Power Rangers Zeo: Episode 11: A Few Bad Seeds

When we last left off with Power Rangers Zeo, Billy graduated high school. One of the Alien Rangers returned to Earth to ask for help with an issue on Aquitar. Billy, with nothing left to hold him back in Angel Grove, chose to travel to Aquitar to help. The Zeo Rangers didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye because they were busy fighting a monster when Billy left.

Now we’re onto the first post-Billy episode. Not that Billy has completely left the show, yet. He still needs to return as a red herring for the Gold Ranger. But this will be the first episode without Billy. It sounds like there will probably be some plant-based action, whether with the teens or with the monster. The only way to know for sure is to watch…

Episode 11: A Few Bad Seeds

Rocky grew a plant for a botany project. He didn’t know what the plant was since he had simply taken a few unlabeled seeds from the science lab. Whatever the plant was, it wanted to eat anything made of metal. Adam suggested that Rocky take a sample of the plant to Alpha to see what the plant was. While Rocky was doing that, Bulk and Skull stole a sample for themselves, so that they could have a plant to grow for botany.

The Machine Empire decided that the plants would make good monsters to destroy Angel Grove. If the plants were hungry for metal, they would eat a lot of the city. It was a good choice. The plants went to work at the automotive scrap yard, eating whatever they saw. The downfall of the plan was that the plants didn’t work well together. King Mondo called the plants back to the Machine Empire base and sidelined one of them. The other returned to Earth where it cast a spell on Rocky to turn him into a plant.

While the Zeo Rangers were fighting the plant monsters, Bulk and Skull were learning about fertilizer. Lt. Stone was one of the founding members of Angel Grove’s botanist society. He showed the bumbling pair where to get fertilizers and which ones were the best. Then they heard about the theft of the plants from the greenhouse. Bulk and Skull went out on a mission to recapture their plant. They laid out a trail of metal and hid in a bush.

The Zeo Rangers spent most of their time fighting off the threats sent by the Machine Empire. Rocky and Adam got to have the first fight. They went up against the Cogs that stole the plants. There was some tug-of-war with the vines from the plants, but the two Zeo Rangers lost that one. All the Zeo Rangers were present for the fight in the scrapyard. Punching and kicking. A little bit of blaster action. The fight was cut short by the plants being transported back to the Machine Empire base. Rocky then went up against one of the plants solo and was dusted with pollen that turned him into a plant. The final fight was another punch-kick fight with all the Zeo Rangers and the one plant that was left fighting. They won by filling their blasters with pure oxygen and shooting the pure oxygen at the plant. The end.

Power Rangers Zeo brought another entertaining episode with A Few Bad Seeds. There may not have been a fight with the Zords, but there were enough hand-to-hand combat scenes to fill any fighting itch. There were also some goofy comedic beats that Power Rangers perfected by this point. It was a classic episode that really didn’t mean much in the overall scheme of things. There were some strange happenings, however.

The strangest thing, and the most apparent as soon as it happened, was the plan of The Machine Empire. Many Power Rangers stories involved having the moon monsters or The Machine Empire take something that the teens were doing on Earth and turn it into a monster. This was one of those episodes. The strange thing was that the plants being used were metal eating plants. Had this happened when it was the moon monsters, that would have been fine. The Machine Empire is made of metal, though. Wouldn’t they think about the implications of bringing metal-eating plants to their base? The plants didn’t eat them, for some reason, so they got lucky. But it was still a questionable decision to bring those plants to a base where everyone in the base was made of metal.

Then there was the fact that The Machine Empire, at one point, only sent one of the plants back to Angel Grove. What did they do with the other plant? Did they leave it in their base? It would be a dangerous thing to simply have hanging around in a base made of metal near people made of metal. It’s bound to get loose on some sort of eating binge and destroy a good chunk of the base. It’s bound to get loose on some sort of eating binge and eat some of the soldiers or royalty within the base. I don’t know the thinking behind keeping one of the plants in their base.

The personalities of the plants should also be quickly discussed. When they were turned into monsters, the plants took on distinct personalities. They were cousins. One of them had a sort of Andrew Dice Clay kind of voice. That was the monster that was better at monstering. The other monster simply got in the way, which was why it was left out of the later fight against the Zeo Rangers. That monster had a European accent akin to those body-builder guys that Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon played on Saturday Night Live. So, I guess, kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger-ish. They were strange accents.

Finally, there was the way that the monsters were defeated. Well… The way the monster was defeated. The Zeo Rangers only ever defeated one monster. When Rocky was turned into a plant, Alpha couldn’t determine a cure. Rocky came up with the solution in a moment of lucidity from his plant-like state. Pure oxygen would suffocate the plant cells because they breathed carbon dioxide. That was fine and dandy when it came to isolating Rocky in a small chamber thing. It was far less believable when it came to killing the plant monster. The Zeo Rangers loaded their blasters with pure oxygen canisters and fired them at the monster. The monster wasn’t in an enclosed space, which would have lessened the effect of the pure oxygen to a great degree. It would have just blown away. But this was Power Rangers Zeo, so it didn’t. They killed the monster.

That about does it for A Few Bad Seeds. It was Power Rangers Zeo at its best and worst. It had fun action and some entertaining comedy. It also had some nonsensical story and logic beats. Kind of like any episode that Power Rangers ever put out. That’s part of the charm. Soon, I’ll be getting into another episode of Power Rangers Zeo. I’ll be writing about Instrument of Destruction. I hope you’ll be here to read it. See you whenever that post comes out.