Black Ranger Power: “Always a Chance”
Apr. 14th, 2010 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameAstronema recruits a new monster, Lizwizard, to steal the knowledge and computer data from Earth scientists so she can build a “grand weapon”…that we never see. Lizwizard also has another ability—the power to switch places with anyone who he holds captive with his long tongue. You’d think this would mean that the Rangers would learn to avoid it, but no. Carlos is gung-ho to try to stop him, but a last second switch puts Cassie in the path of his Lunar Lance, injuring her shoulder. While Cassie insists that she’ll be fine, Carlos’s faith in himself is shaken.
Professor Phenomenous has the last key piece of information needed for Astronema’s Incredibly Vague Plan, but fortunately for him, Bulk, and Skull, Carlos is brooding nearby. He hears their screams of terror and runs over, but it takes him time to build up the resolve to morph. Black Ranger arrives just in time to allow the trio to escape, and Lizwizard mockingly asks him whose side he’s on today, but Carlos plays up his confidence as he fights. Still, he can’t manage to focus, and Lizwizard is easily beating him. Luckily, someone with experience as a Black Ranger just happened to be in the neighborhood. A few kicks knock Lizwizard off of Carlos as an old hero stands tall in the midst of the PRiS heroic theme: Adam Park, Carlos’s predecessor as Green Turbo Ranger I, Green Zeo Ranger, and Black Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger II.
The two Black Rangers double-team him, but Carlos’s loss of confidence continues to be a weakness while Adam—despite having no powers—sends Lizwizard running with ingenuity and martial arts. Carlos explains his recent problems to his former mentor, asking for help. Adam insists he knows what Carlos is going through and offers to train him, spending the next several days (judging by Cassie’s prognosis and the costume changes for Adam) building his confidence by retraining his body. But Carlos still fails to deal. After Adam defeats him in a blindfolded sparring match, he insists he’s no Ranger and runs off. Alpha asks Adam if Carlos will be okay, and Adam admits there’s nothing more he can do—it’s all up to Carlos now. Adam admits he sometimes wishes he was still the one in the spandex, and he retrieves his old Power Morpher from his bag, asking Alpha if it might still work. But Alpha nearly has a robot equivalent of a heart attack, warning him that with the Power Coins destroyed, morphing could kill Adam. Adam tells him to relax, that it was all hypothetical, but there’s still a clear look of longing on his face as he puts the morpher away.
Back on the Megaship, Carlos turns in his morpher and communicator, over the protests of his friends. He takes his bag and leaves, insisting he has to go before he hurts someone else. Astronema, meanwhile, gives Lizwizard one last chance when Ecliptor tells her that Carlos is alone on Earth, and Carlos arrives to tell Adam and Alpha that he quit. Just as he walks away, the ground explodes around him, and Lizwizard and a squad of Quantrons attack. Adam kicks ass against the Quantrons just like in the good old days, but with Carlos powerless and losing against Lizwizard, he knows what he has to do. He takes out his battle scarred morpher and over the protests of Alpha and Carlos, lets out the famous cry: “It’s morphin’ time! Mastodon!”
Mighty Morphin’ Black attacks Lizwizard, telling Carlos to run. Despite his fears that Adam will be destroyed, Carlos follows his mentor’s instructions, leaving Adam to deliver an old school beatdown. But Carlos’s conscience gets the better of him and he runs back, just as Adam’s powers are failing and he’s painfully switching back and forth between human and Ranger. As Lizwizard begins defeating Adam, Carlos tackles Lizwizard, getting him off Adam. Lizwizard taunts Carlos for being “only human,” but the other Space Rangers show up for backup. They fight off the Quantrons, and Cassie tosses over Carlos’s morpher. He catches it and insists to Lizwizard, “You’re right. I am only human. But I’m also the Black Ranger.”
Quantrons swarm Carlos while Adam continues to fight Lizwizard, but when he sees Adam in trouble, Carlos leaps to the rescue, Lunar Lance outstretched. Hoping to trick Carlos again, Lizwizard pulls a switch like he’d done with Cassie, but Carlos steps off of Adam’s shoulder and lands a hit on Lizwizard. The Black Rangers are ready to continue the fight together, but Astronema fires the satellasers on Lizwizard. It proves to be just in time, as Adam’s morph fails completely, leaving the Space Rangers to show him how they do it new school style, calling in the Astro Megazord to finish off Lizwizard. They hurry back to see Adam still in pain but otherwise okay, and though Carlos insists Adam shouldn’t have morphed, Adam insists that he knew he stood a chance as long as Carlos was around. His faith reaffirmed, Carlos is celebrated as the hero of the day, with his teammates lifting him up in victory.
This episode accomplishes two things that I felt were really important. First, it gave Carlos some much-needed character focus, as he is frequently given the short end of the stick in PRiS. Second, it tells an original spin on the “old guard/new dogs” team-ups that became tradition following this season.
As one of the few episodes that focuses heavily on Carlos, “Always a Chance” accomplishes a lot more in developing him than is accomplished all season. After injuring Cassie by mistake, he’s so wracked by guilt that he can’t focus on his battles anymore. He constantly second-guesses himself, afraid that he’ll make another mistake and hurt someone again. He’s reluctant to fight, having reactions of fear and pain as he tries to work up the nerve to morph. In the moments before morphing to save Prof. Phenomenus, Bulk, and Skull, he looks like he’s in real physical pain as he lifts his morpher. I’m not entirely sure that was a wise choice in direction, as it kind of looks silly in execution, and in any case, Roger Velasco did an excellent job otherwise conveying Carlos’s self-doubts. Once he does morph that first time, he plays confident against Lizwizard, trying not to let his taunts get to him. This is a general thing for Carlos all season—shy and subtle out of uniform, but more confident once he morphs. It’s always seemed a little odd, especially given how Power Rangers in Space clearly shows TJ as second-in-command or co-leader as opposed to MegaBlack in the Megaranger footage, but this time it works in his favor. As a Ranger, he’s not supposed to let these things bother him and he can’t let the villains know they are bothering him. But he can’t keep his false confidence going for long.
Unlike the other inter-season crossover episodes of Power Rangers, this one sticks to the story of the source season, with the guest star being an actual guest. The usual formula for these crossovers is “old villain (or relative of old villain) returns and it’s up to the old Rangers to teach their successors how it’s done.” This is especially blatant in episodes like the later “Once a Ranger,” where the Overdrive Rangers aren’t even able to morph anymore, but the Retro Rangers (ironically led by Adam) are kicking ass and taking names. You start wondering why the old Rangers aren’t still active if they’ve clearly still got it, and it usually ends up with one team or the other showing the other up.
Instead, Adam plays the explicit role of mentor in “Always a Chance.” The villain is still Astronema—no former villains have returned, and Adam only morphs on a whim. The focus is—as it should be—on the current season. Carlos needs help, and as his predecessor, Adam takes it upon himself to retrain him and help him build up his confidence again. Adam’s role is not to show him how to do it in terms of power, but in terms of heart.
When Carlos is at his lowest, Adam insists he’s not alone. He tells him that he’s facing the same doubts all the Rangers before him have faced. He plays the role of teacher, helping Carlos work though this crisis. He could have gone the whole episode without morphing and it would still have been a solid one, but his morph went and made the whole lesson stick better. Where Carlos doubts himself, Adam is steadfast in his faith. Carlos isn’t sure he can risk hurting anyone else, and Adam is willing to take the risk of his own death to protect Carlos. He remembers what being a Ranger is all about. It’s similar to what Dillon would be taught by Summer in RPM’s “Rain” eleven years later—that once he’s given the morpher, he’s being trusted as a protector and that there must be that quality in his heart that makes him want to protect and defend others. Despite knowing that he could be killed by his old morpher, Adam uses it anyway because he knows it’s the right thing to do. He morphs because Carlos is in danger, and he can’t fight off Lizwizard without powers. He shows Carlos what it really means to be the Black Ranger—that he has to put all doubt out of his mind and put his own life at stake to defend others. And when Carlos asks him why he did it when he knew he might die, Adam insists that he had complete faith in Carlos the entire time to help him through it, which means more to Carlos than anything the others may have told him. While the Black Rangers may not have had much chance to fight side-by-side in costume, Adam served his purpose in teaching Carlos to take up the morpher again and trust himself.
This was one of the first episodes of Power Rangers in general that I ever saw, and I was impressed with Adam’s commitment and his willingness to risk his own life to help Carlos and do the right thing. So I hold it in pretty high regard. However, looking back, I’ve got to say there’s one thing that really bugs me. Lizwizard is looking for information to build some kind of “grand weapon,” but nothing ever comes of it. In fact, it’s never mentioned again throughout the episode. This seems to be a recurring problem with Judd Lynn’s writing, no matter how much I like his work. He sets up some great ideas, but then he doesn’t follow through on them. For example, take the last episodes of RPM—he spends “End Game” building up two things: that Gem and Gemma have found the Venjix Palace and that there are Hybrids all throughout Corinth. The Rangers are about to head out to attack the Palace when all of the Hybrids are activated…and little comes of it. The Hybrids in the military do manage to seize Col. Truman and allow Venjix to take over the Control Tower (then listen to Tenaya when she orders them out to execute Doctor K’s plan), but the civilian Hybrids don’t do anything other than look scary. And we never get to Venjix Palace, which is a waste of a subplot. Again, I like Judd Lynn’s writing, and he’s done some awesome work on the seasons he’s worked on, but he does tend to just leave these things hanging.
As I mentioned before, this isn’t the only episode where Adam takes up the morpher again. For the fifteenth anniversary episode “Once a Ranger” in Operation Overdrive (written by Jackie Marchand), Adam’s powers are restored as he leads a team of former Rangers—Bridge Carson as SPD Red, Xander Bly as Mystic Force Green, Tori Hanson as Ninja Storm Blue, and Kira Ford as Dino Thunder Yellow—to relieve the powerless Overdrive Rangers when Rita and Zedd’s son, Thrax, threatens the world. In retrospect, there are a couple of things in “Once a Ranger” that take care to remember this episode. First off, they take pains to show that Adam has a shiny new Power Coin now that his connection to the Morphing Grid has been restored, thereby ensuring that he didn’t spend all of “Once a Ranger” in agonizing pain. I also must thank them for giving him a new morphing sequence, as the stock footage was very noticeable in “Always a Chance.” Adam goes from having long, curly hair in Power Rangers in Space to looking a little younger with short hair in his morphing sequence. I can’t even begin to think how bad it would have been if we saw him de-age fourteen years from adulthood to adolescence just for a morph. Secondly, when Adam asks Alpha 6 to join him at his dojo, it seemed a little odd until you re-watch “Always a Chance.” Despite not knowing Alpha 6 as well as he knew Alpha 5, Adam had quite a few heart-to-hearts with him about Carlos in this episode. Maybe it’s still a little weird, but at the very least, there was that setup of a friendship between them.
“Always a Chance” was written by Judd Lynn. Johnny Yong Bosch reprised his role as Adam Park, Black Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger.
Professor Phenomenous has the last key piece of information needed for Astronema’s Incredibly Vague Plan, but fortunately for him, Bulk, and Skull, Carlos is brooding nearby. He hears their screams of terror and runs over, but it takes him time to build up the resolve to morph. Black Ranger arrives just in time to allow the trio to escape, and Lizwizard mockingly asks him whose side he’s on today, but Carlos plays up his confidence as he fights. Still, he can’t manage to focus, and Lizwizard is easily beating him. Luckily, someone with experience as a Black Ranger just happened to be in the neighborhood. A few kicks knock Lizwizard off of Carlos as an old hero stands tall in the midst of the PRiS heroic theme: Adam Park, Carlos’s predecessor as Green Turbo Ranger I, Green Zeo Ranger, and Black Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger II.
The two Black Rangers double-team him, but Carlos’s loss of confidence continues to be a weakness while Adam—despite having no powers—sends Lizwizard running with ingenuity and martial arts. Carlos explains his recent problems to his former mentor, asking for help. Adam insists he knows what Carlos is going through and offers to train him, spending the next several days (judging by Cassie’s prognosis and the costume changes for Adam) building his confidence by retraining his body. But Carlos still fails to deal. After Adam defeats him in a blindfolded sparring match, he insists he’s no Ranger and runs off. Alpha asks Adam if Carlos will be okay, and Adam admits there’s nothing more he can do—it’s all up to Carlos now. Adam admits he sometimes wishes he was still the one in the spandex, and he retrieves his old Power Morpher from his bag, asking Alpha if it might still work. But Alpha nearly has a robot equivalent of a heart attack, warning him that with the Power Coins destroyed, morphing could kill Adam. Adam tells him to relax, that it was all hypothetical, but there’s still a clear look of longing on his face as he puts the morpher away.
Back on the Megaship, Carlos turns in his morpher and communicator, over the protests of his friends. He takes his bag and leaves, insisting he has to go before he hurts someone else. Astronema, meanwhile, gives Lizwizard one last chance when Ecliptor tells her that Carlos is alone on Earth, and Carlos arrives to tell Adam and Alpha that he quit. Just as he walks away, the ground explodes around him, and Lizwizard and a squad of Quantrons attack. Adam kicks ass against the Quantrons just like in the good old days, but with Carlos powerless and losing against Lizwizard, he knows what he has to do. He takes out his battle scarred morpher and over the protests of Alpha and Carlos, lets out the famous cry: “It’s morphin’ time! Mastodon!”
Mighty Morphin’ Black attacks Lizwizard, telling Carlos to run. Despite his fears that Adam will be destroyed, Carlos follows his mentor’s instructions, leaving Adam to deliver an old school beatdown. But Carlos’s conscience gets the better of him and he runs back, just as Adam’s powers are failing and he’s painfully switching back and forth between human and Ranger. As Lizwizard begins defeating Adam, Carlos tackles Lizwizard, getting him off Adam. Lizwizard taunts Carlos for being “only human,” but the other Space Rangers show up for backup. They fight off the Quantrons, and Cassie tosses over Carlos’s morpher. He catches it and insists to Lizwizard, “You’re right. I am only human. But I’m also the Black Ranger.”
Quantrons swarm Carlos while Adam continues to fight Lizwizard, but when he sees Adam in trouble, Carlos leaps to the rescue, Lunar Lance outstretched. Hoping to trick Carlos again, Lizwizard pulls a switch like he’d done with Cassie, but Carlos steps off of Adam’s shoulder and lands a hit on Lizwizard. The Black Rangers are ready to continue the fight together, but Astronema fires the satellasers on Lizwizard. It proves to be just in time, as Adam’s morph fails completely, leaving the Space Rangers to show him how they do it new school style, calling in the Astro Megazord to finish off Lizwizard. They hurry back to see Adam still in pain but otherwise okay, and though Carlos insists Adam shouldn’t have morphed, Adam insists that he knew he stood a chance as long as Carlos was around. His faith reaffirmed, Carlos is celebrated as the hero of the day, with his teammates lifting him up in victory.
This episode accomplishes two things that I felt were really important. First, it gave Carlos some much-needed character focus, as he is frequently given the short end of the stick in PRiS. Second, it tells an original spin on the “old guard/new dogs” team-ups that became tradition following this season.
As one of the few episodes that focuses heavily on Carlos, “Always a Chance” accomplishes a lot more in developing him than is accomplished all season. After injuring Cassie by mistake, he’s so wracked by guilt that he can’t focus on his battles anymore. He constantly second-guesses himself, afraid that he’ll make another mistake and hurt someone again. He’s reluctant to fight, having reactions of fear and pain as he tries to work up the nerve to morph. In the moments before morphing to save Prof. Phenomenus, Bulk, and Skull, he looks like he’s in real physical pain as he lifts his morpher. I’m not entirely sure that was a wise choice in direction, as it kind of looks silly in execution, and in any case, Roger Velasco did an excellent job otherwise conveying Carlos’s self-doubts. Once he does morph that first time, he plays confident against Lizwizard, trying not to let his taunts get to him. This is a general thing for Carlos all season—shy and subtle out of uniform, but more confident once he morphs. It’s always seemed a little odd, especially given how Power Rangers in Space clearly shows TJ as second-in-command or co-leader as opposed to MegaBlack in the Megaranger footage, but this time it works in his favor. As a Ranger, he’s not supposed to let these things bother him and he can’t let the villains know they are bothering him. But he can’t keep his false confidence going for long.
Unlike the other inter-season crossover episodes of Power Rangers, this one sticks to the story of the source season, with the guest star being an actual guest. The usual formula for these crossovers is “old villain (or relative of old villain) returns and it’s up to the old Rangers to teach their successors how it’s done.” This is especially blatant in episodes like the later “Once a Ranger,” where the Overdrive Rangers aren’t even able to morph anymore, but the Retro Rangers (ironically led by Adam) are kicking ass and taking names. You start wondering why the old Rangers aren’t still active if they’ve clearly still got it, and it usually ends up with one team or the other showing the other up.
Instead, Adam plays the explicit role of mentor in “Always a Chance.” The villain is still Astronema—no former villains have returned, and Adam only morphs on a whim. The focus is—as it should be—on the current season. Carlos needs help, and as his predecessor, Adam takes it upon himself to retrain him and help him build up his confidence again. Adam’s role is not to show him how to do it in terms of power, but in terms of heart.
When Carlos is at his lowest, Adam insists he’s not alone. He tells him that he’s facing the same doubts all the Rangers before him have faced. He plays the role of teacher, helping Carlos work though this crisis. He could have gone the whole episode without morphing and it would still have been a solid one, but his morph went and made the whole lesson stick better. Where Carlos doubts himself, Adam is steadfast in his faith. Carlos isn’t sure he can risk hurting anyone else, and Adam is willing to take the risk of his own death to protect Carlos. He remembers what being a Ranger is all about. It’s similar to what Dillon would be taught by Summer in RPM’s “Rain” eleven years later—that once he’s given the morpher, he’s being trusted as a protector and that there must be that quality in his heart that makes him want to protect and defend others. Despite knowing that he could be killed by his old morpher, Adam uses it anyway because he knows it’s the right thing to do. He morphs because Carlos is in danger, and he can’t fight off Lizwizard without powers. He shows Carlos what it really means to be the Black Ranger—that he has to put all doubt out of his mind and put his own life at stake to defend others. And when Carlos asks him why he did it when he knew he might die, Adam insists that he had complete faith in Carlos the entire time to help him through it, which means more to Carlos than anything the others may have told him. While the Black Rangers may not have had much chance to fight side-by-side in costume, Adam served his purpose in teaching Carlos to take up the morpher again and trust himself.
This was one of the first episodes of Power Rangers in general that I ever saw, and I was impressed with Adam’s commitment and his willingness to risk his own life to help Carlos and do the right thing. So I hold it in pretty high regard. However, looking back, I’ve got to say there’s one thing that really bugs me. Lizwizard is looking for information to build some kind of “grand weapon,” but nothing ever comes of it. In fact, it’s never mentioned again throughout the episode. This seems to be a recurring problem with Judd Lynn’s writing, no matter how much I like his work. He sets up some great ideas, but then he doesn’t follow through on them. For example, take the last episodes of RPM—he spends “End Game” building up two things: that Gem and Gemma have found the Venjix Palace and that there are Hybrids all throughout Corinth. The Rangers are about to head out to attack the Palace when all of the Hybrids are activated…and little comes of it. The Hybrids in the military do manage to seize Col. Truman and allow Venjix to take over the Control Tower (then listen to Tenaya when she orders them out to execute Doctor K’s plan), but the civilian Hybrids don’t do anything other than look scary. And we never get to Venjix Palace, which is a waste of a subplot. Again, I like Judd Lynn’s writing, and he’s done some awesome work on the seasons he’s worked on, but he does tend to just leave these things hanging.
As I mentioned before, this isn’t the only episode where Adam takes up the morpher again. For the fifteenth anniversary episode “Once a Ranger” in Operation Overdrive (written by Jackie Marchand), Adam’s powers are restored as he leads a team of former Rangers—Bridge Carson as SPD Red, Xander Bly as Mystic Force Green, Tori Hanson as Ninja Storm Blue, and Kira Ford as Dino Thunder Yellow—to relieve the powerless Overdrive Rangers when Rita and Zedd’s son, Thrax, threatens the world. In retrospect, there are a couple of things in “Once a Ranger” that take care to remember this episode. First off, they take pains to show that Adam has a shiny new Power Coin now that his connection to the Morphing Grid has been restored, thereby ensuring that he didn’t spend all of “Once a Ranger” in agonizing pain. I also must thank them for giving him a new morphing sequence, as the stock footage was very noticeable in “Always a Chance.” Adam goes from having long, curly hair in Power Rangers in Space to looking a little younger with short hair in his morphing sequence. I can’t even begin to think how bad it would have been if we saw him de-age fourteen years from adulthood to adolescence just for a morph. Secondly, when Adam asks Alpha 6 to join him at his dojo, it seemed a little odd until you re-watch “Always a Chance.” Despite not knowing Alpha 6 as well as he knew Alpha 5, Adam had quite a few heart-to-hearts with him about Carlos in this episode. Maybe it’s still a little weird, but at the very least, there was that setup of a friendship between them.
“Always a Chance” was written by Judd Lynn. Johnny Yong Bosch reprised his role as Adam Park, Black Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger.