Linkara enters the magical realm of Power Rangers Mystic Force and looks at some of the strengths and flaws of a divisive season.
Tropes:
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Linkara is annoyed by how Nick has trouble believing in magic at the beginning, especially seeing as how he'd seen Udonna use spells to fight Foot Soldiers by that point, not to mention that he's just observed his other companions transform into Power Rangers.
- Badass Cape: Points out the addition of capes to the Rangers' outfits is the biggest change to the Mystic Force uniforms from past teams. Though he knows
some fans dislike the idea, he approves of it, as it fits with the Power Rangers being superheroes, and the capes aren't long enough to get in the way but are still long enough to look regal and cool. - Black-and-White Morality: One of the problems he has with this season is that the entire morality runs on this. Characters are either noble good guys or evil monsters with no shades of grey. This effectively makes almost all the characters boring for him.
- Cliché Storm: Says that one of the biggest things holding back this season is that every plot is just so damn cliché that you can see the resolution coming from a mile away.
- Compressed Vice: He points out how the humans and the forest creatures' distrust of each other only shows up at the very beginning and end of the series.
- Critical Backlash: He notes that this series is hugely divisive and understands why some fans dislike it, but states in his opinion, it isn't terrible and feels it's worth watching.
- Crossover: Expresses his disappointment that there wasn't a crossover with SPD, especially given that SPD is strictly rooted in science while Mystic Force is rooted in magic, and would have liked to see that dynamic come into play. Though he does acknowledge that making a crossover between the two would have been difficult given the timeline.
- Decoy Protagonist: Feels this way about the Rangers, who get very little, if any, character growth or focus outside of Nick. Instead, the season focuses on Udonna's family and allies, their backstories participating in the ancient war, and them coming back together to fight again.
- Executive Meddling: He actually contacted Ron Wasserman (who'd previously done work for Atop the Fourth Wall) to get the real story about what happened with this show's theme song. Turns out Wasserman's original version, which is his typically epic work, was turned down because the producers wanted to hop on the rap bandwagon. Wasserman complied, but was quite unsatisfied with the result, and so were they, so they went with another composer. And then they chided Wasserman for putting his first version online, despite never creating a soundtrack album, so it's pretty clear their only problem with it was that he was exposing how stupid they were to reject it.
- Likewise he mentions that Disney wanted to use more magic as they didn't like the frequent physical contact of the show... despite the fact they already had done four PR seasons doing this and should've known by now how action-heavy the series was. Disney, the most kid-friendly and smartest company around.
- Fan Wank: Mentions that seeing the mystic creatures of the forest moving into civilization to live alongside humans probably contributed a lot to humans and aliens learning to get along easily in the backstory of SPD.
- Flat Character: Thinks of the Rangers as this.
- Also has this criticism towards the villains.
- Honor Before Reason: Linkara's major criticism of Koragg: he talks a good game about being honorable, but he seems to define it more as being a horrible tactician than actually hewing to any chivalric code.
- In Name Only: Linkara considers Mystic Force a fantasy story, a sadly generic one, that has Power Rangers in it, rather than a fantasy-themed Power Rangers series.
- It's Been Done: His opinion on the Fallen Hero/Noble Demon aspect of Koragg is that previous villains such as Astronema, Villamax, Merrick or Ryan did the story-line before, and not only that, they did it better.
- The Load: Subverted, despite making jokes about Udonna getting kidnapped, he states she never felt like this.
- Mundane Made Awesome: Notes he's okay with the Mystic Morphers being this in this instance as they're magic wands disguised as cell phones and thus the mundane part actually makes sense.
- Questionable Casting: Has this reaction to the voice of the Mystic Mother, more specifically the crew not getting Barbara Goodson back, given they'd revealed the Mystic Mother to be the reformed Rita Repulsa.
- The Scrappy: Does share the dislike for Nick, calls him out as a Designated Hero given that he's supposed to be the Chosen One even though he's no better than the rest of the team and is often the first one to quit when things get hard. He doesn't, however, mention the common criticism of Nick stealing the spotlight (For reasons mentioned below).
- Sliding Scale of Free Will vs. Fate: A more minor thing that he harps on for this series is that it seems to be more on the side of fate than free will.
- Sound Defect: One aspect of the fight scenes he doesn't like is that when someone kicks something, it makes a laser noise instead of an actual kicking sound.
- Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Notes that the side characters have more focus than the rangers, aside from Nick (and even then, only his mythical heritage is given focus rather than his development as a ranger). He goes further to say that the ultimate conflict between good and evil here is nearly superfluous to the Rangers themselves, and just feels like "All the people who fought the last war trying to get together to finish what they started."
- Supporting Protagonist: Again with the exception of Nick, Linkara says this season is less a season of Power Rangers, and more a fantasy story that just so happens to have Power Rangers in it.
- Take That!: Compares the introduction to the four rangers, besides Nick, to an MTV reality TV show, and talks about the filming of one in progress as though it were a crime.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Feels this way about Chip, whose desire to be a Knight in Shining Armor who actually embodies those traits, unlike Koragg, what it meant to him could've been more explored.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Notes this on a few things, with one of the main problems with the season being that the show didn't give the Rangers themselves enough focus, and the final two episodes had enough plot points that could have been fleshed out in place of some of the filler episodes.
- Specifically laments the lack of an SPD team-up episode, since seeing the team of space cops from the year 2025 interacting with the team of wizards from 2006 could have made for plenty of great material due to their contrasting themes, environments & philosophies. Especially frustrating when Piggy shows up in one episode living on the Earth long before the future timeline of SPD and only shows up as more comic relief to interact with Jinji. The most we get from him beyond that is just foreshadowing of what went down in his series. He does, however, admit that given that SPD is set in the future, that creating a setup for a team-up would be more difficult than other shows.
- Then again, Dino Thunder and SPD had the time gap as well, and they had two crossovers...
- Tranquil Fury: While not on par with his speech in the Wild Force review, there was a definite edge in his voice when he was talking about people spoiling the surprise of the Mystic Mother's identity.
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic: His opinion of Nick, who he even describes as an "arrogant, unsympathetic, overemotional douchebag." He initially feels the same about Leelee, who basically only had a Heel–Face Turn for selfish reasons, but redeems herself when she goes with Phineas and Claire to rescue Udonna.
- The Un-Twist: Invoked with the identities of Udonna's long-lost husband & son; the same episode revealed Udonna's son was taken to the human world as a child, and that Nick is an orphan and his Orphan's Plot Trinket is the same blanket Udonna's son had in the flashback. Coupled with the revelation that Udonna's husband was an honorable warrior and a flashback of Koragg where we find out he used to be human, and it's very obvious where this story-line is going, even if it takes some time to get there.
- Vindicated by History: Linkara stated during the "Once a Ranger" video that he feels Mystic Force is a good theme song in comparison to Operation Overdrive's more rap-based theme.
