Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2

Episode 22

You remember last week, when I said that Fighter D was starting to feel like a side-character in his own show? I didn't know how right I was, because this week our boy doesn't show up for one single frame. He's just gone. Poof. A protagonist in absentia. In his place, “A Special Bond ~Hibiki and Sesera~” offers us a long-overdue check-in with one of the characters who got this whole story started back in Season 1, and the results are…well…they sure are something. Yes, indeed.

Let's start with the positive and give Go, Go, Loser Ranger! kudos for stepping up its game on the animation front. I've been very critical of how hard the show's production values have fallen off ever since the season lost the plot back around Episode 7, but we've got some decent-looking cuts of animation here. One of them is even pretty good! There's not a lot to write home about in what I will call the first two “segments” of this trifurcated story, so far as spectacle goes, but it's far from terrible. The final segment, which is where Hibiki and Sesera take center stage, is the one that manages to impress with its slick choreography and impactful use of visceral violence. It's the first time all season where I've been properly thrilled by an action scene, frankly, and that's no small feat for the animators to have accomplished.

Unfortunately, for as good of a job as the Hibiki & Sesera segment does in the visual department, the story doesn't work. For one, it's not given anywhere near enough time to breathe, since the episode also spends a lot of time catching us up on Komachi's whole deal with the new Blue Ranger, along with a frankly pointless diversion to fight against Nü-Magatia. These are, once again, sequences that probably deserved to serve as the climaxes of their own episodes, but instead they end up taking away from whatever build-up Hibiki's grand return to the story might have had.

Okay, “grand” is overselling it by a whole lot, but I don't think it is crazy to have expected Loser Ranger to do something with this character, considering how long he's spent lurking around the edges of the narrative. I have no idea how it worked in the manga, though I have to imagine it worked better than whatever the heck the Loser Ranger anime was trying to do this week. Here is a complete summary of Hibiki's entire storyline since he handed his identity over to Ranger D, up to and including this episode: First, he spent an entire season-and-a-half just wandering around in that Organization XIII-looking cloak of his. Then, after the show put in all of this effort foreshadowing some role that Hibiki would have to play once his quest for justice began to bear fruit, he was unceremoniously kidnapped and imprisoned by the monster protection society. After weeks of accomplishing even more nothing, Fighter XX saw fit to let Hibiki out for some reason related to convincing him that he is going to be entirely useless at solving any of this mess that humanity has found itself caught up in. Finally, despite knowing full well that he has no powers and no ability to accomplish anything useful, Hibiki runs out into the middle of the battlefield and immediately gets his sister, the Pink Dragon Keeper, killed by Hwalipon.

I'm serious: It is one-hundred percent his fault she “dies.” The girl turns out to have incredibly overpowered regeneration abilities that allow her to even survive getting her head cut off, and yet she ends up having to “sacrifice herself” to save Hibiki after he trots out into the middle of her fight and gets cut to ribbons. This culmination of Hibiki's story is such a ludicrously stupid and sudden development that I paused the episode for a few minutes because I could not stop laughing.

Of course, my riotous laughter only continued when the show tried to play this moment off as Serious Anime Drama and had Hibiki scream that he would kill Hwalipon and avenge his sister. I don't know what is sillier: The fact that Hibiki could get so consumed with rage over the most egregious self-own I've seen in a long time, or the fact that Hwalipon is dead after only properly existing as a major villain for maybe two-and-a-half episodes. Or maybe he will be back next week! Unfortunately, it is difficult to care very much either way, at this point.

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Go, Go, Loser Ranger! is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+ on Sundays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.