Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Season 1, Episode 15: Peace, Love, and Woe

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers does not shy away from focusing episodes on a specific character.  It is a way to build that character and have the audience fall in love with them.  It brings up the stakes for the audience when they are watching the Power Rangers in a threatening situation.

I appreciate the work that the showrunners did with the first season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  They were able to build each character through a series of episodes into likeable characters.  But there are certain episodes that I fear.  These episodes are the ones focused around Billy.  I don’t think that Billy is necessarily a bad character.  It’s the acting of David Yost that bothers me.  I think he’s pretty bad.  However, there are episodes that must be focused upon his character.  This episode is one of them.

Season 1, Episode 15: Peace, Love, and Woe

There’s going to be a dance at the Angel Grove Juice Bar and Billy doesn’t have a date.  Zack wants to teach him dance moves, but Billy would rather work on a weather machine.  That is, until he bumps into the female version of himself and knocks off her necklace.  They plan a pre-dance date and head their separate ways.

Rita Repulsa, meanwhile, has recruited Madame Woe, a weather controlling, inter-dimensional sending monster, to take down the Power Rangers.  She wants Madame Woe to get to the date location and abduct the Blue Ranger.  Thinking that the female version of Billy is the Blue Ranger, she takes her away, leaving only the necklace.

Billy goes to meet her and finds her necklace.  He and the other Power Rangers go after Madame Woe.  Madame Woe takes them to another dimension where they fight her for a long time.  Then they use their coins to give Billy enough power to take Madame Woe back to Earth.  When there, Billy breaks the power crystal on Madame Woe’s head, freeing the rest of the Power Rangers.  They combine their power weapons and blow up Madame Woe.

Billy goes to the dance with the female version of himself.  Everyone has a good time.  Ernie faints in a cake after smelling Bulk’s foot.  Then there’s a freeze frame on everyone dancing.

The episode was a pretty fun episode, as most are.  There was action, the monster was interesting, and some of the comedic beats worked beautifully.  There is a problem in the acting of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, however.

David Yost is my least favourite actor on the show.  Billy could be such a good character if played right.  But there is never anything behind Yost’s performance.  He just says the words as if he’s reading them for the first time off of a piece of paper being held just off screen.  It’s sometimes tough to get through a scene with Billy because of this.  What the character needed was a little bit of emotion behind the words.  Ground the character in a way that makes him feel more like a nerdy teenager and less like Alpha 5’s emotionless cousin.  I hope that his acting improves as the show goes on.  Right now, David Yost is the weakest link.

That’s what came out of my fingers after watching this episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  From what I can tell of Netflix Canada’s episode order, I think the next episode is filling in one of the two gaps in the episode numbers.  You can look forward to that gap getting filled with the next post.