Kyoryuu Sentai Zyuranger 33 – A Bite of Courage

The warrior of courage and the girl who lacked one.

In this episode, the DoraRaiger is grabbing kid sacrifices as part of Bandora's plan in flooding the earth with endless rain. During one of the instances that she is grabbing a kid, a kid named Saori cancelled her pocket dimension. As it turns out, her necklace contains a gem of the Fae of Sunlight, Sunny who is good friends with the Fae of Rain, Rainy! Can the Zyurangers save Rainy from DoraRaiger's blue stone?

This episode is obviously a Dan focused episode as it runs around the concept of courage since the episode title is "The Tale of the Courage Egg", when the title of this episode is revealed, I am bothered what is this courage egg. It becomes a bit clearer as the episode progressed. The plot of this episode kinda reminded me an early Dan focused episode involving a kid's love confession in a sense that Saori and the kid from that episode need to muster their courage to do something incredible. The only difference is that Saori is a sacredly cat at the start of the episode and she starts becoming courageous as the episode progressed.

Saori is a sacredly cat at the beginning of the episode that she didn't save her friend, Yuuko when she was teased by her classmates. What made her courageous is how Dan encouraged her to gain a little courage. That's expected since Dan is the Warrior of Courage and he is just doing his mission. But unlike the kid in the DoraGoblin episode, it took Saori the entire episode just to gain her courage, which I will get into later.

One thing I liked about in this episode is the back story about Sunny and Rainy and how they were turned into stone by Bandora. Based on this tale, it seems that Bandora's attack to the tribes in the series might have happened after this one since she was sealed after her attack. The tale of Sunny and Fae is quite a sad tale of friends since a witch separated them and she forced them to have their powers to use for evil. To make things sadder, Rainy's power is used to create an endless rain to flood the world.

As the DoraRaiger is busy with her rain ceremony, which I find creepy, the Zyurangers has just arrived on time to stop her thanks to Sunny's guidance. Our heroes are then stuck to the DoraRaiger's pocket dimension and fight her there. As expected, the DoraRaiger gets the upper hand since she keeps on using her teleportation and gliding abilities in her own dimension, making her invulnerable against any attack. With no other options left, Tricera Ranger suggested to let him leave the pocket dimension to ask Saori's help for them to break Rainy's spell.

Tricera Ranger escaped and reverts back to Dan and starts looking for Saori. This is when the "courage egg" thing becomes clear. Since Saori is scared, Dan showed her a method on how she can gain courage by writing "courage" in the air, grab it and mold it like an egg and swallow it. Granted it kinda looks a bit childish but that's the best way to gain self-confidence and to gain courage, by imagining you are swallowing an egg size of courage. Even if that is the case, Saori didn't try it yet because the DoraRaiger appears in front of them with a bottle containing Dan's teammates.

Dan asked for Saori's necklace so that he can free Rainy himself out of the blue crystal. What happens next is one of Dan's finest moments in this series as he faced the DoraRaiger head on. Even though he gets beaten a couple of times by it, his determination to save Rainy, his friends and the kids made this scene really fantastic. On the technical side of things, I can't help but notice that there are some scenes the Tricera Ranger is wearing the necklace while there are some scenes he is not wearing it, most of those scenes involved a lot of flipping around.

Because of Dan's display of courage and her friends in danger, Saori decides to follow Dan's advice and take a bite of courage. Saori running around not caring if she gets hit by the DoraRaiger is really great. What's more, Dan didn't hog the spotlight and Saori is the one who did the critical blow that freed everyone from the blue liquid! It just shows her growth as a character quite well that from a sacredly cat, she finally got a little courage and saved everyone.

Now that Rainy, the other kids and the Zyurangers are saved, it is time to finish the DoraRaiger. Since the Thunder Slingers are not that used much, they decided to go with the Ranger Slinger finisher, which dealt a great amount of damage to the DoraFranken a couple of episodes ago. Much to my surprise, we don't have a giant battle for this episode but what the heck, the episode is fantastic on its own that it doesn't need one giant battle to make it good! At the end, the Fae friends are freed and thanked Saori for what she did.