OOC: Info Post
Zen and the Art of Robotic Red Ranger Maintenance
Mack Hartford is the Red Overdrive Ranger, so yeah, he does get to do the whole overly-long CGI morphing sequence and end up in the inexplicably near-impenetrable spandex suit and helmet. Up until a couple of months ago, he thought he was the only son of multimillionaire adventurer Andrew Hartford.
Well, he is, in a sense, but Andrew Hartford being too much of an adrenaline-seeking, treasure-hunting gadfly to ever settle down, he tapped the resources of his technology company to pull a 21st-century Geppetto and build himself a son. (Let's leave out the fact that he could totally have paused long enough for one fertile attempt at the horizontal MMMBop, because hi, Disney show.)
Mack looks about eighteen years old, but he's only been operational and sentient for about three years; any "memories" from before that time are, of course, programmed. He also has super-strength, which was supposedly the result of genetic resequencing when he was made a Ranger but may actually just be a perk of being an android. (Knowing my canon, we may never find out -- as pink_windchaser can totally attest.)
He's still the Red Overdrive Ranger, as well, and may head out of town from time to time to investigate leads in the hunt for the last jewel of the Corona Aurora.
One thing to note about Mack's status as a Power Ranger: it's not a secret identity for him, the way it is for most other Ranger teams, as with Milieux's own Cassie Chan. They're effectively a privatized special ops team that just happens to have to do superhero things in the course of their work, and they've been on national television unmorphed, so having people know who they are isn't an issue.
Mack will be up front about that, especially if you ask him about the cell phone he sports: that's his Overdrive Tracker, which lets him morph into Ranger form, features a blacklight and scanning capabilities, and possibly a few other tricks as well.
(Anyone who interacted with Sakura Nishihori from FH is welcome to recognize Mack's Tracker as being very similar to Sakura's Accellular -- I gotta give a shoutout to PR:OO's source material, GoGo Sentai Boukenger, after all.)
He can be very cheerful and friendly, but he's a little bitter about the whole finding-out-he's-an-android thing at the moment. Don't worry. He'll get over it, mostly.
A few quick notes on Mack's backstory and where he comes from in canon, now.
Operation Overdrive in a Nutshell
Operation Overdrive is the name of Mack's Ranger team, and for once the PR franchise's predilection for assembling a diverse yet predictable group of character archetypes makes sense, because when you need a group of people to travel all over the world and hunt down legendary artifacts, it makes sense to have a professional thief, a race car driver, an academic genius/tech whiz, and a stuntman, right?
. . . yeah, uh, we're not so sure about Dax either.
Anyway, yeah. That's what they do: go all over the world to try and retrieve the five lost jewels of a legendary crown called the Corona Aurora, because if they don't Very Bad People will get their hands on them and then Very Bad Things will happen. For the purposes of Milieux, this mission has been given a temporary reprieve of urgency, and the Corona Aurora and the jewels that OO's already got are safe in a dimensional pocket. This doesn't mean that they can kick back and not worry about having to find the last jewel, or steal back the one that one of their Very Evil Rivals got hold of; it just means the Very Bad Things aren't as likely to happen.
Mack, of late, hasn't been handling the fact that he's an android too well. (Would you? Honestly.) He's been getting reckless, going off into dangerous situations because he figures he's expendable and his father can always just build a new model. This doesn't exactly sit really well with his teammates, his father, and Spencer The Best Butler In The History of Ever, so since the crown and three of the jewels are safe now seems as good a time as any to let the six-million dollar DVD player get a chance to actually be a real boy for a little while.
That's all the key stuff, I think . . . any questions?