Retrospective: “Countdown to Destruction”

Picture this: You’re hired to head up the final season of Power Rangers. Ratings are terrible, and you’ve basically been given a free pass to whatever the hell you want. At this point, the suits don’t care. So you come up with this amazing, epic storyline that is completely unlike any season that’s come before. It shakes up the status quo, it forces the characters to make tough decisions, and it has a plot twist straight out of Star Wars. But when you sit down and watch the Sentai series you’re adapting the source footage from, you’ve got a major problem: It’s nothing like what you have planned. In fact, in comparison, it seems kinda silly. But you’ve got balls—you go along with it anyway and you make this amazing series that you originally wanted to do. You follow the story of the brooding young man with the mysterious past as he joins up with an established team of heroes and they help him in his quest to face his past and locate his missing sister. You watch him slowly hook up with the Yellow Ranger. You find out his sister is the enemy they’ve been fighting all this time, and the team isn’t sure if they can trust her. Hell, you even watch him tell off his best friend when he admits he’s attracted to her. But just when it looks like she’s about to join the team, her boss kidnaps her and reprograms her back to evil. And as the series draws to a close, you know the Rangers have to make some tough decisions about who they can save and what they should sacrifice for the greater good.

Sound familiar? But the year is 1998, the season is Power Rangers in Space, and the writer is Judd Lynn.

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