The Rescue Mission

Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy, Episode 18

Original Airdate: 10-2-1999

Last Time: Trakeena decided to steal the beauty of the women of Terra Venture...wait, that can't be right...

On Terra Venture, Mike walks onto the bridge to find Commander Stanton trying to respond to a distress call from an alien ship. He can't quite get through to the aliens, and so has Mike set a meeting with the council of elders. Credits!

Later, the council of elders object to rescuing the aliens, as it would pull Terra Venture off course. Mike somehow convinces them to go along with the rescue mission with talk of the righteousness of helping others. This is the same council who basically waved off any concern about Mike returning from the dead, so they're not exactly a force to be reckoned with.

Mike decides to recruit Leo for the mission, and finds him playing with some young children in the park because, like the children, Leo is a drain on society. Unlike the children, he won't make up for it later. Mike and Leo, and some other nameless grunts, get in their Starship Trooper gear and head out to the alien ship.

They make it onto the ship, and realize that everything is covered in a web of some sort, followed by then finding what appears to be a partially digested alien crew member. Now, at this point, you might think it best to get the hell of the ship seeing as there are no signs of life, but plenty of signs of death, but then we'd only have half of an episode, so the rescue mission continues.

On the bridge of the alien ship, they find the corpse of the captain who had sent the distress call. He is very, very dead. Leo, the graverobber that he is, takes the book that the captain had been holding. Given that the corpse is basically a skeleton, and the distress call appears automated, they realize that they were way, way too late to rescue anyone. Meanwhile, Kai has discovered that something is moving quickly towards the rescue team on his Alien-scope, just in time for communications to fail.

Leo and Mike hear gunshots and discover that something has already taken one the marines, and causes another to mentally breakdown. Mike sends the freaked-out guy back to the shuttle and decides that he has to rescue the captured marine. Er....not that I dislike this episode or anything, because it's actually not too terrible, but um....did they run out of Sentai footage or something?

The show decides to answer my question by having Kendrix show up on Terra Venture's bridge and retrieve Kai. Back on the alien ship, the marines realize that the monster is above them, and a fight breaks out and makes it abundantly clear that they can't actually show any of the humans getting hurt. So the alien monster just swats at peoples' gun for a while and then escapes. Apparently, in the melee, the monster captured all of the other marines except for Leo and Mike. Mike, not knowing when to cut his losses, decides that he and Leo have to rescue all of the marines who were taken.

The brother descend into a chamber with omimous music and red lights, only to find that Mike's team have been coccooned by the monster. Of course, this being a kid's show, everyone's fine and they all decide to leave. Elsewhere, the cowardly marine from earlier is wandering around and comes upon the Rangers, who have shown up because...well, you really can't have an episode of the Power Rangers without them.

The marines all escape from the chamber, and Leo and Mike hang back to delay the monster long enough to let them escape. In the course of their fight with the monster, they manage to cause some shipboard explosions with their guns, which causes some sort of terminal damage to the alien craft. They also accidentally blow a hole in the hull, which allows for their shuttle to fly alongside and for them to jump in...except they're in space, and in reality, the atmosphere would have leaked out and the result pressure differential would have at least knocked them unconscious. Leo jumps first, but the monster is able to catch up in time to grab Mike as he attempts to leap to the shuttle. This leads to Mike ordering the team to get out of there without him, but Kai drives by in his Jet Jammer to free Mike and they all go home as the alien ship is destroyed. They also still have the book, although they don't actually know what the hell it is. Show Over!

Next Time: The stern rule of growing the brand!