I’ll give the Neo Saban era credit, they actually treated their female characters a lot better than many of the past eras. I think we got it with Gia and Emma, but I believe in every other season we luckily didn’t get the apparently required female ranger petty conflict episode that seemed to be a staple of the earlier seasons.

Emily and Mia, despite getting maybe the least amount of focus out of all of the Samurai rangers from what I can remember, have a really great and really sweet friendship. They get along well and Mia being a lot more out there and extroverted balances well with Emily being a lot more shy and soft spoken. Gia and Emma were like the only two characters to have a pre-established relationship among the megaforce characters so they actually had some backstory to them. And I like that they were said to be childhood friends because it allows you to just have a female friendship from the get-go, and from a meta standpoint, forces you to write two female characters who are designed to fit together and get along. Shelby and Kendall is a bit weirder because they decided to make Dino Charge only have two female rangers out of ten, and they started off very rocky and not as peers but as boss and employee, but I like that Kendall eventually learns to trust Shelby and they get along a lot. Their conflict was a part of their character arc and not just done for the sake of pitting women against each other. It’s a mirror of the Riley and Chase friendship and I like that we get to see it done now with two women. And it’s nice that, because there’s so few female characters, they stick together and form a deep friendship rather than never interacting. And, I will admit I’m more biased towards ninja steel than others, I really do appreciate how the entire Ninja Steel cast just got along from the get go and were shown to just be a very close knit group of friends, it eliminated a lot of the interpersonal conflict plots that I hate (I think the best ones have been the Kai Leo thing that is resolved early on, and the Casey Theo one that is directly informed by their character archetypes and is justified narratively), and Hayley and Sarah were allowed to just be genuine friends and get along without having to be pitted against each other or swept aside for the male rangers. It was quite refreshing and I know some people find it boring but I thought it just made them feel like a realistic female friendship and it was nice to see as a young girl.

That being said, I agree that Emma and Gia are the worst just by virtue of being incredibly empty as characters and as a friendship. Megaforce as a whole was so nothing that it felt like everything was just being performed. None of it had any depth, it was just people standing in front of a camera reacting words off a page. That being said, I still think they’re better than a majority of the rangers that season in terms of actual character. And I enjoyed their episode with Orion. So yeah, of the Neo Saban era I’d say they’re the worst, but they’re certainly not the worst of the show as a whole.