#7 MAY 5, 2018 · 8 yr ago
My take on the episodes:
Return Of The Shredder - nothing remarkable, it's basically the establishing episode for season 2. It was the earliest episode of the show I saw as a kid - not the first, that was Return Of The Technodrome, but this was the first episode I saw when they started repeating them. I never saw season 1 as a kid, and only saw that for the first time in 2014, as I already said. I actually watched this episode right after season 1 that year, and found myself cringeing at the way the show had so quickly descended into slapstick and wisecracks. I actually couldn't bring myself to go any further. However, on seeing it again recently, I felt it wasn't quite so bad. Actually, the concept of trying to frame the turtles was a pretty good plan, the ninja wannabes going out of their way to identify themselves as the turtles . . . basically this is equivalent to "Spitting Image" in Thundercats, or "The Defense Never Rests" in Defenders Of The Earth. (PS - Wilycub - do have a watch of some more DotE!)
Enter The Fly - our last sighting of Baxter in human form, and the return of Rocksteady & Bebop to the main events. It's slightly odd the way it happened though, they could have come up with something less contrived, as the excuse about needing to balance things on either side of the portal doesn't quite hold up when you consider that it wasn't an issue in either Return Of The Shredder or (especially) Return Of The Technodrome! That said, the storyline was again pretty unremarkable. These 80s cartoons tended to use the same storylines and plot devices as each other a lot, and some did them better than others. Usually when a character falls ill the way April did, you have to go on some epic quest to take a life to save a life and then decide that this other life is not yours to take and get the cure a different way. Visionaries did this best in "Horn Of Unicorn, Claw Of Dragon", King Arthur And The Knights Of Justice did it in "To Save A Squire" (albeit they said right at the start that they couldn't kill the animal in question rather than waiting until the climax), and I forget the name of the He-Man episode that did the same thing. This at least made a refreshing change, in that the cure was just a simple plant, and the complication arose from Shredder & co stealing it from them after they had acquired it. When they're buying the gazai plant, we're thinking, "this is too easy" - it's perhaps surprising that Shredder didn't get to it first. Oh well, OK, nothing special.
Splinter No More - definitely the most interesting episode of the bunch, as it explores the characters' feelings regarding their mutated states. Splinter misses being Yoshi, and I guess it's understandable enough. But in the meantime, he's gotten so used to being a rat that he has forgotten how to think like a human. And of course, when the anti-mutagen wore off, his rat senses saved the day - again, it had to be that way, you have to appreciate the good in what you've got.
Return Of The Technodrome - the big season finale and a very important episode in the show's overall continuity, the clue for which is in the title! In some ways, it's surprising that this wasn't a 2-parter, you can just imagine the cliffhanger ending as the Technodrome appeared at the end of the first part, and every kid watching would have gone through hell and high water to be sure of seeing the second part! Yes, the instincts between Splinter & Shredder are very Star Wars-esque, as has been reported everywhere. There's a lot in this episode. Like I said, it was the first episode I saw originally, although oddly season 2 was shown slightly out of sequence over here, and so The Cat Woman From Channel 6 was shown after it rather than before it. Actually there was one line that I couldn't remember was in which of these two episodes, where Rocksteady wonders out loud what happened, and Leonardo answered, "WE happened, Rocksteady!" Also, this is probably the first time we get any sense of the scale of how big the Technodrome really is. I still think that size could have been conveyed to us better by the animators, but the sheer volume of power required to open a portal big enough for the Technodrome is clearly immense. The cliffhanger bit where Krang aims the cannon at the turtles and then discovers after the break that he's used too much power in opening the portal does work, although where all the foot- and rock-soldiers disappeared to in between times, enabling the turtles to escape, is a curiosity! In any event, it's a good episode.
