Bates felt that if he wasn’t able to do his job, he should gracefully leave the show. He departed as story editor just before the new sixth Ranger, Orion, was introduced but he wouldn’t be completely out of the picture. Bates still consulted on producer cuts of Megaforce and towards the end of Super Megaforce’s run, executive producer Jonathan Tzachor came to Bates for help writing the footage heavy two parter, “Vrak is Back”.

“(Tzachor) flattered me enough to say, ‘There’s no one who’d I’d rather hire to do this than you.’ Well, guy has to pay his mortgage and I hadn’t moved on to too many other projects at this point so I came back.”

Vrak had been the only villain to escape destruction at the end of Megaforce and hadn’t been seen since. If Bates had stayed on as story editor, Vrak would have returned every three episodes or so and functioned as a lone wolf. Now, Bates would have to wrap the character up in two episodes. Two episodes that would use five episodes of footage from Goseiger. Five episodes that Bates had originally excised from Megaforce.

“On Super Samurai, Serrator has a plan to split apart the Earth by putting these wedges in,” Bates explains. “Well in Goseiger, Vrak has a storyline where he puts in wedges to split the Earth. I was like ‘we gotta skip these five episodes. Yeah there’s some cool stuff in there but we can’t have the season after Serrator have Vrak do the same thing.’”

Despite having to work with these episodes, Bates is very happy with how the two parter turned out. In it, Robo Knight returns after being missing in action for most of the season and ends up sacrificing his life to save Orion.