Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987 series)/Headscratchers

• Why isn't April more succesful? She gets all the good stories. How did Michelangelo get to talk so different than the other turtles, since they don't talk with anyone else? Also, shouldn't Splinter be a rat-sized human?
  • April isn't respected by her employer (the boss calls her his "third-best reporter" in the pilot), Michelangelo probably picked it up from watching TV, and the mutagen doesn't necessarily always make the person turn into the same size as what they touched (case in point, the two guys who got turned into garbage monsters, but remained human-size).
    • "Muck Man & Joe Eyeball"
    • Nostalgia Critic made a good point. Why a rat? From what I've gathered from the show, the turtles were the last thing he touched and it's not like he made any contact with rodents
    • I believe the sequence of events is something like: 1) Touches rats offscreen, 2) Notices ooze and 3) steps on it in order to get to the turtles, activating the mutation.
  • It says whatever they most recently had contact with. I believe what they meant was had the most contact with recently. So the turtles had spent the most time with a human while Splinter had spent more time with rats than the turtles.
• In the episode "The Missing Map", we learn that Splinter apparently has documented evidence of Shredder's treachery within the Foot Clan. It's implied that if these documents were released, Shredder would be exiled and Splinter would be reinstated, allowing him to reform the ninja clan to its former glory. So... Why has he not done precisely that?? If Splinter is concerned no one would take a giant talking rat seriously, he could just as easily hand the documents off to April. Instead, these documents are hidden away and are never mentioned again...
  • I highly doubt that episode was canon...
• Exactly why did the Turtles not let Baxter Stockman change back to his human form at the end of his last episode, "Revenge of the Fly"? Baxter gets his hands on Shredder's Retromutagen Ray gun, but then the Turtles tackle him through the dimensional portal and they all land in the dimensional limbo. Shredder starts closing the portal, so the Turtles grab the ray gun and get out of there, apparently leaving poor Baxter trapped in his mutant form. I know they were in a hurry, but is there really a good reason why the Turtles didn't zap Baxter with the ray before leaving? If they had returned to Baxter to normal right there, the Turtles would have one less villain to have to deal with, since he'd no longer have reason to get revenge on them (that, and he'd still be trapped in the dimensional limbo considering the hurry they were in). Did the writers expect they were going to do at least one more episode with Baxter after "Revenge of the Fly"? I ask that because the fact that they destroyed his computer buddy in this episode kinda suggested they weren't intending for that.
  • Well, I heard that the Red Sky episodes were announced abruptly. You can tell by some other Season 7 episodes that they had different plans for some other minor characters. And plus, Baxter is HEAVILY implied to be unstable mentally and probably would still be evil even as a human again.

• Why would a disintegrator chamber merge Baxter with a fly? Shouldn't it have...I don't know...disintegrated them? And why bother with disintegration in the first place, why not just have a mook kill him?
  • That's not Krang's style.

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