Episode Title: Doomsday Part 2
Original Airdate: November 30, 1993
When we were last in Angel Grove, the whole city was throwing a bit of a party in honor of the Power Rangers. Of course, Rita rained on that parade by unleashing a zord of her own called Cyclopsis. She also zapped all of Angel Grove’s residents into an alternate dimension. After a big battle that seemed like a victory for our heroes, Rita called upon the big blue floating head, Lokar, to reassemble Cyclopsis. Now it’s attacking the city, but the Rangers’ zords are needing a recharge. What can they do? Let’s find out in the conclusion of this story, Doomsday Part 2.
Alpha and Zordon inform the rangers that the zords need 12 more hours to recharge. But with so much destruction happening, Jason decides to take the zords out at half power. This proves to be somewhat disastrous as the rangers are easily overpowered by Cyclopsis and Lokar. The Mega Zord even loses an arm in the battle and the Dragon Zord gets part of its tail chopped off. A special safety measure installed by Zordon then causes the rangers to eject and the zords to be zapped back to their secret hiding places to repair. With all the damage, the rangers now find their communicators don’t work, so they can’t contact Zordon.
Our heroes head for Billy’s garage lab so he can try to fix the communicators. While there, Goldar even shows up to taunt them in the driveway. Just before he attacks, though, the wrist communicators are repaired and the team transports back to base. Now the zords are ready to go, though I don’t think it’s been 12 hours yet. Thanks to some hacking of Rita’s files by Alpha, our heroes find out that if they keep changing battle modes, Cyclopsis won’t be able to keep up. From there it’s just a matter of summoning every possible zord they’ve got (including Titanis, suddenly free again after being sucked into the earth last episode) and gettin’ all medieval on Cyclopsis.
I gotta admit, this is not a very good episode. There are moments when it seems that the rangers are going to have to get creative and overcome some big obstacle…but then it just goes back to business as usual. Like at the beginning when we’re told that they can’t take the zords out because they aren’t fully charged. The solutions is for Jason to decide to go out anyway! Couldn’t they have come up with something else? Or how about when the rangers can’t morph and can’t communicate with Zordon and then find themselves staring down Goldar in Billy’s driveway? I was all set for a big hand to hand to battle! No superpowers…just teenagers fighting a big blue lion thing. Ooops, sorry. We fixed the communicators and teleport before Goldar even lets fly with one punch.
On a whole this episode is just very muddled. Things feel very hurried and frantic when it might have helped things out to slow down a bit. The battles still do end up being pretty wild. Plus, we get to see something we’ve never seen before when it appears that Cyclopsis kicks the Mega Zord in the nuts! I also can’t help but get a bit of a kick out of Lokar. He serves no purpose here, but I can’t help but laugh when he uses his deadly breath or shoots blue lighting out of his spiky hair.
I should mention that the citizens of Angel Grove all end up safe and the party for the Power Rangers resumes promptly. Then, we get a big surprise! Who do we see shake hands with all the rangers as they walk toward the stage? Some kid named Tommy Oliver. So, he is still hanging out around Angel Grove…coming to terms with being a normal teen again. One other thing to mention is that the final scene of the episode features Zordon giving the rangers a chance to go back to life as regular teenagers if they want. Lucky for us, all five decide to continue on.
This episode does represent the end of the first part of season one of the series. It could have been the end of the series in general. Saban had exhausted all the Japanese footage they had. The series was a huge hit, though, so new footage would be created to move forward. However, it would be two months before a new episode of the show would air. That’s where we’ll pick up next time with Rita’s Seed of Evil.
Channel: Superhero 