Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Season 2

Episode 15

When Hisui stormed into the principal's office to confront the former Green Squadron member Kyosuke Wakaba for his apparent possession at the hands of Boss Monster Magatia, I knew it couldn't possibly be that easy. Yes, Hisui is a certified baddie who can seemingly spit out extra laser knives whenever she needs to ad infinitum, but Fighter D and the others hadn't gotten the chance to do anything yet, and poor Angel was only just trapped in her school-life illusion at the end of the last episode. I know I complained about how quickly the last storyline dragged on, but this arc needed a bit more time in the oven before wrapping up.

That is when the episode arrived at my favorite moment of the storyline so far, where Hisui tackles the fake Kyousuke out of a window and impales his freaking skull with a laser beam…only for her attempt at murdering a faculty member to be spotted by a classmate in the window, leading to Hisui and the gang being time-warped back to the start of the day. Hisui's hands were still poised in a primo stabbing position, even. It's such a perfectly dark and absurd moment of Sisyphean failure for Hisui, one that firmly establishes Magatia as a force to be reckoned with.

Unfortunately, the rest of the episode doesn't quite live up to that thrilling anti-climax. It's not a terrible chapter of the storyline, to be sure, but not a whole lot happens by the time credits roll. Hisui spends the rest of the episode trying to resist the pull of Magatia's illusion, though we never see how that inner battle resolves one way or the other. Hisui herself is fully trapped in Magatia's mental prison, and while her loss of self is interesting insofar as it seems to generate more of that supposedly nonexistent empathy for surface dwellers that Fighter D would never it to feeling, it also doesn't amount to much more than a simple check-in. Then, a lot of the episode is devoted to Fighter D's confrontation with Sensei Gatou, the Snake Boss's willing accomplice, though that is another plot thread that spends a lot of time accomplishing very little.

ittedly, it is fun to see Fighter D in the dust-flesh again and using his regenerative powers to mess with the teacher Bugs Bunny style, but the small snippets of Gatou's military backstory and the general contrast of Fighter D's monster upbringing with the usual human childhood don't add enough to the fight to justify its length. It is one of those occasions where it's clear that the episode knows it can't adapt any more of the manga than it is already covering without ending in an awkward spot, so it is instead stuck playing things out maybe 15% slower than they need to be. Still, that's not a major complaint in the grand scheme of things, and I'll take “rambling in its pacing” over “an entire season stuck in a parking garage” any day.

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Go, Go, Loser Ranger! is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+ on Sundays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.