Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20150930020647/@comment-995426-20151023004214

Flamerstreak: Well, to be frank...seasons 1 and 2 were wonderful. They were funny, but the core characters still seemed like realistic teenagers for once with worries and angsts and hormones and all that. And Splinter was great as an ever-involved disciplinarian dad with a few awkward moments of his own. And the show seemed to have promise to be a decent action-comedy-sitcom-drama with compelling storylines that made you feel things and wonder how they were going to develop these plots. And not only that, the voice acting and character animation could be truly excellent and full of subtle expression, so that just like in live acting, you could pick up as much from characters' body language as you could from their words alone.

In this view, the were lots of good episodes, but the truly great episodes were the ones like It Came From The Depths, The Alien Agenda, Karai's Vendetta, Showdown (both parts), The Mutation Situation, Slash and Destroy, Of Rats and Men, Mazes & Mutants, The Wrath of Tiger Claw, Vengeance is Mine, Into Dimension X! and The Invasion (both parts).

But with the start of season 3, things started to go rapidly downhill. The North Hampton arc (from Within the Woods to the beginning of Return to New York wasn't the worst thing ever (like some of my friends would call it), but it seemed to lose what made Northampton arcs of the past so great&mdash;healing, family and reconnecting with life. This series made it feel more like a frat house vacation, or as my friend called it, ": North Hampton".  It could have been a great opportunity for much more profound character development and growth.  Instead, not only did they not seem to grow up much, but it was during this arc that they revealed that the characters were still 15 years old after turning 15 over two years before.  It wasn't a good omen.  Now, there were some episodes better than others, like Donnie baring his soul to April in A Foot Too Big, and the surprisingly good Eyes of the Chimera written by Greg Weisman, and Vision Quest certainly could have been a lot worse than it was. But more than not, it felt like a wasted arc and a wasted opportunity.

We hoped it would get better with Return to New York, and that episode wasn't terrible. But then with all the promise of introducing the new Bebop and Rocksteady, I was surprised by how I so quickly got sick of them once they became just more of the same generic mooks of the Shredder and stopped having any real character development. The last truly good episode was Battle for New York, Part 1 and Part 2, but even that had a lot of problems, and the only real character development happened among the Mutanimals. What we didn't know was that that would be the last real character development among the Mutanimals.

Then came the "WTF" moment in Casey Jones VS. The Underworld when they moved back into their no-longer-secret lair after the Kraang had so messily invaded it and there was no guarantee whatsoever that the Kraang hadn't passed along its location to the Foot Clan. The TMNT multiverse has a long history of the main family abandoning home after home when it is exposed to their archenemies, and it's terrible ninjutsu to permanently return to any of them. That episode also wasn't that good of a Casey episode.

The Noxious Adventure was a mostly a waste of screen time, with its only real saving grace being the amusing subplot of the turtles being grounded by Splinter and trying to sneak past him.

But the real disappointment was Clash of the Mutanimals, where the once gingerly-written long-term plot between Raph and Slash came to its lowest, most wasted moments. It became obvious that Raph's character development had drastically simplified, and Slash no longer had much depth at all anymore. The best thing about this otherwise bad episode was the brief scene where Raph worries and frets over Slash's welfare, which involved a rich burst of body language. And after that...nothing, ever again.

From here, I didn't expect to find anything to like in Meet Mondo Gecko. And, true to that expectation, neither Mikey nor Casey had much more of a role than tag-along as designated window dressing. It was also perfectly clear now that Casey had completely failed in his character's role as a foil for Raph, and actually functioned more believably as Mikey's entourage. But it was a little interesting in how compelling Jason's backstory was, and how it touched on the very serious and heartbreaking topic of youth homelessness and exploitation.

The Deadly Venom wasn't...bad. The Healing Hand aspect as actually rather interesting. But Karai's role in the story already started to feel old and tired, and ended only with more viewer frustration.

And then there's Turtles in Time...the worst episode of the entire series so far. Though I always thought Mikey had the best personal chemistry with Leatherhead, I was willing to give him and Renet a chance. But what followed was one of the most shallow, vapid, character-derailing "plots" ever vomited up. It not only made Mikey a less interesting, less sympathetic character, but it also virtually guaranteed that this version of Renet would never have any meaningful character development at all, and existed mainly as a very cheap continuation of the Greg Cipes-Ashley Johnson meme at Nickelodeon.

After that, I hoped for a better episode in Tale of the Yokai. And it wasn't......bad, per se. The problem was, it wasn't actually good, either. It was a straightforward, no-surprises, no-twists account of Tang Shen's death. The only slightly amusing part was Mikey's Caramelldansen scene. And the worst part was the revelation that everything that happens with the Time Scepter was meant to be, which also implied that Mikey and Renet meeting and falling in love was pre-ordained. So combined with how much of an abortion the previous episode was, it meant the show had pulled off a romance arc that managed to be worse than Twilight. WORSE. THAN. TWILIGHT.

Attack of the Mega Shredder! wasn't bad, but also had the problem of not necessarily being all that wonderful either. Its nods to were a little good, at least. But it was also painfully obvious that the production had deeply slashed the budget on 3D rendering, with some of the worst-looking 3D building renders I'd ever seen in this series.

The Creeping Doom was...bad. I can't mince words on that&mdash;it was a bad episode. The plot began with smart Donnie making the extremely stupid decision to put fragile dangerous objects on a rickety shelf around a reckless little brother, and we're supposed to be surprised he knocked it down? And this was all before Donnie lost his intelligence. And Raph had some pretty dumb schmuck-bait moments himself. I also noticed how remarkably empty and soulless April and Splinter seemed in this episode, and it actually gave me a sense of uncanny valley to see their parts.

The Fourfold Trap was good for one reason, and one reason only: It gave Splinter one more opportunity to be completely badass. But the episode also drove home the impression that the turtles are actually pretty incompetent. They keep getting themselves in trouble, and need someone else to get them out of it. Splinter came out on top, but his sons' character development suffered.

Dinosaur Seen in Sewers! had its own share of problems. Raph not only comes across as an exploitative, manipulative jerk, but it is again painfully aware that the show had completely forgotten what made the Raph-Slash plot so great&mdash;the two of them actually worrying about each other and appearing affected by each other on a regular basis. Strangely, the good part of the episode was when Zog explained to the turtles just how much of a failure they've been as heroes, because for the first time in a long time it had the (possibly unintended) effect of making the show seem self-aware. Zog's accusations were right, and he came off as having the moral high ground, with the turtles coming off worse than ever. I mean, that's until Zog's conclusion was that the Earth must be destroyed, but still.

Annihilation Earth! was a mixed bag. I know a lot of friends who instantly loathed this version of Bishop for having nothing in common with 2K3's Agent Bishop, but I actually didn't see it that way, as I saw him more as an expy of the Bishop character from the Alien films. So he wasn't all that bad. And for the first time in a whole season, Kraang Subprime got some actual character development, and a glimpse into his background and motivations. ...and then he died. And strangely, one of Mikey's funniest moments in the entire series was also one of his worst moments as a character&mdash;his time in the mind-sucking machine. As great as that acid sequence and its aftermath was, it also seemed to demonstrate that Mikey really is exactly as shallow a character as he seems, what with him having nothing near and dear to him but pizza. Not only did they not find thoughts of his family or loved ones, but even Renet (his supposed meant-to-be love interest as ordained by the Time Scepter) was completely absent. When Splinter was mowed down by Shredder, it was an unusually intense scene that gave the Shredder his richest character development moment in a long time, and was one of the only times in this series we can hear a character sobbing. Bebop and Rocksteady had a brief glimpse of character development before being sucked into the black hole. And the Earth destruction sequence was a feast of special effects, some of which even seemed to acknowledge some of the more obscure scientific principles of black holes and massive gravity wells in general, such as time slowing down, and how gravity rips objects apart, though they still went with the less realistic route of the black hole looking like a literal hole that open and closes like a sci-fi TV worm hole rather than more realistically being a black dot of complete gravitational collapse. And then came Casey's line at the end of the episode, and it's hard to imagine a worse way they could have ended that episode.

And that, in a (very long) nut shell, is my problem with season 3. It's a season that has left me feeling burned and betrayed as a fan, and not optimistic for season 4.