Baxter's mutation made less sense than in the FW show.

[neatoman]

I realised something weird... Something about the FW show made more sense than in this show.

In the FW show, Baxter is mutated by Krang after he was exchanged for Bebop and Rocksteady. Shredder had established that he hated working with Baxter and Krang saw no use for him because his skills were comparatively low, so keeping him around was seen as pointless and a waste. Krang wasn't even trying to mutate him, he was actually trying to execute him and just happened by accident. The rest of the episode isn't very good and it's weirdly cruel even for a villain like Krang to execute someone just for not being useful at the moment, but the logic of the characters can be understood here.

The sequence of events in this show is that Shredder had forced the mechanical engineer to work for him and placed mutagen capsules on his neck to keep him in line, demands that he should create a mutant army with a substance that really nobody but a bunch of aliens understand. For obvious reasons, he doesn't make much progress in just a few weeks and is called a failure for it, at which point Shredder decides to mutate him. Despite being mutated into a demented fly creature, Shredder still expects him to do the work and remain loyal to him.

Did you get that? If not, let's convey it in the form form the respective villains' perspective.

FW Krang: "My partner hates you and I don't consider your skills valuable, there is no use for you so I'll just kill you!"

2012 Shredder: "I got you to do something I can't really get anyone else to do, you still need to figure out how to do it though so I consider you a failure and so I punish you by transforming you into a monster with a worse grip on reality. However, you are still the only one I have with anything that resembles skill in this and I still want it done, so I still want you to continue working for me and I don't expect you to stab me in the back."

So... Yeah, I think I found an instance of this show actually being dumber than the FW moment it was inspired by, which feels weird. The FW version of this isn't perfect but I get it, there was accident that occurred when a straight up execution was in progress. Here it just comes across as an attempt to make the same basic thing happen but not really taking into account what that means for the plot or characters.