Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Season 1, Episode 22: The Trouble with Shellshock

I was going to write this sooner, but I’ve been a little bit sick and I didn’t feel confident enough in myself to write this is a good state of mind.  So I waited until the recovery period of the sickness to put all of this together.  I would be farther ahead in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers if it weren’t for getting sick.  Oh well.  Qué sera, sera.  Whatever will be, will be.  Now it’s onto actually writing about Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Following the conclusion of the Green with Evil saga, I was wondering how the improvement would change the series.  As I found out in this episode, it didn’t so much.  Mighty Morphin Power Rangers seemingly reverted back to its old self, albeit with a new character involved in what goes on.  Tommy Oliver is now a part of the team.  But the writing is back to the normal fluff that it has been since the beginning of the series.  There isn’t much depth in the episode.  Let’s get to the episode.

Season 1, Episode 22: The Trouble with Shellshock

Baboo and Squatt, two of Rita’s henchman, take it upon themselves to create a monster.  What they do is take a mold of a turtle, shove a stoplight into it, mix it with a cannon, a hook and some other stuff, and turn on the monster machine.  A bipedal turtle with a stoplight sticking out of its head comes out of the machine.

Jason and the gang are at the basketball court in the park fooling around.  Zack is kicking all of their asses at basketball.  After a few games, Tommy has to head off to karate practice.  After he leaves, Baboo and Squatt attack the remaining five Power Rangers with some putties and Shellshock.  While fighting back, Shellshock shoots a go-beam at Trini, causing her to run away.  He then shoots Zack, Billy, and Kimberly with a stop-beam, freezing them indefinitely.  Jason manages to teleport them all to the control center.

The only way to unfreeze the other Power Rangers is for Trini to find some flower on a mountain.  She runs all the way there.  Meanwhile, Jason goes off to fight a giant Shellshock.  He enlists the help of Tommy.  Both use their zords to fight Shellshock, but end up caught in a stop-beam.  Rita is happy that Baboo and Squatt did something right, until Trini shows up with the flower and unfreezes everyone.  Then the Power Rangers defeat Shellshock.

The end of the episode is two basketball games.  The first match is between Zack and Tommy.  Zack easily takes down Tommy.  Then Billy decides he’ll try to beat Zack.  Zack doesn’t believe that Billy can win, but Billy dunks over him and takes the title of best basketball player.  Then we go to credits.

There wasn’t a moral to the episode that I can decipher.  I have no idea what they were trying to do other than have fun.  There was no lesson in the episode.  There was nothing deeper than the surface.  The episode had nothing that would make children into better people in the future.  All it had was basketball and fighting.

This isn’t a bad episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  I would never go that far.  But I’m disappointed that as their first follow up to Green with Evil, there wasn’t more substance to hold onto.  It’s a fun enough episode, but it’s ultimately empty.  I wanted more.  I did not get it.

Maybe in future episodes of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, I’ll get the more serialized, complex storytelling that I’ve been hoping for.  This is just more hope though.  I hope that every series has the ability to not be completely episodic.  Self-contained episodes like this one leave no mark upon the series and will ultimately be forgotten through the series’ run.  It’s a shame.

I’ll be back sometime soon with another episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  I would like it if you’d come back again and share my love of the show.