REVIEW: Dino Supercharge 20 "End of Extinction"
All right, the moment we’ve been waiting for has come and gone. Power Rangers Dino Supercharge comes to an end with this episode. Would that I had known that the title was to be taken literally. I pretty much expected a standard finale, one that wrapped up the hanging plot threads and gave us satisfactory closure for the characters. And, well, this was a thing. I don’t think it’s too harsh to say that I was not particularly thrilled by the final outcome of the series, and it’s hard to pin down exactly why. I am not sure I can really do it justice, but I’ll try my best.
I guess I’ll start with the elephant in the room. Time travel is almost always a snarl on a show that isn’t explicitly devoted to time travel. The only time I’ve ever seen it done well was on LOST, and while people have varying opinions about the overall outcome of the show (mine’s mostly positive btw) it’s generally not a thing to be taken lightly. Because I have always maintained that this season is more like a reverse Time Force than any of its Dino predecessors, it probably should not have come as a surprise to me that they’d travel in time, but this plot point raises more questions than answers. I don’t think anyone was dying to know what influenced the line in the intro about “trying to break the chains that divide” but for those of you who were, now you know.
As for the other elephant, I can’t help but feel disappointment that the team I’ve loved the most out of any of the recent teams is the one team that utterly fails in its quest to protect the Earth. There is no getting around it; without the redo that the Energems provide as a deus ex machina, the Power Rangers do not protect the Earth from its ultimate fate and in fact cause it from a certain point of view. It’s a heck of a twist that just when it seems like they’ve finally triumphed, the Dark Energem’s destruction turns into a black hole that sucks Sledge’s ship and the Earth alike into oblivion. But at the same time...the entire show has been about teamwork. They’ve played that song since day 1 over and over. And for the most part, they’ve succeeded in showing the merits of it, if it’s been a bit ham-fisted in the effort. The problem arises when the Rangers explicitly enlist the help of the Earth’s citizens (complete with shots of civilians we’ve seen and been able to bond with) to make the biggest team ever. It’s a heartwarming moment, a team of humanity that dares to stand against the greed of a space warlord, a team 7 billion strong...and they lose. They lose more thoroughly than any other Ranger team before.
Everyone, from Betty Morgan, to Zack, to Mr. Watkins, to Dr. Runga, to Erin, to Albert, to Mr. Smith and his bodyguard, to Burt, to Matt Griffin, to Chloe Randall...they all die in an instant. That’s almost impossible to comprehend. Considering that even during RPM there were pockets of resistance, this has managed to be more apocalyptic than the grimdarkest season thus far. One thing I like about this is that the Rangers don’t immediately have a huge reaction to this, because it would take some time to really sink in and they don’t get enough time to have this happen. I also like that it touches Heckyl particularly because he's already seen it happen to his own world.
It sounds like I only have negatives for this episode. Not so; there is a lot here to like. As I mentioned, it’s a really uplifting moment when we get to see the Rangers encouraging the people of Earth to help them defeat the Dark Energem, which is kind of somewhere between a MacGuffin and the actual villain of the season, oddly enough. Tyler and Shelby get a not-really-a-kiss-scene, which is about what I expected. It’s at least made clear that they care about each other romantically and intend to move forward as a unit. Heck, even Sledge’s plan with layers upon layers is a good one. The fact that the Greenzilla eggs are actually towing-points for the ship to haul off the Earth is a good world-ending threat that it makes sense for the Rangers to mobilize for. Sledge has always been kind of a lower-threat villain, so I’m glad he has a big enough bad-guy thing that it gives the Rangers urgency in defeating him.
I do have to be honest, however; with all the baiting-and-switching, I was legitimately wondering if Keeper was actually the villain of the story, having attempted to low-key rid the Earth of its saurian protectors by putting them on Sledge’s radar in the past and now finally succeeding in destroying the Earth, and on top of that getting the Rangers to throw their Energems into space. Additionally, the feel of the final confrontation between Sledge and the Rangers is a bit off. I like that Ivan finally gets closure with Fury, and the humorous banter between Sledge and the Rangers is good enough. But it doesn’t seem menacing enough for me. Once Present-Earth is destroyed, it feels like literally anything could happen afterward, and my investment dropped after it happened and gets immediately undone. The humor in the villains having no idea who the Power Rangers are makes it harder to feel like an earned win. From Sledge & Crew’s perspective, they chase Keeper to Earth in the premiere only to be stopped by multicolored freaks who blast them into the sun. The return of “It’s a bomb!” is also welcome, but I don’t know if it works to push this back into "good" territory for me.
Heckyl as the new Keeper of the Dark Energem seems like it makes sense, although in a way he kind of already was. I’m not sure how he’s still alive, given that technically he should have crashed into the sun 65 million years ago with the rest of Sledge’s crew. I’m okay with his redemption and arc over the last few episodes from a character standpoint, but I feel like I needed more details hashed out from a practical standpoint. Witness my earlier point made about time travel. That he does not become a Ranger as I had hoped and predicted was disappointing, and actually as I write this I realize that this could have been avoided if he had become the Talon Ranger. Throw in a handwave about how the Energem protected him from the alterations in time and space and we’re golden. Not to mention that as fans we’re much more likely to forgive weirdness in plot stuff when we get a new Ranger in the mix.
For me, however, the most frustrating thing is the temporal shenanigans. Given that the Rangers come back to find a world where dinosaurs survived any of the other extinction events that could have killed them other than an asteroid, and since Sledge was destroyed eons prior, does that mean that nothing they did this season matters? I’m afraid so. Yes, obviously they themselves have grown as people, but Ivan and Koda go back to their time, the Rangers go back to the present, and dinosaurs exist, divorcing Dino Charge from any semblance of continuity with the main series. All the work Shelby did relating to her father, the redeeming of Erin and Burt, Chloe and Chase becoming closer as siblings...none of it happened. While this isn’t a huge tragedy, it makes it seem somewhat futile. The fact that the Energems’ true power is a reset button to end all reset buttons is not great, to say the least, and raises the question of why Keeper didn’t just collect the Energems immediately after the chaos on Earth in the past and do the time-travel spell thing right then. I don’t think that bringing back the dinosaurs is something the dinosaur season needed to do, and I wish they hadn’t made that essentially vital to saving the world.
Power Rangers Dino Supercharge is a battle of extremes. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the series, but it really made it hard to do so at times. This episode in particular did not rescue the series from the Scrappy heap, as I had hoped. If anything, it makes a lot of the episodes leading up to it look better in hindsight, but that’s for my season review. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the Christmas special will not in fact rectify any of the issues this episode had, and there were several. Some were an unfortunate consequence of the wheel-spinning of mid-season Supercharge, and some were just baffling choices that somehow made it on screen. The implications of this ending will never be explored again; of this I am certain. I am not so triggered to rate this lower than Legendary Battle, but it certainly seems as if Samurai’s borrowed Shinkenger ending is the most satisfying Neo-Saban ending thus far. With that, Dino Supercharge has cemented itself as the weaker of the two seasons and something of a disappointment in general, but again, that’s for my season review.
