3 out of 5

Produced by: Gary Richardson, Frederick U. Fierst, Joellyn Marlow, Tae Ho Han

In TV, I’d say most viewers are quite familiar with the time jump: when a series jumps forward X months or years in its timeline, shaking up the status quo in some way. For good reasons, I’d say this trope is often regarded with some caution as a sign of flagging viewership; skipping some big happenstances and then using new episodes to fill in the blanks is essentially a (hopeful) shortcut to tension, even though that’s also ridiculous, as events have all happened for the characters already – what the viewer sees is not “new” to those characters.

A sister to this trope is when the time jump picks up characters from Date A and moves them – their Date A selves – to Date B, so that all the inbetween stuff gets to be just as shocking to them. This can be fun, but as it’s almost always temporary (because the goal will be to return to Date A), it again minuses out that hoped-for tension.

I’m sure both of these methods have been used in cartoons before, but TMNT: Fast Forward – the show’s sixth season, leaping our 2000-era Turtles to 100 years in the future felt notable to me. Surface-wise, it kind of felt like a betrayal of the show’s roots, and also alienating of its viewership, in that the designs and tone were brightened and lightened, trying to get at a younger demo. This was especially hard to take because it leaned into the techy-cringe of the previous seasons, in which tech concepts and talk were liberally applied in a way that always felt a little dated and forced, and now we have a whole setting based around AI and VR and talking robots. Behind the seasons, we’d lost a season: we were prepping for Ninja Tribunal – season five – but 4Kids were panicked for viewers so much that they flipped in Fast Forward instead, and it was a hard cut from season 4. It all came across as pretty clunky, and it suffers from the trope elements mentioned above.

However: I was always consistently surprised at how hard the writers tried to make Fast Forward its own thing. It became much less serialized, true, but that meant not every episode was focused on “getting back home.” And an initial fear that we were going to get future proxies for every main character was stymied early on: Cody (April and Casey’s great-grandson) is his own person; Serling (his butler robot) is a straight-man foil that provides a new dynamic; new baddie Sh’Okonabo is… never really a threat, but he’s also not the Shredder. Plus there’s one great carryover that’s probably Fast Forward’s master stroke in terms of twists.

The lighter tone ended up mostly being applied to allowing the Turtles to walk around in the daytime, as this future is used to aliens and the like; it is more jokey overall, but personalities arrived intact from the prior seasons, and the daytime shift opens up some story possibilities where the script doesn’t have to divert and drop a line about staying in the shadows.

But the ticking clock of temporariness does hang over everything. There’s not really a set of episodes I remember very strongly, but some characters – like the forever roguish Torbin Zixx – stick out, which I think is a fair balance for this kind of mandatory settings change. On the more negative side, visually, Fast Forward is a bit cluttered. Producers Gary Richardson, Frederick U. Fierst, Joellyn Marlow, and Tae Ho Han insert the brighter colors figured for this younger demographic, but things still have the rather blocky feel of the prior seasons, leaving the future world feel somewhat undefined. Like, it’s flying cars and tall buildings; it’s a little generic and never gets quite the wow factor of first seeing Shredder’s building, or the mystery of the foot mystics.

…It could have been much worse, though. It’s essentially a season of filler episodes, but TMNT 2003 had plenty good ones of those, and some of them are in the Fast Forward season, spiced up a bit by having some new characters and concepts to play around with. “Back to the Sewers'” relative return to form was definitely welcome, but maybe only because Fast Forward was only ever temporary. If we had been committed to a full-on future world with the Turtles, I bet it could’ve turned out a lot more memorable.