Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2

Episode 23

I'm pretty sure a lot of us nerdy types have had this experience before: There's that one friend you have that has a favorite movie, or show, or video game, or what have you, and they want to spread the love and get you interested in it. Maybe they sit you down and plop a stack of manga in front of you so you can flip to a bunch of the coolest panels, or they pull up YouTube clips of the best scenes from the show, or they boot up their PlayStation so you can check out the game's opening cutscene. It's cool, you're always down to expand your horizons, and besides, your friend is invested in showing off the media they love. The problem is that they really love this thing, so much so that their desire to make sure you understand its appeal overrides their ability to read some of the polite cues you're trying to give that maybe you're all good, for now. “A few clips!” turns into watching whole episodes' worth of out-of-context videos for what feels like forever. “Just watch me play the opening fight so you can see how the combat works!” becomes several hours of an impromptu Let's Play that you now feel socially obligated to stick around for. You don't know enough about this Cool New Thing to truly “get” it in the way that your friend so desperately hopes that you will, but you politely acknowledge all of the nifty stuff that is getting thrown at you, because, c'mon, it'd be a real bummer to just out-and-out tell your pal that you honestly don't care that much and you'd like to do just about anything else now, please.

If you've been the overeager pal in this scenario, don't sweat it. We've all been there. I know I have certainly trapped my loved ones in an endless Godzilla and Final Fantasy Hyperfixation Death-Spiral on more than one occasion. The point is, when you're the outsider that is being forced to consume way too many details about plots and characters you're only passingly familiar with, it becomes nearly impossible to feel truly invested in the material, no matter how much you'd vibe with it if you had the chance to just absorb it all at your own pace. This back half of Go, Go, Loser Ranger!'s second season has become that to anyone who wasn't already extremely familiar with the source material before the show fell off. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that, so far as being a functional season of television is concerned, Loser Ranger is a lost cause. Still, it's coherent enough to keep up with as an enthusiastic but woefully disjointed advertisement for the manga.

To give this episode credit, the production values have gone up considerably compared even to last week, and we've diverted away from that ridiculous nonsense with Hibiki and his sister to focus on Fighter D and the season's other dozen unresolved plot-threads. None of those plot threads are delivering any satisfying emotional or intellectual impact, but we can at least rest assured knowing that Loser Ranger still remembers that they exist. Small favors, and all of that.

Of the five different directions this story is insisting on dragging us this week, I appreciated Fighter D and Angel's fight the most. I wish that Angel had been allowed to serve as a genuine main character for more than a handful of scattered scenes before the show suddenly decided that she was going to be an emotional fulcrum around which the entire series would pivot, but whatever, we're here now. It's cool and weird that her origin revolves around her dad being such a hopeless Dragon Keeper otaku that he just went and knocked up a Boss Monster so he could sire a new generation of ungodly abominations against nature. More than that, I dig the potential that she has as an ally of Fighter D's who can understand how impossible it feels to try and conquer one world without also being bound by the expectations of another.

When Aizome enters the fight to enact further vengeance on behalf of her deceased Blue Keeper, my feelings become more mixed. On the one hand, you can insert all of my complaints about underdeveloped characterization and crappy pacing ruining what should have been a badass and emotional payoff to multiple seasons of build-up. On the other hand, Aizome eats a Divine Artifact and Cronenberg herself a brand new destructo-arm for her troubles, and I'm not going to lie to you and say I wasn't entertained.

On the truly disappointing end of the spectrum is the way the show pays off the Yumeko cliffhanger from a couple of episodes ago. If Angel is a side-character who has been unceremoniously thrust into center stage without enough preparation, then Yumeko's situation is just the opposite: She feels like a central pillar of the cast of a long-running adventure who got thrown down into the ranks of the occasional guest star, doomed to have her entire storyline slashed out when the inevitable compilation movie comes around. Her self-actualizing act of defiance against the Red Keeper, where she frees all of the clones that have been used to fuel the Divine Artifacts, could have been one of the defining moments of the entire series in an alternate universe. Here, it's an anticlimactic letdown that the show can't hurry past fast enough. What a waste. At least the animation was better this time.

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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.