Linkara enters the Bruce Kalish era of the Disney seasons with Power Rangers S.P.D., including space police, dog mentors, and loads of explosions.
Tropes:
- Angrish: Complains that Gruum's dialogue often comes off like this and he has difficulty understanding it.
- Boring, but Practical: States that one of the reasons why he likes it when the rangers pull out their blasters is because of how practical a solution it is. However, he goes into detail about how this (specifically the reliance on special effects through "Kalishsplosions") can make fights boring, which is a problem for a show that's 75% fight scenes.
- Continuity Nod: Mentions several nods to previous seasons, including a Monster of the Week coming from KO-35, one of the trainers in the SPD Academy being an Aquitian, and the Blue Senturian popping up in a video game the SPD Rangers are playing fighting Cyclopter.
- Creepy Good: An initial problem he had with the rangers outfits at first was that the helmets made them appear evil due to the large visors, even drawing comparisons to the Psycho Rangers.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Felt that this was a very good way to introduce the villains.
- Face–Heel Turn: The A-Squad. He gives kudos to the writers for not overturning this or hand wave it off as the result of brainwashing, feeling it was a great plot twist and a nice final challenge to the B-Squad to come into their own as true heroes, though he admits he's it's disappointing that we never learn much about The A-Squad or why they turned evil.
- Fan Wank: Discussed, since SPD takes place in the future (and a specific year at that, 2025), and all the fan theories on timing and parentage are discussed, as well as an alternate theory that a timescale in Power Rangers is nearly impossible since the B-Squad's parents were apparently working in Time Force to make powers.
- Wild Mass Guessing: He attempts to reconcile these issues by theorizing that the Power Rangers universe has different timing, in that a year is not the same length of time as in our universe (he puts the length of a PR year in the ballpark of 700-800 days). He notes that this could be just one of several other differences in the same vein as the moon having earth-like gravity and an atmosphere in the Power Rangers universe.
- Fridge Horror: Invoked, he notes that if Sky's father was Wes, that unfortunately means that Wes was killed by Murloc.
- Generic Doomsday Villain: While he liked Grumm as a villain, Linkara notes that he doesn't really have a defining personality outside of being evil.
- Hero of Another Story: How he views the A-Squad & B-Squad, noting that A-Squad are the best of the best and would normally be the characters the story followed, with B-Squad being the characters this would normally apply to.
- Living Prop: As evidenced by his comments when summing up the Character Development for the season, he (Much like the SPD writers) seems to view Sam/Omega Ranger as this."Sam... Has no Character Development. He's a ball of light. Moving on."
- One-Word Title: Nitpicks at this aspect, since it doesn't really lead to interesting titles and in some cases leads to outright generic titles since the first and last episodes for this season are Beginnings and Endings respectively. This becomes a thing for the rest of the Kalish era since the later seasons would just add one more word to each of their titles.Explanation
- Only in It for the Money: Praises Broodwing for having this as his motivation, noting that it made a refreshing change to the other villains throughout the series, who have mostly had the same goals of conquering something.
- Personality Powers: Does a very nice, in-depth look at why the Ranger's civilian powers match their personalities. He also especially praises SPD for making each power something relatively unorthodox and unique (making barriers, phasing through solid objects, energy readings, etc.) instead of something like Dino Thunder's more common and overused set of powers.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Sees SPD as this kind of team done very well.
- Shown Their Work: When talking about the "Kalishsplosions;" he notes that the person actually responsible for them was Koichi Sakamoto, though he still calls them "Kalishsplosions" since Bruce Kalish would have had to approve of such ideas, as well as the fact that they became particularly prominent in the Kalish era (they have since shown up in RPM and Samurai).
- Sliding Scale of Villain Effectiveness: Says that Grumm is higher up on the scale compared with other villains thanks to his use of diversionary tactics to help get what he wants, and even getting an entire team of rangers on his side BY CHOICE.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Discussed extensively with "Kalishsplosions", and how this is actually very much an annoyance for its lack of creating suspense and makes the Rangers look weak for being sent into the air by explosions behind them, which have logically missed them. Linkara also notes how it makes the fight scenes BORING, by focusing on explosions instead of the martial arts of past seasons, making the point that you could splice together any random fight scenes & it would be hard to tell that they weren't from the same fight.
- Plus the occasional shots of explosions off to the side, which makes even less sense.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Comments that Mora is sadly underdeveloped, with the viewer never learning how Grumm found her, why she worked for him or why she hated being a grown-up so much. Didn't help that her final fight in the finale was rushed and was the last we would see of her.
- Unintentionally Sympathetic: He views Syd as this during "Dogged". We're supposed to see her as in the wrong for how she treated R.I.C. in the episode initially, but Linkara brings up that he was a "malfunctioning piece of crap" and was in desperate need of an upgrade.
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Since Piggy frequently betrays the rangers and rarely shows remorse (not to mention he had plenty of opportunities to get out of town and lay low if he didn't want to work with Grumm or Broodwing), he finds it too difficult to sympathize with him, especially since the show tries to make him sympathetic and fails.
