Beast Morphers: "End of the Road" was a bit of a silly one -- a decent idea of Zoey trying to convince the Mayor to cancel a forest-destroying road project in favor of green-energy Morph-X-powered bikes (which supposedly can be either pedaled or self-powered, but which were never really shown as anything other than ordinary bikes), but the execution was kind of silly, in the ridiculous ease with which the Mayor could postpone or cancel a construction project on the spot after what were presumably months' worth of planning and contract negotiations that the city would be heavily penalized for breaching. Not to mention the absurd idea that all the forest animals endangered by the road could be gathered up one by one and evacuated in a few cars. Also, it's oddly behind the times, given how many cities already have bike-sharing programs like the one presented here as novel and unpopular.
Still, I'm really growing to like Jacqueline Scizlowski as Zoey -- she's an effective actress who brings charm, strength, and humor to the role, and she's pretty nice-looking too. This was Liana Ramirez's first substantial turn as the evil Roxy avatar, and she was pretty effective too. Zoey and Roxy had a nice face-off in the warehouse at the climax.
I liked how they subverted our expectations about Ben and Betty. When we first saw Betty getting excited about building their own X-Bike, the expectation was that they'd totally fumble it somehow, but the next time we saw them, they'd built an awesome tandem bike that everyone admired (and it even had cupholders!), and it didn't go wrong until the monster attacked. They did overreach themselves more comically at the end, but it was nice to see that the comic-relief characters don't invariably screw things up. It helps explain how they stay employed at Grid Battleforce.
The monster and the climactic action footage came from
Go-Busters episode 3, in which the "Needleoid" was converted from medical equipment and the plot involved the villains stealing a hospital's Enetron supply -- so they really toned it down a lot here. As far as I could tell, the only
Go-Busters footage was of the giant robots' fight. The battle with the smaller robot was all-new, since its G-B counterpart fought the Go-Busters inside a hospital.
And I was wrong last week -- they've kept the part of the morphing sequence where the sunglasses pop up from the morphers and they hold them in front of their faces to complete the transformation. Although they've created their own version of the sequence, with the swirly cloudy energies and the roaring animal faces forming out of them (and a roaring bunny looks kind of weird).