Beasts Unleashed

"Beasts Unleashed" is the premiere episode of "Power Rangers Beast Morphers," the 2019 PR season. It dispenses with the high school antics of the previous "Ninja Steel" seasons and plunges right into an epic sci-fi action plot involving a revolutionary new energy source that is being tested to power the grid for the city of Coral Harbor. The episode is fast-paced, full of action and laced with humor. I found the young adult Ranger characters quite engaging and the adult authority figures confident and compelling. The foundation is being laid for an excellent season.

At Grid Battleforce, the entity set up to provide high-tech security for the power grid, three young people are selected to become the Power Ranger team that will protect the energy source, called Morph X, but when a virus infects the system during the morphing process, disaster ensues and two young do-gooders on the scene rush in to help. In a clever turn of events, they wind up becoming Power Rangers themselves, along with one of the original designated Rangers, making a three-person team of Red, Blue and Yellow Rangers. They also engage in some spectacular martial arts fight scenes with the "avatars" created by the virus during the morphing process. It's all very exciting.

There is an excellent dramatic music score by Matt McGuire, who gets credited in the opening, the first time I've seen a prominent music credit in the franchise since the days when Shuki Levy was in charge of composing back in the 1990s.

The series is based on the 2012 Super Sentai season, "Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters," a show I like a lot. This is the first time a series that was passed over in the previous Power Rangers progression has been adapted. (This gives me hope that "Ressha Sentai Toqger," from 2014, my favorite sentai season, will eventually get adapted for Power Rangers.) As far as I could tell, there was no Japanese footage in the first episode of "Beast Morphers," although that is not uncommon for season premiere episodes in the PR franchise. I eagerly await the next new episode.