Elite Eight: “The Big Brawl” Part Two

“I have suffered enough in the name of patience. I have bowed before them. I have begged their forgiveness as my father wished. But now, my time has come. I will take the throne from my father, and I will become the supreme Daimyo of the Battle Nexus, and I will make the turtles and their rat master pay for their insolence to me with their lives.” — The Ultimate Ninja

Written by: Ben Townsend

Original Air Date: September 18, 2004

Recap Narrator: Leonardo

Characters and Concepts Introduced: Murakami Gennosuke, assorted battlers.

Gargoyles episodes I could make comparisons to: N/A

The Beats:

• Leo is attacked by shadowy assassins. He fights, but is eventually overtaken.  He is eventually joined by a samurai rabbit, who assists him in vanquishing his attackers. They introduced each other—the rabbit is Miyamoto Usagi. More warriors attack, but are eventually defeated by the two new friends.
• The Gyoji appears with Leo’s repaired sword, and lets Leo and Usagi know that the next stage of the Battle Nexus Tournament is about to begin. The two boyfriends part ways.
• As Usagi walks among his fellow contestants, he spots a friendly face from his world, Murakami Gennosuke, who also plans to compete in the tournament, and make some money on the side.
• Leonardo reunites with his family and the Ultimate Ninja, who promises to look into the attack on the turtle.
• The Battle Nexus contestants are separated into dyads for the next stage of the competition. All the familiar faces win, with one exception: Donatello, who like all the defeated warriors, is teleported to the medics’ quarters.
• Elsewhere, the shadow assassins meet with their leader, The Ultimate Ninja, and apologize for their failure. After they leave, Daimyo’s son meets with yet another conspirator, his counselor, shrouded in a cloak, who advises patience. The Ultimate Ninja will hear none of it.
• Tier two of the tournament begins. The contests include Leo vs. Usagi, Michelangelo vs. Splinter, and Traximus vs. Raphael. The first of these to conclude is Michaelangelo and Splinter’s battle, which ends when Splinter forfeits the match, in order to allow their sons their chance to shine.
• As the tournament continues, Splinter commiserates with the Daimyo about fatherhood. He also notes that Leonardo’s opponent seems familiar. The Daimyo notes that he should, as he is the rabbit who stepped in and assisted Splinter against Drako they year Splinter won the tournament. The Daimyo then receives a note calling him away, and he excuses himself.
• The battles continue. Raphael defeats Traximus, although it is a close call.
• The Ultimate Daimyo is advised against his plan by his counselor, but the Battle Nexus Prince ignores him. The Ultimate Ninja takes his blowgun and shoots a dart at Leonardo, who promptly falls unconscious.

Continuity and Mythology Notes

• Usagi and Gen are characters created by Stan Sakai for his comic book Usagi Yojimbo,  which like the turtles debuted on 1984. The turtles and Usagi have a long and deep connection, thanks to Sakai’s friendship with the turtles’ creators–particularly Peter Laird–and Usagi had been a guest star in the original TMNT cartoon and several comics.
• On that note, while Gen is for the most part faithfully reproduced here, the original version of the character was a drunk, which is a big no-no for children’s cartoons.  This version is instead a gambler.

—-

There’s multiple reasons why this post has taken so long to come out. First, life has gotten in the way. Since I last posted about an episode, I’ve finished a graduate thesis, moved, gotten my first place, reinvented my look, and gained a few new hyperfixations. Additionally, if I’m being honest, the turtles and Gargoyles have lost much of their shine. They no longer live in my head rent free (*1).  Really, though, the main reason I’ve dithered is because there really hasn’t been a lot to say about this arc, and especially here, in part two, which is largely spent on fight scenes.  Sooooo many fight scenes. The initial battle between Leo, Usagi, and the dark assassins takes up nearly a fifth of the episode’s total running time, and much of the rest is spent in the first two rounds of the Battle Nexus Tournament.  While the story is going somewhere–The Ultimate Ninja is still up to no good, surprising few–it’s really in no hurry to get there.

Not that this is a problem.  With twenty-six episodes a season, the series can afford to slow down, and in a twenty-minute show, an episode in which not much happens can be better than one that is overstuffed, like, say, the Leatherhead intro episode.  What’s more, the leisurely pace allows for the series to really lean into its strength: character relationships and interactions.

Actually, let me rephrase, because that makes it sound as if those elements are less important, and they’re not. In fact, I’d argue that breathing space is absolutely essential to storytelling, and one of the reasons why I still enjoy this take on the TMNT more than Gargoyles.

One of the chief differences between Gargoyles and TMNT is that the former isn’t really an ensemble show. Not only is Goliath clearly more important than the other gargoyles, who can be set aside for long stretches of time, the series is often not interested how the various characters interact with characters who are not Goliath. While Elisa, Brooklyn, Broadway, Lexington and Hudson are developed as individuals, their group dynamics, with some exceptions (Broadway and Elisa), remain largely shallow and lack specificity.  Whereas it’s possible, even easy, to imagine how a scene between Leonardo and Raphael is different from a scene between Raphael and Michelangelo, because the series has spent time exploring how they interact , the same cannot be said for, say, Brooklyn and Hudson vs. Brooklyn and Broadway. This, in turn, means it’s much harder for the series to create spaces to let characters personalities drive the story in ways that don’t feel hollow or artificial. An episode like this one, where it’s all about seeing characters interact, would be much harder to do in Gargoyles.

It’s often said that in writing, everything you show has to develop something, be it plot, or character, or the world, and I feel that is generally good advice.  However, I also feel that this approach can be taken to an extreme that feels, for lack of a better word, capitalistic, acting as if time and space must be maximized and everything must be said in the most efficient way possible, which I don’t think always works. As necessary as it is for a story have structure and purpose, there’s something to be said to setting aside time for leisure and play, and I really appreciate that TMNT understands that. 

Random Thoughts:

• Perhaps it’s the tournament aspect of this arc, but this episode felt very reminiscent of the fighting game series The King of Fighters. It’s a series I have a lot of time for, in large part because of its character dynamics, which are uncommonly robust, for the genre. Fighting games, by convention, don’t really have a lot of time for character building, and yet KOF’s team set-up, which ties characters together in continuously changing groups of three or four; and its sense of history and scale–facilitated in part its crossover series nature–help it do a lot with very little, and I get a similar sense from this story. Despite being a mostly-new setting, the Battle Nexus feels very lived in, something that is harder to achieve than it sounds.
• Splinter forfeiting the competition in order to allow Michelangelo to advance is really a lovely moment, and one of the best in the series.
• Nobody told the animators that that the line above Usagi’s left eye is meant to be a scar, so it just appears and disappears at random.  It’s very distracting.

Footnotes!

(*1) Or at least, that had been the case, until recently. Now, fears about not being able to get DVD copies of TMNT–we never did get collected seasons 3 or the first half of season 4–have gotten me thinking about the series again, hence this post.