Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Season 3, Episode 27: Another Brick in the Wall

Previously in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Rita Repulsa sent down a monster that caused Tommy to eat much more than he should have if he wanted to stay healthy. Bulk and Skull were also trying to eat a bunch of food. Katherine got her first taste of Power Rangers powers as she worked with the team to stop this monster and keep Tommy from eating himself to obesity. It was a perfectly fine, fun standalone episode.

This one looks like it could be another. Katherine will still be getting used to her powers, with the residual effects of Rita’s evil spell still doing something. Maybe. Who knows, at this point? I couldn’t guess what this episode is about at all, but I’ll find out pretty soon. I’m going to watch…

Season 3, Episode 27: Another Brick in the Wall
Katherine recently arrived in Angel Grove. She wanted to show how much she appreciated the welcoming community by giving back to it. There was a vacant lot somewhere in the city and she made it her project to get it fixed up. She gathered a bunch of her peers to help clean up graffiti, plant flowers, and get rid of the garbage that filled the vacant lot.

Rita Repulsa wanted to prove to Lord Zedd that she and Rito Revolto could make a good plan. She sent Rito and some Tenga Warriors to the plot after everyone had left for the day. They were supposed to trash the work that had been done. Katherine was checking everything over when she saw the monsters. She and the Power Rangers got their Ninja Powers going to fight off the monsters. Rita thought it would be the perfect time to zap Katherine back to evil. She missed and hit the wall instead, creating The Brick Bully.

The Brick Bully had one power. He could turn the Power Rangers into bricks. He turned Tommy, Rocky, Adam, and Aisha. Billy and Katherine took them back to the Command Centre. Katherine came up with a plan to deteriorate the bricks and free her friends with some contained pollution. While doing that, Billy went back out to fight The Brick Bully one-on-one.

When the rest of the Power Rangers were saved and Billy had defeated The Brick Bully, everyone went back to the vacant lot. There was a ceremony where the mayor was going to give Katherine an award for her good deed. Only, the mayor wasn’t there. Bulk and Skull had been tasked with protecting the vacant lot and found an old woman with a shovel scoping it out before the ceremony. They detained her. Lt. Stone told them that she was the mayor and reprimanded them while the mayor presented her award to Katherine.

The major fights of the episode were the Ninja Powers fight and the Billy fight. The Ninja Powers stuff was fun enough. Katherine was held back by the Tenga Warriors from saving her project. She called on her friends. They showed up. Rita tried to zap Katherine. She hit the wall instead, creating The Brick Bully. The Power Rangers went to their full powers and were turned to bricks when they tried to attack. The second fight got more interesting, and less by-the-books. Billy had to fight the monster while playing very defensive. The Brick Bully kept trying to zap him into a brick. He had to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge to avoid being turned. Billy realized that the monster got its power by eating construction materials, so he took it for a run through the suburbs, where it slowly weakened. Rita zapped it to large, so Billy fought one-on-one in his Zord. Watching the Blue Zord be the only one fighting was an interesting change of pace and made for a fight full of surprises. The Brick Bully was destroyed without an explosion, too. It fell apart at the end.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers can get weird sometimes. This episode was one of those times. The monster was a brick wall. That was it. It was a brick wall. The plan was to have it destroy Angel Grove by eating construction materials. There was no need to attack people, unless they attacked it. The monster was only after construction materials that it could eat to stay strong. Couple that with the fact that it was a Katherine episode where Billy saved the day by being the one Power Ranger fighting, and you have the recipe for one of the most strangely written episodes of the third season.

Bulk and Skull got to shine in this episode with their slapstick humour. Bulk fell into a giant tub of cleaning water. The end credits were Bulk and Skull getting pranked by Katherine. They ran away from the Tenga Warriors with one of them pushing the other in a wheelbarrow. It was standard stuff for the pair, but still funny. Also standard was their basic storyline. They ran away and told Lt. Stone why they ran away. He still didn’t believe them about the monsters. How was he still in disbelief? He saw the Tenga Warriors in previous episodes. He saw what they did. But he still wouldn’t believe Bulk and Skull when they claimed there were monsters. Maybe he thought they were lying to get out of work. Except that he saw the destruction that could only be caused by the creatures. Lt. Stone should know better.

As for the vacant lot stuff, there was a nice montage near the beginning of the episode as the teenagers of Angel Grove cleaned it up. There was a song that I’ll call “Gonna Make It Right” that played over the scene. It sounded like it was by Ron Wasserman, who did most of the songs that played in the show. It was an upbeat song that wouldn’t have fit into a fight scene. It didn’t seem like it was credited at all, so consider this a note of the song’s existence.

There’s not too much more to say about Another Brick in the Wall. It was a strange episode where the writing didn’t make any sense. Why would an episode based around Sentai footage where the Blue Ranger defeated the monster be an episode with the Pink Ranger as the central figure? Why was the monster a chunk of wall? These are questions that will never be answered. Let’s move onto the next episode, then. A Chimp in Charge is coming up soon. I’ll see you then.

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