Nerding Day: Armor of God Force, Finale

Not quite right.

Much better. Armor on!

I remember my first love. Not fel lust, or pagan companionship, or secular rent division, or holy starvation with sixteen kids. Love. It was 2 AM, and two deadlines loomed. Instead, I gaped at the Armor of God Force homepage. A web series promising sin-free Power Rangers.

Obviously, too good to be true. Plenty of weeb pranksters would make a fake Bible Rangers homepage. Like myself, and…hmm.

This was real: a human adult had made a Bible sentai show. Communion Rider. Pretty Pure. Ultraman Vs. Modernity. Genius or fool, they’d opened the gate. Practical effects beyond my ken could enter our heroless world. Anything was possible, except my other deadline. Armor of God Force had a live stage show, and it demanded attention.

Balls. Armor of God Force had youth group questions, and they demanded attention.

I provided, alongside money to a deprecated Mercari store. There were simply no competitors: who else brought action bulimia to bible camp? Granted, I’d been burned by Christian heroes before—after ordering a cape comic called Christian Flagg, I received three issues of “go fuck yourself.” I still opened my heart to love.

And got 12 episodes of it. Plus benefits:

After the initial erection, I panicked. Action-fueled life lessons, from God’s stalkers? Any decent Bible sentai would breed more nazis than Goebbels. If the Inquisition Fan Society had decoded live-action anime, Earth was fucking over. Only luck had saved us when Batman’s most famous living writer decided Muslims were bacteria. The Myrrh Heroes could create a Gilead that swapped bonnets for cat ears.

False alarm. Armor of God Force sucked holy ass. Total Atwood Saturation remained weeks or even months away, aside from the climate collapse in Oryx and Crake. And billionaire forts in Oryx and Crake. And hell media in Oryx and Crake. I’m guessing a series hits Hulu by winter.

Instead of binging, I spread the series out over two nights. You know, four replays. Slowly, I changed. The Word of Zordon was alive in me. My roommates told me to shut the fuck up. My neighbors, family, and partner told me to shut the fuck up. All understandable. I’d let things get out of hand. For balance, I ghosted my friends, ghosted my family, and dumped my partner live. I had Armor of God Force.

And it’s still majestic. I’m laughing in a coffee shop, and the staff says I’ll soon be laughing outside. Eventually, I’ll be laughing in a straightjacket. Here’s the last two volleys of joy.

There’s a Power Rangers knockoff for Jesus freaks, and I find it amusing. I’m gonna talk about the ending.

First up’s another Jessica episode, about women’s vanity and maybe Jesus. You know, if there’s time.

My bad, Jessica’s been written out. And by written, I mean she’s just fucking gone. Vanished. She fades like savings in an even-numbered decade. While other gaffes get cute throwaway lines, the force has nothing to say about their first permanent casualty.

As a dumpster archivist, I’m obligated to overthink this. Jessica’s last appearance was a bit part in “The Anxietor,” which starred the Anxietor. Hell’s starting pitcher.

Pastor Jay flailed a bit too, but Armor of God Force knew where the money was. The Anxietor’s the closest thing the tail half of the series has to an idea (Max Profit’s stock megachurch parody comes in early). A burly, fear-powered demon is as elegant as it is stupid.

Moving along, I’ve narrowed Jessica’s fate down to five possibilities.

Hard to say. Peacing out seems natural, but Stockholme syndrome’s strong. Especially in backwards, mind-warping cults like crimefighting teams. Door Two seems like an odd one to offscreen, especially when the creators and fans both love a good Anxietor Driver. While Door Three matches Jay’s personality, he’d have to win a fight. Unlikely. While Door Four fits the failed Kickstarter, Five fits every episode’s script. We’re short on real evidence, so I’ll leave this to crime podcasts. We won’t get answers, but we’ll find a solid scapegoat.

Goodbye, Jessica. While your body’s escaped, your spirit carries Pastor Jay’s endless hectoring. That’s probably like eternal friendship.

Our semifinal episode does have Rocco’s tadpole. R10-9’s a self-aware machine born to train Jay’s fundamentalist paramilitary. He has no other purpose, except helping me understand Luddites. I got halfway through typing this paragraph before rush-ordering a sledgehammer. A robot delivered it, so I’ll need a new strategy.

For now, enjoy a Boston Dynamics training dummy.

And new friend. R10-9 can dance!

Huh, a dancing Chistrian robot. Kind of like—oh hey, Jay’s dancing.

Wow! It’s like a miracle, backwards.

But R10-9 can also enjoy scripture!

And kill!

But that’s jumping ahead. The first act drags. We open on some maintenance, from the patient’s perspective. R10-9 has Terminator vision,a subtle spoiler if you’re a newborn.

Note the phone: that gunmetal grey U.S. flag feels noncommittal. Add the line, Jay. We already know what you’re about, and it matches your armor. If this came out a month closer to a riot, you’d sound like a Saturday morning Uncle Ruckus. I’ll take that over Sunday morning Rollo Goodlove.

You might recognize R10-9 from an earlier episode. That makes you smarter than me. I can only remember the obesity demon, the OnlyFans demon, and the shittier robot that invented the “dumbphone.” This robot runs the broke church’s Danger Room. Spiritual War Room. Which is a pretty fresh angle.

Right. Well, I liked that arc, Whedon’s in the Negative Zone, and crazed fundamentalism changes the flavor. I’ll take anything over another dumbphone. Chris deems R10-9’s semi-legal Alpha impression annoying, and changes it to the broad robot voice you’re imagining. Contempt for the Power Rangers feels odd in the home stretch, but it keeps us on our toes.

It’s the friendship episode, so Chris and Jay call their speedbag buddy and pal before jamming him back in storage. Good stuff. We’re finally getting some realism. I didn’t know they went to Princeton, but it brings back memories. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything less than four dollars. Maybe some gum.

Synastor sees opportunity. I think. The script and voiceover are beyond phoned in:

That’s senioritis for you. The Fallen One’s phoned it in since demotion. Otherwise you’d be crawling through the ashes of World War XII, instead of pumping the breaks on III. Think quiet quitting on a cosmic scale. That old canard about good men doing nothing? It’s a hustle culture quote. Get up before the devil to steal his power. Just skip the ice bowl, he made that to fuck with you.

The freshly-infected R10-9 weaves a web of shapeshifting deception. I’m not sure why, when anyone watching could beat Chris and Jay to death at the same time. Especially the children. Maybe R10-9’s afraid Jessica will jump it from the shadows. I wouldn’t stress it. After the gluttony episode, she’d probably watch Pastor Jay drown in a kiddie pool.

A painful wedge grows between our heroes.

I didn’t drift far from the real deal.

Classic skinwalker shenanigans. You might get secondhand social anxiety, if possession’s big in your town. And the ghosts in your towns are dumbshits.

Then R10-9 hits Chris with a short joke, sparking a classic hero-on-hero conflict. These are always exciting the first time. In fact, Marvel Comics refused to publish anything else for a decade. I’d love to have Jessica in the mix, so that we could crown a true Armor of God Force champion. But that leaves us a hook for a sequel. For now, here’s Wrestlemania week’s best match.

Jay wins.

Pastor Jay beats the piss out of Chris. It’s not even fucking close. Think a geriatric versus an infant: weakness doesn’t make them equal. It’s an old man flailing at a baby, missing twice, and then punting them into the other side of the family reunion. Hopefully all this scripture’s works, because Chris meets God.

Then, for extra lameness, it’s not even Chris.

The robot took that beating. Sorry for lying, I just needed to spread that disappointment. I couldn’t carry it alone. I almost quit running ArmorCon, the world’s largest and only Armor of God Force fan fest.

With the truth in hand, Jay seeks out his fugitive replicant. He needs (wants) to get his friend (combat Roomba) back from Synastor (the devil). His charm lands as well as it usually does.

It doesn’t matter: Jay has Christ’s patience, and the gentle hand of friendship. He reaches out to his friend/slave in need.

Something rotten and fanged hides deep in that man.

Luckily, friendship makes R10-9 better. There’s a short speech about forgiveness, which tracks if you consider a virus conjured from hell’s depths a judgement issue. Jay sure does. But It’s fine as long as R10-9 gets back to work. And stays his friend or whatever.

Nice message, after telling Jessica to learn to code. Again: Pastor Jay’s replaced the only woman with a robot. I’ll take a break here. Every joke about that flits through the mind at double speed. You know, the way sane people watch Armor of God Force. If nothing comes to mind, don’t sweat it. Focus on escaping the compound.

They can keep sanity. I have the final episode.

The stakes are high out the gate: Pastor Jay figures out the devil’s behind all those challenges to God. It evokes, by intent and accident at once, the now-famous clip of Batman writing “Alucard” in the mirror. Which, in hindsight, I’ll defend. It made you believe, for a second, that version of Bruce would get himself eaten.

Synastor speed dials the church. One of the Iron EZ chair’s buttons, I suppose.

A bold face before crushing failure. Check the scorecard. Synastor’s franchise is collapsing, and the assholes we’ve seen were his best. Dumbphones. A semi-hard video game. An egirl. A crackhead. Dumbphones. A punchable computer virus. Hell’s hit hard times. The score’s 10-1-1, and Jessica wandered off by herself. It’s that Christmas party in the trenches all over again.

After losing his entire staff to parry-fishing, the devil’s crafted his most devious plan yet. A proper sequel to his glory days in Eden. And he’ll be re-damned if Eve’s anti-fandom steals half the credit this time.

The force fears for the future. For an attosecond, even Chris is relatable. His reasoning’s alien, as he imagines Christianity falling to threats he beat with negative competence and less backbone. But I get fretting over what’s next. You know, for publishing. Lots of consolidation. And I should harass people about preorders. I Google visas at 3 AM to boost preorders.

True to his creed, with his follower’s heart in his hand, Jay fucks off for a moment with the Deciever. Satan’s shorter in person.

I cannot, over four articles about it, understate how much the force sucks.

It’s not just the beatings.

It’s the lack of grace or progress. Each exorcism looks like the first time they’ve heard of conflict. Or moved. They flop like fish that just learned Sushi2Go isn’t an aquarium.

I’m watching Spider-Man slam into one billboard, forever.

Still, I’m a media optimist. You can’t tell here, because I specialize in self-help for Confederate sorcerers. There’s some light ahead. While the fight with Satan starts the standard way—with Pastor Jay bitching out like someone found his secret family—I enjoy the next three moments for three different reasons.

First, Jay finds a spine. He pushes past the overwhelming stench of his own urine to swing a foam sword once.

With that, the Devil immediately bitches out. By creator design. There’s even a Bible quote, played as literally as the concept demands.

And you know what? For once, that’s the right beat. Heroes punch, demons urinate. That’s all the show ever needed to double the lunatic population. Armor of God Force threw away Saturday mornings on OAN for 11.5 episodes. This should just be Garo with hate. Thank Synastor it isn’t, but it would’ve made easier writeups.

Anyway, I don’t really give a half-shit about the story arc. It just feeds Moment Two: The fucking Anxietor’s back, and climate-sized.

My label, not the shows. Armor of God Force would run table reads of Pink Flamingos before mentioning eco-anything. Rival tithing pools, on the other hand, are a hot topic.

Our boy hasn’t missed a beat: He gets right on our hate quota, and squashes Max Profit’s insufficiently militant megachurch. A nice reminder of what we’re watching, and how many of us Pastor Jay would let live.

I still owe you one anti-miracle.

After reuniting with the team (sans Jessica, plus Scrappy-Bot), Jay pulls a fucking Megazord out of his church’s sin hole. I expected that, because why else are we here? A reverse tutorial for After Effects? Sword fights from a fifth grade Peter Pan play? Decoding the last will and testament of Jessica? Art doesn’t live here.

Armor of God Force still found a way to sweep my leg. My thin scraps of reason remain a kryptonite-level flaw.

Confirm this one for me—it’s possible I”ve just re-lost my fucking mind. Occupational hazard of digging past hell. Sorry about the leakage, by the way.

It’s fucking Shockwave. Not canonically—the HolyZord is an original robot from an original universe. Mortal Engines/Fifty Shades copyright rules and all that. But that’s Shockwave’s fucking suit, plus ten years of camera advancement and decay. If you know anything about old wrestlers, you’re a little depressed. You also know getting them to retire is like getting a painkiller-forged artist to leave the stage he traded his life force for.

Bin that. Goofy robot! Battle with The Axietor is joined.

Now we’ve got a fucking match.

Remember:this is the finale. They’ve pulled a hitherto unseen, unmentioned mech straight from the pagan abyss. Armor of God Force could do anything from here. So you can bet it’s time for the same shit. Sing along if you know the faith.

Embarrassing beating!

Embarrassing beating!

Come on. At least button-mash.

Shield of Faith!

Sidebar: on top of everything else, Shockwave knows punch fans. He wrestled around the world. He has to know how looping one finish, week in and week out, plays. I might have liked the tennis return ending one or four times. And yet…

Pong return!

Sword of the Spirit!

And that’s all she wrote.

Another lie. I hunted the stage show like it had the antidote. I needed to know where on a scale of 1 to Love Never Dies this went in person.

The stage show begins with a high-effort reading of Ephesians 6:12. If I had a stronger/any spiritual weathervane, I’d have opened the first article with that. Ah well. At least we got the full power-up sequence, which is where my soul thrives.

Followed by five minutes of show footage. It’s a fucking asset flip. Struggling churches paid the Armor of God Force to come perform half of an eleven minute script. I hope it’s The Anxietor, or the Finale. You can’t learn the power of leg day too early.

No.

This must be some kind of child endangerment. You’re strangling senses of humor before they can spell “this sucks.”

Of course. What did I expect? Disdain for modernity is Chris Ruiz and Shockwave’s guiding moonlight. Whoever’s baby this is, that was guaranteed to deform it. And they’re not the type to pull the plug early.

Some children laugh. They’re either well-trained, or into it. Let’s say enthusiasm, and vindicate my core point: you can show youth group inmates anything and take them to entertainment heaven. I spent Jamaican summers watching trash that made Madea Goes to Hell look like Moonlight.

Onstage, Chris represents the whole team. Probably the best outcome. Jessica acts the way I pray, and Jay’s character is an atheist plant.

Hmm. Live, the flavor of the executions feels off. And the flavor already felt off. This is less “too much paprika” and more “too much white mold.” Steampunk Steve Jobs begs before he gets offed. Then, Chris kills the momentum by asking the kids to watch a “replay” on the projector. Namely, the explosion from the episode.

A little Bateman, but what fits a hat like another hat? And the catchphrase is all live:

Thank god this show sucks.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Elliot Watson who still doesn’t know what "tokusatsu" means, but knows Armor of God Force made him cry in a church basement.

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