Ranger Reject – 2 [Go! Fighter D!]

Welcome all, to the first post of the Spring season and the first full-coverage show of 2024! That’s right, I enjoyed Ranger Reject so much that I wanted to promote it to full coverage. Will I be able to keep up with it? When I’m already behind on so much else? Probably not, but by god am I going to try. So without further ado, lets dive into the episode!

First up, lets take a closer look at Ranger Reject’s production. Visually, I still think it’s rather strong. Maybe it doesn’t move the best of the season, and the CGI we get isn’t as well utilized as say… Girls Band Cry. But I think Ranger Reject has a good understanding of color, pacing and posing. Stuff like Red Ranger’s “fight”, the showmanship of it, felt right out of a Super Sentai show, which makes sense considering its roots. My point though is that Ranger Reject is doing a good job of bringing that to animation, of not forgetting where it came from even as it seeks to deconstruct it a bit. Other than that, the OST is pretty hit or miss, often not fitting the scene it plays over. Which makes the OP being pretty great, definitely one of the best of the season, rather surprising.

Diving into the narrative, I continue to really enjoy the almost dystopian setting Ranger Reject has going on. All the propaganda, the indoctrination of new rangers, the downright tyrannical way the Rangers rule over the monsters. You could call it heavy handed, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but Ranger Reject has never truly tried to hide the nature of this world from us and I think it works to drive home the evil of the Dragoons at the top. They know exactly what they are doing, but they put on a kind face about it to fabricate some kind of moral high ground. It actually reminds me of Helldivers 2, which I’ve been playing recently, and the artificial nature of its alien conflicts. The hope is that Ranger Reject hasn’t shown us everything it has, leaving some in reserve to slowly reveal and up the ante as we go.

As for our lead, Fighter D, he spends the episode on a super secret spy mission. I would say this is where Ranger Reject was at its weakest. Not because spy missions are bad, they aren’t. In fact it’s a very good place for Fighter D to begin, he needs intel if he’s going to be taking down the Rangers from the inside. The issue is that Ranger Reject never really gave him a… plan? He’s sort of just stumbling about with no idea where to go or what to do. I wouldn’t call it uncomfortable, but watching someone screw up in such blatantly obvious ways that even a child would know to avoid, especially acting as a person he’s just met and is impersonating with next to no information on, was weird. This feels like it could and should have come later, after he had planned a tad more.

Now to be fair, Fighter D seems like a very impulsive person. In the pilot he decided to publicly stick it to the Rangers without any real thought for the consequences, which the rest of the Monsters then had to suffer, and this week we decides to go on an impromptu impersonation mission. He has no skills, no understanding of humans or human culture, and barely even knows what his own goal is. So to some degree, his actions make sense. However you have to remember that Ranger Reject is a story, it’s written by an author, and they have the choice as to what happens and how a character is written. Just because it makes sense narratively doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good writing. That said, I feel this all may come across a tad harsh. It wasn’t bad. Just the worst part of an otherwise decent episode.

Besides, credit where its due, all of this lead towards Suzukiri, the blond ranger, figuring it out and confronting Fighter D over it. And that was pretty good! The slow build, the hints here and there that she clearly knows something is up, escalating to her directly helping him keep his over, until she finally confronts him on it and demands to join. I thought this was done well, and the impersonation mission fed into this, so that’s another point for Ranger Reject. Anyways, the question now becomes: What does Suzukiri want? Why is she helping Fighter D? Does she just want to topple the current regime and take over herself, supplanting the Rangers ? Or is she a 3rd party, a species of much more effective aliens here to conquer the world? I really hope it’s the former personally, because the latter inevitably ends in the Rangers and Monsters joining forces and I think that would undercut a lot of what’s being built up now.

Finally we come to what is easily the best part of the episode, the finale. This is what finally gives Fighter D a purpose, something to fight for other than this own hang ups. We get to see the sword hanging above the Monsters heads, just how out matched they are and how little their lives mean to the Rangers. The way Red Ranger is more concerned about how cool he looks, the attack name, the pose, the light show, than the life he just ended. It was a great scene, both for the action and the push it gives Fighter D. We also get to see a good starting point for him, the Divine Weapon, and how it’s the one thing that can truly kill them. If he can get rid of that, steal or destroy it somehow, he can maybe level the playing field. Sounds like a good place to start.

So yeah, all in all a solid episode of Ranger Reject for me. While the impersonation bit wasn’t great, what it enables and leads to is. Hopefully as the show goes on and Fighter D becomes more and more competent, those sorts of uncomfortably bad “plans” will become fewer and fewer. I’m down for a lead to start as incompetent, I just need him to not be that incompetent, as well as to slowly grow out of it. As for where the show is going to go, I feel that’s obvious. Fighter D is going to join the Rangers, work his way up the totem pole, learn more about their organization and how to destabilize it, all the while either turning other Rangers to his side or pushing the Monsters to properly rebel. I don’t know how much will be covered yet, but I’m engaged for now.