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thelegion2017-12-15 10:23 pm
legionnpcs) wrote in thelegion2017-12-15 10:23 pm
Legionnaire Legacies: Jason Lee Scott
[The Legion World staff maintains a feed of all Legion-related media so Legionnaires can be kept abreast of any reporting that's done on them. Two women appear on the screen, sitting at a desk, their appearances altered by glam filters so that one is all pink hair and skin and sparkles, and the other is all in blues. They look pretty flashy and tacky but this is the future. Reporters don't exist anymore; they're "personalities" now.]
Shellee: I'm Shellee Star! [That would be the pink one.]
Tammee: And I'm Tammee Tim! [That would be the blue one.]
Shellee: Welcome the popular, ongoing investigations of Legion Watch: Legionnaire Legacies!
Tammee: Not all heroes are created equal. Nor are all heroes treated as they deserve.
[She pauses, waiting for Shellee to take over, but Shellee's busy taking some pills. The overlay's marked them as Rings of Saturn Titan-Strength Migraine Reducers™, available for cheap at any reputable pharmacy.]
Tammee: Ahem. And so today we examine a hero who hasn't quite gotten the reputation he might like. Presenting... Amp!
Shellee: Born in Angel Grove, California in 1977, Jason Lee Scott, known to us in the future as Amp, grew up a shy, timid boy from a middle-class family. With parents who loved him and supported him... Ugh.
Tammee: You okay?
Shellee: Sorry. Just a bit of a headache. Had a conference with Siobhan earlier and you know how loud she can get in your head? Just give me a second.
Tammee: Three, two, one...
Shellee: Born in Angel Grove, California in 1977, Jason Lee Scott, known to us in the future as Amp, grew up a shy, timid boy from a middle-class family. With parents who loved him and supported him, Jason was still a bit of an outcast.
[Cue pictures of a shy, quiet young boy watching everyone else play games.]
Tammee: Fortunately, he found something he could pour his heart into, something that gave back just as much as he put into it.
[The same young boy, eyes wide, watching a karate class. The instructor notices him watching, and comes over with a friendly smile. The scene transitions to Jason in a white uniform, nervous, but giving it his all. There's an honest-to-god montage as he struggles to break a board, but slowly fills out over the years, growing taller, bulkier, more confident and outgoing. Instead of trying not to hurt his hand on a board, he's breaking bricks for an audience. Instead of trying to hide in the back of the group, he's teaching groups of students on his own. And, instead of being alone at recess, he's seen laughing with a group of friends, marked as Zack, Trini, Kimberly, and Billy.
He's almost never alone now, save for his 3 A.M. jogs. He's seen sparring with Zack, who fights with his own hip hopkido, going through slow motion tai chi exercises with Trini, pretending to be Kimberley's boyfriend at parties so other guys will leave her alone and let her have fun, and staring down a pair of bullies, Bulk and Skull, who interrupt his cram sessions with Billy.]
Shellee: Treating others with respect, Jason earned theirs. The bonds he'd forged with his friends were practically unbreakable, and almost everyone who knew him would trust him with just about anything. If his life stayed on this track, he'd probably end up opening a dojo and spreading his love for martial arts to a new generation of children.
Tammee: Instead, fate took a hand. Imprisoned on the Moon for ten thousand years, the Empress of Evil, Rita Repulsa, was stirring.
[Footage shows two astronauts fiddling with a space dumpster, opening it. Suddenly, balls of light flash out, forming a quartet of monsters. They're labeled Baboo, Squatt, Finster, and Goldar. After some prompting, Rita herself rises from the dumpster, stretching out with a joyful shriek.]
Finster: Oh, it's good to be out after ten thousand years.
Baboo: Here, your evilness. Let me help you.
Rita: Out of my way, monkey face!
[She pushes past him, then whirls, jabbing her wand at the dumpster she'd been trapped in. Energy flashes out, destroying it. The two astronauts watching cry out and flee over a hill.]
Rita: Aw, don't leave! You'll miss my coming out party! That's when I destroy the nearest planet!
[She glances up towards the Earth and cackles, joined by her lackeys. Tammee and Shellee are cackling too, but for a very different reason.]
Tammee: Oh my Grife that dress!
Shellee: Didn’t you wear that at Carnivale two years ago?
Tammee: …Parts of it. [She coughs.]
Shellee: I told you your tailor’s sense of fashion was twelve thousand years out of date.
Tammee: Stop distracting the viewers with old dates and get back to Amp’s story.
Robot: Oh no! This is the big one! I just know it!
Tubular Dude: Calm down, Alpha. It’s Rita. She’s escaped and she’s attacking the planet.
Alpha 5: Ai-yi-yi, what do we do?
Head Man: Teleport to us five overemotional and overbearing humans.
Alpha 5: No! Not that! Not teenagers!
Blue Man Group’s Reserve Member: That’s correct, Alpha.
Alpha 5: I was afraid of that.
[The scene zooms back to Jason and his four friends, struggling to remain standing before they’re teleported to the dark, starry Command Center. They pick themselves up and glance around, exploring cautiously. One gets the feeling that Alpha may have screwed Zordon on the ‘overemotional and overbearing’ part.]
Kim: Isn’t exactly the mall, is it?
Billy: This place is magnificent!
Zack: I don’t get it, how’d we end up here?
Trini: I just want to know where ‘here’ is.
Billy: Maybe the answer’s in these controls?
Alpha 5: No, don’t touch that!
[The little robot does a prat fall, prompting everyone to swarm around him.]
Billy: A fully sentient, multifunctional automaton! Never seen anything like it! Whoa.
[In her overlay, Shellee takes a long slug of something alcoholic enough to have fumes distorting the air above it. Tammee gives her a Look.]
Shellee: We’re officially on vacation hours. And if we have to deal with people who talk like that, Auntie Shellee is gonna need some amplification of her own.
Tammee: [Sigh.] Pass the bottle.
[The scene continues in that vein. The Wizard of Oz appears and announces himself as Zordon, helpfully expositing that he’s caught in a time warp. He reveals the threats to the Ranger’s world, the same evil sorceress from before. ‘Rita Repulsa’.]
Tammee: Do you think she’s evil because that’s her name or do you think that she got that name by being evil?
Shellee: She’s not that repulsive. I mean, she could probably use some syrup for that throat of hers, but…
Tammee: Are we going to do this the entire time?
Shellee: Only until we see Goldar in a pair of tight, pleather pants and a mesh top.
Tammee: Ugh.
[Thankfully, Zordon interrupts them.]
Zordon: You have been chosen to form an elite team to battle Rita. Each of you will be given access to extraordinary powers drawn from the ancient creatures you call dinosaurs.
Kimberly: Dinosaurs?
Zordon: Behold! [Golden coins and dark grey holders, the Power Morphers, appear in a flash on their belt buckles.] The keys to your power.
Zack: Whoa! [He holds his, with an engraved Mastodon on front, up.] What’re these?
Zordon: Those are your Power Morphers. When in danger, raise them to the sky, calling the name of your dinosaur.
Shellee: Spoilers, they never raise them to the sky. These kids don’t follow instructions real well.
Zordon: -And you will morph into a formidable fighting force known to one and all as the Power Rangers.
Kimberly: Morph?
Billy: Metamorphosis.
Trini: That means to change.
[Kimberly makes a face, as if to go ‘That’s legit’, and Zordon continues on.]
Zordon: As Power Rangers, you will have access to a universe of power and you will have access to a fleet of fighting machines called “Zords”.
Tammee: Subtle.
Shellee: He’s a giant head in a tube. Let him have some moments of ego.
Zordon: Jason, you are bold and powerful. You will control the Tyrannosaurus Dinozord.
Tammee: I can already hear the haters start up their ranting, but ask yourself: Would a normal person be considered ‘bold and powerful’ when compared to the rest of the Legion? Remember the early mission reports. He may be underpowered, but he’s definitely done more with less when compared to some of the other Legionnaires we’ve seen.
Shellee: You’re talking over the head honcho there, he’s not done yet.
Tammee: Let me summarize. The pink one who doesn’t understand half the words she hears is ‘smart’ so she gets a bird, the black one gets an elephant, the blue one gets a horned tricycle, and the yellow one gets a housecat. They turn into a giant robot. Look, I won a championship in the robot fighting circuit five years ago-
Shellee: So you never tire of reminding us whenever it comes up…
Tammee: Like I was saying, I’ve had experience with all kinds of designs. Combiners are always a terrible idea. You get a lot of power when you connect them all together, but they’re fragile when they come together and-
Shellee: And you can learn more when you read her autobiography. Now back to Amp.
Tammee: I thought you said you skipped my autobiography.
Shellee: I was mad. Shut up.
[Selling the teens on piloting giant robots isn’t going very well, either. They walk out, with Jason being the last holdout. He stays in the Command Center, arms crossed, until Zack calls him again. Then, reluctantly, he turns and leaves.
The teens wander back through the desert. Bitching about the walk. A lot. After a while, Jason cuts in.]
Jason: Guys, we shouldn’t have left. I mean, he chose us to save the world! I say we do it.
Trini: Do you really think we can?
Zack: Hey guys, I mean, you really don’t even know what you’re talking about. We were talking to a giant floating head!
[Suddenly, lasers rip through the sky, narrowly avoiding the teens. And, with the explosions, there are ugly grey monster-men. The Putty Patrol. They attack the panicked teens and, well. It’s not the best showing they could have. The Rangers end up in a heap while the grey monsters dance around them.]
Kimberly: This day is just too weird.
Trini: What do we do now?
Jason: Zordon said these Power Morphers would give us power. Let’s do it!
Shellee: Wait, wait, wait. Where’d that electric guitar come from?
Tammee: I don’t know. The editors said it was already there. What I want to know is why they’re all posing!
Shellee: Forget the posing, what kind of world just has spontaneous guitars out of nowhere?
Tammee: Maybe it’s tied to his power source and that’s why he hasn’t been doing anything like this since arriving here?
Shellee: Maybe it’s like dancing? They suck if they don’t have a beat to beat their enemies with?
Tammee: Grife, we’re going to have to just re-record this entire episode, aren’t we?
Shellee: Probably. It’s not like we’re getting overtime pay here.
[It’s at this point that Rita shrieks and hurls her wand at the Earth, causing a crackle of energy that causes Goldar to grow massive.]
Tammee: Looks like her monster’s not the only thing that’s growing.
Shellee: I wonder how hard she had to chuck that staff to get it to the Earth that quick? I mean, the earthquake looks like it could be magic, but that throw looks normal.
Tammee: Well, it’s probably all magic. That took… what, three? Four seconds to hit the Earth? We’re looking at somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand miles per second.
Shellee: Wow. That would kill a city, wouldn’t it?
Tammee: Orbital weapons are no joke. There’s a reason most planets have banned them. But given that she never just uses that to kill the Rangers, I’m guessing she just speeds it up using magic. What do you think, some sort of inertia-less movement?
Shellee: What, by transforming her staff’s mass into something imaginary? It couldn’t be a perfect reduction or else it would be moving at the speed of light. Then again, that staff’s moving somewhere around a third to half the speed of light already, but…
Tammee: Let’s not fall into the trap of overexamining magic. I mean, look at this, we’ve already missed the entire fight.
Shellee: Ah, Goldar just quit when things were getting hard. Talk about an anti-climax.
Tammee: Guess getting bigger didn’t make it better.
[When they finally stop chattering, Zordon has the Rangers gathered in front of him, praising them for their handling of Goldar.]
Zordon: Congratulations on a job well done. Now that you have become Power Rangers, you must follow three basic rules or lose the protection of the Power. First: Never use your power for personal gain.
Shellee: That tracks. Sources show that Amp regularly donates most of his Legion-earned paychecks to charity. The rest of it apparently goes toward food and renting properties so that his teammates can go on vacation.
Zordon: Second: Never escalate a battle unless Rita forces you. And finally, keep your identity a secret. No one may know you’re a Power Ranger.
Tammee: Well, we kinda messed the carpet on that one, didn’t we?
Shellee: Sprock it, it’s not like this is going out on the air anyway. We’ll just stick to the script next time. Maybe when it does we can do like Karina had us do and censor everyone’s faces.
Tammee: Man. She was fun. I miss her. D’you still have that picture?
Shellee: Yeah. I’d kind of hoped we could bring her on as a co-host.
Tammee: Forget it. She wouldn’t have agreed to do any of the ones that we didn’t get permission for.
Shellee: The things we do for a paycheck…
[While they’re chatting, the video feed has the teens joking in the Command Center, then putting their hands in a circle, leaping into the air and crying out ‘Power Rangers’. On seeing this, both of the hosts burst into laughter, shaking their heads.]
Shellee: Wow. Wow. I thought people only did that in cheesy sports movies from twenty years ago! Good grief.
Tammee: That is possibly the lamest thing I’ve seen all week.
Shellee: Worse than that clip someone sent of Doubletime running into walls?
Tammee: At least that one was set to music!
[The two of them are so busy chattering, and refilling their glasses, that they’ve failed to notice an overlong montage of Rita hurling her staff in an overlong event that was probably supposed to lead to a lame pun if they’d stuck to the script. They trail off and watch some more, shaking their heads.]
Shellee: How many monsters did they face?
Tammee: Not counting the Putties? About thirty-five over the course of forty weeks. Give or take a few for resurrections and doubling up.
Shellee: You know, now that I know it was a whole Rule that he couldn’t reveal his identity, that makes sense, but I can’t help but wonder how seriously people would take him if they knew he was dealing with that. Monsters on a weekly basis? The Legion's stuff must be like a vacation to him!
Tammee: I almost hope they don’t fix the situation soon, he deserves as much of a break as he can get from all that.
Shellee: So you think they’re gonna handle Chronoblivion? Honest opinion.
Tammee: They’re the Legion. You?
Shellee: I agree.
[They glance off-screen to watch the monitors for a moment. Jason’s with Kimberly and Zack, looking rather depressed.]
Shellee: So what’s going on here?
Tammee: Oh, right. Well, he’s feeling depressed because he couldn’t break the school record or something like that.
Shellee: What was the record?
Tammee: I think about a thousand and ten reps?
Shellee: He’s embarrassed about not meeting that? I think my arms would fall off before I hit the hundred and fifty mark! How far did he get?
Tammee: About a thousand and nine.
Shellee: Well, that’s pretty close. I’m sure if he’d pushed-
Tammee: Twice. He started over about an hour after his first shot.
Shellee: …Good Grife, what sort of meathead are we dealing with?
Tammee: Yeah, later in the afternoon he finally breaks the record. Spoilers.
Shellee: “Oh no, I’m a quitter”, says the guy who does three thousand reps in one day.
Tammee: Yeah, the third bit happened after he fought Goldar and a stripper, too.
[King Sphinx and Goldar, slashing at the Red Ranger, fighting them solo, with their staff and sword plays out on the screen.]
Tammee: Look at that nass. That’s plush.
Shellee: The kind of bubble butt that you could sink your fingers into.
Tammee: I’d like to see him take a twirl around that pole.
[As they chatter, the scene shifts a few times. Jason and his team fighting monsters. Going to school. Dealing with bullies, largely by tricking them into humiliating themselves. Teaching karate classes for children and teens. Doing homework. Picking up litter around the park. Helping set up the Juice Bar for things like parties and special events.
More than once, Shellee and Tammee devolve into shrieking laughter at how the Ranger teens act, especially whenever they pose right before a fight. Eventually, Tammee starts making mock poses of her own, wielding her datapad like a gun, and Shellee's reduced to tears. Finally, wiping at her eyes, she sits up and coughs.]
Shellee: So are we just not going to address the whole thing where Amp’s killed about three dozen people here?
Tammee: It’s in the script for this episode. Apparently Rita’s monsters are all artificial life forms. One of her employees crafts them from clay, then passes them through some kind of ‘Monstermatic’ machine. Whoosh, instant monster.
Shellee: So… They’ve got personalities but they aren’t really sentient?
Tammee: That’s my guess. Primitive robots, like the Metal Men of ancient times. But made of magic and clay.
Shellee: And that massive sword that always flies out of space?
Tammee: Magic. Like the staff. Same with how they manage to keep the robots in volcanos. I wonder how much more respect he’s get from the fans if he just dropped a giant robot on everything?
Shellee: You saw the footage of him having that swordfight. And him leading the charge against Harrow. If that didn’t win fans over, nothing will.
Tammee: We’ll have to find some way to hammer that in, I guess. Rewrite the Legacy script some. He’s definitely got some balls on him, that’s for sure. You notice that whenever some monster shows up, he’s never worried for more than a few minutes?
Shellee: We can’t lead with that, people would just say he’s too dumb to be scared. And it’s kind of hard to tell if he’s winning because the Rangers are that strong or because the monsters are just that weak.
Tammee: How about we focus on battle smarts, then? I mean, looking back on it, they’re facing against two hundred foot monsters on a weekly basis and… How many casualty reports do the Rangers have?
Shellee: Hold on, let me check… Huh. Zero? We can work with that.
Tammee: So we ditch some of the growth footage sequences and the other fight scenes. That’s just gratuitous time filler, anyway. Edit in more footage pointing out how the Rangers always end up isolating the monsters in a nearby quarry, the city parks, or, when they get big, near a batch of empty warehouses or out in the wilderness. We can point out, I don’t know. ‘Their teamwork was on such a high level that they didn’t even need to communicate to command the battlefield’?
Shellee: Needs more punch, but we’ll kick it around some. Maybe one of the interns will have an idea.
Tammee: So, are there any major events we need to cover?
Shellee: Well, there’s the Green Ranger. He’s pretty neat, the kids will probably like him.
Tammee: Nass. He’s galivey and you know it.
Shellee: The last thing we need is another ‘but it’s plorgo’ argument. Let’s not go there.
[Shellee leans over and adjusts the footage, fast forwarding through easily twenty minutes of footage. Mostly fighting. When she comes to a stop, Jason and another teenager in green, noted as ‘Tommy Oliver’ on an overlay, are in the middle of a martial arts competition. They move swiftly and furiously, displaying some high-level moves, but Tommy pulls ahead after Jason steps out of bounds. It’s only through some furious footwork that Jason manages to score even a tie.]
Shellee: So, this new kid shows up and it turns out that he’s real good at martial arts. Rita Repulsa decides that he’s the perfect person to give the Green Ranger powers to, because apparently she’s had the coin all along and didn’t decide to just… I don’t know, find an actual martial arts master? An adult? A trained assassin?
Tammee: I mean, Goldar’s more powerful than a single Ranger, so I can see why she didn’t waste it on him. Wouldn’t make him much stronger, would it?
Shellee: Right. Anyway, so Tommy gets mind controlled and turned into the Green Ranger. He trashes the Command Center, destroying the communications and teleportation equipment, causing one of Jason’s friends to reveal what’s sure to be Brainiac 5’s favorite part of the program.
[Yup. It’s a flying car, all right.]
Shellee: And I don’t know if Rita’s amping his power any or if he’s just that much better, but I haven’t seen a beating that bad since news footage of Judge Beeny assisting the Science Police with a drug raid went viral.
[It’s… pretty bad.The Green Ranger jumps into the Megazord and starts slapping the team around while they’re still inside, eventually just throwing them through the window and all the way to the ground. They pick themselves up from the two hundred foot fall, and he jumps down to join them, treating the assembled Rangers like they’re chumps. The only one who comes close to standing up to him is the Red Ranger, and even he gets manhandled, culminating in the Green Ranger firing a straight up energy ball at the team. In the aftermath, they’re teleported back to the command Center.
Sometime when the camera wasn’t on it, it got trashed. Zordon’s missing, Alpha’s glitching out repeatedly, and wires and panels are strewn all over the place. After Alpha shuts down again, the Rangers are left alone.]
Trini: What’re we going to do?
Jason: Prepare ourselves. We don’t have Zordon to help us this time.
Zack: We’re gonna have to do it on our own.
Jason: I think we’ve only made it through round one of what’s about to be a major battle.
Tammee: Sweet sprock, that was brutal. This Green Ranger would be kind of cool, if he wasn’t a bad guy.
Shellee: Right? Give him a TV show and I could watch him beat people up all day. Anyway, the Green Ranger has a pretty big advantage. The Rangers don’t know who he is, but the villains have known who the Rangers are from day one. This lets him get the drop on Amp, banishing him to the Dark Dimension.
[Jason and Goldar square off against each other in a dark room filled with thick mist, and it’s immediately obvious that Jason is outclassed by the golden gladiator. Goldar spends the entire time toying with him, slinging his morpher to the slinging him around one-handed, and shrugging off Jason’s best shots. Eventually, Jason is forced to hide by lying on the ground, while Goldar searches for him by stabbing the ground every few feet, taking his time. One shot has him bury the point of his sword into the stone floor next to Jason’s head, then step over him to continue the search.
At one point, Jason finally has enough, standing up and screaming before finally knocking Goldar onto his rear with a flying kick. It doesn’t do him any good, however, because Goldar soon sends him sprawling again and is poised to deliver the final blow when… the Green Ranger intervenes and announces that Rita’s going to allow him to kill Jason.]
Tammee: Grife. Talk about luck.
Shellee: Oh, it gets better. So, Amp is returned to his friends, but they still don’t know Tommy’s the Green Ranger. We can definitely play that for drama. Anyway, skipping over some drama, Rita calls in an old friend, Scorpina, who manages to fight the Rangers to a stand-still, then sets it up so that Scorpina, Goldar, and the Green Ranger all fight the Megazord at once in giant form. And then Rita causes an eclipse, blocking all light from reaching the Earth and crippling the Megazord. Ironically, the Zords are green, they run on solar energy.
Tammee: There are worse energy sources. I knew a guy who used a windmill.
[The scene is… Well. Ugly. The Megazord would struggle with these odds in the best of conditions, but cut off from its power source, it doesn’t stand a chance. Despite their best efforts, the trio practically pulls it apart, and the fury of their attacks rips open a crevice in the Earth that the Megazord falls into, breaking apart and sinking into the lava. The Rangers, obviously, make it out.]
Tammee: Yeesh. If I didn’t know that he’d survived that…
Shellee: Right.
[Smash cut to the Rangers sitting in the Command Center, various looks of dismay and resignation crossing their faces.]
Kimberly: The Power Rangers are history.
Trini: It’s over. Rita’s won.
Jason: Rangers, we can’t give up.
Kimberly: Why shouldn’t we? Zordon’s gone! The Megazord’s been destroyed! We’re outmatched.
Alpha 5: Billy, what are the odds of bringing Zordon back?
Billy: Less than 10%.
Jason: Isn’t the smallest chance of victory enough of a reason for us to keep on fighting? The world needs us, Rangers.
[Tammee stands up, jabbing her finger at the screen.]
Tammee: Why the hell is our script ignoring that? We’re gonna have to rewrite that nonsense. This is it!
Shellee: That’s exactly why he’s Legion material. If we can hammer that through to the fans…
Tammee: As might trash as we’re talking, anyone who can get sprocked like that and still stand up and fight, we gotta highlight that. Sprock the writers.
Shellee: Whoa, whoa, whoa. We’ll have to be careful about that. He got screwed, but it’s not worth us losing our jobs.
Tammee: …Point. So what’re we looking at next?
Shellee: Right, so Zordon manages to come back thanks to Billy, and he reveals that the Zords teleported to safety and initiated some auto-repair functions.
Tammee: You’d need them for a setup like that.
Shellee: Anyway, it turns out that the Green Ranger has this really neat dagger that can be played like a flute. And Rita gives him a giant dragon Zord that he can control with it. And that’s his downfall.
Tammee: What kind of idiot sets up their giant robot to be controlled by a musical instrument?
Shellee: Less robotics snobbery, more listening, okay?
Tammee: Sorry. Anyway, keep going.
Shellee: Just watch the footage. I’m going to get another bottle.
[The Dragonzord wreaks havoc in the city, wrecking the docks, destroying a factory, and blasting the Rangers with missiles when they appear on a rooftop. Finally, Jason summons his Tyrannosaurus, and lures the Dragonzord out of the city. The two robots are far too equally matched, and Jason takes advantage of knocking the Dragonzord down to form the Megazord with everyone else. From there, the fight is entirely one-sided, culminating in the Dragonzord being picked up and thrown through a mountain.]
Tammee: That’s when you know it’s time to cash in and go home.
[The Red Ranger takes the time to leap out of the Megazord and take on the Green. Whether it’s because he’s fired up, filled with hope, or knows this is his last shot, Jason does better this time. He still falls short compared to Tommy, whose powers and weapons allow him more shots in, until Jason manages to disarm him and destroy the Sword of Darkness that had been turning him evil.
At this point, Shellee returns and starts talking over the recording. probably a good thing, though the subtitles will still cover everything.]
Shellee: So, long story short, he joins up and Jason’s got himself a new boyfriend. At least, according to the script. Attitudes towards sexuality in that age were pret-ty primitive, and we’ll leave it at that.
[More scenes flash by. Jason and Tommy working out together. Sparring. Sometimes arguing. The Rangers, more powerful than ever, take on Rita’s monsters with more ease than before. After a while, it becomes clear that Shellee and Tammee have stopped paying attention.]
Shellee: I’m just saying, if they’d given Goldar Green Ranger powers, then we’d have proof!
Tammee: I don’t care how tight the spandex is! There’s no way!
Shellee: What, your little dog-man is that much better?
Tammee: At least Finster has class. He’d wine and dine you. Goldar’s just a thug with a big sword!
Shellee: Trust me, darling, sometimes a big sword goes a long way.
[This episode really shouldn’t have been aired. After a good twenty minutes of bickering in this vein, while the screens show the Red and Green Ranger battling against Titanus, the Ultrazord, among other monsters. Eventually, Tammee glances up.]
Tammee: Wait, what? What’s wrong with everyone?
[Jason’s in the Dark Dimension, squaring off against Goldar while Zack pleads with him to leave.]
Zack: Jason! You missed your chance.
Jason: What’re you doing here? Go back!
Zack: Tommy’s in trouble.
Goldar: You’re all in trouble!
Jason: But he’ll lose his powers!
Zack: If we don’t get to him in time, he could lose his life.
Goldar: Which will you choose? Come on, Jason.
[ It’s not even a choice. With a tortured look at Goldar, Jason follows Zack out, reunites with his friends, and moves to save Tommy. After killing the shapeshifting Cyclops, who’d been prolonging the battle with Tommy on purpose to burn up his remaining powers. The Rangers teleport back to the Command center, and Shellee promptly begins talking over everything.]
Shellee: Yeah, I was reading this earlier. The space witch set up some magic thing to steal the Green Ranger’s powers, but Tommy gave his coin to Jason and lost his Ranger abilities.
Tammee: You know, a lot of this is kind of revolving around Tommy.
Shellee: What can I say? It’s like Amp plays second fiddle whenever he shows up. The guy’s got charisma, a memorable entry, cool powers, and the villains hate him more than just about everyone. It’s like the only time anything important in Amp’s life happens as a result of Tommy. Otherwise, it’s just weekly monster battles.
Tammee: We’ll have to find some way of editing that down some and making him seem cooler on his own.
Shellee: Yeah. Honestly, this is really about it as far as things go. We’ve got hours more footage of him fighting more and more monsters, but only one fight really gets big. Otherwise, his life is just… Super repetitive.
Tammee: Who could have thought that a guy who fights monsters could be so difficult to talk about?
Shellee: Whatever. We’ve got a week to figure this out. Maybe by then Amp will have come out of wherever the Legion’s keeping him.
Tammee: Yeah, I just hate putting off projects. We’ve got three more recordings tomorrow alone, remember? I-what?
[They pause, then stand, laughing, and wave someone onscreen. Janitorial staff.]
Shellee: Is it that late already? Oh Grife, we’re so sorry. Let’s get out of your way. Hey, can you do us a favor when you’re done?
Janitor: Sure thing.
Shellee: Would you mind taking the data crystal here and putting it on Siobhan’s desk when you make the rounds here? We’ve got some things stored on there we need to talk over with her and I don’t want to forget anything. Just put it in the ‘in’ box?
[The custodian nods. Shellee and Tammee lean in to kiss him on the cheeks, prompting a laugh, and they go their separate ways. He spends about fifteen minutes scrubbing and straightening the room before reaching for the camera and it all cuts to black.]
Shellee: I'm Shellee Star! [That would be the pink one.]
Tammee: And I'm Tammee Tim! [That would be the blue one.]
Shellee: Welcome the popular, ongoing investigations of Legion Watch: Legionnaire Legacies!
Tammee: Not all heroes are created equal. Nor are all heroes treated as they deserve.
[She pauses, waiting for Shellee to take over, but Shellee's busy taking some pills. The overlay's marked them as Rings of Saturn Titan-Strength Migraine Reducers™, available for cheap at any reputable pharmacy.]
Tammee: Ahem. And so today we examine a hero who hasn't quite gotten the reputation he might like. Presenting... Amp!
Shellee: Born in Angel Grove, California in 1977, Jason Lee Scott, known to us in the future as Amp, grew up a shy, timid boy from a middle-class family. With parents who loved him and supported him... Ugh.
Tammee: You okay?
Shellee: Sorry. Just a bit of a headache. Had a conference with Siobhan earlier and you know how loud she can get in your head? Just give me a second.
Tammee: Three, two, one...
Shellee: Born in Angel Grove, California in 1977, Jason Lee Scott, known to us in the future as Amp, grew up a shy, timid boy from a middle-class family. With parents who loved him and supported him, Jason was still a bit of an outcast.
[Cue pictures of a shy, quiet young boy watching everyone else play games.]
Tammee: Fortunately, he found something he could pour his heart into, something that gave back just as much as he put into it.
[The same young boy, eyes wide, watching a karate class. The instructor notices him watching, and comes over with a friendly smile. The scene transitions to Jason in a white uniform, nervous, but giving it his all. There's an honest-to-god montage as he struggles to break a board, but slowly fills out over the years, growing taller, bulkier, more confident and outgoing. Instead of trying not to hurt his hand on a board, he's breaking bricks for an audience. Instead of trying to hide in the back of the group, he's teaching groups of students on his own. And, instead of being alone at recess, he's seen laughing with a group of friends, marked as Zack, Trini, Kimberly, and Billy.
He's almost never alone now, save for his 3 A.M. jogs. He's seen sparring with Zack, who fights with his own hip hopkido, going through slow motion tai chi exercises with Trini, pretending to be Kimberley's boyfriend at parties so other guys will leave her alone and let her have fun, and staring down a pair of bullies, Bulk and Skull, who interrupt his cram sessions with Billy.]
Shellee: Treating others with respect, Jason earned theirs. The bonds he'd forged with his friends were practically unbreakable, and almost everyone who knew him would trust him with just about anything. If his life stayed on this track, he'd probably end up opening a dojo and spreading his love for martial arts to a new generation of children.
Tammee: Instead, fate took a hand. Imprisoned on the Moon for ten thousand years, the Empress of Evil, Rita Repulsa, was stirring.
[Footage shows two astronauts fiddling with a space dumpster, opening it. Suddenly, balls of light flash out, forming a quartet of monsters. They're labeled Baboo, Squatt, Finster, and Goldar. After some prompting, Rita herself rises from the dumpster, stretching out with a joyful shriek.]
Finster: Oh, it's good to be out after ten thousand years.
Baboo: Here, your evilness. Let me help you.
Rita: Out of my way, monkey face!
[She pushes past him, then whirls, jabbing her wand at the dumpster she'd been trapped in. Energy flashes out, destroying it. The two astronauts watching cry out and flee over a hill.]
Rita: Aw, don't leave! You'll miss my coming out party! That's when I destroy the nearest planet!
[She glances up towards the Earth and cackles, joined by her lackeys. Tammee and Shellee are cackling too, but for a very different reason.]
Tammee: Oh my Grife that dress!
Shellee: Didn’t you wear that at Carnivale two years ago?
Tammee: …Parts of it. [She coughs.]
Shellee: I told you your tailor’s sense of fashion was twelve thousand years out of date.
Tammee: Stop distracting the viewers with old dates and get back to Amp’s story.
Robot: Oh no! This is the big one! I just know it!
Tubular Dude: Calm down, Alpha. It’s Rita. She’s escaped and she’s attacking the planet.
Alpha 5: Ai-yi-yi, what do we do?
Head Man: Teleport to us five overemotional and overbearing humans.
Alpha 5: No! Not that! Not teenagers!
Blue Man Group’s Reserve Member: That’s correct, Alpha.
Alpha 5: I was afraid of that.
[The scene zooms back to Jason and his four friends, struggling to remain standing before they’re teleported to the dark, starry Command Center. They pick themselves up and glance around, exploring cautiously. One gets the feeling that Alpha may have screwed Zordon on the ‘overemotional and overbearing’ part.]
Kim: Isn’t exactly the mall, is it?
Billy: This place is magnificent!
Zack: I don’t get it, how’d we end up here?
Trini: I just want to know where ‘here’ is.
Billy: Maybe the answer’s in these controls?
Alpha 5: No, don’t touch that!
[The little robot does a prat fall, prompting everyone to swarm around him.]
Billy: A fully sentient, multifunctional automaton! Never seen anything like it! Whoa.
[In her overlay, Shellee takes a long slug of something alcoholic enough to have fumes distorting the air above it. Tammee gives her a Look.]
Shellee: We’re officially on vacation hours. And if we have to deal with people who talk like that, Auntie Shellee is gonna need some amplification of her own.
Tammee: [Sigh.] Pass the bottle.
[The scene continues in that vein. The Wizard of Oz appears and announces himself as Zordon, helpfully expositing that he’s caught in a time warp. He reveals the threats to the Ranger’s world, the same evil sorceress from before. ‘Rita Repulsa’.]
Tammee: Do you think she’s evil because that’s her name or do you think that she got that name by being evil?
Shellee: She’s not that repulsive. I mean, she could probably use some syrup for that throat of hers, but…
Tammee: Are we going to do this the entire time?
Shellee: Only until we see Goldar in a pair of tight, pleather pants and a mesh top.
Tammee: Ugh.
[Thankfully, Zordon interrupts them.]
Zordon: You have been chosen to form an elite team to battle Rita. Each of you will be given access to extraordinary powers drawn from the ancient creatures you call dinosaurs.
Kimberly: Dinosaurs?
Zordon: Behold! [Golden coins and dark grey holders, the Power Morphers, appear in a flash on their belt buckles.] The keys to your power.
Zack: Whoa! [He holds his, with an engraved Mastodon on front, up.] What’re these?
Zordon: Those are your Power Morphers. When in danger, raise them to the sky, calling the name of your dinosaur.
Shellee: Spoilers, they never raise them to the sky. These kids don’t follow instructions real well.
Zordon: -And you will morph into a formidable fighting force known to one and all as the Power Rangers.
Kimberly: Morph?
Billy: Metamorphosis.
Trini: That means to change.
[Kimberly makes a face, as if to go ‘That’s legit’, and Zordon continues on.]
Zordon: As Power Rangers, you will have access to a universe of power and you will have access to a fleet of fighting machines called “Zords”.
Tammee: Subtle.
Shellee: He’s a giant head in a tube. Let him have some moments of ego.
Zordon: Jason, you are bold and powerful. You will control the Tyrannosaurus Dinozord.
Tammee: I can already hear the haters start up their ranting, but ask yourself: Would a normal person be considered ‘bold and powerful’ when compared to the rest of the Legion? Remember the early mission reports. He may be underpowered, but he’s definitely done more with less when compared to some of the other Legionnaires we’ve seen.
Shellee: You’re talking over the head honcho there, he’s not done yet.
Tammee: Let me summarize. The pink one who doesn’t understand half the words she hears is ‘smart’ so she gets a bird, the black one gets an elephant, the blue one gets a horned tricycle, and the yellow one gets a housecat. They turn into a giant robot. Look, I won a championship in the robot fighting circuit five years ago-
Shellee: So you never tire of reminding us whenever it comes up…
Tammee: Like I was saying, I’ve had experience with all kinds of designs. Combiners are always a terrible idea. You get a lot of power when you connect them all together, but they’re fragile when they come together and-
Shellee: And you can learn more when you read her autobiography. Now back to Amp.
Tammee: I thought you said you skipped my autobiography.
Shellee: I was mad. Shut up.
[Selling the teens on piloting giant robots isn’t going very well, either. They walk out, with Jason being the last holdout. He stays in the Command Center, arms crossed, until Zack calls him again. Then, reluctantly, he turns and leaves.
The teens wander back through the desert. Bitching about the walk. A lot. After a while, Jason cuts in.]
Jason: Guys, we shouldn’t have left. I mean, he chose us to save the world! I say we do it.
Trini: Do you really think we can?
Zack: Hey guys, I mean, you really don’t even know what you’re talking about. We were talking to a giant floating head!
[Suddenly, lasers rip through the sky, narrowly avoiding the teens. And, with the explosions, there are ugly grey monster-men. The Putty Patrol. They attack the panicked teens and, well. It’s not the best showing they could have. The Rangers end up in a heap while the grey monsters dance around them.]
Kimberly: This day is just too weird.
Trini: What do we do now?
Jason: Zordon said these Power Morphers would give us power. Let’s do it!
Shellee: Wait, wait, wait. Where’d that electric guitar come from?
Tammee: I don’t know. The editors said it was already there. What I want to know is why they’re all posing!
Shellee: Forget the posing, what kind of world just has spontaneous guitars out of nowhere?
Tammee: Maybe it’s tied to his power source and that’s why he hasn’t been doing anything like this since arriving here?
Shellee: Maybe it’s like dancing? They suck if they don’t have a beat to beat their enemies with?
Tammee: Grife, we’re going to have to just re-record this entire episode, aren’t we?
Shellee: Probably. It’s not like we’re getting overtime pay here.
[It’s at this point that Rita shrieks and hurls her wand at the Earth, causing a crackle of energy that causes Goldar to grow massive.]
Tammee: Looks like her monster’s not the only thing that’s growing.
Shellee: I wonder how hard she had to chuck that staff to get it to the Earth that quick? I mean, the earthquake looks like it could be magic, but that throw looks normal.
Tammee: Well, it’s probably all magic. That took… what, three? Four seconds to hit the Earth? We’re looking at somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand miles per second.
Shellee: Wow. That would kill a city, wouldn’t it?
Tammee: Orbital weapons are no joke. There’s a reason most planets have banned them. But given that she never just uses that to kill the Rangers, I’m guessing she just speeds it up using magic. What do you think, some sort of inertia-less movement?
Shellee: What, by transforming her staff’s mass into something imaginary? It couldn’t be a perfect reduction or else it would be moving at the speed of light. Then again, that staff’s moving somewhere around a third to half the speed of light already, but…
Tammee: Let’s not fall into the trap of overexamining magic. I mean, look at this, we’ve already missed the entire fight.
Shellee: Ah, Goldar just quit when things were getting hard. Talk about an anti-climax.
Tammee: Guess getting bigger didn’t make it better.
[When they finally stop chattering, Zordon has the Rangers gathered in front of him, praising them for their handling of Goldar.]
Zordon: Congratulations on a job well done. Now that you have become Power Rangers, you must follow three basic rules or lose the protection of the Power. First: Never use your power for personal gain.
Shellee: That tracks. Sources show that Amp regularly donates most of his Legion-earned paychecks to charity. The rest of it apparently goes toward food and renting properties so that his teammates can go on vacation.
Zordon: Second: Never escalate a battle unless Rita forces you. And finally, keep your identity a secret. No one may know you’re a Power Ranger.
Tammee: Well, we kinda messed the carpet on that one, didn’t we?
Shellee: Sprock it, it’s not like this is going out on the air anyway. We’ll just stick to the script next time. Maybe when it does we can do like Karina had us do and censor everyone’s faces.
Tammee: Man. She was fun. I miss her. D’you still have that picture?
Shellee: Yeah. I’d kind of hoped we could bring her on as a co-host.
Tammee: Forget it. She wouldn’t have agreed to do any of the ones that we didn’t get permission for.
Shellee: The things we do for a paycheck…
[While they’re chatting, the video feed has the teens joking in the Command Center, then putting their hands in a circle, leaping into the air and crying out ‘Power Rangers’. On seeing this, both of the hosts burst into laughter, shaking their heads.]
Shellee: Wow. Wow. I thought people only did that in cheesy sports movies from twenty years ago! Good grief.
Tammee: That is possibly the lamest thing I’ve seen all week.
Shellee: Worse than that clip someone sent of Doubletime running into walls?
Tammee: At least that one was set to music!
[The two of them are so busy chattering, and refilling their glasses, that they’ve failed to notice an overlong montage of Rita hurling her staff in an overlong event that was probably supposed to lead to a lame pun if they’d stuck to the script. They trail off and watch some more, shaking their heads.]
Shellee: How many monsters did they face?
Tammee: Not counting the Putties? About thirty-five over the course of forty weeks. Give or take a few for resurrections and doubling up.
Shellee: You know, now that I know it was a whole Rule that he couldn’t reveal his identity, that makes sense, but I can’t help but wonder how seriously people would take him if they knew he was dealing with that. Monsters on a weekly basis? The Legion's stuff must be like a vacation to him!
Tammee: I almost hope they don’t fix the situation soon, he deserves as much of a break as he can get from all that.
Shellee: So you think they’re gonna handle Chronoblivion? Honest opinion.
Tammee: They’re the Legion. You?
Shellee: I agree.
[They glance off-screen to watch the monitors for a moment. Jason’s with Kimberly and Zack, looking rather depressed.]
Shellee: So what’s going on here?
Tammee: Oh, right. Well, he’s feeling depressed because he couldn’t break the school record or something like that.
Shellee: What was the record?
Tammee: I think about a thousand and ten reps?
Shellee: He’s embarrassed about not meeting that? I think my arms would fall off before I hit the hundred and fifty mark! How far did he get?
Tammee: About a thousand and nine.
Shellee: Well, that’s pretty close. I’m sure if he’d pushed-
Tammee: Twice. He started over about an hour after his first shot.
Shellee: …Good Grife, what sort of meathead are we dealing with?
Tammee: Yeah, later in the afternoon he finally breaks the record. Spoilers.
Shellee: “Oh no, I’m a quitter”, says the guy who does three thousand reps in one day.
Tammee: Yeah, the third bit happened after he fought Goldar and a stripper, too.
[King Sphinx and Goldar, slashing at the Red Ranger, fighting them solo, with their staff and sword plays out on the screen.]
Tammee: Look at that nass. That’s plush.
Shellee: The kind of bubble butt that you could sink your fingers into.
Tammee: I’d like to see him take a twirl around that pole.
[As they chatter, the scene shifts a few times. Jason and his team fighting monsters. Going to school. Dealing with bullies, largely by tricking them into humiliating themselves. Teaching karate classes for children and teens. Doing homework. Picking up litter around the park. Helping set up the Juice Bar for things like parties and special events.
More than once, Shellee and Tammee devolve into shrieking laughter at how the Ranger teens act, especially whenever they pose right before a fight. Eventually, Tammee starts making mock poses of her own, wielding her datapad like a gun, and Shellee's reduced to tears. Finally, wiping at her eyes, she sits up and coughs.]
Shellee: So are we just not going to address the whole thing where Amp’s killed about three dozen people here?
Tammee: It’s in the script for this episode. Apparently Rita’s monsters are all artificial life forms. One of her employees crafts them from clay, then passes them through some kind of ‘Monstermatic’ machine. Whoosh, instant monster.
Shellee: So… They’ve got personalities but they aren’t really sentient?
Tammee: That’s my guess. Primitive robots, like the Metal Men of ancient times. But made of magic and clay.
Shellee: And that massive sword that always flies out of space?
Tammee: Magic. Like the staff. Same with how they manage to keep the robots in volcanos. I wonder how much more respect he’s get from the fans if he just dropped a giant robot on everything?
Shellee: You saw the footage of him having that swordfight. And him leading the charge against Harrow. If that didn’t win fans over, nothing will.
Tammee: We’ll have to find some way to hammer that in, I guess. Rewrite the Legacy script some. He’s definitely got some balls on him, that’s for sure. You notice that whenever some monster shows up, he’s never worried for more than a few minutes?
Shellee: We can’t lead with that, people would just say he’s too dumb to be scared. And it’s kind of hard to tell if he’s winning because the Rangers are that strong or because the monsters are just that weak.
Tammee: How about we focus on battle smarts, then? I mean, looking back on it, they’re facing against two hundred foot monsters on a weekly basis and… How many casualty reports do the Rangers have?
Shellee: Hold on, let me check… Huh. Zero? We can work with that.
Tammee: So we ditch some of the growth footage sequences and the other fight scenes. That’s just gratuitous time filler, anyway. Edit in more footage pointing out how the Rangers always end up isolating the monsters in a nearby quarry, the city parks, or, when they get big, near a batch of empty warehouses or out in the wilderness. We can point out, I don’t know. ‘Their teamwork was on such a high level that they didn’t even need to communicate to command the battlefield’?
Shellee: Needs more punch, but we’ll kick it around some. Maybe one of the interns will have an idea.
Tammee: So, are there any major events we need to cover?
Shellee: Well, there’s the Green Ranger. He’s pretty neat, the kids will probably like him.
Tammee: Nass. He’s galivey and you know it.
Shellee: The last thing we need is another ‘but it’s plorgo’ argument. Let’s not go there.
[Shellee leans over and adjusts the footage, fast forwarding through easily twenty minutes of footage. Mostly fighting. When she comes to a stop, Jason and another teenager in green, noted as ‘Tommy Oliver’ on an overlay, are in the middle of a martial arts competition. They move swiftly and furiously, displaying some high-level moves, but Tommy pulls ahead after Jason steps out of bounds. It’s only through some furious footwork that Jason manages to score even a tie.]
Shellee: So, this new kid shows up and it turns out that he’s real good at martial arts. Rita Repulsa decides that he’s the perfect person to give the Green Ranger powers to, because apparently she’s had the coin all along and didn’t decide to just… I don’t know, find an actual martial arts master? An adult? A trained assassin?
Tammee: I mean, Goldar’s more powerful than a single Ranger, so I can see why she didn’t waste it on him. Wouldn’t make him much stronger, would it?
Shellee: Right. Anyway, so Tommy gets mind controlled and turned into the Green Ranger. He trashes the Command Center, destroying the communications and teleportation equipment, causing one of Jason’s friends to reveal what’s sure to be Brainiac 5’s favorite part of the program.
[Yup. It’s a flying car, all right.]
Shellee: And I don’t know if Rita’s amping his power any or if he’s just that much better, but I haven’t seen a beating that bad since news footage of Judge Beeny assisting the Science Police with a drug raid went viral.
[It’s… pretty bad.The Green Ranger jumps into the Megazord and starts slapping the team around while they’re still inside, eventually just throwing them through the window and all the way to the ground. They pick themselves up from the two hundred foot fall, and he jumps down to join them, treating the assembled Rangers like they’re chumps. The only one who comes close to standing up to him is the Red Ranger, and even he gets manhandled, culminating in the Green Ranger firing a straight up energy ball at the team. In the aftermath, they’re teleported back to the command Center.
Sometime when the camera wasn’t on it, it got trashed. Zordon’s missing, Alpha’s glitching out repeatedly, and wires and panels are strewn all over the place. After Alpha shuts down again, the Rangers are left alone.]
Trini: What’re we going to do?
Jason: Prepare ourselves. We don’t have Zordon to help us this time.
Zack: We’re gonna have to do it on our own.
Jason: I think we’ve only made it through round one of what’s about to be a major battle.
Tammee: Sweet sprock, that was brutal. This Green Ranger would be kind of cool, if he wasn’t a bad guy.
Shellee: Right? Give him a TV show and I could watch him beat people up all day. Anyway, the Green Ranger has a pretty big advantage. The Rangers don’t know who he is, but the villains have known who the Rangers are from day one. This lets him get the drop on Amp, banishing him to the Dark Dimension.
[Jason and Goldar square off against each other in a dark room filled with thick mist, and it’s immediately obvious that Jason is outclassed by the golden gladiator. Goldar spends the entire time toying with him, slinging his morpher to the slinging him around one-handed, and shrugging off Jason’s best shots. Eventually, Jason is forced to hide by lying on the ground, while Goldar searches for him by stabbing the ground every few feet, taking his time. One shot has him bury the point of his sword into the stone floor next to Jason’s head, then step over him to continue the search.
At one point, Jason finally has enough, standing up and screaming before finally knocking Goldar onto his rear with a flying kick. It doesn’t do him any good, however, because Goldar soon sends him sprawling again and is poised to deliver the final blow when… the Green Ranger intervenes and announces that Rita’s going to allow him to kill Jason.]
Tammee: Grife. Talk about luck.
Shellee: Oh, it gets better. So, Amp is returned to his friends, but they still don’t know Tommy’s the Green Ranger. We can definitely play that for drama. Anyway, skipping over some drama, Rita calls in an old friend, Scorpina, who manages to fight the Rangers to a stand-still, then sets it up so that Scorpina, Goldar, and the Green Ranger all fight the Megazord at once in giant form. And then Rita causes an eclipse, blocking all light from reaching the Earth and crippling the Megazord. Ironically, the Zords are green, they run on solar energy.
Tammee: There are worse energy sources. I knew a guy who used a windmill.
[The scene is… Well. Ugly. The Megazord would struggle with these odds in the best of conditions, but cut off from its power source, it doesn’t stand a chance. Despite their best efforts, the trio practically pulls it apart, and the fury of their attacks rips open a crevice in the Earth that the Megazord falls into, breaking apart and sinking into the lava. The Rangers, obviously, make it out.]
Tammee: Yeesh. If I didn’t know that he’d survived that…
Shellee: Right.
[Smash cut to the Rangers sitting in the Command Center, various looks of dismay and resignation crossing their faces.]
Kimberly: The Power Rangers are history.
Trini: It’s over. Rita’s won.
Jason: Rangers, we can’t give up.
Kimberly: Why shouldn’t we? Zordon’s gone! The Megazord’s been destroyed! We’re outmatched.
Alpha 5: Billy, what are the odds of bringing Zordon back?
Billy: Less than 10%.
Jason: Isn’t the smallest chance of victory enough of a reason for us to keep on fighting? The world needs us, Rangers.
[Tammee stands up, jabbing her finger at the screen.]
Tammee: Why the hell is our script ignoring that? We’re gonna have to rewrite that nonsense. This is it!
Shellee: That’s exactly why he’s Legion material. If we can hammer that through to the fans…
Tammee: As might trash as we’re talking, anyone who can get sprocked like that and still stand up and fight, we gotta highlight that. Sprock the writers.
Shellee: Whoa, whoa, whoa. We’ll have to be careful about that. He got screwed, but it’s not worth us losing our jobs.
Tammee: …Point. So what’re we looking at next?
Shellee: Right, so Zordon manages to come back thanks to Billy, and he reveals that the Zords teleported to safety and initiated some auto-repair functions.
Tammee: You’d need them for a setup like that.
Shellee: Anyway, it turns out that the Green Ranger has this really neat dagger that can be played like a flute. And Rita gives him a giant dragon Zord that he can control with it. And that’s his downfall.
Tammee: What kind of idiot sets up their giant robot to be controlled by a musical instrument?
Shellee: Less robotics snobbery, more listening, okay?
Tammee: Sorry. Anyway, keep going.
Shellee: Just watch the footage. I’m going to get another bottle.
[The Dragonzord wreaks havoc in the city, wrecking the docks, destroying a factory, and blasting the Rangers with missiles when they appear on a rooftop. Finally, Jason summons his Tyrannosaurus, and lures the Dragonzord out of the city. The two robots are far too equally matched, and Jason takes advantage of knocking the Dragonzord down to form the Megazord with everyone else. From there, the fight is entirely one-sided, culminating in the Dragonzord being picked up and thrown through a mountain.]
Tammee: That’s when you know it’s time to cash in and go home.
[The Red Ranger takes the time to leap out of the Megazord and take on the Green. Whether it’s because he’s fired up, filled with hope, or knows this is his last shot, Jason does better this time. He still falls short compared to Tommy, whose powers and weapons allow him more shots in, until Jason manages to disarm him and destroy the Sword of Darkness that had been turning him evil.
At this point, Shellee returns and starts talking over the recording. probably a good thing, though the subtitles will still cover everything.]
Shellee: So, long story short, he joins up and Jason’s got himself a new boyfriend. At least, according to the script. Attitudes towards sexuality in that age were pret-ty primitive, and we’ll leave it at that.
[More scenes flash by. Jason and Tommy working out together. Sparring. Sometimes arguing. The Rangers, more powerful than ever, take on Rita’s monsters with more ease than before. After a while, it becomes clear that Shellee and Tammee have stopped paying attention.]
Shellee: I’m just saying, if they’d given Goldar Green Ranger powers, then we’d have proof!
Tammee: I don’t care how tight the spandex is! There’s no way!
Shellee: What, your little dog-man is that much better?
Tammee: At least Finster has class. He’d wine and dine you. Goldar’s just a thug with a big sword!
Shellee: Trust me, darling, sometimes a big sword goes a long way.
[This episode really shouldn’t have been aired. After a good twenty minutes of bickering in this vein, while the screens show the Red and Green Ranger battling against Titanus, the Ultrazord, among other monsters. Eventually, Tammee glances up.]
Tammee: Wait, what? What’s wrong with everyone?
[Jason’s in the Dark Dimension, squaring off against Goldar while Zack pleads with him to leave.]
Zack: Jason! You missed your chance.
Jason: What’re you doing here? Go back!
Zack: Tommy’s in trouble.
Goldar: You’re all in trouble!
Jason: But he’ll lose his powers!
Zack: If we don’t get to him in time, he could lose his life.
Goldar: Which will you choose? Come on, Jason.
[ It’s not even a choice. With a tortured look at Goldar, Jason follows Zack out, reunites with his friends, and moves to save Tommy. After killing the shapeshifting Cyclops, who’d been prolonging the battle with Tommy on purpose to burn up his remaining powers. The Rangers teleport back to the Command center, and Shellee promptly begins talking over everything.]
Shellee: Yeah, I was reading this earlier. The space witch set up some magic thing to steal the Green Ranger’s powers, but Tommy gave his coin to Jason and lost his Ranger abilities.
Tammee: You know, a lot of this is kind of revolving around Tommy.
Shellee: What can I say? It’s like Amp plays second fiddle whenever he shows up. The guy’s got charisma, a memorable entry, cool powers, and the villains hate him more than just about everyone. It’s like the only time anything important in Amp’s life happens as a result of Tommy. Otherwise, it’s just weekly monster battles.
Tammee: We’ll have to find some way of editing that down some and making him seem cooler on his own.
Shellee: Yeah. Honestly, this is really about it as far as things go. We’ve got hours more footage of him fighting more and more monsters, but only one fight really gets big. Otherwise, his life is just… Super repetitive.
Tammee: Who could have thought that a guy who fights monsters could be so difficult to talk about?
Shellee: Whatever. We’ve got a week to figure this out. Maybe by then Amp will have come out of wherever the Legion’s keeping him.
Tammee: Yeah, I just hate putting off projects. We’ve got three more recordings tomorrow alone, remember? I-what?
[They pause, then stand, laughing, and wave someone onscreen. Janitorial staff.]
Shellee: Is it that late already? Oh Grife, we’re so sorry. Let’s get out of your way. Hey, can you do us a favor when you’re done?
Janitor: Sure thing.
Shellee: Would you mind taking the data crystal here and putting it on Siobhan’s desk when you make the rounds here? We’ve got some things stored on there we need to talk over with her and I don’t want to forget anything. Just put it in the ‘in’ box?
[The custodian nods. Shellee and Tammee lean in to kiss him on the cheeks, prompting a laugh, and they go their separate ways. He spends about fifteen minutes scrubbing and straightening the room before reaching for the camera and it all cuts to black.]
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