Talk:The Big Blow-Out!/@comment-27929748-20171217034206/@comment-995426-20171225184412

Asfaloth12:

This is not necessarily a comment on the Mutant Apocalypse arc itself, including whether it was good. But I may still have to disagree with you on principle. The traditional prevailing ethos of TMNT is, "life at best is bitter sweet." While a TMNT story arc ending does not have to be end horribly, it must accept both the good and the bad of the events that have come before it as part of a whole experience, even if the bad things that happened were truly horrific. "We must accept the hand that the universe has dealt us," even if it's a mutagen bomb and a post-apocalyptic future. A life full of tragedies where characters mature and grow and forge their own happy endings in spite of it all, is what TMNT is all about. The 1987 TV series and its legacy have been largely discordant with this ethos.

All that said, it was clear to me that Mutant Apocalypse was an homage to an earlier set of TMNT works&mdash;some of the various resource books for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness by Palladium Books, whose future scenarios are mostly about a world where humans have mostly died and mutants prevail in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The Palladium RPGs deeply influenced various elements of the 2012 TV series, including, Doctor Farrell, and the Dream Beavers, and even 's design was based on one of the showrunners' old RPG character designs, so Mutant Apocalypse was no surprise whatsoever. Though in general, post-apocalyptic futures are common in the TMNT multiverse, as both the Mirage TMNT comics and the Archie TMNT comics feature them to some degree. Palladium's (and 2012's) are on the starker side of these portrayals, but it would have been stranger if the future world of the 2012 TV series wasn't post-apocalyptic in some way, at least temporarily until civilization found a way to rebuild as it did in the more distant Mirage and Archie future worlds.

However, in respect to the 2012 TV series' continuity, this series frequently flagrantly violated its own continuity, sometimes less than half a season between plot developments, so it didn't surprise me if the show wasn't going to honor its previous continuity commitments. It may have been best overall to regard each season as a self-contained continuity with moderate differences between them, with continuity becoming gradually more retroactively pliable over time.