Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2

Episode 20

If the last episode of Go! Go! Loser Ranger! had me feeling like we were suddenly skipping whole episodes in between important scenes. This week, we may as well be leapfrogging over the top of entire seasons. “Come and Join the Monsters!” starts on shaky enough ground with an extended battle against the Monster Protection Society that we've barely even been introduced to, and things only unravel more from there. I hate to invoke the specter of purely hypothetical fandom memes in times like this, but this is starting to remind me of that made-up second season to The Promised Neverland that everyone likes to joke about when describing anime that completely crapped the bed and threw out all of the source material's potential with a rushed adaptation.

To give the episode some credit, the battle against the Monster Protection Society is…fine? Let's go with “fine.” It's always fun to see Hisui kick some more ass, and the concept of an underground foil to the Dragon Keeper's organizations is a sound one. It's a shame that none of the characters, except for Angel's dad, can make any lasting impression. While I was willing to give the show some slack over its shoddy production values during the Time-Loop Arc, that was because I was genuinely interested in the story and characters. G!G!LR! has lost me on that front, so I cannot help but be distracted by the wooden animation and lazy storyboarding that sucks most of the fun out of this fight by the time all is said and done.

Mediocre animation is the least of our concerns because the script almost completely falls apart once we awkwardly cut to the Monster Society and the Dragon Keepers having their little diplomatic conference. This is a theoretically interesting scenario to take place, but it has no business happening twenty minutes of runtime after the Monster Society was even introduced. If all that came of this was a standoff that established the enmity between the two groups, we might still be all well and good. It's a storyline that you could at least squeeze a half-dozen episodes of solid misadventures out of, right?

Apparently not. Just like last week, this is where Loser Ranger defies conventional wisdom and just crams an ungodly amount of reveals and story beats into barely ten minutes of a single episode. Allow me to run it down for you:

• The Dragon Keepers outmaneuver the MPS by revealing Angel and her father's ties to the Monster Cult fiasco that also ruined the lives of Hibiki and his sister, the Pink Dragon Keeper.

• The Keepers then shock the world by revealing their true identities, which turns into a double-shocking twist when we all learn that the new Red Keeper is just the Old Red Keeper, who is not dead?

• Before we have time to process any of that, Red Keeper ruins everything by maiming Angel's father on live TV

•The person recording this, by the way, was Hwalipon, the Horse Boss Monster, who has been in cahoots with the MSP this whole time.

•The MSP becomes a venerated institution followed by thousands of new fans overnight, and the entire Dragon Keeper organization is destroyed just as fast. Fighter D's mission has seemingly been completed, and all without him doing much of anything whatsoever…

•Except wait a minute, Hwalipon and the MSP are super evil for real, and they're going to use a bunch of neon-green Reanimator Juice to transform everyone into an unstoppable monster army.

•Except for Angel, I guess, because she's half-monster herself, whatever that means.

•Also, the Dragon Keepers might be the “good guys” in this scenario now, after all, on account of the evil monster army.

Do you see what I mean about this pacing? I could imagine a universe where a lot of these beats make for great, dramatic payoffs for a finale episode…if this were Season 3 of G!G!LR. Instead, we're stuck with this bizarre mishmash of interesting ideas and mangled execution that more resembles a collection of animated Wikipedia episode summaries. Is there any chance for the anime to recover from this?

Rating:

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.