Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151111163045/@comment-995426-20160310032952

Looney Tunes bores me. I mean, some Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and Freakazoid could often be better (especially some of the Tiny Toons movies), and Wile E. Coyote writing had to dare itself to be imaginative just to stay fresh, but most classic Looney Tunes all feels like filler to me.

In that silly filler episode, Splinter wasn't just silly&mdash;both he and April seemed soulless to the point of uncanny valley. There's a difference between character comedy and character void.

When I speak of character balance, I mean writing in such a way that the story doesn't feel like it's jumped the shark. Characters in-universe can be a chaotic wreck. But the way the story and their character development is written, still matters.

Mirage Baxter started to really shine in volume 2 with his terrorism taking an ever more creepy angle (like shooting out windows in a skyscraper just to write a message intended just for April to read), but he reached his most interesting point in volume 4, where he had long already become Donatello's imprisoned colleague. It was remarkable in showing some of Donnie's rarely-seen darker side, but also contrasting it to Stockman's trollish cunning, in his creative ways of trying to pique Donnie's scientific interest just to keep him busy to buy time until April would die. Only after the inescapable conclusion that Stockman was thoroughly irredeemable, Stockman's last act of depravity was in finally driving Donnie to straight-up murder him execution-style. What was interesting was that Stockman was essentially harmless at this point, and just like Satan, only had the power to persuade, provoke or goad people into making their own decisions. Donnie could have just abandoned Stockman to his dark, lonely fate, but instead sank to his colleague's level by killing him while helpless. Splinter had taught his sons to hold life as sacred and only kill when it became truly necessary, and this was not one of those moments. Stockman's legacy was to corrupt Donnie, if even for one brief moment. Now that is a good deconstruction of evil.

To be honest, all the turtles were becoming less interesting over season 3, not just Raph. They all became less character and more caricature in each their own ways. Raph was just dulled in a particularly bad way.