[Locke]

Roughly ten episodes away from the end of SPD now and here is my reason that I'm not enamoured with the series for all those that care:

So the way SPD feels is like this, Kalish watched DekaRanger and pencilled out a vague set of heroes, villains and a setting. He then went to either end of the children's TV writers spectrum and created two teams from either end, he explained to them his vague outline and then said they could fill in the blanks with whatever they wanted after they had watched Deka Ranger.

So the first team, who believe that children's TV shouldn't assume children are stupid, saw Deka Ranger as a great way to really mix up Power Rangers in both the more slower paced action of police work and also as a humorous critique of the series all wrapped in a mature storyline full of actual conflict that really push the soccer Mum boundaries. A sort of RPM prototype or similar to the Dragon Knight Kamen Rider adaptation.

The second team, a bunch of late twenties something's drinking pepsi max with the flipped round baseball caps are sat in a living room watching sports.

"So Kalish wants us to watch some fag ass chinese power rangers knock off but subtitles are gay who wants to READ a movie!"

They high five and chuckle to themselves.

"But like we need to write something or we wont have money for sports merchandise."

"Well you remember MMPR right? The only Power Rangers series because all the others that I don't recognise that came after that are for kids and fat chicks."

"Haha fat people."

A round more of high fives and laughs continue.

"So yeah what was MMPR about again?"

"From what I remember there were loads of villains with personalities and voices that didn't match their personalities at all, who would say stupid shit to take all the drama and the tension out of the scenes."

"I'm typing this into my iPad it's gold! So what about the characters and the police theme and stuff?"

"MMPR never did anything to convince us it was actually them in the suits other than taking their helmets off."

"Good point!"

"And if we just make all the characters annoying then we've given them all depth without doing anything!"

"Perfect!"

So the two sets of writers went back with their stories for SPD and Kalish decided that...MMPR that is vaguely in the future and sorta about police if they really must is by far the better series. Realising he had already paid those other writers though, he decided to splash elements of their story around and give them a chance to actually have a few of their stories filmed.

What does this clash of tones do? Not only does it show off how great SPD could have been if they stuck with a mature police procedural show but it also highlights just how utterly crap the rest of the series is.

And not only that but the two kinds of shows are so different it actually hurts to watch at times from whiplash as we go from sinister and intelligent villains to villains who are just as strong but played entirely for comic relief for no real story reason. As the show goes from a fairly slow paced, intelligent and well used depiction of a future police force to a bunch of idiots bumming around until the next bit of sentai footage. As the characters go from deeply layered following interesting arcs to immature children in the next episode. As plot lines come up that are so mind blowingly stupid that they almost contradict everything the show stands for just urgh.