[Sh Ranger]

I have a lot to say about this episode, but first, here's my obligatory comment about Gears. Gingaman is the only 90s Sentai I haven't watched yet, but Sunred compared it to my second and third favorite 10s Sentai, Goseiger and Ryusoulger, so now I'm planning to watch it after I'm done with Turboranger and Sekai Ninja Sen. However, I know enough from Lost Galaxy to understand the power, even though its use here is very situational.

Moving on to the main course:

Gaon being confronted by Juran to make him acknowledge his prejudice should be familiar to a lot of people. At an early age, we don't think very critically, so we just eat up all kinds of destructive stigmata. "You did this to X, but would you do that to Y?" That kind of question really makes a person consider how their own morality might be challenged by those stigmata.

Gaon's behavior here is different from Episode 7, where he actually had a point about Kikainoids being more durable than humans and even admitted to Kaito that he considered his fellow Kikainoids as friends. Furthermore, in the Zenkai Red special, he took pride in being a tough Kikainoid, as that gave him more power to protect humans.

Here we see him taking Juran's interrogation and not talking back, cause despite Gaon being an a**hole, that's just how we see him from a third person perspective. He believed his treatment of robots was heroic. He didn't see anything wrong with that, considering it justified for how he was treated by Tojitendo. He's not observant enough to immediately understand the nuances of the problem, like how having friends who are also Kikainoids should of course mean not all Kikainoids are bad. He has to be prompted to think about that to actually see the error of his ways.

Sometimes heroism, if followed to the letter instead of the spirit, can lead us to become zealots. Heroism isn't something that can be universally defined, as Robin Hood once said in Kamen Rider Ghost. If there's any moral worth taking away from this, I think it's that we should routinely evaluate how we think and feel about other people to determine whether or not we're still being fair to them. Most of us were Gaon at one point and likewise, Gaon has taken the first steps to becoming a better person. Seeing him take one for the team by enduring a beating, to the point of being demorphed and pretty badly hurt, is proof that he really does care about his friends deep down, much more than he cares about himself.

I have to praise Juran as well, for being the only person on the team willing to call him out on this behavior, despite it turning out to be irrelevant to the problem of the missing Zenkaiju Gear. His wisdom is an incredible asset and one of several reasons why he's still my favorite Zenkaiger tied with Vroon. I mentioned in the first episode how an anniversary Sentai should remind people what heroism and justice really means and I think Juran was the first character to show that, when he saved that kid, for no other reason than he wanted to save him. There are so many amazing morals in this show that we should all take to heart.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rogerph2015

Oh, no! The worst Zenkaiger Episode ever? Why?!

Personally, I would give that title to Episode 20. But even that had a nice moment with Zox and Flint and the debut of Super Twokaizer.

What about this episode didn't work for you? Was it the ToQGer flashback reference that left a bad taste? Fortunately, like Gaon, I wasn't observant enough to notice that.