[Switchblade]

Pretty much, yeah.

Operation Overdrive may not be the purest distillation of everything that was wrong with the Kalish era of Power Rangers - that would by Mystic Force (which I actually liked a lot) - but it did suffer heavily from all of his faults - uneven characterization, lame comic relief, half-hearted plotting, and a ridiculous overuse of wire work and people jumping in slow motion as something behind them explodes. While Mystic Force actually had even more of this, what saves that show for me is that it still feels like there was some heart and effort put into it - Operation Overdrive always just feels lazy and half-assed - like no one involved with the show really gave a rat's ass about what they were doing.

The characters are either bland (Ronnie, Rose, Taizon, Mack), annoying (Will), or so infuriatingly obnoxious I want to systematically travel back in time and murder every preceding generation of their family just to ensure that there will never, ever be any single strain of DNA anywhere in the world that might contribute to any aspect of that character ever existing (Dax - oh god, I could rant for hours about all the places where that character fails). Now, in fairness, Power Rangers has rarely been a place to go to see fantastic and deep characters, but at least most other shows have characters with some level of personality - or maybe one character that can stand out above the pack to still be really likable or interesting - but PROO just doesn't. No one on this show is in any way likable, not the Rangers, not the supporting cast, not the villains. This is the only PR show I've ever watched where there was a team-up episode and my first thought was "why can't we just lose the regular cast and keep going with these guys?" (granted, said team up was pretty much a "greatest hits" sampling of the previous four Ranger casts and Adam, but still).

Characters aside (and I haven't even touched on the lame, useless, and overcrowded villain cast), there's nothing else to really recommend the show. The plot is mediocre and badly paced, with several bits of it recycled from previous shows (seriously, Taizon is the laziest character ever - his entire backstory is three parts Doggy Kruger and two parts Merrick - he even steals his morphing pose from Dino Thunder). The action isn't all that great, mostly just the same wire work and explosions we'd been seeing for the last several seasons. The stupid unmorphed powers were back and lazier than ever (one guy had the super power to hear really well! ). Even the stuff we got from Boukenger wasn't all that good - this was the start of the "clusterfuck" Megazords that just kept piling Zord upon Zord upon Zord until you have an immobile, vaguely human-shaped monstrosity.

I can keep ranting, but it all basically boils down to the show being poorly thought out, badly executed, and lazy as fuck.

But I still enjoyed it more than Samurai.