Power Rangers Beast Morphers: Evox Unleashed Review

PRBM "Evox Unleashed"

What "Evox Unleashed" nails as a season finale, and finale to a Ranger team's story, is an "end of term" feel, wrapping up a number of small but important threads. In doing this, it touches the emotions to a surprising degree, making up for slight deficiencies with the action portion of the episode.

Yes, Venjix/Evox is gearing up for a final power play, but there are human stories to attend to, even in the midst of a Coral Harbor evacuation. In a touching scene, Zoey reveals that she's the Yellow Ranger to her mother (and now, all three original Rangers are "out" to their parents). Even when the situation is desperate, Ben and Betty resolve to stay and help the team. And this is a wonderful episode for Commander Shaw. She authorizes Zoey's disclosure, and Shaw gets one of her best moments in a pep talk to the team about the power of being human. The speech is blunt, efficient, and composed, and I expect nothing less from her.

And another favorite end-of-season trope: morphed Rangers with their helmets off! 

With Venjix having adapted to Grid Battleforce weapons, the Rangers try using various pieces of legendary Ranger arsenal, but despite their best efforts, Venjix appears to kill Steel. Down a Ranger, the team comes up against Venjix' giant evil mech, appropriately looking like a bastardization of an RPM zord. Zoey tells us this is "50 times bigger" than a gigadrone. That seems like quite an exaggeration. It's maybe twice as big?

In a clever turn, the Rangers figure out a way to literalize their human advantage over Venjix. Using examples from earlier in the past two seasons, they figure out that Venjix' Evox form is incompatible with human DNA, and that animates their final blow to the cyber-villain. Impressive as that is on a storytelling level, the biggest issue with the episode is that the fight with Venjix himself is not dynamic. They shoot at him, it doesn't work, Steel tries to shoot him, it doesn't work, Venjix kills Steel with a wave of his hand, Venjix gets big, Rangers stab him, job done. And as a gift from the Morphin Grid, Steel is reconstituted in totally human form.

But that slack is picked up by the rest of the episode, which even provides an epilogue set one year later. Colonel Truman (!) shows up with the fugitive Scrozzle, who had been hiding in the sewers of Corinth. (That year of Scrozzle on the loose is ripe for untold stories at some point.) Commander Shaw is seen out of uniform for the first time and even attempts painting her son's favorite subject, Roxy (who was seen earlier in the episode helping with the evacuation). Devon is now Commander of Grid Battleforce, and he even tries to "do" Shaw in his delivery of orders.

Steel is a movie star in action films, with Blaze as his stunt double (Dax from Operation Overdrive, much?). The finale sees Devon calling Steel away from set for a surprise birthday party. Surely that could've waited until Steel was done filming that day? But in any case, the ending is happy. And Beast Morphers ends with a poignant episode that makes up for its fairly barebones action with a fond salute to this cast of characters. 8/10.