Power Rangers Beast Morphers is the first series of the long running franchise to be produced by Hasbro, following the acquisition of the series in 2018 for $522 million. Some were a little worried about what would happen to the franchise under Hasbro, some thought that they might scrap the live action series and focus on animated shows instead, whilst others suggested the idea that they might not be able to adapt the brand as well as Saban. Whilst Saban had done some good things with Power Rangers before, and made the brand, I was very disappointed with Power Rangers Ninja Steel and thought that it was one of the worst seasons of Power Rangers to date, and was looking forward to some freshness in the brand.
Having now watched the first episode of Beast Morphers I'm happy with what the show has done. Okay, I know that I've only seen the one episode, but after the cringe-worthy and mostly boring season that was Ninja Steel it felt amazing to actually enjoy an episode of the show again. It was exciting, different, and made some bold choices straight out of the gate.
The episode starts by establishing that a group called Grid Battleforce (a great way of using the Go-Busters branding) is about to switch on a new reactor that will harness the energy of the Morphin Grid to provide the city of Coral Harbor with clean, renewable power.
We're then introduced to a few of the key characters of the series over at the gym, where Blaze is teaching a karate class as his friends Ravi and Roxy look on. One of the students, Devon, isn't really paying attention and a small confrontation breaks out between him and Blaze, resulting in a fight where the two of them are shown to be pretty equally matched. The fight is broken up by Devon's father, the Mayor of Coral Harbor, who needs Devon to come with him.
In the Mayor's car Devon is chastised for going to the gym rather than a job interview that his father set up for him. He reveals to Devon that he's on his way to Grid Battleforce to perform the switching on ceremony, and Devon begs to come along so that he can try out their battle simulator. When his father refuses, Devon takes a photo of his fathers visitor pass.
At Grid Battleforce Devon uses his fathers copied pass to sneak into the facility, whilst his father is held up by two members of security, Betty and Ben. Once away from them, the Mayor is taken to Commander Shaw by Zoe, one of the janitor staff.
Mayor Daniels is then shown around the facility and meets NAte Silver, a brilliant young tech wizard who discovered how to tap into the Morphin Grid, the power source that gives Power Rangers their abilities. When the Mayor expresses his concern that using this power could make the city targets to monsters and madmen such as Rita Repulsa he's shown that Grid Battleforce is creating a team of Rangers of their own to combat any threats.
When the Mayor turns on the reactor outside to a crowd of reporters the process to create the new rangers begins, and we see that Blaze, Roxy, and Ravi are to be these Rangers. However, a sentient computer virus names Evox has entered the system and corrupts the process, turning Blaze and Roxy into digital avatars of themselves, and evil Power Rangers. Fortunately, Devon is able to stop this from happening to Ravi. Joined by Zoe, the three of them fight these new evil Rangers. During the struggle, the three of them enter the transformation machine, and become Power Rangers themselves.
With help from Nate the new heroes manage to transport the evil avatars away. With the day saved the new team learns that to save Blaze and Roxy from the comas they're now in they'll have to defeat their evil counterparts.
Okay, so as far as setup episodes go this is really good. I like that the Rangers in this season are man-made. There's something about Rangers that aren't tied to magic, ancient artefacts, or mysterious mentors that is just really cool. I don't think it's any coincidence that Lightspeed Rescue, SPD, Time Force, and RPM are all considered great series, and all feature teams made by people and organisations. It also means that whilst the Rangers get to have secret identities to the public they also get a base of operations, a support staff, and resources at their command that they'll need in order to protect the city.
I also think that the look of these Rangers fits this model well too. This isn't the standard kind of Power Rangers suits, where the actors are in skintight spandex, this time they look like tactical leather outfits. There's no need to try and explain that it's not spandex, but some kind of nano-tech polymer or anything like that, because these guys look like some thought has been given to practical combat and protection as far as their outfits go.
What I also think is a really cool move is to create evil Rangers so early on, and to make them such an integral part of the set-up. There have been some great evil Rangers in the past, like the Psycho Rangers, and some absolutely awful ones like Zedd's Dark Rangers, but most of the time when there's bad versions of Rangers they're around for one episode, or you'll get multi-part arc if you're really lucky. Including them so early on like this is pretty wild. But, it's integrated into the story well, and gives the Rangers some bigger stakes and long term motivations outside of the traditional 'beat the bad guy'.
I also really like that the Power Rangers team took the Escape robot costume from Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters and gave it a yellow repaint to make it an evil Ranger suit. It's not as obvious a look as Blaze, who still looks like a cat, but you can see her as some kind of twisted version of a rabbit. This feels like the kind of bold creative choice that was lacking in some of the more recent Power Rangers seasons, and one I'm always open to.
I did also enjoy how the show set up another group of heroes to be the Power Rangers, before twisting that expectation out from under you. The only things that take away from this being a real surprise was that the episode included the opening credits that show Devon and Zoe as Rangers, and that the casting had already been announced at Power Morphicon. If the first episode had aired without credits, or fake credits, and Hasbro had tricked people by announcing the Roxy and Blaze actors instead they could have had a real great rug pull moment when they became evil and two other people had to step in to take their place instead. But, I understand that they probably couldn't do a fake casting announcement or a one-off credits sequence just for a bit of storytelling surprise.
Overall I thought that this was one of the stronger single episode openings to a new series of Power Rangers. Some seasons get a double episode to begin with, and really benefit from it, and some single episode premiers can feel a bit rushed, but Beast Morphers managed to walk the line of condensing the story into one episode yet giving the story and characters enough time very well. I hope that this is an indication of how the creators plan to treat the series going forward, and could be the sign of some good writing to come.
