Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always Is a Paradox of Legacy, Loss, & Missing Pieces

“It’s morphin’ time!” With those three words, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers inspired and excited an entire generation of kids in the early ‘90s and launched a franchise that’s been going strong for three decades. With Once & Always, Netflix is hoping to recapture some of that magic with a new nostalgic special.

Like many a millennial, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was the cultural cornerstone of my childhood. Not only did the adventures of Jason, Trini, Billy, Zack, and Kimberly entertain my imagination for hours on end, they also gave me a fundamental framework for my understanding of friendship, teamwork, and personal identity as a kid, which sometimes just so happened to correspond to a very specific color and giant Dinozord.

It’s not an exaggeration to say I spent the majority of my early elementary school days fighting invisible Putty Patrollers in the backyard with my siblings and the neighbor kids who lived next door. As the oldest brother, I always led the team as the Red Ranger—undoubtedly the only time my older cousin ceded control to me, even as she was probably still not-so-secretly calling the shots as the Yellow Ranger and letting me think I was in charge.

While my desire to learn karate like the Rangers was ultimately short-lived, my little brother earned his black belt in jiu jitsu last year—a passion that can almost surely be traced back to our backyard Putty fighting in some way. (He was always happy to be the Blue Ranger, until Tommy came along, though his newly chosen role as the Green and eventually White Ranger did little to change the power dynamic of our chosen team.)

When we weren’t embodying the Rangers themselves, we spent hours watching the VHS tapes on repeat, and our well-used action figures have been lovingly preserved over a generation for that same cousin’s two young kids to play with now. (The same can’t be said for our original Power Rangers Action Pals, which we’ve never quite forgiven my poor mother for donating to charity.)

Through the years, we’ve seen every Power Rangers movie in theaters together: 1995’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, its 1997 Turbo offshoot, and even the 2017 reboot—which my brothers and I all agreed was essentially sacrilege, but still bought tickets for anyway.

All of that’s to say that Power Rangers has played a sentimental and central role in my family’s collective memory for the past thirty years. So when the screener for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always popped up in my Netflix account, I couldn’t wait to see what I’d be sharing with my siblings once the 30th anniversary special premiered.

But now that I’ve seen the special, which premieres on Netflix Wednesday (April 19), I’m not quite sure what to say. For one thing, it certainly wasn’t the blast of happy, morphinominal nostalgia I was craving.

Once & Always centers on Billy and Zack, who are back in their Blue and Black Ranger uniforms to protect Angel Grove from Robo-Rita, a new, technologically charged incarnation of original baddie Rita Repulsa.

The action actually kicks off with all six Mighty Morphin Power Rangers back together and fighting on the same team. How and why are questions that go unanswered for any fans who are even the tiniest bit familiar with the franchise’s canon. But it all rings hollow knowing the other Rangers aren’t really there behind their famous helmets, despite the studio trickery using recycled audio of their voices. (Amy Jo Johson, who played Kimberly, and Jason David Frank, who played Tommy, both declined to return for the special before the latter’s tragic and devastating death by suicide last November. And Austin St. John, otherwise remembered as Jason, was indicted on federal fraud charges tied to COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program loans before Once & Always went into production.)

Of course, the void that couldn’t possibly be filled even if all the other actors had returned for the special was that of Trini, played by the inimitable Thuy Trang, who sadly passed away in a car accident in September 2001 at the age of 27. Trang’s sudden and untimely death has been a source of quiet grief among the fandom for more than two decades, which makes the writers’ decision to kill off Trini less than five minutes into the special all the more jarring. (Not a spoiler, it was heavily inferred in the trailer.)

Both onscreen and off, death looms heavily over the proceedings, and it’s an uncomfortable weight to carry for a children’s TV series about friendship, loyalty, and good always triumphing over evil. Trini’s death at the hands of Robo-Rita and her magical wand may jumpstart the special’s plot, but is it really necessary for Robo-Rita to cackle gleefully about murdering the Yellow Ranger while literally feet away from her headstone in the Angel Grove cemetery?

Only after Trini’s death do we discover she has a daughter named Minh, played by relative newcomer Charlie Kersh, a third-degree black belt in Taekwondo who hails from Vietnam just like Trang did. Minh is a bonafide “teenager with attitude” standing right in front of Billy and Zack, but they’re too busy recruiting other grown-up Rangers like Steven Cardenas’ Rocky and Catherine Sutherland’s Kat to notice how eager the 17-year-old is to honor her late mom’s legacy.

Without giving any spoilers away, the rest of the Once & Always is both chock full of Easter eggs and callbacks for longtime fans and pays haphazard regard to basic storytelling elements like continuity and history. On the one hand, it unfolds exactly how you’d probably imagine; on the other, you’ll wonder exactly when flying cars and the power of invisibility became part of the equation.

Yet, by the time the credits rolled—fading to a dedication in memory of our beloved Yellow and White Rangers—I still felt compelled to look for a Power Rangers Action Pal in good condition on eBay before texting a series of heart emojis in my family group chat: red followed by yellow, blue, black, pink and white. Because it turns out that one fact still holds true: once a Ranger, always a Ranger.

Glenn Rowley is a journalist based in New York City whose writing has appeared in Billboard, The Recording Academy, Bustle, PAPER, NYLON, Vulture and elsewhere. For more on music, pop culture, politics and Real Housewives, you can follow him on Twitter @glennsrowley.

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