Review: GhostForce “Raijin”; “Chronoklok”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Liv tries to get a forgotten piece of equipment to her parents’ movie shoot but the team has to face a lighting ghost. Later, a ghost possesses a special watch that Mike’s father gave him, forcing him to get the team to not attack it.

OUR TAKE

Okay, I think these might have been aired out of order, because it is in this episode, after at least half a dozen appearances, that we get the first canonical appearance of Glowboo, the orange GhostForce robot who sometimes fights with the team. And considering that I was surprised we even GOT an origin episode for Glowboo when we haven’t gotten one for anyone else, I guess it goes to show how little any of these characters have grown or developed in any of these episodes. Heck, I’ll be surprised if we get any more indications that there was a passage of time AT ALL. Case in point, this is probably the third or fourth time we’ve checked in on Andy and Liv’s parents working on this Solarman movie, but it doesn’t seem to have moved very far past shooting a couple scenes when they serve as means to cause another ghost attack. Normally you’d see that as a way of tracking the collective story arc and see it all culminate at the end of the season. And we might for all I know! But at the moment, things seem trapped in a time loop, with every single episode being almost entirely interchangeable and disposable.

Then we have the other episode, which is more Mike focused, and from what we’ve seen of Mike focused episodes, they’re either about his crush on Charlie or his incredibly wholesome relationship with his pro basketball player father. There is a small, miniscule, microscopic bit of tension due to the ghost of the episode possessing a prized possession given to Mike by his father, but then you stop and think for even one second and realize that even if the watch did get smashed by the fight, it’s not like anything bad would happen between Mike and his dad. Even at the end of the episode, he says that he’d accept him no matter what, which is a pretty nice thing to hear overall, but it’s just another thing that shows that there’s not a whole lot to pick apart or talk about with this show. Which I guess isn’t really of the goal of it in the first place, but then what am I here for? I suppose we’ll find out in the remaining three episodes of this week. But man, I wish I could just talk about them in a batch like I did before.