Movie Madness, Part II

Power Rangers: Time Force, Episode 25

Original Airdate: 7-28-2001

Last Time: A monster named Cinecon trapped the Rangers in movie parodies, and the writers thought that that was so clever that they stretched it to two episodes.

Back in the Western, Trip steals a horse and saves Wes. This leads to Nadira quitting the troubled production. Trip tells Wes that the clapboard is the key to getting out the movie dimension, and they start to formulate a plan to steal it. Credits!

In the jungle movie, Eric is still about to be cooked and eaten. Luckily for him, he's able to get a trained chimp to break him out of his cage. The other movie satires also continue apace. In Western-land, Trip and Wes manage to trick Cinecon in a deception too stupid to put into words and frees the Rangers, also managing to knock Eric, who had been swinging on a vine, into a stone wall.

Ransik shows up to put a damper on their celebration and to shout his lines as loudly as possible to prove that he's acting as hard as he can. Naturally this involves running the Rangers down in some Mad Max-looking vehicles. The chase begins, but takes a quick break as Ransik loses track of the Rangers almost immediately, and the team takes a pit stop at the craft services table. Jen steals a passing by golf cart and the chase resumes....until the golf cart runs out of gas. The Rangers split up and fight some more Cyclobots.

The Rangers escape only be caught up in a flashflood, which somehow leads them into a wardrobe where every single member of the team takes the opportunity to disguise themself as a member of the opposite sex. In fairness to the writers, once they realized that they didn't have two episodes worth of material, it was too late to go back and cancel this two-parted. Also, Katie is most convincing as a member of the opposite sex, mainly due to a judiciously applied fake soul-patch. Ransik tracks the Rangers down to the wardrobe room and accidentally puts on an intricate frilly dress. I don't know how the hell that happened. Can we just call it an episode here? Nine more minutes? Are you fucking kidding me?

Ransik enters a room where a five-member rock band is playing loudly, but can't make the logical inference and wanders off before the band reveals themselves to be the Rangers in another disguise. You know, just having the characters dress up in funny outfits isn't really enough for an entire episode. Anyway, they make it outside where Cinecon teleports in their motorcycles and resumes the chase scene from earlier. Yeah, the last few scenes, completely and utterly pointless in every way.

Anyway, instead of continuing the pursuit, the Rangers blast away at the cars following them, eventually leading to Wes hunting Ransik down, and getting him to run into another car in a homage to the end of Waterworld. Neat, but if you're referencing Waterworld, that means that your movie parody episode is completely out of ideas.

Cinecon's declares it's time for the megazord fight and the Rangers realize that they're still in the movie dimension. The monster then brings in the Q-Rex and the megazord that sends the Time Force Megazord into the scene for no particularly good reason. They fight for a bit before Cinecon realizes that he's missing the last page of his script, which somehow allows the Rangers to kill him for reasons that I leave to English majors among us to speculate on.

Later, the Rangers watch a Frankie Chang movie, and they reminisce on scenes from earlier in the episode. Show Over! Thank you God, Show Over!

Next Time: Jen turns evil....more evil!