Welcome all, to another week of Ranger Reject. A lot happens this week, not all of it necessarily good, so lets skip the pleasantries and dive right into the episode!
Starting off, this was a really fast paced episode, and not necessarily in a good way. Ranger Reject covered a lot of ground, 5 entire chapters from what some friends have told me, and there were a lot of concepts in this episode that don’t feel like they got the attention they need or deserve. Take the Rangers and their power structure for instance. We get a small scene early on revealing their 2nd-in-Commands, as well as an introduction to the idea that the Rangers can be replaced and how little they care for each others lives. This was our chance to really dive into the internal politics of the Rangers, to show us they weren’t a unified force, using Suzukiri as our point-of-view character. Instead it’s a rather quick scene only showing us how ruthless they are, something we really already knew.
Another good example would be Fighter D, who survived! The core of his stuff is great. How he survived using the explosives to blow himself up before the artifact did, the injury and subsequent fight with the 5th ranked of the Blues, even the replica artifacts and everything were cool. It’s again nice to see Fighter D steadily improving and figuring out how to best use his powers, I really like that. But again, it feels like more time could have been spent fleshing things out. Why is the Blue and the artifact melting, is it because he’s a replica just like it, not a real person? Why did no one comment on it? And he can make fully functioning heads out of his hands now? That seems wild. There’s so much here that Ranger Reject just dropped on us without much explanation.
Oh and don’t even get me started on Hibiki, this was is a freaking train wreck. Cutting of his hand at a moments notice to help sell their trick so Fighter D can join the Rangers? The dudes that committed already? I get that he was raised by religious fanatics, but that seems like a bit much. Hell, I find it difficult to even buy his crazy parents to be honest. They want peace between humans and monsters and blame the humans for all the violence because they defended themselves? Against the monsters aggression? Also, how did he survive destruction of his church and still think monsters and humans could get along? Did the monster leave him alive and brain wash him or something, is that the plot thread? Ranger Reject can do a lot here, but when combined with everything else it’s just… To much for a single episode.
And that’s sort of where I’m at for the whole week. It feels like Ranger Reject has a set arc in the manga it wants to reach, a story beat it wants to end on, and chose this moment to absolutely blitz through the story so that the rest of the season would be on pace to reach it. And you know what? If it works, if the rest of the season is good and well paced and not a mess, I’ll take it. I’ll sack one episode for the sake of the season and a productions health, go for it. But for now, as the most recent episode, this is the first crack in Ranger Reject for me. Hopefully it’s just a one-off.
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