TMNT – “The Weird World of Wyrm” Review

“You can call me Wyrm.” – Wyrm

On their way to the next stop, the turtles get in some training with the Fugitoid’s simulator, taking on Chris Bradford in all three of his forms. Their post-workout meal is interrupted, though, but a distress signal from a rocket cleaved in half. The boys head out to investigate, but there’s no one left alive. While the others debate what happened, Casey finds himself a hypercube – a device with 5^th dimension access – being guarded by space zombies. The team fights its way back to the ship, but something is amiss with Casey Jones, who refuses to give up the cube even when Professor Honeycutt warns of its dangers.

While everyone else is preoccupied, Casey sneaks down to the professor’s vault and opens the cube, unleashing a 5^th dimensional being known as Wyrm. Wyrm will grant the team three wishes, but two are quickly used (Casey wished for the space zombies, and Donatello wished Casey would be less dumb), leaving only one wish left. However, Wyrm trapped the team in a 5^th dimensional prison of his own, and Professor Honeycutt reveals that if the diabolically mischievous creature grants all three wishes, he will be set free completely

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The turtles battle to keep Wyrm contained, but in the heat of the moment Raphael uses the final wish. However, his wish can’t even be used effectively, as he wishes for a weapon to destroy the creature, and the rules of the wishes state that the wishes can’t be used to harm the Wyrm. With that, the all-powerful being is free, and begins a destructive rampage on the universe. The only one that may be able to help is the now hyper-intelligent Casey Jones, but after running scenarios in his mind, Casey decides the only logical course of action is to join Wyrm.

Casey mercilessly fights the others in Wyrm’s illusory world, and then Wyrm grants his new friend one last wish to destroy his friends. However, Casey’s intelligence means easily outsmarting the creature, and the boy uses the wish to guarantee that they never found the cube, returning Wyrm to his eternal prison.

It’s been a while since there was a Casey-ish focused episode, and like all the episodes that are suppose to be more about a supporting character, that individual did not get terribly much in the way of development. Casey got to be the smart one who saved the day, but only through sheer accident, and certainly not extended through the episode. The wish to make him smarter was only utilized at the very end, after all. It’s a shame that it wasn’t utilized more, or that Wyrm wasn’t allowed to stay free for a while, with Casey actually joining him until some point down the road this season. However, solving these problems quickly and refusing to take a real risk seems to be the tone of the show for a while now, to its detriment.

It’s fairly obvious at this point that the battle with the Triceratons is going to take a back seat to one-off space adventures this season. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it does present a couple of issues. First, the show runs the risk of being the same thing as last season in a different locale. (Yes, the point of individual episodes like this is to allow the average viewer to jump in anywhere without being too lost, but that doesn’t mean the story has to be sacrificed.) Something the first two seasons did really well was having each standalone episode still include something toward the main plot for the season. In the last season+ now, that seems to have been lost. It may sound like nitpicking, but for fans that have invested time and energy in the series, it should continue to pay dividends in terms of great storytelling and character development. The show has sacrificed both in the last year (possibly for any number of reasons, but certainly the continually dwindling viewership has to come into play). If it can pick that back up, then the show could become great again – and it seemed like that was the route being taken with the destruction of Earth. Overall, it was another so-so episode that didn’t really appear to add anything to the development of the plot or the characters (there wasn’t even a “space apples” line!)

Rating: 6/10