Endpoint Analysis: Lost Galaxy
Jul. 29th, 2010 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameWhen Power Rangers in Space ended, it brought to a close a six-year legacy of power. With the destruction of Zordon and the eradication of the United Alliance of Evil, the stories of the Power Rangers from “Day of the Dumpster” through “Countdown to Destruction” were completed. The Space Rangers were the last team to carry over from a previous season. From here on out, all of the Rangers would be brand-new with closed storylines that would begin with the premiere and end completely with the finale (barring, of course, the crossover resurrecting a villain here or there).
Power Rangers Lost Galaxy is a bit of a transition season—a sort-of epilogue to the Zordon era. Characters such as Karone carry over from the previous season, but overall, the storyline is its own. The story revolves around a group of space colonists setting out in search of a new home somewhere in the galaxy, determined to band together and make it on their own, and in a way, I feel like that reflects the general sense of the season itself: it’s trying to be a pioneer, breaking away from years of tradition and safety and trying to tell its own story without being too tied down by too much continuity.This is where I disagree with Linkara: I think it helps Power Rangers as a whole not to have as many ties to continuity—it’s difficult to keep track of for both the audience and the writers, and you risk writing yourself in a hole if things don’t happen by a specific point in time.
Unfortunately, it has its flaws. The Sentai season providing stock footage, Gingaman, was entirely different from Lost Galaxy in terms of setting and storyline. Where Power Rangers in Space and RPM managed to make it work, Lost Galaxy falls a little short in trying to mesh the stock footage and the American storyline. There are several issues between the Japanese story and the American story that drove me nuts while I was watching: the sudden importance of the Transdaggers when nobody could have known about them (“Rookie in Red”), why the hell would an ancient galactic power such as the Lights of Orion be hidden on a recently built space station, and why they don’t bother to use the Astro Megazord if they’ve clearly still got it in mothballs (really bitched about in “The Power of Pink”)? However, I do have to say that as it began, it felt like it had a much better sense of its story than PRiS had in the beginning: by the sixth episode, the Lights of Orion had been introduced, and the Magna Defender by the ninth; in contrast, PRiS really didn’t get its storyline cohesive until episode 16, “Flashes of Darkonda.” There was a lot of filler in the way, particularly with nobody ever finding the Lights of Orion, but we got enough revealed about the Magna Defender in the meantime that it helped make episodes like Kai’s quest for a one-shot girlfriend or Kendrix and Maya’s OOC bitchfest more tolerable than otherwise. I didn’t feel like I had to skip to a certain point in the series just to get to the good stuff, the way I sometimes feel with PRiS.
Lost Galaxy’s greatest strength is its characters. I’ve said throughout the reviews that there were multiple themes at work, and all of them were really character-related:
1. Nobody gets left behind
2. Sacrifice
3. Revenge
4. Honor vs. treachery
5. Family
Maya was probably the character who had the least development throughout the course of the season. It’s not to say that her character was boring or poorly written or anything—she just didn’t have as drastic a shift in personality or role as some of the others had. When we first meet her, she’s very other-worldly: even disregarding her jungle girl get-up, you can tell she’s not from the same world as the others. When they first become Rangers, she emphasizes how they were chosen to fulfill a powerful destiny. And when you get down to it, she’s right. There is no other way than “destiny” to explain how any of the eight come together to meet: the Quasar Sabers were on Maya’s home planet; by chance, she got to Earth’s moon and happened to meet Mike, Leo, Kai, and Kendrix; Leo happened to stow away on Terra Venture; Kai happened to bring along Damon when he hijacked the Megaship; Mike happened to fall into the same crevasse on the same planet the Magna Defender had been sealed within; and Karone happened to be around in the right place at the right time to learn where the Pink Quasar Saber was to retrieve it. That much coincidence, and you know it has to be destiny.
Maya’s other-worldliness meant that she was more in-tune with the spiritual parts and powers of the galaxy than the others were. She had the ability to hear the Galactabeasts and understand them. She could sense the Lights of Orion were nearby. And when Kendrix ascended, Maya was the one she was able to contact to warn her about her Saber falling into the hands of evil. She was basically the oracle of the team, their link to the unknown, and it was a role that worked for her. There were other things that could have tied into it better. One thing that really pissed me off about “Loyax’ Last Battle” was that it really had the chance to be a good Maya episode, if it hadn’t shoehorned in too many themes at once. Maya’s insistence that Loyax still had good inside him fit with her character role as the oracle or medium between worlds. It foreshadows how she and the rest of the team accept Karone without question when she joins.
As for Maya’s progression, I’d have to say it was a matter of maturing. She didn’t change drastically, but you could see that when she returned to Mirinoi in “Journey’s End,” she had grown from her experiences and her destiny.
I’ve made no secret that Damon is one of my favorite characters this season, and part of the reason I loved him so much was his snark. He’s the guy who didn’t want to end up here. He had a nice job as the mechanic on the Astro Megaship Museum until one day, some kid from the GSA hijacked the museum and tried to make her fly. Damon tried to talk him out of it, but then he had to take the controls and work a miracle so they wouldn’t crash and die. The guy was a proto-Sokka from Avatar: he didn’t ask for this. He was a mechanic, damnit, not a Power Ranger. He was constantly bitching at his teammates—good-naturedly, though—and generally being the straight man in the middle of the insanity. But at the same time, he has a good heart, and you know that for all he complains and snarks, he’s got the heart of a Ranger.
And then something happened. About halfway through the story, he stopped snarking. It’s subtle, but if you watch carefully, you realize that Damon’s funny moments become fewer and farther between. His humor even becomes less biting and sarcastic. Somewhere around “Green Courage,” he really seemed to accept and grow into his role as the Green Ranger. In “Journey’s End,” he quipped, “Why am I always the decoy?” when he had to draw the Scorpion Stinger’s attention so Leo could attach the bomb to its pincer. In truth, Damon began making himself the decoy as time went on. He became more concerned about other people, and he began putting himself in harm’s way to protect them. When Fish Face had a little girl held hostage in “Sunflower Search,” Damon rescued her and attacked the monster. When Councilor Renier was captured in “Green Courage,” he volunteered to head to the Scorpion Stinger in exchange for her, since he was kicking himself for being unable to save her before. And in “Beware the Mutiny,” he was infuriated by the sight of Captain Mutiny’s slave camp and would have run down there without a plan to try to save them if the others hadn’t reminded him that they had to worry about the immediate danger to Terra Venture first. Right then and there, you knew he was no longer the guy who’d been dragged along against his will. He was a hero himself, putting others before himself.
More drastic was Kai’s transformation. His first appearance set him up as the series’ Spock: analytical and by-the-book. He didn’t do anything without authorization, and it was clear he had a man-crush on Commander Stanton. Hell, even baking cookies has to go by-the-book: the laidback Damon likes to eat the dough, and Kai is sure to tell him and Maya that cookies have to be baked first before eating. Despite that, he’s actually very emotional. He and Kendrix have an excellent friendship, and it seems pretty clear that she’s the one he feels he can open up to the most, since he chats with her about how she looked like a movie star (“Double Duty”) and about his one-episode crush on a girl in “The Blue Crush.” He gets depressed the easiest of all of them, moping about and refusing to cook either because he blames himself for a teammate’s capture or because he thinks his crush is about to get married, which means the other guys sharing his apartment don’t get to eat.
However, he becomes much stronger and learns to stand on his own. In “Blue to the Test,” he’s forced to defy Commander Stanton when he knows that following orders would put the entire colony in danger. Though he’s stripped of his rank and kicked out of Command, Kai sticks to his guns and proves Stanton is under mind control. I still love the way Kai worded his response to the Commander: he made it clear that he wasn’t disobeying orders; he was just doing what he knew was right, and he was trying to show as much respect as possible. Having proven himself in the right the whole time, he’s rewarded with a promotion to second-in-command, and he’s alongside Mike for the remainder of the season as Stanton’s trusted lieutenant. In “Enter the Lost Galaxy,” we see his sense of mercy trump everything, when he can’t bear to let the Guardian die in prison and sets him free. At the same time, he’s smart enough to feel suspicious and pray he’s not being led into a trap when he has to steal the Galaxy Book from Science. Destiny draws him to the Guardian, but what motivates him is his heart, and he’s horrified when Deviot kills him. His best moment is “Hexuba’s Graveyard,” when he decides that he needs to head off alone to track down the source of the resurrected monsters and put an end to Hexuba’s magic. He’s forced to improvise the whole fight, and he does everything he can to destroy her crystal ball. He throws caution to the wind and just blows the whole place sky high. And then in “Escape the Lost Galaxy,” he’s the one who decides to use the Keonta Spell to get them out of the pocket dimension galaxy hellhole, fulfilling his role as the new Guardian of the book. He proves himself a fitting second-in-command for both Terra Venture and for the Rangers—he knows what chances he needs to take, and he becomes more approachable, forming a close friendship with Leo by the end.
Cutting ahead to the sixth, seventh, and eighth Rangers, I’ll explore them before I get to Kendrix and Leo, who I think had really important development I’d like to save.
The Magna Defender was probably one of the best-written characters Power Rangers has ever had. The man was not a Ranger, and he was not a hero. He was a father, first and foremost. Three-thousand years ago, he faced down Scorpius and his forces, who held his young son, Zika, hostage. Magna agreed to stop fighting and begged them to free his son. He let himself get thoroughly beaten, and it was only because Fish Face wanted a piece of the action that Zika was even let go. But Zika couldn’t bear to watch his father get killed, so he rushed Scorpius with the dagger his father had given him. Scorpius struck the boy dead immediately, and thus began the quest for vengeance from a devastated father.
The original story, Gingaman, set a parallel between Bull Black and Ginga Red by having it that Bull Black’s younger brother had been killed (and like Leo, Ginga Red had apparently lost his brother, only to learn that Bull Black had saved him). Oddly, I find Magna Defender more compelling as a father who had lost his only son. I think it’s because it does sever the parallel between him and Leo; Leo insists he can understand what Magna is going through, but he can’t. He’s never been a father, so he can’t know what it’s like to experience that specific kind of loss. None of the Rangers can, and that sets Magna apart from them even more. It also makes him seem that much older than them: they’re all young men and women, and he’s a dad. They’re bright and idealistic, and the source of his light and optimism was brutally murdered right in front of him. Even more than the three-thousand years would add, he’s older than them by so much.
Magna Defender was driven by the quest for vengeance, haunted by the memory of his son’s death. He would do anything to achieve his goals. No matter how much Leo pleaded with him, he insisted that he had a dark heart and that there was no redemption for him. All he wanted was to get his revenge. He had his moments of mercy—his first appearance was rescuing Leo from Furio’s suicide attack, and he lingered for a moment before he realized the other Rangers were there. Leo keeps trying to get through to him, never giving up on him, but he knows there’s no redemption for him, and he doesn’t want it anyway. When he reveals that Mike is still alive within him, he insists that Leo kill him to free Mike, though he recognizes Leo’s sense of integrity would never allow him to just kill, so he attacks him and tells Leo to consider a killing blow self-defense. Without realizing it, he proves Leo right that he’s not so far gone—he’s still honorable enough to respect Leo’s hesitance to kill in cold blood, even if it’s the right thing to do. And as he watches the Rangers struggle against the volcano, he realizes that he’s been stupid all these millennia—that he should have been noble and just like they were, and honored Zika’s memory instead of trying to avenge him. Once he came to that conclusion, Zika appeared to him and convinced him he was still good and that he could set things right. He releases Mike and dies to save the colony.
Mike is granted the powers by the Magna Defender and Zika, told to complete their mission. He had originally been the one to pull the Red Quasar Saber from the stone, but he passed on his powers to Leo when it became clear that he wasn’t going to escape the crevasse on Mirinoi. Sadly, I can’t say a whole lot about Mike. He doesn’t really fulfill a role in the team’s makeup. He’s levelheaded and competent—just what a leader should be, which proves why he should have been the Red Ranger. But by the time he comes back, Kai is already fulfilling that role on the team and in Command. For several episodes, he just apparently disappears—not even being credited in the opening—and we’re to assume that it’s his responsibilities in Command that keep him from doing much. He does have some strong moments, like “Escape the Lost Galaxy,” where we see him willing to get sent to the slave camp so he can rescue the prisoners there, and he’s merciful enough to do what he can to help the other slaves, even if it comes with bad consequences for him—mercy that he had punished Magna with, as he constantly fought with him not to let his revenge quest overtake him. He also sacrifices his powers and his Zord to ensure that Terra Venture can escape through the wormhole, fulfilling the mission Magna Defender had given him.
The role we see Mike in most is as Leo’s big brother, and really, that’s his defining character trait. When we first see him, he’s critical of his brother, insisting he’s rash and immature. When he returned, Leo expected Mike to just take his job as Red Ranger, since he’d been the chosen one who pulled the Saber from the stone anyway. But Mike insisted that Leo was really the one who was destined to be the Red Ranger and master the power. He trusted Leo in a way that he couldn’t trust anyone else. Whenever Mike had to go on a mission, he always brought Leo along—we see this in both “The Rescue Mission” and “Green Courage,” though Leo had to set out separately as the Red Ranger in “Beware the Mutiny.” Unfortunately, even this isn’t used to the capacity it could have been. I was very disappointed in “Journey’s End” that even with his brother trapped on Terra Venture, fighting for his life against Trakeena, we didn’t see anything from him. He had just lost his powers, and in “Destined for Greatness,” it was clear he wanted to get in the fight to help Leo, no matter how much he trusted him to handle himself. Now, when he’s in a similar situation, it doesn’t seem to bother him at all? And unfortunately, he really didn’t have enough of a connection to the others at this point (Karone was new, and the others had been friends with Leo much longer), so it really left him out of the loop. I hate saying it, but he really has no more impact on me characterization-wise than Commander Stanton. There was potential for his character, with episodes like “Destined for Greatness,” “Stolen Beauty,” “Dream Battle,” and “Escape the Lost Galaxy” indicating just what you could do with him, and sadly, it wasn’t followed through very well.
Karone is in an interesting place in that her character progression carries over from another season, with hints that there’s stuff that happened between seasons that influenced her now. Kind of like Kevin in Ben 10 and Alien Force, to make a comparison. We first knew Karone as Astronema, the Princess of Evil and major villain for Power Rangers in Space. She was secretly Andros’s long-lost sister, and when she tried to turn good, Dark Specter brainwashed her back into evil. It wasn’t until Zordon was destroyed that she was able to turn back to the light, and the Rangers accepted her as one of their own. But there was always that question of what happened after. How could the people of Angel Grove and the rest of the universe accept her after all the horrible things she’d done? Not everyone would buy that she was brainwashed. This is how Karone’s character starts in Lost Galaxy: She’s on a redemption quest when she meets the other Rangers, determined to try to start setting things right by retrieving Kendrix’s Quasar Saber and returning it to them. Her determination to ensure that the Saber is safely in their hands at all costs impressed Kendrix, and she chooses Karone as her successor. But Karone is never Kendrix’s replacement—her personality, skills, and strengths are very different, and even Karone herself seems to think of herself simply as a substitute rather than a replacement. In “Journey’s End,” Kendrix thanks her for everything, and Karone responds that it’s was her honor to fill in for Kendrix—Kendrix had given her a chance to redeem herself and fulfill her childhood dream of being a Power Ranger.
She only has a couple of episodes to establish her character and complete her character arc, but it’s handled quite well. Karone redeems herself by her second episode, when she faces the specter of Astronema and proves how far she’s come, then when she cries at the stone Warrior and tells him that she wishes she could take his place. She learns to forgive herself for all of her past sins, and she begins to move on. Sure, there’s still some element of Astronema in her personality—she’s deadly when crossed, for one—but she’s able to be bright and cheerful in a way she never could have before. She’d started off somewhat shy (carried over from PRiS, where she kind of hung around in the background around the other Rangers), but the others accepted and welcomed her, letting her shine. Her experience as a villain gave her seniority on some issues, and Leo would defer to her if he thought she might know more than he did. At the same time, her role on the team isn’t simply “former villain.” She’s cheerful and energetic, so eager to see and do everything that she’s almost like a little sister to some of the team. It’s especially evident around Damon in “Turn Up the Volume,” where she drags him into a competition he doesn’t want to be part of, but she thinks it’s for his own good, so he’s stuck doing it. In “Until Sunset,” Damon had said that despite what happened to Kendrix, Karone fit perfectly with the team, and it’s this balance of maturity and wide-eyed enthusiasm that really gives her that sense.
In contrast, we have the character she succeeded, Kendrix. When we first meet her, she’s a shy young woman working in the Science Department, albeit one drawn to the good-hearted stowaway, Leo. It was indicated that before they became a team, her only real friends were Kai and Mike, who were her coworkers (though Kai seemed to have been a very close friend, so they possibly knew each other longer). But underneath it was strength and dedication. The first hints of that came in “Double Duty,” which seemed to foreshadow her later fate: She agreed to fill in for a supposedly injured actress to finish scenes for a movie, and even though she herself was badly hurt, she insists on fulfilling her obligation to the director and to the Rangers. She’s always there for her friends, acting as a confidante for Kai and for Leo, and eventually forming a close friendship with Maya, her roommate. Because Science was studying the Galaxy Book, she would often dedicate hours to finding information that the Rangers would need, taking on the role of researcher and analyst on the team when it came to ancient artifacts. She was the one who discovered the Stratoforce and Centaurus Megazords and the Zenith Carrierzord were Galactabeasts and that their Galactazords wouldn’t fight their brothers (“The Lost Galactabeasts”). And she was the one who discovered the page on the Savage Sword, which led to her sacrifice (“The Power of Pink”).
Unfortunately, do to Valerie Vernon’s illness, a lot of Kendrix’s storylines had to be cut or reassigned. Karone had to become the new Pink Ranger, the budding romance between Leo and Kendrix was abandoned (though Leo hinted that he still felt something for her), and Kai ended up being in charge of the Galaxy Book. Harsh as it sounds, the biggest tribute they could do was kill off her character. It was better than sending her to some Peace Conference, after all. And the way they killed her was one of the most powerful moments in the seventeen years to date that Power Rangers has been on the air. I covered it in-depth in the review for “The Power of Pink,” but Kendrix went into the heart of the pink power vortex from Cassie’s morpher and the Savage Sword and destroyed the Sword to save Cassie’s life, all without any fear for herself. In the wake of her death, the Galaxy Rangers—already a close-knit family, thanks to the very nature of Terra Venture forcing otherwise perfect strangers to band together—drew closer together in solidarity, in her memory.
The one part that nobody seems to be able to understand is how Kendrix came back in “Journey’s End.” I’ve got to say, it doesn’t make sense. But there were always implications that she would come back. Leo said that he knew they’d see her again in “Until Sunset,” and Kendrix herself promised them that she’d always be there in “The Power of Pink” and to Karone in “Protect the Quasar Saber.” Given that she’d still been in the vortex when she died, I’m forced to assume that she became one with the Pink Ranger powers (Zordon did say way back in “Wild West Rangers” that too much Pink power was dangerous). After all, she was able to morph at will, and her spirit appeared to be tied to the Pink Quasar Saber, since she sent it to another planet (possibly trying to get it to Mirinoi) and she was able to directly pass on her powers to Karone by creating a Transmorpher for her, which only the Quasar Sabers could do (Kendrix’s own morpher would have been destroyed with her—there was only the Saber left behind). So when the Quasar Sabers were returned to their sacred place of rest and they released the power needed to restore Mirinoi, it’s possible that the Pink Saber simply released Kendrix from the Morphing Grid or wherever she was. Either way, it doesn’t negate her sacrifice. What she did was still noble, courageous, and beautiful, and she had no way of knowing that she’d be okay in the end.
To finish out the heroes, I come to Leo. From the very start, you knew he’d be the Red Ranger. Destiny was written all over him in red pen. He was impulsive, but he had a good heart. I’ve said repeatedly that his greatest strength was his integrity—he refused to compromise it no matter what, making him an excellent foil to Trakeena and the Magna Defender, and drawing parallels to honorable but evil warriors like Villamax and Treacheron. And yet, you see the hints of a revenge quest against the monster who supposedly killed his brother. He was blind with rage against Furio in “Quasar Quest,” but Kai dragged him back to the Megaship. Kai also jumped on the controls alongside him in “Race to the Rescue” when one of Furio’s monsters was attacking Terra Venture. Kai was frequently his foil on the team, straight-laced and cautious as opposed to impetuous, and Leo’s development into a more cautious and level-headed leader was the exact opposite to Kai’s learning to loosen up and trust his instincts more.
Leo was denied his chance at revenge when Furio nearly killed him in a suicide attack, thereby preserving his integrity. The Magna Defender, on the other hand, is exactly what might have happened to him if he’d gone through with it and lost sight of what was really important. Leo had become the Red Ranger to honor Mike, his words on the Megaship while he’s in uniform and holding the Saber being, “This is for you, Mike.” Episodes like “Rookie in Red” and “Destined for Greatness” highlighted how inadequate he felt as Mike’s replacement. He wasn’t a GSA leader, and he didn’t command that level of respect that Mike did. Instead, he earned it from his friends and his powers, which Mike showed him. Unlike with Mike, being a brother was only part of Leo’s character—he was also a leader and a friend, forming his own family among the Rangers.
Another of Leo’s defining traits was his loyalty and dedication to his friends. In “Quasar Quest,” Commander Stanton warned the GSA training on the moon (among them an incognito Leo) to never leave a man behind, and while the theme drove Kai to hijack the Megaship to chase after the others, Leo seemed especially dedicated to that theme. A major tie to that theme is the fact that the Lights of Orion can’t be activated unless all five Rangers are there, as discovered in “Shark Attack.” Leo followed Mike’s telepathic instructions and stuck out of the infirmary to help his friends fight. In “Destined for Greatness,” he clashes with Mike when the others are captured—he wants to charge after Skelekron and rescue them, but Mike insists they need to wait to come up with a plan. We see this again (but this time with both brothers wanting to charge in) when the Psycho Rangers kidnap the others as a trap, and Andros has to convince them to hold back so the three of them could think of a plan. When his friends are in trouble, he’s the first one to jump in and offer himself in their place: giving up his morpher and Quasar Saber in “An Evil Game” so Villamax and Deviot would release the others, racing againstKamen Rider Ripoff Motor Mantis in “Mean Wheels Mantis” to save Kendrix and Maya, and between him and Damon (whose progression toward more sacrificial/heroic tendencies I’ve already covered), offering to be killed first to buy some time for the other. He really grew up, becoming the kind of leader the Rangers needed. He could be silly and immature—he’d even commented to Karone in “Facing the Past” that he’d never really grown up—but the moment there was trouble, he’d snap into hero mode. A good example would be “Stolen Beauty”—he’d been completely under Trakeena’s spell…and then Kendrix and Maya were attacked. Suddenly, he’s in charge and yelling at Mike for appearing to care more about his new girlfriend than about their friends—their family. And as he became more mature and more suited to the role of leader, it was fitting that he became closer friends with Kai, especially when they came up with the idea of reading the Keonta Spell backwards to escape the Lost Galaxy (in the episode of the same name). They were set up as foils—Kirk and Spock—and over time, Kai became a little more like Leo and Leo became a little more like Kai. When Kai asked him in “Journey’s End” if he regretted sneaking aboard Terra Venture and he said that he’d do it again, you know that they’re lightyears away from the young men who couldn’t work together in “Rookie in Red.”
In Power Rangers, villains get a fairly strong focus in comparison to other kids’ shows, and about half of the main villains in Lost Galaxy are really handled well. The “fake boss,” if you will, for Lost Galaxy was Scorpius—a monster running some kind of evil empire of bug monsters. His generals were typically loyal to him (except Deviot), but Trakeena pretty much had him wrapped around her finger and always managed to convince him that someone she didn’t like was plotting against him. And that’s about it. Scorpius wasn’t really given much in terms of personality—he cared about his daughter, and that was about it. Comes episode 21, he’s killed off. But I’ve got to say they give him a good send-off, if at the very least to build up Trakeena’s character.
Next up on the undeveloped villains list is Captain Mutiny and his forces. He was a pirate. He was greedy for treasure and would capture ships that strayed into the Lost Galaxy (somehow, given that apparently the only way to get there was the Keonta Spell) and enslave the crews, forcing them to mine for treasure. And he had a castle floating on top of a giant turtle. That is it. There’s not even anything all that interesting to say about his generals, Barbarax and Hexuba, other than the fact that Hexuba kicked a demorphed Mike’s ass before getting her ass kicked and was beating up Kai until he blew up her entire lair. For pirates, they sure weren’t all that interesting. They did something, but I’d take Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, Davy Jones, and even Captain Hook any day over Mutiny.
Now for the interesting villains: Deviot, Villamax, and Trakeena. All three were really well developed, up there with villains who turned good at the end, like Astronema and Ransik.
Deviot was introduced in the two-part episode “The Lost Galactabeasts,” applying for the job of Scorpius’s general. And he was evil to the bone, sharing many similarities to Darkonda of PRiS. He’d discovered the Phoenix, Rhino, and Shark Galactabeasts and converted them into Galactazords. To power them, he kidnapped Kai and Damon and forced them to battle each other against their will, then used the Rangers’ own attacks against him to finish the job. His goal was to gain power at all costs, right from the start. He made no secret of his intention to get to the Cocoon, and he plotted against Scorpius and later Trakeena at every chance he could get. He could have given Shakespeare’s Richard III a run for his money. He was determined to prove a villain, through and through. He hired assassins to kill Trakeena, and when it looked like they were caught, he killed them and said he was protecting his Queen. He was constantly at odds with the more ethical Villamax, who had principles to uphold. When Villamax followed through on his promise to release the Rangers once Leo gave himself up, Deviot was floored that he was stupid enough to do so (“An Evil Game”). In that same episode, he was torturing Leo, and Villamax had to stop him, reminding him that Trakeena wanted to be the one to kill him. Similarly, Barbarax had to tell him to leave Leo and Damon alive until Captain Mutiny arrived, only this time, Deviot agreed because it was only a few hours until then anyway (“Until Sunset”). The guy shamelessly changed sides at the drop of a hat, joining Captain Mutiny’s crew when he got pulled into the Lost Galaxy, then telling Trakeena he’d been captured and forced to do slave labor once he was out—at which point, Trakeena was fed up with his bullshit and called him out on it, ordering Villamax to kill him. His only true loyalty was to himself.
Villamax was the flip of the coin, the Ecliptor to Deviot’s Darkonda. He’s similar in some ways to the earlier general Treacheron, whom Trakeena had sacked when he turned her in to her father to save his own hide. In “Heir to the Throne,” he’s immediately attracted to Trakeena and comes to her rescue against bar-brawlers, teaching her how to fight. He’s a brutal training-master, and the spoiled princess is frustrated with his tactics until she realizes that they’re paying off. But despite the fact that he’s evil, he’s honorable to the last, especially to his enemies. As I mentioned before, he keeps his word to Leo and releases the Rangers, to Deviot’s shock. He encourages Trakeena to send the likewise honorable Loyax against the Rangers, extolling his virtues while Deviot insists that the guy’s a washed-up old fool. Another massive foil to Deviot is his loyalty to Trakeena—from the moment he laid eyes on her, he devoted himself to her, like a Don Quixote to his Dulcinea. When Deviot supposedly saved Trakeena from assassins in “An Evil Game,” he offered him a dagger in gratitude, completely oblivious to Deviot’s inevitable betrayal. Because Trakeena wanted to kill Leo in that same episode, he told Deviot to stop torturing him. However, his loyalties are torn between Trakeena and his sense of integrity in “Journey’s End,” when Trakeena turns all of the Stingwingers into suicide bombers. He found it distasteful that they were sacrificing all their troops, and it grew worse when he saw that she was targeting innocent civilians who had never done her harm. He tried to remind her that it was the Red Ranger who had caused her loss, but she was too far gone. She challenged him to a fight, but he refused to fight back. Out of instinct, he attempted to defend himself a few times, but whenever he came close to landing a blow on her, he held himself back. She finally destroyed him, crushing the flowers a little girl had given him, and it was really damn painful watching him die so disillusioned with her and yet loyal at the same time.
Trakeena, however, has the most development of all the villains. From the very beginning, she was interested in getting involved in battle. When Villamax asked what her motivation was in “Heir to the Throne,” she said that she wanted to stand by her father’s side and conquer the universe. She would constantly beg Scorpius to let her fight, but he always wanted to keep her safe and would refuse. She then would go to his generals, trying to con them into letting her help, and she had joined Furio and Treacheron on occasion disguised in bug-themed armor. But she wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be. She had her vanity, such as in “Stolen Beauty” and when she complained of a broken nail during in “Heir to the Throne.” And she was not a good fighter. When Treacheron threatens her in “Shark Attack,” it’s only the timely arrival of the Rangers that saves her life. She’s even more terrified when Magna Defender arrives, deciding that he should pay an eye for an eye and let Scorpius learn what it’s like to lose his only child. She does, however, decide that she needs to learn to fight, and her quest for a general who will teach her leads her to Villamax. Under his tutelage, she becomes much stronger, kicking ass on Onyx until she learned that her father was dying (unknowingly betrayed by Deviot). She had abandoned her old staff in the desert of Onyx, and as she made her apologies to her father, she gained one of his tentacles, which transformed into a staff mounted with a scorpion in amber, which she takes up with all the determination of Leo vowing to honor his brother by taking up the Quasar Saber. She grows up from there, vowing revenge against the Rangers and even keeping the Cocoon around just in case she needs the extra power. She’s willing to do whatever it takes to destroy the Power Rangers, even reviving the Psycho Rangers and putting them under control by pain, actually managing to scare the utter shit out of them. When Psycho Pink even threatens her at arrow-point, she doesn’t really care. It’s all in her favor if Psycho Pink manages to take out the Pink Rangers, and she damn well ensures she benefits, trying to gain control of the Pink Quasar Saber and fighting Karone for it. She becomes more and more dangerous until she reaches the breaking point in “Journey’s End.” Some have argued that she becomes so depraved as a result of fusing with Deviot in the Cocoon; however, she herself rejects this, insisting that Deviot was “done for,” indicating that she was the one in control. She gleefully sacrificed all of her foot-soldiers to try to destroy all of Terra Venture, willingly targeted civilians, and alienated herself entirely by destroying Villamax when he called her out on her madness. The madness of Queen Trakeena led to her using the Cocoon to mutate, and she managed to pilot the City Dome of Terra Venture in a kamikaze attempt to wipe out the colonists on Mirinoi below. The only way the Rangers could destroy her was for Leo to attempt to sacrifice himself in a suicide attack, using his battlizer at point-blank range (oddly similar to the attack Furio had used against him, denying him his revenge). Her quest for vengeance brought her so far over the edge that there was no way she could come back from it. She had to be destroyed by the one who had rejected that cycle early on, ensuring that he never sacrificed his principles and lost sight of the goal. To quote a certain David Xanatos, “Revenge is a sucker’s game,” and Trakeena fell for it hard.
As my final summation, I have to say that I truly enjoyed Lost Galaxy. Sure, there were things I hated—pacing issues, editing issues, Leo’s battlizer looking too bulky, Captain Mutiny—but there was a lot more that I liked. The Power Rangers of this season really defied the odds and not only became friends, but a family. Noble characters and treacherous characters constantly butted heads, and the consequences of revenge were always an issue. I probably would not have enjoyed it nearly as much when I was twelve, but I do wish in retrospect that I’d given it more a chance. It was a worthy successor to Power Rangers in Space, and a great beginning for a journey into new worlds in Power Rangers, with new teams finding their own way whether on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy.
Power Rangers Lost Galaxy is a bit of a transition season—a sort-of epilogue to the Zordon era. Characters such as Karone carry over from the previous season, but overall, the storyline is its own. The story revolves around a group of space colonists setting out in search of a new home somewhere in the galaxy, determined to band together and make it on their own, and in a way, I feel like that reflects the general sense of the season itself: it’s trying to be a pioneer, breaking away from years of tradition and safety and trying to tell its own story without being too tied down by too much continuity.
Unfortunately, it has its flaws. The Sentai season providing stock footage, Gingaman, was entirely different from Lost Galaxy in terms of setting and storyline. Where Power Rangers in Space and RPM managed to make it work, Lost Galaxy falls a little short in trying to mesh the stock footage and the American storyline. There are several issues between the Japanese story and the American story that drove me nuts while I was watching: the sudden importance of the Transdaggers when nobody could have known about them (“Rookie in Red”), why the hell would an ancient galactic power such as the Lights of Orion be hidden on a recently built space station, and why they don’t bother to use the Astro Megazord if they’ve clearly still got it in mothballs (really bitched about in “The Power of Pink”)? However, I do have to say that as it began, it felt like it had a much better sense of its story than PRiS had in the beginning: by the sixth episode, the Lights of Orion had been introduced, and the Magna Defender by the ninth; in contrast, PRiS really didn’t get its storyline cohesive until episode 16, “Flashes of Darkonda.” There was a lot of filler in the way, particularly with nobody ever finding the Lights of Orion, but we got enough revealed about the Magna Defender in the meantime that it helped make episodes like Kai’s quest for a one-shot girlfriend or Kendrix and Maya’s OOC bitchfest more tolerable than otherwise. I didn’t feel like I had to skip to a certain point in the series just to get to the good stuff, the way I sometimes feel with PRiS.
Lost Galaxy’s greatest strength is its characters. I’ve said throughout the reviews that there were multiple themes at work, and all of them were really character-related:
1. Nobody gets left behind
2. Sacrifice
3. Revenge
4. Honor vs. treachery
5. Family
Maya was probably the character who had the least development throughout the course of the season. It’s not to say that her character was boring or poorly written or anything—she just didn’t have as drastic a shift in personality or role as some of the others had. When we first meet her, she’s very other-worldly: even disregarding her jungle girl get-up, you can tell she’s not from the same world as the others. When they first become Rangers, she emphasizes how they were chosen to fulfill a powerful destiny. And when you get down to it, she’s right. There is no other way than “destiny” to explain how any of the eight come together to meet: the Quasar Sabers were on Maya’s home planet; by chance, she got to Earth’s moon and happened to meet Mike, Leo, Kai, and Kendrix; Leo happened to stow away on Terra Venture; Kai happened to bring along Damon when he hijacked the Megaship; Mike happened to fall into the same crevasse on the same planet the Magna Defender had been sealed within; and Karone happened to be around in the right place at the right time to learn where the Pink Quasar Saber was to retrieve it. That much coincidence, and you know it has to be destiny.
Maya’s other-worldliness meant that she was more in-tune with the spiritual parts and powers of the galaxy than the others were. She had the ability to hear the Galactabeasts and understand them. She could sense the Lights of Orion were nearby. And when Kendrix ascended, Maya was the one she was able to contact to warn her about her Saber falling into the hands of evil. She was basically the oracle of the team, their link to the unknown, and it was a role that worked for her. There were other things that could have tied into it better. One thing that really pissed me off about “Loyax’ Last Battle” was that it really had the chance to be a good Maya episode, if it hadn’t shoehorned in too many themes at once. Maya’s insistence that Loyax still had good inside him fit with her character role as the oracle or medium between worlds. It foreshadows how she and the rest of the team accept Karone without question when she joins.
As for Maya’s progression, I’d have to say it was a matter of maturing. She didn’t change drastically, but you could see that when she returned to Mirinoi in “Journey’s End,” she had grown from her experiences and her destiny.
I’ve made no secret that Damon is one of my favorite characters this season, and part of the reason I loved him so much was his snark. He’s the guy who didn’t want to end up here. He had a nice job as the mechanic on the Astro Megaship Museum until one day, some kid from the GSA hijacked the museum and tried to make her fly. Damon tried to talk him out of it, but then he had to take the controls and work a miracle so they wouldn’t crash and die. The guy was a proto-Sokka from Avatar: he didn’t ask for this. He was a mechanic, damnit, not a Power Ranger. He was constantly bitching at his teammates—good-naturedly, though—and generally being the straight man in the middle of the insanity. But at the same time, he has a good heart, and you know that for all he complains and snarks, he’s got the heart of a Ranger.
And then something happened. About halfway through the story, he stopped snarking. It’s subtle, but if you watch carefully, you realize that Damon’s funny moments become fewer and farther between. His humor even becomes less biting and sarcastic. Somewhere around “Green Courage,” he really seemed to accept and grow into his role as the Green Ranger. In “Journey’s End,” he quipped, “Why am I always the decoy?” when he had to draw the Scorpion Stinger’s attention so Leo could attach the bomb to its pincer. In truth, Damon began making himself the decoy as time went on. He became more concerned about other people, and he began putting himself in harm’s way to protect them. When Fish Face had a little girl held hostage in “Sunflower Search,” Damon rescued her and attacked the monster. When Councilor Renier was captured in “Green Courage,” he volunteered to head to the Scorpion Stinger in exchange for her, since he was kicking himself for being unable to save her before. And in “Beware the Mutiny,” he was infuriated by the sight of Captain Mutiny’s slave camp and would have run down there without a plan to try to save them if the others hadn’t reminded him that they had to worry about the immediate danger to Terra Venture first. Right then and there, you knew he was no longer the guy who’d been dragged along against his will. He was a hero himself, putting others before himself.
More drastic was Kai’s transformation. His first appearance set him up as the series’ Spock: analytical and by-the-book. He didn’t do anything without authorization, and it was clear he had a man-crush on Commander Stanton. Hell, even baking cookies has to go by-the-book: the laidback Damon likes to eat the dough, and Kai is sure to tell him and Maya that cookies have to be baked first before eating. Despite that, he’s actually very emotional. He and Kendrix have an excellent friendship, and it seems pretty clear that she’s the one he feels he can open up to the most, since he chats with her about how she looked like a movie star (“Double Duty”) and about his one-episode crush on a girl in “The Blue Crush.” He gets depressed the easiest of all of them, moping about and refusing to cook either because he blames himself for a teammate’s capture or because he thinks his crush is about to get married, which means the other guys sharing his apartment don’t get to eat.
However, he becomes much stronger and learns to stand on his own. In “Blue to the Test,” he’s forced to defy Commander Stanton when he knows that following orders would put the entire colony in danger. Though he’s stripped of his rank and kicked out of Command, Kai sticks to his guns and proves Stanton is under mind control. I still love the way Kai worded his response to the Commander: he made it clear that he wasn’t disobeying orders; he was just doing what he knew was right, and he was trying to show as much respect as possible. Having proven himself in the right the whole time, he’s rewarded with a promotion to second-in-command, and he’s alongside Mike for the remainder of the season as Stanton’s trusted lieutenant. In “Enter the Lost Galaxy,” we see his sense of mercy trump everything, when he can’t bear to let the Guardian die in prison and sets him free. At the same time, he’s smart enough to feel suspicious and pray he’s not being led into a trap when he has to steal the Galaxy Book from Science. Destiny draws him to the Guardian, but what motivates him is his heart, and he’s horrified when Deviot kills him. His best moment is “Hexuba’s Graveyard,” when he decides that he needs to head off alone to track down the source of the resurrected monsters and put an end to Hexuba’s magic. He’s forced to improvise the whole fight, and he does everything he can to destroy her crystal ball. He throws caution to the wind and just blows the whole place sky high. And then in “Escape the Lost Galaxy,” he’s the one who decides to use the Keonta Spell to get them out of the pocket dimension galaxy hellhole, fulfilling his role as the new Guardian of the book. He proves himself a fitting second-in-command for both Terra Venture and for the Rangers—he knows what chances he needs to take, and he becomes more approachable, forming a close friendship with Leo by the end.
Cutting ahead to the sixth, seventh, and eighth Rangers, I’ll explore them before I get to Kendrix and Leo, who I think had really important development I’d like to save.
The Magna Defender was probably one of the best-written characters Power Rangers has ever had. The man was not a Ranger, and he was not a hero. He was a father, first and foremost. Three-thousand years ago, he faced down Scorpius and his forces, who held his young son, Zika, hostage. Magna agreed to stop fighting and begged them to free his son. He let himself get thoroughly beaten, and it was only because Fish Face wanted a piece of the action that Zika was even let go. But Zika couldn’t bear to watch his father get killed, so he rushed Scorpius with the dagger his father had given him. Scorpius struck the boy dead immediately, and thus began the quest for vengeance from a devastated father.
The original story, Gingaman, set a parallel between Bull Black and Ginga Red by having it that Bull Black’s younger brother had been killed (and like Leo, Ginga Red had apparently lost his brother, only to learn that Bull Black had saved him). Oddly, I find Magna Defender more compelling as a father who had lost his only son. I think it’s because it does sever the parallel between him and Leo; Leo insists he can understand what Magna is going through, but he can’t. He’s never been a father, so he can’t know what it’s like to experience that specific kind of loss. None of the Rangers can, and that sets Magna apart from them even more. It also makes him seem that much older than them: they’re all young men and women, and he’s a dad. They’re bright and idealistic, and the source of his light and optimism was brutally murdered right in front of him. Even more than the three-thousand years would add, he’s older than them by so much.
Magna Defender was driven by the quest for vengeance, haunted by the memory of his son’s death. He would do anything to achieve his goals. No matter how much Leo pleaded with him, he insisted that he had a dark heart and that there was no redemption for him. All he wanted was to get his revenge. He had his moments of mercy—his first appearance was rescuing Leo from Furio’s suicide attack, and he lingered for a moment before he realized the other Rangers were there. Leo keeps trying to get through to him, never giving up on him, but he knows there’s no redemption for him, and he doesn’t want it anyway. When he reveals that Mike is still alive within him, he insists that Leo kill him to free Mike, though he recognizes Leo’s sense of integrity would never allow him to just kill, so he attacks him and tells Leo to consider a killing blow self-defense. Without realizing it, he proves Leo right that he’s not so far gone—he’s still honorable enough to respect Leo’s hesitance to kill in cold blood, even if it’s the right thing to do. And as he watches the Rangers struggle against the volcano, he realizes that he’s been stupid all these millennia—that he should have been noble and just like they were, and honored Zika’s memory instead of trying to avenge him. Once he came to that conclusion, Zika appeared to him and convinced him he was still good and that he could set things right. He releases Mike and dies to save the colony.
Mike is granted the powers by the Magna Defender and Zika, told to complete their mission. He had originally been the one to pull the Red Quasar Saber from the stone, but he passed on his powers to Leo when it became clear that he wasn’t going to escape the crevasse on Mirinoi. Sadly, I can’t say a whole lot about Mike. He doesn’t really fulfill a role in the team’s makeup. He’s levelheaded and competent—just what a leader should be, which proves why he should have been the Red Ranger. But by the time he comes back, Kai is already fulfilling that role on the team and in Command. For several episodes, he just apparently disappears—not even being credited in the opening—and we’re to assume that it’s his responsibilities in Command that keep him from doing much. He does have some strong moments, like “Escape the Lost Galaxy,” where we see him willing to get sent to the slave camp so he can rescue the prisoners there, and he’s merciful enough to do what he can to help the other slaves, even if it comes with bad consequences for him—mercy that he had punished Magna with, as he constantly fought with him not to let his revenge quest overtake him. He also sacrifices his powers and his Zord to ensure that Terra Venture can escape through the wormhole, fulfilling the mission Magna Defender had given him.
The role we see Mike in most is as Leo’s big brother, and really, that’s his defining character trait. When we first see him, he’s critical of his brother, insisting he’s rash and immature. When he returned, Leo expected Mike to just take his job as Red Ranger, since he’d been the chosen one who pulled the Saber from the stone anyway. But Mike insisted that Leo was really the one who was destined to be the Red Ranger and master the power. He trusted Leo in a way that he couldn’t trust anyone else. Whenever Mike had to go on a mission, he always brought Leo along—we see this in both “The Rescue Mission” and “Green Courage,” though Leo had to set out separately as the Red Ranger in “Beware the Mutiny.” Unfortunately, even this isn’t used to the capacity it could have been. I was very disappointed in “Journey’s End” that even with his brother trapped on Terra Venture, fighting for his life against Trakeena, we didn’t see anything from him. He had just lost his powers, and in “Destined for Greatness,” it was clear he wanted to get in the fight to help Leo, no matter how much he trusted him to handle himself. Now, when he’s in a similar situation, it doesn’t seem to bother him at all? And unfortunately, he really didn’t have enough of a connection to the others at this point (Karone was new, and the others had been friends with Leo much longer), so it really left him out of the loop. I hate saying it, but he really has no more impact on me characterization-wise than Commander Stanton. There was potential for his character, with episodes like “Destined for Greatness,” “Stolen Beauty,” “Dream Battle,” and “Escape the Lost Galaxy” indicating just what you could do with him, and sadly, it wasn’t followed through very well.
Karone is in an interesting place in that her character progression carries over from another season, with hints that there’s stuff that happened between seasons that influenced her now. Kind of like Kevin in Ben 10 and Alien Force, to make a comparison. We first knew Karone as Astronema, the Princess of Evil and major villain for Power Rangers in Space. She was secretly Andros’s long-lost sister, and when she tried to turn good, Dark Specter brainwashed her back into evil. It wasn’t until Zordon was destroyed that she was able to turn back to the light, and the Rangers accepted her as one of their own. But there was always that question of what happened after. How could the people of Angel Grove and the rest of the universe accept her after all the horrible things she’d done? Not everyone would buy that she was brainwashed. This is how Karone’s character starts in Lost Galaxy: She’s on a redemption quest when she meets the other Rangers, determined to try to start setting things right by retrieving Kendrix’s Quasar Saber and returning it to them. Her determination to ensure that the Saber is safely in their hands at all costs impressed Kendrix, and she chooses Karone as her successor. But Karone is never Kendrix’s replacement—her personality, skills, and strengths are very different, and even Karone herself seems to think of herself simply as a substitute rather than a replacement. In “Journey’s End,” Kendrix thanks her for everything, and Karone responds that it’s was her honor to fill in for Kendrix—Kendrix had given her a chance to redeem herself and fulfill her childhood dream of being a Power Ranger.
She only has a couple of episodes to establish her character and complete her character arc, but it’s handled quite well. Karone redeems herself by her second episode, when she faces the specter of Astronema and proves how far she’s come, then when she cries at the stone Warrior and tells him that she wishes she could take his place. She learns to forgive herself for all of her past sins, and she begins to move on. Sure, there’s still some element of Astronema in her personality—she’s deadly when crossed, for one—but she’s able to be bright and cheerful in a way she never could have before. She’d started off somewhat shy (carried over from PRiS, where she kind of hung around in the background around the other Rangers), but the others accepted and welcomed her, letting her shine. Her experience as a villain gave her seniority on some issues, and Leo would defer to her if he thought she might know more than he did. At the same time, her role on the team isn’t simply “former villain.” She’s cheerful and energetic, so eager to see and do everything that she’s almost like a little sister to some of the team. It’s especially evident around Damon in “Turn Up the Volume,” where she drags him into a competition he doesn’t want to be part of, but she thinks it’s for his own good, so he’s stuck doing it. In “Until Sunset,” Damon had said that despite what happened to Kendrix, Karone fit perfectly with the team, and it’s this balance of maturity and wide-eyed enthusiasm that really gives her that sense.
In contrast, we have the character she succeeded, Kendrix. When we first meet her, she’s a shy young woman working in the Science Department, albeit one drawn to the good-hearted stowaway, Leo. It was indicated that before they became a team, her only real friends were Kai and Mike, who were her coworkers (though Kai seemed to have been a very close friend, so they possibly knew each other longer). But underneath it was strength and dedication. The first hints of that came in “Double Duty,” which seemed to foreshadow her later fate: She agreed to fill in for a supposedly injured actress to finish scenes for a movie, and even though she herself was badly hurt, she insists on fulfilling her obligation to the director and to the Rangers. She’s always there for her friends, acting as a confidante for Kai and for Leo, and eventually forming a close friendship with Maya, her roommate. Because Science was studying the Galaxy Book, she would often dedicate hours to finding information that the Rangers would need, taking on the role of researcher and analyst on the team when it came to ancient artifacts. She was the one who discovered the Stratoforce and Centaurus Megazords and the Zenith Carrierzord were Galactabeasts and that their Galactazords wouldn’t fight their brothers (“The Lost Galactabeasts”). And she was the one who discovered the page on the Savage Sword, which led to her sacrifice (“The Power of Pink”).
Unfortunately, do to Valerie Vernon’s illness, a lot of Kendrix’s storylines had to be cut or reassigned. Karone had to become the new Pink Ranger, the budding romance between Leo and Kendrix was abandoned (though Leo hinted that he still felt something for her), and Kai ended up being in charge of the Galaxy Book. Harsh as it sounds, the biggest tribute they could do was kill off her character. It was better than sending her to some Peace Conference, after all. And the way they killed her was one of the most powerful moments in the seventeen years to date that Power Rangers has been on the air. I covered it in-depth in the review for “The Power of Pink,” but Kendrix went into the heart of the pink power vortex from Cassie’s morpher and the Savage Sword and destroyed the Sword to save Cassie’s life, all without any fear for herself. In the wake of her death, the Galaxy Rangers—already a close-knit family, thanks to the very nature of Terra Venture forcing otherwise perfect strangers to band together—drew closer together in solidarity, in her memory.
The one part that nobody seems to be able to understand is how Kendrix came back in “Journey’s End.” I’ve got to say, it doesn’t make sense. But there were always implications that she would come back. Leo said that he knew they’d see her again in “Until Sunset,” and Kendrix herself promised them that she’d always be there in “The Power of Pink” and to Karone in “Protect the Quasar Saber.” Given that she’d still been in the vortex when she died, I’m forced to assume that she became one with the Pink Ranger powers (Zordon did say way back in “Wild West Rangers” that too much Pink power was dangerous). After all, she was able to morph at will, and her spirit appeared to be tied to the Pink Quasar Saber, since she sent it to another planet (possibly trying to get it to Mirinoi) and she was able to directly pass on her powers to Karone by creating a Transmorpher for her, which only the Quasar Sabers could do (Kendrix’s own morpher would have been destroyed with her—there was only the Saber left behind). So when the Quasar Sabers were returned to their sacred place of rest and they released the power needed to restore Mirinoi, it’s possible that the Pink Saber simply released Kendrix from the Morphing Grid or wherever she was. Either way, it doesn’t negate her sacrifice. What she did was still noble, courageous, and beautiful, and she had no way of knowing that she’d be okay in the end.
To finish out the heroes, I come to Leo. From the very start, you knew he’d be the Red Ranger. Destiny was written all over him in red pen. He was impulsive, but he had a good heart. I’ve said repeatedly that his greatest strength was his integrity—he refused to compromise it no matter what, making him an excellent foil to Trakeena and the Magna Defender, and drawing parallels to honorable but evil warriors like Villamax and Treacheron. And yet, you see the hints of a revenge quest against the monster who supposedly killed his brother. He was blind with rage against Furio in “Quasar Quest,” but Kai dragged him back to the Megaship. Kai also jumped on the controls alongside him in “Race to the Rescue” when one of Furio’s monsters was attacking Terra Venture. Kai was frequently his foil on the team, straight-laced and cautious as opposed to impetuous, and Leo’s development into a more cautious and level-headed leader was the exact opposite to Kai’s learning to loosen up and trust his instincts more.
Leo was denied his chance at revenge when Furio nearly killed him in a suicide attack, thereby preserving his integrity. The Magna Defender, on the other hand, is exactly what might have happened to him if he’d gone through with it and lost sight of what was really important. Leo had become the Red Ranger to honor Mike, his words on the Megaship while he’s in uniform and holding the Saber being, “This is for you, Mike.” Episodes like “Rookie in Red” and “Destined for Greatness” highlighted how inadequate he felt as Mike’s replacement. He wasn’t a GSA leader, and he didn’t command that level of respect that Mike did. Instead, he earned it from his friends and his powers, which Mike showed him. Unlike with Mike, being a brother was only part of Leo’s character—he was also a leader and a friend, forming his own family among the Rangers.
Another of Leo’s defining traits was his loyalty and dedication to his friends. In “Quasar Quest,” Commander Stanton warned the GSA training on the moon (among them an incognito Leo) to never leave a man behind, and while the theme drove Kai to hijack the Megaship to chase after the others, Leo seemed especially dedicated to that theme. A major tie to that theme is the fact that the Lights of Orion can’t be activated unless all five Rangers are there, as discovered in “Shark Attack.” Leo followed Mike’s telepathic instructions and stuck out of the infirmary to help his friends fight. In “Destined for Greatness,” he clashes with Mike when the others are captured—he wants to charge after Skelekron and rescue them, but Mike insists they need to wait to come up with a plan. We see this again (but this time with both brothers wanting to charge in) when the Psycho Rangers kidnap the others as a trap, and Andros has to convince them to hold back so the three of them could think of a plan. When his friends are in trouble, he’s the first one to jump in and offer himself in their place: giving up his morpher and Quasar Saber in “An Evil Game” so Villamax and Deviot would release the others, racing against
In Power Rangers, villains get a fairly strong focus in comparison to other kids’ shows, and about half of the main villains in Lost Galaxy are really handled well. The “fake boss,” if you will, for Lost Galaxy was Scorpius—a monster running some kind of evil empire of bug monsters. His generals were typically loyal to him (except Deviot), but Trakeena pretty much had him wrapped around her finger and always managed to convince him that someone she didn’t like was plotting against him. And that’s about it. Scorpius wasn’t really given much in terms of personality—he cared about his daughter, and that was about it. Comes episode 21, he’s killed off. But I’ve got to say they give him a good send-off, if at the very least to build up Trakeena’s character.
Next up on the undeveloped villains list is Captain Mutiny and his forces. He was a pirate. He was greedy for treasure and would capture ships that strayed into the Lost Galaxy (somehow, given that apparently the only way to get there was the Keonta Spell) and enslave the crews, forcing them to mine for treasure. And he had a castle floating on top of a giant turtle. That is it. There’s not even anything all that interesting to say about his generals, Barbarax and Hexuba, other than the fact that Hexuba kicked a demorphed Mike’s ass before getting her ass kicked and was beating up Kai until he blew up her entire lair. For pirates, they sure weren’t all that interesting. They did something, but I’d take Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, Davy Jones, and even Captain Hook any day over Mutiny.
Now for the interesting villains: Deviot, Villamax, and Trakeena. All three were really well developed, up there with villains who turned good at the end, like Astronema and Ransik.
Deviot was introduced in the two-part episode “The Lost Galactabeasts,” applying for the job of Scorpius’s general. And he was evil to the bone, sharing many similarities to Darkonda of PRiS. He’d discovered the Phoenix, Rhino, and Shark Galactabeasts and converted them into Galactazords. To power them, he kidnapped Kai and Damon and forced them to battle each other against their will, then used the Rangers’ own attacks against him to finish the job. His goal was to gain power at all costs, right from the start. He made no secret of his intention to get to the Cocoon, and he plotted against Scorpius and later Trakeena at every chance he could get. He could have given Shakespeare’s Richard III a run for his money. He was determined to prove a villain, through and through. He hired assassins to kill Trakeena, and when it looked like they were caught, he killed them and said he was protecting his Queen. He was constantly at odds with the more ethical Villamax, who had principles to uphold. When Villamax followed through on his promise to release the Rangers once Leo gave himself up, Deviot was floored that he was stupid enough to do so (“An Evil Game”). In that same episode, he was torturing Leo, and Villamax had to stop him, reminding him that Trakeena wanted to be the one to kill him. Similarly, Barbarax had to tell him to leave Leo and Damon alive until Captain Mutiny arrived, only this time, Deviot agreed because it was only a few hours until then anyway (“Until Sunset”). The guy shamelessly changed sides at the drop of a hat, joining Captain Mutiny’s crew when he got pulled into the Lost Galaxy, then telling Trakeena he’d been captured and forced to do slave labor once he was out—at which point, Trakeena was fed up with his bullshit and called him out on it, ordering Villamax to kill him. His only true loyalty was to himself.
Villamax was the flip of the coin, the Ecliptor to Deviot’s Darkonda. He’s similar in some ways to the earlier general Treacheron, whom Trakeena had sacked when he turned her in to her father to save his own hide. In “Heir to the Throne,” he’s immediately attracted to Trakeena and comes to her rescue against bar-brawlers, teaching her how to fight. He’s a brutal training-master, and the spoiled princess is frustrated with his tactics until she realizes that they’re paying off. But despite the fact that he’s evil, he’s honorable to the last, especially to his enemies. As I mentioned before, he keeps his word to Leo and releases the Rangers, to Deviot’s shock. He encourages Trakeena to send the likewise honorable Loyax against the Rangers, extolling his virtues while Deviot insists that the guy’s a washed-up old fool. Another massive foil to Deviot is his loyalty to Trakeena—from the moment he laid eyes on her, he devoted himself to her, like a Don Quixote to his Dulcinea. When Deviot supposedly saved Trakeena from assassins in “An Evil Game,” he offered him a dagger in gratitude, completely oblivious to Deviot’s inevitable betrayal. Because Trakeena wanted to kill Leo in that same episode, he told Deviot to stop torturing him. However, his loyalties are torn between Trakeena and his sense of integrity in “Journey’s End,” when Trakeena turns all of the Stingwingers into suicide bombers. He found it distasteful that they were sacrificing all their troops, and it grew worse when he saw that she was targeting innocent civilians who had never done her harm. He tried to remind her that it was the Red Ranger who had caused her loss, but she was too far gone. She challenged him to a fight, but he refused to fight back. Out of instinct, he attempted to defend himself a few times, but whenever he came close to landing a blow on her, he held himself back. She finally destroyed him, crushing the flowers a little girl had given him, and it was really damn painful watching him die so disillusioned with her and yet loyal at the same time.
Trakeena, however, has the most development of all the villains. From the very beginning, she was interested in getting involved in battle. When Villamax asked what her motivation was in “Heir to the Throne,” she said that she wanted to stand by her father’s side and conquer the universe. She would constantly beg Scorpius to let her fight, but he always wanted to keep her safe and would refuse. She then would go to his generals, trying to con them into letting her help, and she had joined Furio and Treacheron on occasion disguised in bug-themed armor. But she wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be. She had her vanity, such as in “Stolen Beauty” and when she complained of a broken nail during in “Heir to the Throne.” And she was not a good fighter. When Treacheron threatens her in “Shark Attack,” it’s only the timely arrival of the Rangers that saves her life. She’s even more terrified when Magna Defender arrives, deciding that he should pay an eye for an eye and let Scorpius learn what it’s like to lose his only child. She does, however, decide that she needs to learn to fight, and her quest for a general who will teach her leads her to Villamax. Under his tutelage, she becomes much stronger, kicking ass on Onyx until she learned that her father was dying (unknowingly betrayed by Deviot). She had abandoned her old staff in the desert of Onyx, and as she made her apologies to her father, she gained one of his tentacles, which transformed into a staff mounted with a scorpion in amber, which she takes up with all the determination of Leo vowing to honor his brother by taking up the Quasar Saber. She grows up from there, vowing revenge against the Rangers and even keeping the Cocoon around just in case she needs the extra power. She’s willing to do whatever it takes to destroy the Power Rangers, even reviving the Psycho Rangers and putting them under control by pain, actually managing to scare the utter shit out of them. When Psycho Pink even threatens her at arrow-point, she doesn’t really care. It’s all in her favor if Psycho Pink manages to take out the Pink Rangers, and she damn well ensures she benefits, trying to gain control of the Pink Quasar Saber and fighting Karone for it. She becomes more and more dangerous until she reaches the breaking point in “Journey’s End.” Some have argued that she becomes so depraved as a result of fusing with Deviot in the Cocoon; however, she herself rejects this, insisting that Deviot was “done for,” indicating that she was the one in control. She gleefully sacrificed all of her foot-soldiers to try to destroy all of Terra Venture, willingly targeted civilians, and alienated herself entirely by destroying Villamax when he called her out on her madness. The madness of Queen Trakeena led to her using the Cocoon to mutate, and she managed to pilot the City Dome of Terra Venture in a kamikaze attempt to wipe out the colonists on Mirinoi below. The only way the Rangers could destroy her was for Leo to attempt to sacrifice himself in a suicide attack, using his battlizer at point-blank range (oddly similar to the attack Furio had used against him, denying him his revenge). Her quest for vengeance brought her so far over the edge that there was no way she could come back from it. She had to be destroyed by the one who had rejected that cycle early on, ensuring that he never sacrificed his principles and lost sight of the goal. To quote a certain David Xanatos, “Revenge is a sucker’s game,” and Trakeena fell for it hard.
As my final summation, I have to say that I truly enjoyed Lost Galaxy. Sure, there were things I hated—pacing issues, editing issues, Leo’s battlizer looking too bulky, Captain Mutiny—but there was a lot more that I liked. The Power Rangers of this season really defied the odds and not only became friends, but a family. Noble characters and treacherous characters constantly butted heads, and the consequences of revenge were always an issue. I probably would not have enjoyed it nearly as much when I was twelve, but I do wish in retrospect that I’d given it more a chance. It was a worthy successor to Power Rangers in Space, and a great beginning for a journey into new worlds in Power Rangers, with new teams finding their own way whether on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy.
