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turtlethon · 2 years ago

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“Enter: Krakus”

Season 8, Episode 6 First US Airdate: October 22, 1994

Titanus opens a portal to the future as his master plan is revealed.

The eighth season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rolls on with “Enter: Krakus”. This is the concluding part of a three-story arc, following on from “Cry H.A.V.O.C.!” and “H.A.V.O.C. in the Streets!”

After the events of the previous episode, the Turtles and April watch from a distance as the Flux Transformer is transported out of the military base to prevent it being stolen by Titanus. As the Turtles are concerned that they won’t be able to follow the convoy without drawing attention from HAVOC’s mutants, April offers to do so on their behalf. At his headquarters, Titanus learns from his men of the move, and orders them to steal tracking equipment from a company called Suretech Surveillance that will allow them to determine the whereabouts of the Flux Transformer. Later, April watches as the sought-after device is loaded onto a train, and continues to shadow its journey.

The Turtles confront Overdrive, Amok and Seizure moments before their attempted break-in at the surveillance firm, but the battle is interrupted by the arrival of a Sonic Blast Man lookalike who opens fire upon our heroes. Grateful for the distraction, HAVOC’s mutants continue with their mission. The armoured warrior declares that his name is Krakus - “get used to it!” - and flies into the air with Donatello, threatening to drop him to the ground if he doesn’t reveal the whereabouts of Titanus. When Donnie suggests he’s likely in his underground headquarters, Krakus takes this as confirmation that the Turtles are in league with the villain, and allows him to plummet towards the ground, narrowly saved thanks to being caught by Michaelangelo. Krakus flies off, but before doing so accidentally drops a vital clue to his intentions: a small metal plate from one of his missiles marked “METROPLEX POLICE DEPT.”

Before we move on, can we take a moment to appreciate the box transition between this and the next scene? Rarely, if ever, have we seen such attention to presentation in TMNT, and I think it’s worth highlighting that the show is continuing to step up its game eight seasons in.

April’s trail of the Flux Transformer comes to an abrupt halt when it’s moved from the train to a helicopter. Left with no way of following it the rest of its journey, she uses her Turtlecom to inform our heroes of the bad news. The team speculate that there must be digital records stored somewhere that would reveal its destination, and Michaelangelo suggests Donatello could use his computer to hack into the military’s systems. Donnie points out this would be an impossible task, and so instead the Turtles opt to sneak into a government building by way of a basement entrance.

Emerging from a grate, the Turtles sneak inside and view a computer document titled “OPERATION FLUX SHIFT”. After copying the file to a floppy disk, the team are confronted by a guard. Barging their way outside, the green teens find themselves again face-to-face with Krakus, still convinced they’re working for Titanus, who accuses them of breaking into government property and opens fire with a laser blaster.

The Turtles take refuge in an oil refinery, which turns out to not be the smartest move as Krakus is able to do plenty of damage using his blaster weapon. Act one concludes with the gun-toting hero firing upon a metal platform which begins to crumble, threatening to flatten the team.

Krakus assumes his enemies have been vanquished, but the Turtles are able to escape via an underground hatch, re-emerging from another one nearby to confront him. Pinning their opponent to the wall, they demand information about his intentions. We learn that Krakus is a police officer who has travelled back in time from the year 2066, where Titanus was a crime boss who created an army of mutants and almost achieved world domination. Afterwards such genetic experimentation was outlawed, but the enormous villain escaped by travelling back in time. Still convinced the Turtles are in cahoots with Titanus, Krakus again opens fire, but is bewildered when April arrives on the scene to begin filming the action.

April, it turns out, becomes a famous journalist in the future – you'd think she already would be in the present given the number of outlandish events she’s covered over the course of the series for Channel 6, but okay – and more significantly for Krakus, she’ll save the life of his father twenty years from now, ensuring his own birth. Convinced through their connection to April that the Turtles aren’t evil after all, Krakus agrees to work with them to stop Titanus, but his primary objective now becomes to protect April as a means of ensuring his own survival.

Amok hands the tracking device stolen from the surveillance firm over to Titanus, and while doing so mentions the arrival of an armoured flying warrior wearing a star. The description is instantly recognisable to the huge mutant as that of his old foe Krakus, and after making the required adjustments to the tracker he alerts his other followers to the imminent threat.

I thought it was odd that in the earlier discussion between the Turtles of using Donatello’s computer to hack into the government systems it was never mentioned that in the previous episode, Synapse blew all the equipment in the workshop up. Presumably Donnie has since repaired his PC as it’s up and running in the next scene, with the Turtles using it to view the documents copied to the floppy. The team learn that the Flux Transformer is being shipped to an island on the Adams River, and rush off to make sure it’s not intercepted by HAVOC.

April is taking a stroll with Krakus, keen to learn from him about the events in the future that will lead to her hitting the big time. Before he can reveal how things play out, HAVOC’s mutants attack, robbing him of his weapons and destroying his armour. Within seconds the futuristic cop is stripped of all his accoutrements, and is now just a slightly craggy man, dressed in a blue turtleneck sweater and tan slacks that make him look like he’s ready to sit at home and listen to his collection of Jim Reeves records. He does his best Charlton Heston impression as he crawls across the street on all fours, yelling that he’ll fight the mutants with his bare hands if he must, but is soon defeated. Titanus’s troops take April hostage, her protector left to fall into a chasm created during the battle.

The Turtles arrive in their van and discuss how HAVOC intend to reach the nearby island where the Flux Transformer is being held, given that the only way to get there is via helicopter. They get their answer when the mutant underlings show up wearing jet-packs, scooping them up into the air. (Along the way Donatello snatches the tracking sensor from Amok, mistakenly thinking it to be a blaster weapon, an action that will play into the story later). The Turtles are dropped into the water and can only watch as their foes successfully raid the site, taking the critical device. A more pressing issue soon arises as our heroes face the prospect of going over a steep waterfall, saved only thanks to Michaelangelo’s grappling hook and Leonardo’s katana.

Returning to the Turtle Van, the team attempt to reach April via Turtlecom, but get only static. Upon arriving back in town, they find Krakus pinned under some rubble following his earlier altercation with HAVOC’s mutants. The future cop and the Turtles invade Titanus’s hideout, but find only a pre-recorded message from the villain. He tells the team that the Flux Transformer will shortly transform him to his “former glory”. Meanwhile, April has been taken by his underlings to a steel mill where she’ll be finished off. Krakus is insistent upon saving her, but is reminded by the Turtles that he now lacks the means to do so. With that in mind, he instructs his new friends to use HAVOC’s equipment to mutate him, knowing that this will make him an outlaw should he ever be able to return to his own time. Reluctantly the Turtles agree to carry out the procedure, turning Krakus into an enormous beast with fangs and armour. Still in possession of the tracking device, the green teens set out to find Titanus and the Flux Transformer.

Krakus barges into the steel mill, no-selling the attacks of HAVOC’s mutants and rescuing April. Meanwhile, at an abandoned sports arena, Titanus prepares to summon his army of mutants when the Turtles arrive in their van. Mutant warriors from the future begin passing through a portal and the odds appear overwhelming until Krakus arrives with April.

Krakus does battle with his old enemy but due to restrictions implemented by Donatello earlier winds up reverting to his human form at the worst possible moment. Forced to improvise, Leonardo gets behind the wheel of a nearby forklift, shoving the villain through the time portal. As the controls for the Flux Transformer were adjusted by Donnie during the battle, rather than returning to the future Titanus finds himself in the prehistoric past, doomed to spend the rest of his days co-existing with dinosaurs.

After learning from Donatello that his mutation was set to only be temporary, though whether he’d revert to being human was never a sure thing, Krakus prepares to return to the future. In the last second before he heads through the portal, April again asks him what will lead to her becoming famous in the future, only to be told “[She’ll] find out... in time!” (Wow. That’s unhelpful.) The Turtles and April speculate that while Titanus has been vanquished, several of his mutants are still present in our time. Despite this threat, the team vow to be ready for any future challenges.

“Enter: Krakus” brings to a close the entertaining diversion of the HAVOC story arc, an experiment in telling three interconnected tales that require the viewer to tune in over consecutive Saturdays to fully appreciate this, the big pay-off. To some extent, it does so successfully, though I can’t help but wonder if in doing so it’s hampered the momentum that Shredder had built upon after finally being re-established as a legitimate villain. We’ll get back to him eventually, but Titanus is worth celebrating as a worthy adversary for the Turtles in his own right. This is what the show should have been doing all along, and it’s frustrating to think of all the time wasted through the years on unimaginative one-and-done mad scientists and other generic villains. We could have had years of Titanus/HAVOC stories sprinkled among the Shredder shows had the show gone down this route earlier; instead, these three tales are all we get, a tantalising glimpse at what might have been.

There’s an argument to be made that none of this, or anything after “Shredder Triumphant!” should be considered canon, the Red Sky seasons almost feeling like a glimpse into one darker alternate timeline rather than a natural continuation of what TMNT had once been. If we take them as entirely legitimate, “Enter: Krakus” creates a little bit of a problem as it suggests a future that conflicts with the one the Turtles visited in season five’s “Once Upon a Time Machine”, where they met their future selves in 2036. There, the Turtles were celebrated as heroes who had managed to do away with crime altogether, and April was approaching retirement age, still dutifully working the same role at Channel 6 and driving around in her old news van, the world around her seemingly having moved on. It’s implausible that the events of these episodes could co-exist as Krakus initially has no awareness of the Turtles, and there’s no way their public profile declined rapidly enough in the intervening thirty years that they went from practically being worshipped as gods to being completely unknown; conversely, the April from the 2036 we saw seems to have made no career advances, unlike the one Krakus describes. From this, we can only determine that either the timeline has since changed or that earlier adventure was never canon to begin with.

Really, though... was anyone clinging to the events of “Once Upon a Time Machine”, which depicted undignified and somewhat depressing futures for both the Turtles and April, as something definitive? As with so many episodes not written by David Wise, I’m okay with the prospect of jettisoning it from the larger story of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Let’s drop “The Turtles and The Hare” while we’re at it, just assume that whole weird Hokum Hare mini-arc never happened.

Astonishingly, there are only two episodes left to cover in season eight, and one of them is a hold-over that was intended to air a month earlier. Next time, we finally get around to discovering what the deal is with “Cyber-Turtles”.

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