 This article is about a character and mentor in Power Rangers RPM.
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Doctor K is a genius scientist who is the creator of the Category:Ranger Operators' tech and arsenal, and the mentor to the RPM Rangers. She was also the creator of the Venjix Virus, which was unintentionally spread worldwide, conquering Earth.
About
Doctor K reveals herself.
She is a blunt and straight-to-the-point, socially inept, youthful scientist with a genius intellect. She is a workaholic and rarely if ever stops to rest from her task of creating equipment for the Rangers and monitoring other methods of keeping Corinth City safe.
For a particular reason, aside from the occasional slip up, she refuses to call the Rangers by anything other than their Ranger color, much to their growing concern and annoyance. She will often outright state if she doesn't like someone or doesn't approve of something about them, most notably with Ziggy and the genetically-engineered twins Gem and Gemma. When the latter were first introduced to her, she immediately showed dislike towards them, telling them to stop speaking to her in conjoined sentences.
She is musically inclined, able to skillfully play both the piano and the violin, and even uses specifically the violin in conjunction with some of the equipment within the Ranger base. Despite her stern personality traits she oddly seems to have a subconscious affinity towards cute things, as evidenced by the questionably cartoony Zord designs and her childish sleeping attire (a matching top and bottom pajama set with an alphabet pattern with fuzzy puppy slippers). She also apparently has a bit of a sweet tooth.
At a young age Doctor K already showed signs of high intelligence, and at the age of 5, was whisked away by the staff members of a morally corrupt Top Secret Military Think Tank, code-named "Alphabet Soup".[1] Once she arrived there, the people there addressed her by the letter "K" and she was confined to a white-walled room in order to work on new government technology. She was raised on the belief that she was ill and allergic to sunlight and thus was never let outside, despite her wish to do so. She was coerced into working constantly on various difficult tasks while in the facility, and as the years passed she eventually found that she could no longer remember her real name.[2]
Doctor K was the leader of a research team developing exoskeleton robotic suits to amplify human strength and speed. They were attempting to harness the human body’s natural electrical output to prolong the suit’s battery life, when they had a breakthrough. The discovery of a universal bio-electric field, an unseen energy grid that connects the life force of all living things. Manipulating this field allowed unimagined advances in technology, including the RPM Ranger Suits & Powers. (Longtime Power Rangers fans would recognize that Doctor K and her team had managed to tap into the Morphing Grid which was only touched upon briefly in previous Ranger series.)
When Doctor K was about 15, she was presented with a pair of twins who were also occupants of the Alphabet soup named "Gem", and "Gemma". They were chosen to help with the Ranger project for the purpose of being test pilots for the Ranger suits and equipment. Doctor K initially did not like the twins. They gave her the first birthday present she ever received, despite knowing her apparent dislike of them. Overtime, Doctor K finally accepted the two as her friends.
Later on, while K was working on the Ranger Series, a butterfly somehow managed to make it into her workstation. When Doctor K went to follow the butterfly, she found a way out of the facility and subsequently, also discovered that she was not allergic at all to the sunlight and those in charge of Alphabet Soup had been lying to her, Gem & Gemma the entire time. This led to Doctor K's greatest mistake. In hopes of blinding the Security Servers long enough for her, Gem & Gemma to escape, Doctor K uploaded a self-aware, self-generating computer virus; "Venjix", for which she had written the base code for, to the database of Alphabet Soup. Before Doctor K could install the firewall to assure the virus would not escape beyond the walls of Alphabet Soup, the security men for the facility burst in and captured Doctor K, Gem & Gemma. Thus allowing the Venjix Virus to spread and soon take over the world.
A year later the virus had infected over 37% of the world's computers and was still going. Doctor K sent out the distress call all over the world, telling everyone to go to the domed city of Corinth. She was about to leave Alphabet Soup with the Ranger Series Technology, only to once again be cornered by the facility staff, who were determined to not let her leave, until Gem and Gemma came to her rescue. They gave her an opening to get away, but stayed behind themselves in an attempt to retrieve the classified Gold and Silver series Ranger tech. Doctor K was devastated when she saw the wall cave in behind them. She has been shown to still keep the ribbons that wrapped the gift they gave her as a keepsake.[2] It wasn't until the Rangers relayed information that they'd spotted some mysterious gold and silver zords that she had any inkling that Gem and Gemma were still alive, and upon reuniting with them, she broke down in tears.[3]
Doctor K is working alongside Colonel Truman, so it is believed that the RPM team is sanctioned by the defense forces of Corinth City. Everyday Doctor K has to live with the fact that she created the virus that has almost completely destroyed all of mankind, a fact that she kept under wraps from the other Rangers until she was forced into a situation where revealing it was the only option to save Dillon from being taken over.[4] She continues to work at finding ways to save humanity and will not be satisfied until Venjix is completely destroyed.
Due to her underdeveloped emotional state, her relationship with all the Rangers is somewhat awkward even though as time passes she begins to care about them. She finally begins to open up more to the others when Gem and Gemma re-enter her life, encouraging her to increase her bond with her team. Her relationship with Ziggy however is most distinctly complicated and strained, as from early on she displayed a very apparent lack of acknowledgement or respect towards him. She didn't hug him as she did the other rangers after her attempt at showing her appreciation towards them, and tends to get easily exasperated by his personality.
It is eventually revealed that she in fact doesn't hate Ziggy and seems to actually truly appreciate him when it is discovered that her computer password is his name, and also when she, to his surprise, allows him to take her outside. Their relationship finally begins to turn around after they get trapped in a cave together and he brings it upon himself to make her smile during their dire situation, which he ultimately succeeds at.
After Venjix is destroyed, Doctor K states that she and Ziggy are going to open a school for youngsters. Doctor K will teach them about bio field physics while Ziggy teaches them the art of shadow puppets and cooking. She then locks up the RPM morphers for good, unaware Venjix now resides in the Red Morpher.
Notes
- While normally relatively impassive even in an emotional state, Doctor K shows uncharacteristic rage when someone calls the Ranger suits 'spandex', her most notable reaction is towards a young boy. However, this does not apply to Gem and Gemma as they were her first true friends after Alphabet Soup kidnapped her.
- She constantly referred to Ziggy by his ranger color until Venjix is defeated, suggesting she has found respect for him since the beginning.
- K's act of hiding herself behind a computer monitor with her "name" visible and her voice distorted bears a similarity to the main antagonist of the manga/anime series Death Note, the detective L, who did the same thing to keep his identity a secret.
- The violin piece she plays during her brainstorming is Caprice No. 24 in A Minor by Niccolò Paganini.
- The rangers usually tried to dismiss her as a true mentor, always stating that she was younger than them.
- RPM is the first season in which a good character is directly responsible for the villains' rise to power. (Dino Thunder may count as the first, but it is debatable whether Dr. O's actions were directly responsible for Mesogog's rise)
- Olivia Tennet, who plays Doctor K, was 17 years old when production began on the series, and 18 by the time the series aired.
Appearance
Doctor K communicating with the Rangers in an earlier episode
Doctor K is a Caucasian female with short black hair and blue eyes.
At the beginning of the series, she only communicated with people through the computer. All that was seen was a white screen with the letter K on it with a speech graph underneath. Her voice was also distorted which led to some confusion about her gender, as initially she was referred to as male.
At 17 years old, she has been pointed out to be younger than all of the RPM Rangers, and is in fact the youngest Power Rangers mentor to date.
See also
- BOMPER - Super Sentai counterpart in Go-Onger. See comparison page.
