Official Episode Discussion S5 Ep 04: End Times

[CyberCubed]

Originally Posted by Aaronardo

You answered your own question. None of it matters. There's no real reason for any of it. Bare bones, this episode is a story about Kavaxas winning control and unleashing his wrath and the Turtles stopping him.

What do you think supporting characters are for? I'd rather see Leatherhead than not see him. I'd rather see them give an explanation why Fishface left before the final battle than nothing at all. I liked all the fight scenes and chaos going on. I don't know why the hell you keep saying, "bare bones?" As you said, the general plot had to deal with them raising Shredder and Kavaxas trying to break out of Tiger Claw's control.

But then, suddenly, we bring Splinter in for no reason (keep in mind, Kavaxas is releasing the underworld, and where Splinter went to at the end of the episode definitely was not the underworld, so why he was even there in the first place is beyond me) and somehow that's important, because it takes up a couple scenes.

WTF, you're asking why Splinter was even there? Bringing Splinter back was one of the more interesting parts of the episode, tied everything together with both Shredder's fate and him saying goodbye properly to his family, and also being able to help out a bit as a spirit during his fight with Ho-chan. Why the hell wouldn't you want him to be there?

Then, we have the thing with Fishface and his rather uneventful complete 180 turn, AND we get a buttload of disconnected exposition about the minions from him that could've easily been inserted in any other episode.

I don't see any problem with this at all. Fishface always cared more about regular urban crime than any otherworldly stuff.

Then there's that whole mess with Shredder. He served no real purpose in this story at all. He could've not been brought back at all and the story really wouldn't be different in any way. Someone must've realized this, so they just lazily inserted all the little specific things Kavaxas needed to do to unleash his power (instead of, I don't know, building it up over the last three episodes), with resurrecting an evil warrior applying to Shredder. I can't be the only one who thought this came clean out of nowhere and just came off as pure lazy.

The whole point was to revive Shredder. Of course zombie Shredder didn't do all that much, he wasn't suppose to. The build up was all about stopping him and Kavaxas, and Shredder had some last few moments of glory and then realized he didn't belong in the living world and took the dragon with him back to the netherworld. Sometimes I have no idea what you're actually expecting, some lengthy discussion of Kavaxas power or a Zombie Shredder running around Manhattan for 20 episodes?

As for the 2k3 series, the difference between that and this is that was simply bringing in Leatherhead for seemingly no reason, which is fine seeing as how it didn't impact the final product. Every single thing I have just mentioned (obviously, not including randomly bringing Leatherhead in, although it was still lazily handled) negatively impacts this episode in some significant manner.

Yes they did, Leatherhead was constantly brought in during the 4kids episodes for nothing but "extra muscle" for fights, the same exact thing the Nick cartoon did here. Go watch the Season 3 finale of 4kids, and tell me Leatherhead's role isn't exactly the same.