Headscratchers / Power Rangers Operation Overdrive

• As this question has bugged people I'll put it here: if Sentinel Knight could restore the powers of the other rangers in "Once A Ranger", why didn't he restore the Overdrive Rangers' powers?
  • And my answer: Sentinel Knight could restore the powers of the other rangers because their sections of the Morphing Grid were undamaged, he couldn't do that with the Overdrive Rangers because of the damage caused by Thrax. Had the damage spread to the other sections, the other rangers would have lost their powers as well.
  • It could also have been an Aesop. The Overdrive Rangers were getting rather cocky at the start of the episode, so it may have been a conscious decision on the Knight's part to leave them unpowered to teach them not to take their powers for granted.
  • Why didn't, for that matter, he restore every Ranger ever? Did he just not have enough juice for it?
    • That's exactly it, he states that he uses "the last of his energy" to restore the new team's powers. Before being restored at the end of the season, the Sentinel Knight was just a reflection of his formal power. It is also possible that the damage to the morphing grid was why he picked Rangers from different groups, rather than, say, all of Mystic Force. Taking rangers that were all tapped into different parts of the grid would be less likely to overtax the already damaged grid.
  • Okay, I can buy the explanations for the Sentinel Knight not repowering every ranger or the Overdrive rangers given here...but that raises another question: Why didn't the Sentinel Knight just summon rangers from teams that still had their powers (i.e., the In Space, Lightspeed Rescue, or Dino Thunder rangers)? Surely that wouldn't have taken as much energy as repowering 5 rangers from different teams (and that's assuming that it would take the same amount of energy to repower each ranger since the 5 he summoned all relied on different power sources); heck, it would actually be a smarter idea to summon an entire team that still had their powers, since they would have worked with each other before.
  • The Dino Thunder rangers don't have powers. They burned out their gems defeating Mesagog.
  • Technically, Sentinal Knight only had to restore the powers of Adam and Tori. Xander still had his powers and Bridge was brought from the future and had his powers still available to him. Xander still having his powers probably allowed Bridge to be brought from the future. If Sentinal Knight had to restore Xander's powers, he might not have been able to bring Bridge from the future unless he had help and he still might have, even though we don't see it. Mystic Mother is known to be familiar with time magic due to her time as Rita Repulsa and the episodes where the Rangers go into the past. Kira's powers were restored in one of the Power Rangers: Dino Thunder/Power Rangers S.P.D. crossovers.
  • I can buy restoring the powers of rangers, but the Sentinal Knight had to explicitly bring Bridge from the future and yet he continuously says he doesn't have enough energy to do anything else or something like that...
    • Maybe time travel isn't that taxing for him.
• If Andrew Hartford was so willing to become a ranger, why didn't he make another morpher for himself after his son got the position? Furthermore, why did the Retro Rangers leave after "Once a Ranger"? The Sentinel Knight did not seem to consider them temporary. He implied that they would replace the Overdrive rangers. If he planned on keeping the team, why didn't they just team up with the Overdrive team (other than Sentai reasons, of course)? It couldn't have somehow put too much strain on the Knight, as he was shown being just fine (and even more powerful with Excelsior) when they did team up.
  • Why didn't he keep them? They had their own lives. They were willing to help out with the incumbents incapacitated, but if they're not needed, it would be cruel to keep them from their own lives and, in Bridge's case, era. As for Andrew, we don't really know what power source or materials he was using. He may not have had enough for a seventh, and he probably knew based on his wardrobe that he wasn't cut out to be silver.
    • But it's been proven before that you only need to start wearing your color exclusively after receiving powers. Plus, they all wear uniforms, anyway.
  • To address the part about creating the extra morpher: while Power Rangers has created extra rangers in the past, usually they were only to fill in the role of Sixth Ranger for series that didn't have one (the VRV Master from Carranger was promoted to Ranger status in Turbo, while the Titanium Ranger was created exclusively for Lightspeed Rescue), and since Boukenger had a sixth ranger, there wasn't really any need to make one; however, that does make me wonder why Andrew Hartford didn't just become the Mercury Ranger.
• So, Ronny is a race car driver, but Will gets the Speed Driver?
• Dax and Miratrix. I'm okay with him getting over her whole deception in one episode, since they hadn't been dating for long, Dax is The Ditz, and the writers needed An Aesop. However, IIRC, their relationship is mentioned all of once after this. I dunno, I just feel like they could have used their previous relationship as the basis for more plotlines (and possibly jokes)...
  • How do you use a nonexistant relationship for more plotlines,especially after her reveal as a villian? And by "once" you mean the rest of the season right?
    • What do you mean "the rest of the season"? Last time I checked, they barely referenced it. As for plotlines, Miratrix could create a plan/trick hinging on Dax being more sympathetic towards her (he wouldn't have to fall for it; the important thing would be that Miratrix thinks Dax is enough of an idiot to let his previous relationship with her cloud his judgement). Or they could have tried a Star-Crossed Lovers sort of deal.
    • That would have been awesome.
• Okay, so in Once a Ranger, the veteran rangers are seen piloting a zord. This isn't a problem, except..how the hell does Xander know how to pilot a zord??? In Mystic Force, the rangers became the zords.
  • I would imagine Mr Hartford designed the zords to be quite user friendly. The Overdrive rangers figured out how to drive after all, and only one of them was a professional driver.
    • For that matter, of the Mystic Rangers, Xander is one of the few actually shown knowing how to drive a non-broom vehicle.
  • The same way any ranger learns to pilot a zord for the first time: plot convenience.
    • Considering that Billy in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers S1E1 Day of the Dumpster makes a comment, wondering how they knew how to pilot the Zords, I can believe that either the Grid is 'showing' Xander how to do so or that was one of the things he was shown how to do when recruited.
• Why did Tyzonn seemingly show feelings for Rose in "One Fine Day" when he has a fiancee? Maybe he was just trying to be her friend, but it seemed really odd...
  • Didn't he think his fiancee was dead? Maybe he was trying to move on until he found out she was still alive.
  • Not really. He never outright implied he thought she was dead, he only said that he would continue searching for her because he thought she was alive.
• Man, Overdrive has a lot of these, doesn't it? So when Norg speaks to Vella, Vella says "There can be only one Tyzonn." Didn't Tyzonn himself state that his name was common on his planet?? This is a pretty minor one, but it still bugs me.
  • Maybe she meant that there can only be one Tyzonn for her - she didn't necessarily mean there can only be one person named Tyzonn.
• How the FUCK did Mack move a car and rip the door off one in "Kick Into Overdrive, Part 2" when his genes weren't even re-sequenced yet?
  • It's not uncommon for rangers to show great feats of strength. In one episode of SPD, Bridge is able to hurl an entire car at a monster. It's implied that morphing enhances the user's physical strength. Mack's supposed gene re-sequencing simply allowed him to use super strength when unmorphed as well.
    • "Supposed". Exactly this. As a robot he might have had the strength all along, the resequencing was just to keep the masquerade and did nothing at all.
• Why did Andrew Hartford build Mack to look like he was in his late teens? Was he too lazy to update him to simulate growing up? Or maybe he had other reasons....either way, it's kind of weird.
  • It was most likely the former. Because Mack is a robot and won't physically age past the age of 18 or so (how he was built), he's at a relatively reasonable age to live on his own when Andrew passes away while still getting to enjoy being a kid. Basically, Andrew probably built him approaching young adulthood not because he had weird intentions with him, but because he didn't want to have a son that was permanently stuck at an age where he wasn't able to take care of himself; considering how human Mack looks, it probably took Andrew a really, really long time to build him, and to constantly update him to age him would only waste his time.
  • There are some fan theories that Mack was originally created not as a son, but as a prototype for a series of cyborgs Hartford would have used to find the Corona Aurora; after Mack proved to be so human, Hartford felt that he couldn't basically create a group of slaves to do the job, and so reprogrammed Mack as his son and tried to find a suitable team who could choose to do the job instead.
    • This is a really, really good theory. Consider the last time that the American government in general tried to make robot Rangers (Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue), they may have been working at or with Harvard to create other android or robot Power Rangers before the project folded (as Andrew Hartford mentions getting the equipment- including the morphers or morphing technology- from a Harvard project if I'm remembering correctly) and one can assume he got the information on robots, androids, and AI from that project. Also consider the last time there were android Power Rangers and what happens with the android version of Justin not knowing he was an android. It's quite possible they got that information from someone associated with that program.
• Tyzonn's backstory doesn't make much sense. How exactly does a rockfall kill shapeshifters who are able to assume a highly mobile liquid form at will?!?
  • Despite the fact that Tyzonn's species are shapeshifters, he has shown the fact that he can physically get hurt. The assumption would be that they would need to react in time to avoid getting hit. It's possible that Tyzonn assumed that since his friends didn't escape, they didn't transform in time to avoid death.
• Mystic Mother's Thrax's mother, correct? While I know that the only Mystic Force Ranger that shows up is Xander, it seems odd that there's never any explanation for any backlash he may have received from her by killing her son. It seems odd that none of the Rangers involved saw any consequences from her due to it. She may have understood that they didn't have any other choice, but still.
  • Mystic Mother is good now, and Thrax is evil, for one. Two, he wasn't destroyed by any of the Retro Rangers, but by Sentinel Knight. Not sure why Mystic Mother would care.
    • Thrax is still her son. I can't see even Mystic Mother not caring about Thrax even though he was still evil. Heck...even Zeltrax from Dino Thunder cared about his 'son' Goldenrod despite both being evil.
• How did Moltor manage to take Vella captive, and what was he doing with her to begin with? For one, Vella was presumed dead before Moltor was awakened by the Corona Aurora, and two, she was hidden somewhere by Crazar, so how did he find out where she was hiding her?
• Andrew creating an artificial son that was physically a young adult, although it's likely that this is a preferable alternative to making new bodies for him to simulate growing up.
• If Andrew is skilled enough to create a robot sophisticated enough to perfectly pass for human as much as Mack does, why doesn't he use that technology to create a team of Power Rangers?
  • He's worried enough about Mack as is, much less any other robots he builds
  • A popular theory is that Mack was actually created to be the prototype for a team of robot Rangers, but he turned to be so human that Hartford couldn't bring himself to create a team of what would have been essentially slaves and changed his plans to recruit a willing team instead.
• A question of fans is if Mack's super strength was really his own robotic strength, why did he never show it before? The obvious answer is he was always this strong but Hartford put in special programming to keep him from accessing it so it wouldn't be suspicious. Realizing Mack was intent on joining the team, Hartford used this as the excuse to undo that programming so Mack could utilize his robotic strength without realizing he wasn't truly human.