove he's man enough to climb the rope. There is some very clear sexual tension between Bulk and Kimberly who asks “are you sure you know how to work this thing?” to which Bulk replies “what do you think I am?... stupid?” Oh they so want to do it. Bulk’s incredible mass causes the rope to come detached from the ceiling… and the roof to cave in on him. The sassy teens all point and laugh at the poor chubby bastard. No wonder he’s such an asshole.
Meanwhile on the moon (which is at least dark now…) Rita outlines her plan to trap the rangers in a time warp the same way she did Zordon. (Ooh, backstory. Nice.) We cut back to Angel Grove where Billy is babbling on about his new narrow-beam transition module that allows a wave function over an extended interval. Nobody except for Trini has a fucking clue what the poor virgin is talking about. Basically he made them walkie-talkie watches. Turns out they’re also teleporters. By an extraordinary stroke of luck the malfunction teleported them directly into the command center and not into the center of a boulder or the middle of the atlantic ocean, so you know… that’s cool. Zordon congratulates Billy and tells Alpha 5 to fix the watches. Alpha says this will be easy and then for no apparent reason starts running around in circles screaming AiYiYi… nicotine fit?

Back on the moon we get some exposition. Squat and Baboo explain that the time device will crash to earth and open up a hole in (you guessed it) time. Then Finsters’s monster will also enter the hole (hehe) and trap the rangers there forever. Rita goes to visit her poor beleaguered sculptor who creates “BONES” a gruesome, ugly and cheap looking monster. He seems perfect. So powerful that there’s no reason for Rita to just make him really huge to start with. Bones comes out of the fry cooker and removes his head for some reason. They launch the monster to earth in a 1/100oth scale model of an earth space shuttle. It drives down a busy street and for some reason terrifies people.

An alarm goes off in the command center which just sounds like an alarm to me, but apparently it fills Zordon in on Rita’s entire plan about the time device. He sends the rangers to investigate the putty’s that Rita sent while Zordon “analyzes” things. They hide behind a rock watching the putty’s and Zack (the kid in a yellow hat and break-dancing gear) remarks about how perfectly camouflaged they are. Strange because usually it’s Kimberly saying the retarded stuff. Billy notices that they’ve been spotted. Kimberly suggests the morph (not unreasonable considering the last time they fought the putty’s without morphing they got their asses kicked) but Jason says they have to try to take care of things on their own before they use their powers. (Hey, it’s not like there’s an unlimited “rangers fighting puttys” stock-footage supply and there’s going to be like 50 episodes this season!) The rangers run around kicking at the putty’s and giving each other secret high-five handshakes, except for Billy who just awkwardly runs around. (That’s what he does when he feels threatened.) Trini and Billy run off to draw putty’s away. (Doesn’t really make sense since Billy can’t fight and Jason is the toughest, maybe Jason’s trying to get Billy killed so there’s less competition for Kimberly’s affection… Boy is he going to be pissed when Tommy arrives in a few weeks. Billy and Trini decide to split up, Sun Tzu eat your heart out. Trini hides behind a rock and Billy runs up a slight incline. When Trini sees Billy climbing up the very small rock she stands up (defeating the purpose of hiding) and tells Billy he’s climbing too high. I’m afraid of heights too but I don’t know that I feel fear vicariously through my friends when they climb stuff.

Meanwhile, Jason and Kimberly are beating up putty’s while Zack dances up a storm, occasionally hitting a putty. Billy realizes he’s painted himself into a corner as the putty’s approach. He then drops his power morpher… what an asshole. Trini faces her fear and climbs up the rocks (the hard way for some reason) to save Billy’s dumb ass. Lucky for her the putty’s are moving very very slowly. The putty considers his options and then goes with the “charge” strategy. Billy and Trini sidestep and the putty falls to his death. While all this is going on things have been getting bad for the other rangers, the putty’s are gaining the upper hand. Luckily Jason has an idea, a crazy idea, but one that just might work. He puts Zack on his shoulders and Kimberly grabs onto Zack’s legs and they start slowly and awkwardly spinning around in a circle. Though we don’t see anyone make contact with a putty they nonetheless start crashing into cactuses…cactus’… cacti…whatever. The putty’s run away clutching their butts. Rita sees this and throws Bones down to the earth, upon landing on the ground Bones immediately collapses into a pile of loose bones, what craftsmanship. Zordon tells the rangers that Bones is at the amusement park and that he can shoot lasers out of his eyes, jump long distances, render himself invisible and make julienne fries.

IT’S MORPHIN’ TIME

Because this is an emergency the rangers only strike dramatic poses for 5 minutes or so before they strike their big group pose and shout power rangers. This still gives Bones enough time to notice them and send his head spinning into the air which apparently causes the rangers to do the time-warp again. They bust out their fancy laser switch-blades and fight the skeleton monsters from the Daft Punk “Around the World” music video while Squat (who apparently was hiding in a pumpkin in the time warp) looks on. While the rangers fight we see Baboo and Squat plant a bunch of bombs. Bones hits the ground with his sword and causes an earthquake (Zordon forgot to mention that power.) Trini steals Bones’ head and throws it down in the chasm and it explodes like the Emperor at the end of Jedi. In retrospect having Bones’ head come off so easily was a bit of a design flaw. Rita decides to send a giant to earth, the giant makes a jump to the left and then a step to the right and punches a hole in the time-warp again. This seems odd because my understanding was that Rita’s plan was to trap the Rangers in the time warp forever and once the giant monster punches a hole in it should be pretty simple for them to escape, but that’s why I’m a guy writing about Power Rangers instead of an evil genius. The giant grabs Jason and pulls him out of the time warp, suddenly Squatt and Baboo set up us the bomb and the other rangers are launched out of the gaping hole in the explosion. They all seem ok except for some steam coming off their costumes.

Jason shoots the big monster in the eyes which momentarily distracts the big lug.

WE NEED DINOZORD POWER. NOW!

Jason’s T-Rex grapples with the sword wielding monster who appear to have the upper hand when he starts swinging the sword but Jason answers back with some powerful tail whips (he’ll learn “Quick Attack” when he evolves to a Blastoise.) Jason calls down to Zack to ask how he’s doing (if you ask me I think he was fishing for compliments) and Zack tells him that he’s “Morphenomenal” which causes me to spray Dr. Pepper out my nose. Jason’s through messing around and utilizes one of the T-rex dinozord’s special abilities. I’m sure it’s all very complicated and technical but it basically looks like the T-rex jumps in the air and does a jumping jack which makes an explosion fly at the monster who dissolves. Jason celebrates on top of the Zord’s head, and when Rita finds out, she’s horrified.

Later on, the rangers are back at the juice bar/athletics club that is their hangout and we hear Ernie, the proprietor of said establishment, telling some random woman that he heard on the radio that 5 superheroes fought a zombie at the amusement park. I’m assuming that the actors were told that the rangers would be fighting a zombie and then when it came time to actually edit in the Japanese stock footage they discovered that he was in fact a skeleton and they decided not to bother with reshooting that line because no one would be nitpicking the episodes (ha! Sure showed them.) Billy informs the others that their teleporter/communicators are once again functional. Kimberly, the dumbest woman alive, asks Billy if that means they can teleport and communicate. (Somehow she’s the only one of these kids who goes on to have a career after this show.) Billy smiles and says “affirmative” even though he’s probably thinking what we’re all thinking “Great, our pink ranger has the IQ of a turnip.” Kimberly excitedly declares that “this is SO 90’s!!!” It sure is Kimberly… it sure is.

Zack arrives while our heroes are congratulating Trini on how well she climbed the rocks. Kimberly even busts out “morphenomenal” again, but I think using it twice in one episode kind of makes it lose some of it’s impact. Zack sneaks up on Trini wearing a skeleton mask. Trini is startled and her response is to climb up the rope. The sassy teens all laugh and remind us that Trini has overcome her fear of heights. We freeze frame on Trini giving them an exasperated, but playful look. OH YOU GUYS!

THE GOOD
We get to learn a little more about Billy and Trini’s characters in this episode.
The time device was a fun little maguffin even though it doesn’t really make any sense once the big monster smashes into the time-warp somehow.
It was cool to see the final boss be defeated without summoning Megazord. It’s nice to have them solve problems with just 1 or a couple of zords once in a while so that it’s actually special when they DO have to summon Megazord or something more powerful.

THE BAD
We keep hearing about how fearsome Bones is going to be and yet the rangers defeat him in about 45 seconds so the final fight of the episode is with some random monster we know nothing about.
All of Kimberly’s dialogue.
While it was pretty awesome to see the T-Rex battle the random boss it seems like since Trini was more the focus of the episode that it would have made more sense to have had the Sabre-tooth tiger zord fight the boss. But, T-Rexes are cool and there probably was no stock footage of the Sabre-tooth fighting anything solo.

THE HILARIOUS
We learn that building codes in Angel Grove are very lax as Bulk manages to cave a roof in.
Kimberly asking if the Teleporter/Communicator will let them teleport and communicate


All in all, it was an enjoyable episode. I give it 3.5 power coins out of 5.

Next up is an episode called “Teamwork” so I’m sure we’ll all get to learn a valuable lesson.