The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Group Watch Thread

[Octopus Prime]

Except for Splinter, Leo and the Tummy Aliens, I prefer the 2K3 characterizations all around the board.

Not by any great extent maybe but generally.

Oh, also; forgot to mention that Baxter is sporting an eyepatch. This is because Shredder slashed out his eyeball for his previous failure. And because the Tech Ninjas were defeated in this episode, he gets carried off at the end for another chopping.

Shredder doesn’t strike me as a great employer

 

[Octopus Prime]

Fallen Angel was a filler episode that I think was originally going to be a Very Special Episode, but then the writers said "Nah... no.... nah."

In this episode, while Casey and the Turtles are doing what they do best (level-grinding on mooks), Casey is surprised to elarn that one of the Purple Dragons is a punk-rock little girl from his neighborhood named Angel who fell in with the gang and wants to make a name for herself in New Yorks blooming Henchman industry. This largely passes without more than an "Aww man, her grandma is super nice, it's going to suck if I have to explain to her why I had to beat this 12-year-old to death with a baseball bat some day" from Casey.

This is also largely unrelated to Casey discovering a Bloodsport-style secret underground karate tournament that is how prospective Purple Dragons wind up joining the gang, but Casey gets much more involved when he sees Angel jump into the ring to her her place in the gang herself. Luckily, she's absurdly good at martial arts and beats the ever loving hell out of a guy twice her size. Hun, who is the ref of the match, sees Casey and immediately recognizes him as vigilante who's been beating his henchmen to death with baseball bats (nobody else in the gang does until he puts on his goalie mask) and has him captured and decides to let the opportunity to beat Casey entirely to death while he's tied to a stake be the prize for the next winner of the kumite, which the Dragons are completely on board with.

Angel realizes her new friends are... prospective murderers, and flees to get help from Caseys friends, who are, in fact, the Turtles, and they mount a rescue operation; which is to say secretly entering the fight club and beating everyone down themselves and saving Casey instead of killing him. They do (Hun gives them some trouble, as he's, like... supervillain strong) and they get Casey and Angel out, and Angel decides to spend more time her with granny instead of hucking bricks through jewelry store windows and kicking peoples jaws clean off.

Aww.

Now, back to Nick for:

The Gauntlet
Panic in the Sewers

 

[Egarwaen]

“This is serious! I’d better get splinter!”

Best gag in this series so far

 

[Octopus Prime]

Boy, The Gauntlet was making up for lost time with those filler episodes.

April is menaced by a new mutant, a jacked up pigeon man named Pete (actually nice, but weird and gross) who has a warning from her dad that the Krang are going to detonate a Mutagen Bomb over the city, the Turtles launch another attack on the Krang stronghold to try to rescue Aprils dad. They fail but learn that the Krang have been kidnapping scientists to modify the Mutagen since turning people into body horror animal hybrids isn’t what it’s supposed to do.

The Turtles find and disable the bomb but also Xever and Bradford show up because they’re desperate to get back into Shredders good graces, but get pretty soundly beaten and opt to go for suicide by drowning in Mutagen rather than disappoint Shredder again.

And then Shredder himself jumps in to make this a proper boss rush, and he absolutely beats down the turtles severely. They only survive because Shredder is temporarily shocked by the appearance of the pretty horrifically mutated Xever and Bradford (turned into an eel and dog, respectively) and the Turtles retreat, and Splinter informs them that just surviving a fight against Splinter is something to celebrate, but now they know he’s definitely in town so it dunn got real, yo

Also Mikey discovers the fun of chucking smoke bombs

 

[Octopus Prime]

In Panic in the Sewers, Having his four adopted sons be nearly murdered by the man who already previously killed his family and burned down his house clearly did a number on Splinters mental well being, and he’s taking it out in the Turts; forcing them to train endlessly and reinforcing the fact that Shredder beat them so easily that it was only a fluke they were alive at all, until even their own self confidence is completely shot and they’re convinced that even weeny threats are something to be overly cautious of.

This fear is eventually justified when they go on patrol and have to fight the newly mutated Bradford, turned into a Shiba Inu/Doomsday hybrid that Mikey calls Dogpound, who whups them good.

Eventually, after seeing that April is kind of over the turtles being at an emotional low point and decides to spy on the Purple Dragons herself, despite having vastly less ninja training and no mutation based biological enhancements, and learning that Shredder is planning on just speed running his Kill Splinter plan by both blowing up and poisoning the New York sewer systems water supply. The Turtles rally and manage to stop the toxic spill and also beat Bradford in a rematch and then a splinter realizes that he really shouldn’t project his terror onto his sons when he’s training them to be warriors.

And Donny builds the Fantasticar.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Next is Fox with
Garbage Man
The Shredder Strikes (Part 1)

 

[Octopus Prime]

Garbageman is… weird. It’s another MotW episode, really all over the place in tone and is possibly the show at its most Judge Dredd-y. And it also has an anti-recycling message? It’s also a testament to how massively incompetent the NYPD must be, which isn’t a surprise, seeing as 100% of the cities crimes are handled by vigilantes, most of whom never left the sewers until recently.

The first third or so is a straight up horror movie about New Yorks homeless population being hunted by a monstrous garbage truck, that is semi bf ly eating them. Which bugs the turtles since Donny is apparently best friends with a homeless guy who treats recycling with a religious significance and conflates it with Carl Sagans teachings (like I said; this is a weird one). The Turtles see the garbage truck and have a Mad Max esque explosion filled chase through the city before seeing it arrive at a volcano garbage island in the middle of the New York Bay that apparently nobody noticed before.

Apparently the city DID know about the volcano garbage island, but it’s also a very successful landfill and recycling center so the owners bribed the city council to overlook the garbage volcano that is filled with StormTroopers and forced labour camps full of kidnapped homeless people that is clearly visible from the shoreline.

The Turtles break in and confront the leader, the titular Garbageman, who is straight up Mojo from the X-Men, except obsessed with recycling instead of television, and they inspire a slave revolt of all the captive trash miners, and eventually shove the Garbageman off a cliff into the bay where he presumably drowns as half his body is corroded spider-mech; and everyone learns a valuable lesson about, I don’t know… not throwing things in the garbage?

Oh, and Mikey spends the entire episode desperately trying to find a catch phrase or one liner to use and is annoyed that everyone else can do it effortlessly.

 

[jpfriction]

That episode really reminded me of the batman where Bruce gets kidnapped by a gross dude who kidnaps homeless people to be slaves. This one should have had Raph get kidnapped and hit on the head so he forgets he’s a turtle.

 

[Octopus Prime]

The Shredder Strikes has some more backstory, but nothing particularly surprising if you’re at all familiar with the Splinters whole deal. Maybe if you’re used to him being A Man Who Is Rat instead of a Rat Who Is Man, but they established that previously anyway.

Anyhow, after getting a dressing down from Splinter for his overconfidence in weapon choice (which mainly exists to establish that Splinter is a very, very good
Ninja), Leo storms off in a huff, where he encounters a whole bunch of Foot Ninja, who incite them to meet their boss instead of trying to kill him as usual. Leo does, at least partly because he’s mad at his Rat Dad, and he meets Shredder. Presently out of uniform since a guy made of giant knives calling himself “The Shredder” doesn’t make for a great first impression.

Shredder tells him that, yes, he fought the turtles a bunch hit that was because he didn’t know if they were on the side of good or evil and that he is mired in a centuries long struggle against the forces that think they can control the world.

He neglects to mention that he’s the bad guy, and Shredder is definitely not the “everyone is the hero of their own story” kind of villain. But he also gives Leo a cool sword as a signing bonus.

Leo and Raph come to blows when he suggests hearing this Oroku Saki joker out, after all, he told a story with no corroborating evidence that implied he was a good guy, despite all evidence to the contrary, but then they calm down and decide to get a second opinion from Splinter who reveals “Oh… Oroku Saki? Yeah, he’s the Shredder. That guy sucks. He killed I learned ninjitsu from, even though I was a normal ass rat at the time”.

Which is enough for Leo to do yet another 180, because his moral compass is pointing every which way, and it leads to a boss rush against a whole damn lot of of Foot Ninja and also Hun, before Shredder himself shows up in a flash of lightning and says “Okay, you beat up my cannon fodder, now I’m going to kill you”.

Meanwhile those Blade looking Matrix guys keep popping up being reasonably sure the Turtles aren’t as big of a problem as Shredder

 

[jpfriction]

6-8 more months of watching the turtles beat up foot clan mooks should clear things up for them. Gotta be sure.

 

[Daikaiju]

It's the only way.

 

[Octopus Prime]

You can’t walk down any random street in New York without getting attacked by Ninja so it’s really inconclusive

 

[Johnny Unusual]

It's all been detailed in this documentary...

 

[Octopus Prime]

Back to Nick for
The Mousers Attack!
It Came From the Depths!

 

[Octopus Prime]

Mousers Attack manages to be both a MotW episode and also a plot episode!

A sudden competitive streak among the turtles leads them to split into two groups, with Leo and Raph on one side and Mikey and Donny on the other, which leads to problems when the groups split up; one team investigating some small robots that have been seen stealing from Purple Dragons, and the other trying to retrieve Aprils cellphone which was also stolen by the Dragons.

Naturally they don’t take the guy who Does Machines to deal with the robots and they don’t bring the guy who Does Violence to deal with the karate criminals, and things rapidly escalate since I guess everyone forgot that the Dragons work under Bradford who is currently a giant Dog Doomsday, and the Mousers, of course, were built by Baxter Stockman who has apparently learned a thing or two about robotics since he was briefly merged with a military AI and decided that hundreds of tiny robots were better than one giant mecha suit.

Both groups realize they split their core competencies in perhaps the worst possibly way and reunite, tricking the Mousers into attacking Bradford and Stockman, who flee back to the Shredder who hires Baxter since he could really use a mad scientist roboticist on his staff since one of his main henchmen is currently a fish and therefor not very well suited for clandestine criminal operations

 

[Octopus Prime]

It Came from the Depths is a Krang episode and it stars one of my favorite ancillary characters but… radically different. I mean; most characters in this series are radically different but this time I feel like it’s a net loss.

Word reaches the turtles that there’s *another* giant nuclear reptile in the sewers beating people up and go to investigate because, well, that’s *their* shtick, and they find a bunch of Krang robots getting absolutely wrecked by the giant crocodile man; Leatherhead.

Who is not a swamp dwelling Cajun with a belt full of crawdads; he’s an Incredible Hulk who is a crocogator. Who also has tremendous PTSD and goes into a berserk rage when he sees, smells, or hears the word “Krang”.

Mikey immediately sympathizes with him on the grounds that Leatherhead was clearly tortured by Krang and hates them and the Krang are the bad guys; so clearly they have a lot in common. Everyone else is less obliging as he’s a giant, super strong crocogator with a hair-trigger temper.

So Mikey keeps Leatherhead at the lair and learns his story (pet alligator who was flushed down the toilet, abducted by the Krang and experimented on and tortured in their home dimension, and then he fled back to Earth having stolen an important piece of the machine they were using to commebce their invasion) while the rest of the Turtles explore Leatherheads lair, an underground murder-maze, for the Krang device; and eventually succeed just as some drones find Leatherhead. Thanks to some mad science and Leatherhead being just… absurdly aggressive, the good guys win and Leatherhead agrees to go off solo since he’s perpetually one vague inference away from just absolutely murdering everything that enters his line of sight.

We also get Splinter wrecking house on the giant crocogator man when he catches him attacking the turtles.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Next are the Fox episodes:

The Shredder Strikes Part 2
The Unconvincing Turtle Titan

If I'm remembering right, one of those adds... some real head-scratching continuity notes to the series

 

[Octopus Prime]

Shredder Strikes Part 2 was pretty much 22 straight minutes of establishing why the main villain of the franchise earned that title; picking up where Part 1 ended, with an exhausted turtles facing down another small army of Foot Ninja, and also The Shredder; who gives a brief and to-the-point evil speech before absolutely beating the complete hell out of them, blowing up the building they were standing on, and forcing the Turtles to split up so they weren't all immediately killed. Mikey winds up breaking his foot during the escape, and Leo finds one of those Neo/Blade guys who informs him that by deciding to fight the Shredder, they made an ally in the Creepy Neo/Blade guys (who Identify themselves as The Watchers), but then disappear before giving any further context.

Splinter realizes that his sons probably went off to fight the murderous super-ninja he warned them to avoid and finally leaves the sewers to help them, and we then get a extended scene of establishing why, exactly, Splinter is in charge of the Turtles (he is... extremely good at beating up people) and working together Splinter and the Turtles lure Shredder into a rematch where the Turtles fight off the Foot Ninjas and Splinter, avenging his former master and pretty cheesed off that Shredder is attempting to murder his sons, 1v1s Shredder, eventually booting him off the building they were on and dumping a water tower on top of him for good measure.

New Yorks Emergency Services are nowhere to be seen despite all the buildings this ninja army have personally destroyed over the course of this episode.

And as an epilogue, we see Shredder climbing out of the wreckage of the building that just fell on top of him since that was a pretty ambiguous way to die, even if it's had a reasonably good success rate of killing Shredders in the past

 

[Octopus Prime]

The Unconvincing Turtle Titan is… a weird one; it almost feels like a back door pilot but it isn’t much of one. It does explain why the police are completely unconcerned with the rampant ninja crime plaguing the city and the occasional volcano garbage fortress and giant laser shooting the river; turns out there’s also a flippin’ Superman in the town and nobody is remotely surprised by this fact.

So the Turtles are out on patrol and Mikey complains that they aren’t doing enough to save people in non-Ninja related danger, and the rest of the turtles point out that that’s because for Standard Issue Peril there’s the Silver Sentry, a flying strong man in tights who the public loves.

Everyone is surprised at the existence of nuclear turtle men but Superman is right there.

Mikey gets the idea that being more public facing would help their image so he makes his own superhero costume (kind of a Batman Captain America combination) and calls himself the Turtle Titan and decides to team up with the Sentry after noticing a string of people being mindcontrolled into committing crimes. Eventually they track that back to Sentry’s nemesis, Malignus, and Mikey realizes that being a nuclear turtle man with ninja skills is more valuable than a costume with lots of bits that get stuck on things and uses his own skills to beat the villain and save the day.

So… problem solved I guess?

Pretty oblique but given the general bug vibe of his look, I think Malignus might have been a reference to Maligna from the Archie TMNT comics?

 

[jpfriction]

Huh, don’t remember that one at all. Must be caught up to where I got distracted and stopped watching. Fine I guess I’ll watch more cartoons.

 

[jpfriction]

Heh “The greater good? What are you, running for office?”. Good one Leo.

Mikey smacking himself repeatedly in the face with his shield as he Batman’d his way up the warehouse got a genuine chuckle out of me.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Next is Nick

The New Girl in Town
I, Monster

 

[Octopus Prime]

New Girl in Town is a Shredder episode, though he barely appears in it. Instead it’s the introduction of his daughter, Karai.

Leo is feeling rejected because nobody is accepting “Leads” as being the thing he’s good at (not for any good reason, he’s just not advising “Rude”, “Party” or “Machines” as viable solutions) so the rest of the Turtles are on their own trying to stop the apparently recently resurrected Snakeweed from kidnapping people. And while he’s on his own he meets up with a female ninja who immediately tries to chop his head off and is working with the Foot, and inexplicably immediately falls in love with her.

Still a healthier relationship than what April and Donny have going on.

The plots converge when Leo decides that helping his brothers beat Snakeweed and saving all the people he was kidnapping (and apparently planning on melting down into fertilizer) was more important than helping his prospective girlfriend rob a museum. There’s a *vague* implication that she doesn’t agree with Shredder but mainly because she likes All Crime not just Murder Vendetta Crime.

I, Monster is another MotW episode, bringing back Dr. Jeffrey Combs, and made me stop and wonder what the intended age for this cartoon is because JFC it is gnarly. Jeffrey Combs, gone full Raving Lunatic since his last appearance, has gone from a fully furnished science lab working on orangutans to working in a filthy tenement on rats, and blames the Turtles, and humanity in general for this. Then his lab rats cause an electrical fire that also douses him with the chemicals he was working on; burning him down to a Cryptkeeper and also giving him full psychic control over all rats, causing him to dress up like a freaky ass skeleton Baptist preacher and calling himself The Rat King.

Rat King first uses his vermin army to try to drive all Non-Rat life out of New York (which ranges from silly cartoon antics to horrifying carnivorous flesh walls of rats) and then realizes that he *really* needs something sturdier than a potato sized mass of fur and teeth to protect himself so he begins a psychic assault on Splinter to try to for him to be a bodyguard for him.

Under Rat Kings control, the Turtles realize the just ridiculous degree to which Splinter outclasses them as a martial artist, but luckily, under the control of a psychic skeleton preacher or not, Splinter can’t bring himself to kill his sons and that helps him break Rat Kings control and together they beat him down until… the next time Jeffrey Combs wants a paycheque and comes back.

 

[jpfriction]

Nobody does unhinged quite like Dr. Combs.

 

[Octopus Prime]

It’s weird when Jeffrey Combs is playing a good guy, and especially weird when he’s playing a good guy who isn’t kinda disturbing

 

[Johnny Unusual]

The more I think about it, the more I think Shudder needs to make a Re-Animator TV series where Jeffrey Combs tries to solve the problems he creates in the most asshole way possible. It's like shitty Doctor Who but not Rick and Morty where we are also expected to like him in some capacity. He's just the worst doctor.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Next up is Fox for
Notes From the Underground (part 1 and 2)

This is a three parter!

 

[Octopus Prime]

Notes from the Underground is a 3 parter that says “Well… why not Chuck the turtles into a Lovecraft story?” Though a later arc does so much more explicitly.

Donny is doing experiments on the weird crystals and alien technology of their sewer lair, which is something you’d think he’d have been curious about within the first dozenish episodes, but he had a lot on his plate, and as he does so he winds up a series of tremors through the sewers and causing monstrous creatures to emerge from underground to attack the lair.

Splinter says “Well, this is untenable” and the Turtles get ready for some deep spelunking, going into new tunnels that have opened up in the sewer and metro lines, and occasionally getting attacked by more monsters.

Prior to all this, Mikey was thoroughly traumatized by watching The Robot Monster on VHS, so he has to contend with his mounting Monsterphobia. Plus restless dreams of a dead city and a malevolent presense within. He’s not comporting himself well.

Eventually the tunnels and monster attacks all lead the turtles to a long abandoned Foot Clan outpost, secretly buried deep underground (Shredder has a… very rich portfolio) and after disabling its security system, find a recording where the head scientist opted to leave a video gamey Apocalypse log; detailing what exactly they were doing; kidnapping people, turning them into subterranean monsters, and using them as labour slaves to look for Shredders enemies who he suspects to be hiding underground. As it turns out; they weren’t; the scientists found a *completely unrelated* alien city deep in the bedrock, however. And shortly after this they lost control of the creatures who escaped and killed the scientists.

Then the monsters catch up with the turtles and a fight breaks out, but stops when they realize one of the monsters (who identifies themself as “Quarry”) can talk and everyone realizes it’s a misunderstanding; the monsters thought the Turtles were their enemies because they had the alien technology and crystals, which is apparently what the foot used to pull off all this, and the turtles thought the monsters were dangerous because… they’re screeching beasts covered in spikes and they just watched a home movie of them killing a dozen people.

Quarry explains that it’s the *other* mutated people who are the issue since years of exposure to alien radiation and also traumatic transformation into monsters does a number on the ol’ noodle and they’ve lost all sense of reason, they are the only ones left who haven’t gone psychopathic and by disabling the labs security, the Turtles broke the only thing keeping them safe from the more violent monsters. And so they feel kind of obligated to help by going to the dead alien city and finding parts to repair the bases defenses.

Naturally this leads to them encountering considerably more monsterous versions of Quarry and friends in the Necropolis, and finding a suitable power source, but with a literal army of unspeakable horror standing between them and the exit.

And we’ll have to wait a week to see how that pans out because next week is Nick!

 

[Octopus Prime]

Didn’t actually specify what those episodes were, did I, Ah well

The Alien Agenda finally brings together both the Krang and Shredder plots and adds in a MotW for good measure it’s a… pretty dense episode; Karai is tracking the turtles through the city and happens upon them fighting some Krangdroids, and Leo notices her and starts showboating way too obviously. Naturally her main reaction is “Alien robots? The hell?”, and gets pretty interested the Krangs technology since it could be used by Baxter to finish building a new body for Xever, who is currently a fish and thus of greatly reduced effectiveness as a top assassin for a ninja crimelord. Also meanwhile, April has submitted her DNA to 23 And Me and discovered that it’s secretly a front for a Krang operation to study human DNA for their mutation experiments (I am… 60% sure that’s what 23 And Me does in general), and she immediately gets targeted by a Krang old lady robot that is way tougher than the weird skeleton man ones everyone can kill easily. The turtles chase the robot, Karai chases the turtles and eventually everyone meets up in a Krang base, and Karai and the Turtles have to work together to beat the aliens when they’re ambushed… then the Turtles and the Krang have to work together when Karai overloads the mutation machine and mashes all their collected dna into a big ol Cthulhu monster, and flees with a broken Krangdroid that she gives to Baxter, this earning her dads approval.

Aww, a happy ending for the bad guys.

The Pulverizer is a much breezier episode, as the Turtles realize they’ve got an obnoxious fanboy who has given themself a stupid nickname and costume and decided he’s a ninja turtle too. Naturally, this leads to him getting the absolute crap kicked out of him by some Purple Dragons, and Donny is begrudgingly assigned to try to give him even the most rudimentary of martial arts training, since he insists on putting himself in harms way anyway. Meanwhile the rest of the Turtles have to deal with the new and improved Xever and Donny and Pulverizer have to rush clear across the city when they’re outmatched By Xever being poisonous now, and Donny being the only person who knows how to whip up an antivenom. Then everyone insists that Oulverizer leave them alone because he contributed nothing to helping outside of being able to drive Donny while he was working on the antivenom which they wouldn’t have needed if he wasn’t such a friggin’ dweebus Who demanded ninja training

 

[Alex]

The Pulverizer

MMMMMMM okay I won't tell you if you don't already know but hoo boy.