When foolish treasure hunters accidentally release ancient demons from their 3,000 year old prison, the only people who can stop them are the secret government agency known as Lightspeed. To help with this endeavour, Lightspeed recruits five promising young adults to be their own team of Power Rangers.
Lightspeed Rescue actually took some chances with the material. For the first time the Power Rangers are said to be the invention of modern technology instead of ancient magic, the Rangers don't have secret identities, and this season marks the first use of an entirely original character - the Titanium Ranger was not actually in the original Sentai series at all and was made up entirely for the Western release. They even made their own uniform for him and assigned him his own Zord (the Solarzord, which in the original material was remote-controlled.)
Then again, in a way their breaking the formula really only served to enforce the formula. To this point every series of Power Rangers had included a "sixth ranger" who wasn't a part of the original team but joined later and had stronger powers than the first five - the Green/White Ranger from the original series, Gold Ranger from Zeo, etc. This would have been the first Power Rangers series (assuming you've managed to drink enough to forget Alien Rangers) without a sixth ranger storyline, had the Titanium Ranger not been added.
Still, creating a completely original Ranger for the first time was a ballsy move in its own way. They moved outside of their comfort zone and I give them credit for that.
The Rangers and their interactions were also pretty good. They started to fall back into the idealized frame of the first series, but this time around that's actually justified. In contrast to the original, where Zordon's request was "overbearing and overemotional humans" (famously shortened to "teenagers with attitude" in the opening sequence) here the rangers are actually hand-picked for their skills, not their attitudes. Lightspeed wanted ideal Rangers and that's what they got. In all the Rangers and their allies are pretty fun to watch and fairly well written.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the villains. They're boring and one-note, rarely legitimately threatening, and with not a single one of them actually coming across as sympathetic or interesting. They're not the worst in the franchise... but they're also not even remotely at the level we've come to expect coming off of In Space and Lost Galaxy.
Actually, I take that back. Vypra, played by Jennifer L. Yen, WAS one of the worst in the franchise. She was smoking hot, sure, and I suspect that was her primary reason for being there. Unfortunately, her acting talent was somewhere on par with an anesthetized Will Shatner, with a bad habit of misemphasizing words and inserting weird pauses into her dialog.
So what do I think of this series? I know it's gotten a lot of flak, mostly due to it being the first series of the franchise to have nothing to do with the "Zordon Era." I can understand that, but personally it doesn't bother me. Lightspeed Rescue is damn good. It's just a shame about the villains.
KR Rating: [4] GOOD
| PROS: | CONS: |
| + The rangers are really well written. | - Villains are not the best. |
| + Willing to take risks with the source material. | - Vypra is in fact one of the worst. |
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