I recently finished watching season two of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in my quest to revisit and rank all the seasons. This is a particularly hard season for me to really sort out. There are some things that make me really enjoy it, but then others that drive me insane. I’ll try to walk you through several of my thoughts, and we’ll see where we land.

So, one of the best things about this season is the very beginning. Season two starts with “The Mutiny” which is a 3-episode arc that features Lord Zedd arriving and replacing Rita Repulsa. It also features the Rangers losing the Dinozords and gaining the Thunderzords. These three episodes are extremely well done. In fact, a lot of the first 20-ish episodes are very well done and possibly some of the best episodes we ever get of Power Rangers (or at least of Mighty Morphin). “Bloom of Doom” deals with jealousy, “Green No More” is a two-parter about Tommy losing his Green Ranger powers, and then we later get “White Light” where Tommy returns as the White Ranger. Unfortunately, “White Light” is also where the season starts hitting this weird space of some awesome parts and some awful parts.

In order to fully understand some of the things I struggle with in this season, we do have to look at the Sentai for the season. I typically don’t like doing this, but in this case (and I’m assuming in season three of MMPR), I think it’s important. You see, the White Ranger and the Thunderzords come from Gosei Sentai Dairanger. The other five Rangers come from Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger. This means that the footage in Power Rangers starts getting wonky the moment the Thunderzords enter the picture, but things get crazier with the introduction of the White Ranger. After all, how can you have Rangers from two different Sentai work together?

This means that a lot more morphed scenes were filmed for Power Rangers to accommodate all six Rangers. The approach works well when the Rangers fight Putties, but it causes a lot of lackluster moments with the episode’s monster. I think this is why there’s a lot of recycling of monsters in this season. Unfortunately, with the introduction of the Thunderzords so early in the season, from episode 3 until after “Green No More,” the Zord fights are really dumb. Sadly, because they recycle monsters so much in this season, there are plenty of moments later where the Zord fights are once again lackluster and boring because you can’t have the Zords and monsters in the same frame.

What I don’t understand is why they didn’t change the Ranger uniforms. There are at least three perfect opportunities for the Rangers to “upgrade” to the Gosei uniforms. The first is when they first get the Thunderzords during “The Mutiny.” It would’ve been perfectly understandable to explain that the Rangers need a power boost and that includes a change of costume (I’ve included a picture of the Gosei Rangers below). The second is during “White Light” when they found that some new power had helped Tommy and there’s enough to give to the other Rangers to face off against the stronger monsters that Zedd is throwing at them. The third opportunity was during “The Power Transfer.” What if when they performed the power transfer, something needed to change which resulted in the Thunder Rangers? That could’ve worked well and let Power Rangers better use footage from Sentai. Now, let’s look at the flip side of things.