Power Rangers RPM/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• Why is it so perfect that in the end Venjix gets taken out by a building? Power Rangers had spent 17 seasons being dropped or kicked into buildings because of monsters and it was time for the buildings to get some payback.
• The origin of the name Alphabet Soup is a lampshading of the sort of organizations that tend to do rather shady stuff for the government.
• Linkara's off-hand comment about morphing explosions being a side-effect of a massive energy discharge when the Rangers morph (said during his "History of Power Rangers" retrospective) is confirmed in-universe (see Lampshade Hanging on the main page).
• Remember when Crunch was asking "whatever happened to wireless"? Seems Venjix had it all along, as downloading himself into a morpher before the building came down on him proves. That's not the kind of power you want mere subordinates abusing.
• In the fourth episode, "Go For the Green", Hicks is scanning Tenaya at one point, telling her his scanner has been giving him false positives in Venjix hardware. Now, yeah, of course it would go off when scanning Tenaya, but we learn much later on that Hicks is a hybrid. Guess those weren't false positives after all...
• Flynn is from Scotland. The steering wheel in his car is on the right side of the vehicle.
• Why was Dr. K moe? She is the American counterpart of Bomper! She even sounds like him too!
• Why aren't the Rangers more pissed off about Dr. K having created Venjix? Probably because it's been two years since then and they've more or less made peace with the fact that Venjix was a human-made monster that'd been released by accident.
• Why is the Big Bad named Venjix despite having no relationship to Venjix from Power Rangers Wild Force? Because it's not a reference to Venjix at all, but a sound-alike to the word Vengeance, as in Dr. K's unintentional vengeance upon humanity and intentional vengeance upon Alphabet Soup.
• Why does Dr. K have weird feet positions? Her actress, Olivia Tennet, is an accomplished dancer.
• So Venjix builds a doomsday machine and Dr. K steals it and somehow it's capable of combining with the other zords in the Rangers' fleet... how does that make sense? Because Dr. K created Venjix! All Venjix technology is technically Dr. K's technology, so that's why they're compatible.
• Why are the zord battles so short? Because they can't risk damaging Corinth!
• At first, the fact that Gem and Gemma look absolutely nothing alike beyond both being Asian (they look about as related as Jack Black and Ben Affleck) seems like a case of Unfortunate Implications. But there's no reason they have to be biologically related. They could be two random children taken by Alphabet Soup.
• Remember in "Ancient History" when Scott told his dad that Dr. K created the Power Rangers? If RPM were set in the series' main continuity, then this statement would make no sense. But since the season was set in an Alternate Universe (as confirmed by the press release for the upcoming crossover with Power Rangers Samurai), this statement now makes much more sense! Dr. K was the creator of the Power Rangers in that universe. There was no Zordon, no Ninjor, etc. And the "universal bio-electric field" she mentioned in "Rain", although similar to the Morphing Grid, may not be the same as the Grid from previous seasons.
• This might have been obvious to others, but my moment of Fridge Brilliance occurred during Power Rangers RPM. In it, the normally brilliant Dr. K created some very funny looking zords (half-machine, half-animal, with "big, googly, anime eyes" according to Ziggy). I realized during the episode "Dr. K", she's brilliant but emotionally stunted. She was essentially kidnapped and kept in a think tank by a secret government group called Alphabet Soup "hence the Dr. K thing, she has no name that she can remember." She had no childhood, and is still acting like a little girl. She dresses in a school uniform, wears goofy bunny slippers, and since she was locked indoors nonstop (they told her she was allergic to sunlight), she brought the outdoors inside by making the zords look like animals.
• Another moment in RPM has to do with Hicks. Early on in "Go for the Green", he's seen scanning the Robot Girl, Tenaya. He briefly mentions that his scanner has been giving him false positives all week as an excuse for it thinking she was a robot. Just another scene showing how much of a klutz he is, right? Cut to just prior to the finale when it's revealed that Hicks is a hybrid himself. The reveal comes off as shocking until you think back to that particular scene as realize that those weren't false positives at all!
• A lot of people seemed rather depressed regarding the Fridge Horror at the state of the world in Power Rangers RPM, thinking the previous generations of Rangers died at Venjix's hands, then I came to a sort of realization about something. Even though Corinth is touted as the last "bastion of humanity" left on Earth, one has to wonder why Venjix assaults it with less than what he possessed when he began his campaign. He took over the entire Earth and thus, has full access to all its resources, so why isn't he slowly building up his powerbase and sending the full brunt of his armies to topple the opposition? Clearly, he is expending his resources on something else, maybe Corinth isn't alone in the world, as a few episodes demonstrate the existence of human life outside the city, maybe Venjix is dealing with other human uprisings around the globe. And, if it is to be believed RPM takes place in the same continuity as the rest of the series, maybe the previous generations of Rangers are leading these resistance groups, also, take into consideration Earth's numerous alien allies and well, Venjix is surrounded by enemies on multiple fronts, so the fact he is assaulting Corinth with less than his optimum capacity may not be as far-fetched as we think.
  • It does make sense. With Venjix in control of everything, communication is probably a lot harder now than then. How would someone in Corinth know if there was another human civilization on the other side of the world? Or even the country? It'd have to be shielded like Corinth, or very well hidden, to escape the purge, after all.

Fridge Horror

• When Venjix gains control of all the hybrids he experimented on and hid in Corinth, there are children among them, who don't even look a year over ten.
• Power Rangers RPM. Only one city on Earth left means every past character you ever liked (well, outside of Time Force... and Billy, still on Aquitar) is likely a smudge on the pavement.
  • It helps that Word of God confirms that RPM takes place in an Alternate Universe, so everyone is a-okay.
    • And now there's talk of retconning RPM into the main 'verse, so everybody might indeed be confirmed dead (sob).
    • Jossed, thankfully. The one saving grace of "Clash of the Red Rangers" is now that where RPM stands is made clear onscreen: it is now definitely in another dimension.
  • Pretty much anything that seems a little too childish or silly can become very sobering when you think about it. Gem and Gemma seem like children? Only because they were imprisoned from a young age by the government and later tortured in a Venjix prison. Everyone in Corinth seeming just a little too okay with living in the last city on Earth? Denial is probably the only way they can live with the sheer horror of what's happened. The zords look too colorful and cartoonish? They were developed by a child prodigy who was kidnapped off the streets and kept in a military think tank until she was eighteen.