Darker And Edgier / Power Rangers

• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers got this way by the third season. There were several more multi-episode arcs than in the first two. At the beginning, Rito shows up and almost effortlessly destroys the Thunderzords with the help of an ambush from 4 resurrected monsters, requiring a journey to regain their powers. Not too long after, Rita turns a new transfer student, Katherine, evil, and has her befriend the Rangers in human form to gain their trust, and steal one of their power coins. When this succeeds, Rita and Zedd were able to steal the Falconzord and kidnap Ninjor to power their own zords they acquired. Tommy must end up fighting Zedd one on one for the first time ever to rescue Kimberly and gain control of the Zords, but even then, the villains still have Kimberly's Power Coin, Ninjor, and the Falconzord. It takes several more episodes before Kimberly's power coin is recovered along with Ninjor and the Falconzord, coinciding with Katherine turning good and taking Kimberly's place as the Pink Ranger. Shortly after all of this, Master Vile, who recently showed up, uses the Orb of Doom to turn back time and make the Rangers powerless kids, but unlike when Zedd did it previously, Vile made sure the Orb's power couldn't be so easily reversed. It would then take another ten episodes for the Rangers to acquire the Zeo Crystal to bring time back to normal, during which Rita and Zedd stole and destroyed all of the power coins. Shortly after, the season ends on a somber note with Rito and Goldar stealing the Zeo Crystal and successfully setting off an implosion device to destroy the Command Center. Dark, indeed...
• Power Rangers in Space seemed to have a more mature theme compared to the previous seasons at the time. It was the first season to carry the Luke, I Am Your Father trope. It was also the first season where the bad guys actually used their forces to take over all of Earth, not just aim for a single city. It was also a tragic farewell to a mentor who started it all, Zordon, who commits a Heroic Sacrifice, the first death of a good guy in the series.
• Other Darker Power Rangers shows include Power Rangers Lost Galaxy and Power Rangers Time Force. Lost Galaxy features the first death of a core Ranger and the main villain ordering attacks by suicide bombers later in the season, along with the origin of the Magna Defender's and the ON-SCREEN death of his child. Time Force had frequent death and a complete defiance of Never Say "Die", and a legion of mutants on the receiving end of Fantastic Racism and the whole concept of Predestination vs. Free Will, which was a fairly dark theme throughout the series. Ironically Time Force was adapted from a sentai series that was MUCH DARKER.
• Power Rangers RPM is much, much, much darker than either the whole Power Rangers franchise or its source material Engine Sentai Go-onger, going so far as to kill off a large percentage of humanity in the nuclear bombardment of a Robot War, and deal with serious psychological repercussions of traumatic events and childhoods at times. It wasn't all doom and gloom, but even its sense of humor was sharper, relying less on random silliness and more on taking the silliness inherited from the franchise and mocking it. Power Rangers in general, by contrast, is generally the poster child for Never Say "Die", and Go-Onger was very much a silly Lighter and Softer Super Sentai series, complete with monster song-and-dance numbers.
• Power Rangers Samurai is largely a Shot-for-Shot Remake of the darker Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, which is on Sentai's D&E list for a reason. Also, while it loses some of the darkness (the occasional Victim of the Week has his sad backstory toned down, Deker is so not Juzo) it adds some more of its own when diverging from the source material. We have villains who are made stronger by human sadness, so the enemy plans are most often "make a whole lot of people suffer" rather than your basic "try to blow up the Rangers to Take Over the World" stuff, and their abilities can be prime Nightmare Fuel. Serrator's Long Game manipulations make him a Knight of Cerebus extraordinaire by even this series' standards. Deker is so not Juzo… and has to die anyway. His last words are "Finally… I'm free." Dayu is brought to such despair by his loss that she is able to revive Xandred with her sadness alone, and is willing to because by now she just doesn't care what happens to the world, or herself, as she doesn't resist when he absorbs her to become part human and gain immunity to the sealing symbol. Speaking of Xandred, in sentai, he basically sat around getting drunk and yelling at people. Here, Frothy Mugs of Water is in place, but how is it done? The previous generation's attempt to seal him leaves him in CONSTANT AGONY, leading to his bad temper and need to constantly drink a "medicine" that clearly doesn't help a great deal. Dayu's music is all that can (somewhat and temporarily) soothe him, which again goes back to the fact that misery is the best medicine for a Nighlok and Dayu's is of prime quality for just how tragic of a character she is. As for the Rangers themselves, the team's a tradition handed down since the Samurai days, but in execution it's less "every Ranger's from a Badass Family, how cool" and more "everyone in this season can identify with Dr. K from RPM to some degree," as the burden thrust upon them from childhood on has left them pretty much all needing some serious therapy. Oh, did we mention the previous Samurai team - all family members of the current one, including the current Red's father who passed on his Transformation Trinket while dying - got killed in the battle to seal Xandred and we got to see it onscreen? What's funny is, the head writer of this series said it was going to be more humorous to be Lighter and Softer than the last couple of seasons and created something arguably darker, as even RPM had more humor than Samurai (whose sequences of Those Two Guys were totally divorced from the main plot of the episodes, so it was "hellish misery being used as a weapon to destroy the world as grown up Child Soldiers fight... oh, hey, remember how much you liked Bulk and Skull back in the day? ...now back to hellish misery!")

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