Power Rangers Beast Morphers: Fossil Frenzy Review

PRBM "Fossil Frenzy"

While Evox gets to full strength and lays the groundwork for a climactic confrontation in the background, Zoey has a run of the mill, episode-of-the-week focus story in the foreground. Her brother Mike, an amateur paleontologist, has discovered a new species of dinosaur he dubs vulturesaurus (which sounds like a zord naming convention), and Zoey is determined to help him leverage this into a scholarship. Imagine how Mike would react if he knew that Zoey has been to another dimension where dinosaurs never went extinct...

Mike gives a fossil to Zoey so she can use Grid Battleforce resources to comprehensively analyze it. Zoey accidentally melts the fossil down to nothing, so gets a different fossil from the same hard-to-reach site. To reach the site, Zoey free solo climbs up a rock face that looks like it belongs in Wild Force's Animarium. But the episode's logic blows up when Mike's unverified finding, that he was so crestfallen to lose before he could show it off, makes the front page of the newspaper...!?

Elsewhere, Roxy uses the vulturesaurus DNA to upgrade herself yet again, this time to such an extent that she can kaiju herself up to zord size. But her hubris is her downfall. The upgrade process destroys Scrozzle's Robot Maker equipment, meaning that if Robot Roxy or Blaze are destroyed, they're gone for good. (Dramatically speaking, this is a welcome development to add some stakes.) Also, Dino Roxy is doing a fine job kicking the Rangers' asses on the ground, but pushes her luck by taking it into zord scale, where she's outclassed and killed. Robot Blaze, in all his malevolence, has a bit of a moment when he witnesses this and seems to genuinely mourn.

The episode's dialogue is even more on-the-nose than usual. Mike tells Zoey his "entire future" rests on the fossil. Roxy soliloquizes to the camera that she "has to prove herself". It's an episode precariously balanced between a final reckoning with Robot Roxy, and a genuine desire to tie that in emotionally with Zoey's small character story. In the end, Roxy's end feels anticlimactic (after all, we've seen her dispatched so many times), and Zoey's story covers familiar points and the newspaper beat defies all logic. 5/10.

Stray observations:

- When Devon swings to the rescue from Zoey's zord, he cuts a Spider-Man-like figure.

- If Power Rangers was merchandised beyond action figures and the like, they could sell the Grid Battleforce-branded dog onesie featured in this episode.