Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26431570-20170708024820/@comment-995426-20170714175708

Remember back in season 3, with the episode The Four-Fold Trap? People were trying to guess what the trap was and who was setting them. If they were really lazy, they'd do another semi-recycled plot with worm-controlled Karai. Again. I had fun coming up with wild ideas like...the trap is set by Joan Grody, who would actually turn out to be Lonae, and this time the version of the character would be a Triceraton secret agent who temporarily mutated to human form and entered cryptid journalism in an attempt to find the missing Zog. And instead...we ended up getting exactly what everyone assumed we'd get. The episode had a decent Splinter-Miwa scene, but otherwise was a huge letdown.

Thing is, I ended up telling my random wild guess to a friend, and he said the idea I came up with sounded much, much better than the episode they delivered. The fact that they gave us an utterly predictable episode (amidst many other utterly predictable episodes) was a sign of apathy setting in, since they knew by then that their core target audience would tune in and watch and probably love it no matter how stupid the plot was.

This show used to have lots of plot speculation, and episodes that made people want to analyze them, and stuff like that. But with later episodes, when someone likes them, it sounds like a chorus of: "I liked it!" "I liked it too!" "Isn't this show fun?" "Yeah, this show is fun!" ...but not really saying much in the way or how or why&mdash;basically, not requiring any actual thought. Good TMNT should make you think. True Stories? Sons of the Silent Age? Shades of Gray? City at War? Blind Faith and Blind Sight? Dark Shadows? Scars? Mere Appendix? White Horses? Professor Obligado? Swan Song? They were great at that. But when TMNT instead only babies you and delivers cheap mindless gratification, it becomes an unwatchable nuisance to anyone else. A show can be entertaining in one way while at the same time having depth in another way, but it takes a certain level of caring about your work to actually do that.