Level E - Episode 7

Stuck on a planet that doubles as a giant, life-sized RPG, it's probably a good job that our forced Colour Rangers are actually kind of enjoying their role as they have to grind their way up to a sufficient level to complete the main quest which might just provoke the Prince to take them back to Earth.

However, once they actually feel adequately confident in their abilities to begin said quest, they soon come across a couple of problems.  Firstly, the Prince has elected himself to be the game's Princess who needs saving (which is of course disturbing in all sorts of ways), and secondly the bad guy who needs defeating has an assigned level of around 1,300 which is significantly higher than any of our Colour Rangers.  If this isn't bad enough, it seems that the AI which controls the Demon Lord in charge of the game is acting up, making things even more difficult and leaving the Prince to have to resign to being snatched away by the game's evil General to live and fight another day.

Of course, this being Level E there are a fair number of twists to be thrown into its comedy blend throughout this episode, all of which work surprisingly well at both defying expectations and being laugh out loud funny, while the rest of the episode also has enough clever or just downright good gags to be entertaining right the way through to the end of this story arc.

In fact, kudos should really go to the series for managing to make its Super Sentai parody last for three full episodes without ever running out of steam - I got worried when it ran into a second instalment and expected to be thoroughly fed up of it by the time it morphed into a third episode, yet the entire arc had more than enough comedy and smart presentation of those comical scenarios to ease itself through without a problem.  That sense of exceeding expectations pretty much sums up Level E in a nutshell thus far - from an interesting premise it's so far hardly missed a beat in delivering its irreverent sci-fi comedy, and the next story arc looks like it holds lots of potential for hilarity as well, leaving this series to luxuriate in the midst of some of my favourite shows for this season.  It's certainly head and shoulders above some of winter 2011's more predictable comedy fare like Mitsudomoe - even though I also kind of enjoy that show despite not 'blogging about it here, for what it's worth.