How well/poorly has the 2012 show aged?

[Zog The Magnificent]

Part 7

One thing that absolutely bears mentioning is something this show doesn’t get enough credit for. With the IDW comics doing their thing at the moment (ugh), this show stands as the ONLY version of TMNT to have the guts to kill off Splinter, and actually deal with the ramifications of it. Even Mirage, which explored the idea in Vol. 4, still implied near the end that he’s actually not dead. We’ll never know where Peter was going with that, but even Mirage couldn’t commit to it. Here, he dies fighting Shredder, and he doesn’t come back. He’s actually dead, and the turtles have to actually deal with and come to terms with it.

Related to this, but one thing that this show can claim, that no other TMNT outside of Mirage, not even the IDW comics, can claim, is that the turtles actually kill in this one. One of the most common complaints for any TMNT outside of Mirage is that the turtles never kill. They always get around it, they always fight robots, they never are allowed to kill. Not here. These turtles fight to kill Shredder’s henchmen. And Leo definitively decapitates Shredder. Sure, you can say he was a mutant, but that doesn’t really matter. He was the main villain, a pure human for most of the show who got a power up near the end, and they killed him. Say what you want about this show, but the turtles being allowed to kill is something no other version outside of Mirage can claim.

Now, having talked about the things the show does well, it’s only fair to discuss the things that the show does poorly, because there are a few. We’ll start with a few of the obvious ones. Mutagen Man’s subplot was never concluded. That was a complete oversight on their part, and it’s a glaring hole in the narrative. Season 2, as mentioned earlier, has a lot of what feels like filler in the middle. After some strong stories in the beginning and at the end, it really feels like it’s spinning its wheels in the middle. Another easy flaw to bring up is the way the time duplicates were dealt with following the time travel plot. Having another Fugitoid show up and take away the time duplicates, who from their perspective are just abandoning Earth and Splinter without a second thought is just sloppy. It’s a clear example of the writers not being sure what to do, and writing themselves out of the corner. And adjacent to that, implying that our Fugitoid is still alive, then never using him again, undercutting his sacrifice and character arc (which again, was pretty good) for nothing. Mutant Apocalypse, as far as I’m concerned, intentions or not, is not a good ending for the show. I don’t want to get too much into that can of worms here, but it’s ultimately thematically unsatisfying, undercuts the entire show, and I’m totally fine siding with Nick on this one and treating it like an elseworlds tale. It’s fine as a special, but not as the canon future. Even though Mirage ends up similarly, I don’t think a Mirage style future fits this particular iteration. It’s like when they tried to force the book ending of How to Train Your Dragon to the movie ending; it fundamentally did not go together and undercut the whole thing. Another one that bears mentioning is Karai’s mutation. Specifically, the way it’s fixed. They go to a lot of effort to have the turtles’ efforts to fix it fail, and make a big deal of how hard it is to fix. And then after all that, they have Baxter cure it offscreen while literally saying outloud “Good thing I turned you human again!” I can’t defend that. It’s just bad writing.

Another one that bears mentioning, even though I ultimately consider it a nitpick, is the state of Shredder in the back half of season 4. What we got out of it was really good; this show finally made good use of the Super Shredder concept, making him legitimately intimidating, and using him just enough to have a good couple of episodes, and killing him off at the end before he could overstay the welcome. That said, the impetus of how we got there is not very well conveyed. This is one case where I think the events as they were supposed to happen did not line up with what we were actually shown. The intention is clearly supposed to be that Splinter beat Shredder within an inch of his life, beating him so badly that he was bedridden and needed the mutagen to recover. Of course, that’s not totally what it looked like. It’s sort of like in Revenge of the Sith, when Palpatine kills the three jedi masters. The idea was that he was so fast that they had no chance to react, but the way it looks is that he moves somewhat slowly and they just stand there. The visuals didn’t totally match what actually happened in the story, and I think the case was similar here. It doesn’t ruin anything for me, but it is noteworthy.

There’s one more thing in terms of “what the show does wrong” that bears mentioning, one that you’ve probably been expecting for a while now. The matter of the single weakest example of writing in the show: The super-retromutagen. I’ve saved this example for last because while I will still not defend it, I thought of a new perspective while writing this, and I wanted to present it, if not to explain the concept, then to perhaps make it slightly more tolerable. Now, I’m not going to pretend that it’s anything then what it clearly is: The writers wrote themselves into a corner, and needed a deus ex machina to get them out. That’s clearly what it is, that’s clearly what they did, and there’s no changing that. However, I would ask that you consider the following. The manner in which the super retromutagen was created is not unlike how several things were created in real life. There have been plenty of accidental scientific discoveries. There have been plenty of things that people have created without knowing how, or without looking for it. In at least one example, a man accidentally created a gunpowder formula by sweeping a bunch of random stuff into a sink, and inadvertently stumbled onto a recipe. Science in real life is full of times where people stumble onto something remarkable and are unable to replicate it. While a narrative is often subject to more stringent rules on what we’ll believe, the fact of the matter is that real life has no such restrictions; things happen often enough that would be decried as “unrealistic” were they to happen in fiction. It’s an interesting thing: we’ll cry foul when things suddenly work out, but not when they suddenly fail. When a narrative is going well, and things suddenly break, people will sagely nod and pronounce it “realistic,” because people are inherently cynical. But when the opposite happens, when a eucatastrophe happens, people act like it can’t or shouldn’t happen. To which I ask: why not? Sometimes things work out unexpectedly, as often as they fail unexpectedly. Why should we be so annoyed any time it happens? It can be done poorly, but there’s really no reason why the occasional “deus ex machina” should be under any more scrutiny than the much more common “diabolus ex machina.” And looking at it in this manner, I find that I’m not as annoyed with it as I was, even though, like I said, it’s very clearly a way to get themselves out of the mess they made. But it’s something to think about.

There are other things I could talk about; other characters I didn’t mention, other plot points I didn’t talk about. I could easily go on for much longer, but I don’t need to. The point has been made. Is the 2012 show a perfect show? No. Few shows are. I won’t pretend that the show is flawless, but I don’t think we should let those flaws overshadow the far more numerous things that this show does correctly. From a technical standpoint, this show is very well put together. The animation is very good looking, and does its job well. The music fits the show well. The characters are well cast. The designs are good. From an artistic standpoint, this show is well put together. There’s a clear progression from beginning to end, with lots of nuance and thematic elements throughout, almost all of which has a worthwhile payoff. It’s not perfect; there are bumps along the way, a few poor characters, a few bad episodes, a few times with weak writing. But each of these are far outweighed by the things the show does well. It’s a good cartoon. A great cartoon, even. Not perfect. But pretty darn good. And as a TMNT story, it touches on all the things that make a good TMNT story. Ninja action. Sci-fi fantasy. Themes regarding the importance of family, and the consequences of revenge. All the staple hallmarks that make TMNT what it is are present in this show, unlike so many recent iterations of the franchise. The people making this show gave a damn, and I think it shows in the end product. You may disagree with the way it handled certain elements. Some elements may not be your cup of tea. You may wish the show were something different. But for what the show is, and what it tried to do, I think it mostly succeeded. To say that you didn’t like the show is fair. Even the best shows aren’t for everyone; If you don’t like romance, you won’t like a romance novel from a master of the genre. But to say that the show is bad is, I think, unfair. And to say that the show doesn’t hold up is, I think, incorrect. I think that at the end of the day, the show mostly accomplished what it set out to do, and did so well. I’d say it more than holds up.