REVIEW: Dino Charge 9 "When Logic Fails"
Conflict, character, camaraderie, and conclusion. Those are the four things I generally need to be entertained by a piece of fiction, no matter what the demographic. Generally speaking, when all four are present I consider it a win. Now, this isn’t exactly a hard and fast rule; sometimes you want to push, say, your conclusion back a bit so that payoff can occur later. I say this because there are times when you have elements of all four but the overall effort is derailed by something else, or maybe something didn’t mesh well here and there. As I understand it, this episode is probably considered the weakest outing for Dino Charge thus far, an opinion with which I can’t disagree. That’s not to say it was a bad episode, and in any case a mediocre episode of Dino Charge beats the pants off of Megaforce any day. But enough about Chase and Riley shipping, let’s get to the review.
When the episode begins, Fury is being berated by Sledge, while Poisandra struggles to stay relevant by pointing out his failure to recover the e-tracer from last episode. Sledge sides with his fiancee--duh--and banishes Fury, but the latter comes up with a plan to recharge the Pterodactyl charger and drags along Wrench and the MoTW, Puzzler, to assist him. Meanwhile, Riley explains to the others that Sledge, Fury and Poisandra are all working mostly with different motives and different plans that start with the same step: recharge the Ptera Charger. Unfortunately, the pseudo-intellectual babble that they use to achieve this, coupled with the unnecessary angles and calculations we see flying across the screen as a visual representation of Riley’s mental state work as a hindrance rather than a help. The meat of the exposition is just to remind us that Fury has a depleted Pterodactyl charger, the tracer the Rangers constructed has been destroyed (out of necessity) by Chase, and that they need to head off the evil member with the most information toward getting the Gold Energem--again, Fury. There’s also a subplot here with Koda being hungry, which runs in the background throughout the ep.
Fury sets his sights on an abandoned medical facility for the transfer and sends Puzzler out as a sentry. I kind of dig the goofy Puzzler; he’s always chattering about logic and riddles, despite the fact that this episode kind of plays fast and loose with both. Coincidentally, the area where Fury has holed up (the only suitable facility, other than the Rangers’ HQ) is near where Chase has been making a pizza run and near where a pair of kids are playing chess with giant pieces. It’s funny that this feels like another Time Force-y moment, where the comical character with a verby name is stopped from coming home with the pizza by this week’s adventure. Puzzler gets annoyed by the kids’ lousy moves (I feel you on that one, Puzzler) and comes out to menace them, forcing Chase to leap into action. They have a suitably entertaining fight with chess pieces before the others show up and the monster runs off.
Puzzler then decides to mix the Rangers up by turning the facility into a maze when they go in to find him. It’s very Inception-lite; we get a Penrose stairs trick with Shelby and Riley, some weird doors that lead to the same hallway with Tyler, and a blocked-off hall with doors leading to nothing with Chase. Additionally, there’s the moving of the thermostat so they’ll all freeze to death, which seems both oddly macabre and ridiculously impossible. Not to be that guy, but there’s no way that simply moving the knob down would actively freeze them a) so quickly and b) so frostily. Pretty much any storyline where a mundane electronic device becomes an agent of destruction tends to pull me out easily, because most of these devices are either incapable of being that extreme or riddled with safety devices so you can’t do the same thing by accident. Anyway, for an extra dose of confusion, Puzzler mixes up the floor map, so that even when Riley tries to analyze that, it leads him nowhere. Eventually he settles on the air vents. Unfortunately (conveniently!) when he tries to relay his plan to the team, the cold disables their communications. I’m not a huge fan of contrivances as anyone who read my ToQger reviews knows, so...yeah.
Crawling through the vents, Riley gets a glimpse of Fury trying and eventually managing to power up the charger with his weird golden glob of inner energy, though it leaves Fury drained for a moment. As far as (inadvertent?) references go, this was very White Light (MMPR S2). In my opinion, this is the most plot-important part of the episode, as Riley realizes that what Tyler described matches what he’s seeing here. It’s also notable that Wrench didn’t know about this energy until now either. Foreshadowing something, perhaps? I can only assume it’ll be paid off better than, say, a prophetic dream that goes nowhere. Both Riley and Fury get to the roof, where Puzzler is taking a load off, and hey, I love this monster. He’s literally wearing huge sunglasses and sipping a cocktail. Riley and Kendall talk via comm-link to discuss the choice between heading Fury off with his newly powered-up Ptera Charger or finding a way to release his friends from Inception. Kendall is more for the logical option of stopping Fury, but Riley decides to help his friends, which...eh. I get what they were going for, but this sort of choice doesn’t really have a pretty answer as the end shows. I do like the detail when we check in on them that Koda seems relatively fine with the chilly temperature.
Riley challenges Puzzler, who proposes a game of chess to settle the disagreement. During the game, Riley flicks a few marbles through the vents in order to signal his comrades. I’m not entirely sure how he knew which vents would lead to his friends, despite his calculations earlier, so this fell a bit flat for me. The balls reach them as they’re on the verge of freezing to death, so good on him for that. The highlight of this scene was probably the moment when Chase says “Riley, you beauty” when he realizes the plan. Yes, I’m aware of the slang term in Kiwi (it basically just means “great job” if I understand correctly) but hey. It makes sense that Riley would lose the chess game, because he was too busy concentrating on getting the signal to his friends, who join him on the roof just as Puzzler wins the chess game. As the gang assembles, Riley reveals that he was playing a different game all along, and I cannot be more thrilled. I absolutely hate hate HATE when heroic characters feel obliged to play along with the ridiculous rules set out by the villain in their sadistic games. There’s no reason to honor an agreement made with a monster who holds innocent lives in the balance, and I feel like this justification saved the episode for me. Well, that and the “Inconceivable!” that Puzzler lets out upon being outsmarted.
After morphing the Rangers chase Puzzler to Japan--er, the parking garage, and fight him and some Viviks there. Koda gets the kill shot this time, using one of Tyler’s chargers, which I guess is probably a Sentai carryover. Fury decides to use the powered-up charger to summon the Ptera Zord, and I guess pterodactyls just...live in volcanoes in the PRU, which is an interesting parallel. Sledge gives him some backup by making Puzzler grow, and we get a pretty standard zord fight, though one thing of note is that the Ptera Zord finishes Puzzler off to Fury’s chagrin. The Rangers assume that the Ptera Zord was confused when they blasted Puzzler toward it, assuming the hapless monster to be an attacking enemy. I really like this here, that they make a realistic call on what they think to be the case while hinting that perhaps they’ve read it wrong. Fury does get accolades from Sledge for securing the Ptera Zord, and Poisandra seems more annoyed and sidelined than ever, since Fury’s back in Sledge’s good graces. I’ve liked the dynamic between these three for a while, and it just keeps getting better.
The ending scene has Keeper being an actual mentor (again! suck it Megaforce!) to Riley as he and Kendall reassure Riley that he made the right call and the Rangers finally get to eat some pizza. I haven’t been noting every nuance of the Koda hunger subplot, but it is cute to see his enthusiasm after spending the whole episode starving. Tyler and Riley discuss the developments regarding the Ptera Zord and the energy that they now have both seen in Fury, and Tyler decides that they have to stop it one way or another.
This outing was mixed, I must say. The title of the episode, “When Logic Fails” is unfortunately very fitting, as the bulk of the A-plot required you to ignore how logic works. The strength of the episode came from the seasonal overplot, which is still intriguing, and the 4 Cs as listed above. It was just a bit jarring to see these ideas touted as “logic” when in truth they were just gibberish, though the target audience might not be quite as bothered by this as I was. I did like the references like the Ptera Zord coming from the volcano, and the brainy Ranger peering through the grate on a vent to see the opening steps of--spoiler alert--a new Ranger on the horizon. In all, it was an enjoyable enough episode, but I hope they tighten things up going forward, because we’ve seen better from this team. I guess if I grade this, it’d be a solid B-. Could be worse, but let’s aim a little higher next time, m’kay?
