Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always is officially streaming on Netflix, offering pretty much everything Power Rangers fans could want from the high-kicking franchise’s 30th anniversary celebrations. And make no mistake, the hour-long special is 100 percent made for the fans, as it’s filled to the brim with morphenomenal references, callbacks, and easter eggs to not just Mighty Morphin but many other PR series from across the past 30 years.
Thanks to a new season of the tokusatsu series coming out every year ever since 1993, the Power Rangers universe is extremely wide-reaching at this point, which makes continuity and canon hard to piece together for hardcore followers. However, Once & Always subtly weaves together various incarnations of the Rangers to tease some connections between the different teams that we had no idea existed before. Case in point, the S.P.A. Rangers.
What’s the deal with Adam and Aisha in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers special?
Once & Always focuses on Billy (David Yost), Zack (Walter Emmanuel Jones), and Trini’s daughter Minh (Charlie Kersh) as they battle the resurrected Robo Rita who has kidnapped countless other Rangers as part of an evil scheme to rewrite history. Along the way, they recruit Rocky (Steve Cardenas) and Kat (Catherine Sutherland) to their cause. Not to mention off-world Rangers Adam (Johnny Yong Bosch) and Aisha (Karan Ashley).
Like the rest of the returning legacy characters, Adam and Aisha are also former Mighty Morphin Rangers, although this special reveals that they now work for some cosmic organization that goes by the initials S.P.A. While no explanation is given on-screen for this, those with P.H.D.s in Power Rangers lore can guess that this stands for Space Patrol Alpha. Going by their matching uniforms, we can assume S.P.A. is a precursor to Space Patrol Delta, as introduced in Power Rangers: S.P.D.
S.P.D. was a more ambitious PR series than most as it was set several decades in the future, when the Power Rangers had expanded to become an interplanetary peace-keeping force (somewhat like Star Trek‘s Starfleet). Thanks to Once & Always, we can infer that the MMPR Rangers helped establish the organization that would become S.P.D., with Adam and Aisha apparently being key founding members. Likewise, Adam and Aisha mention that they must return to Aquitar, the home planet of the Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers, so it seems the Aquitians are heavily involved in S.P.A. as well.
As much as Mighty Morphin is beloved, it means a lot to the fans to have the other series that make up the Power Rangers universe respected in this way too. Let’s hope Netflix keeps up this love for the past with its incoming ambitious reboot plans.