4 out of 5

May we one day get the bluray release with accompanying retrospective extras this series deserves.

Until then, we have these DVDs, which, y’know, are barebones: they’re just the episodes, and so’s all you can do is rate them on the quality of the episodes.

The final season of 2012 Turtles, re-named ‘Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ – which I was glad turned out to still be very in-universe stuff and not just cartoon versions of the old series, or isolated one-shots a la Tales vol. 2 – is / was such amazing stuff, achieving not only a pinnacle in terms of the writing / visual intelligence and creativity this series’ creatives constantly showed, but also for the way it fully embraced the brand while also making it its own, modern thing.  This is a fantastic quality that the best Turtles’ iterations have achieved – that I recently disenchantedly realized that the IDW comics do not achieve – and TMNT 2012 was able to maintain that for the majority of its 5 seasons and 124 episodes.

Sigh.  It will be missed.

But: The Final Chapters could have been one disc, comprising the awesome exciting, heart-warming, hilarious, and imaginative Mad Max riff Mutant Apocalypse, and the we-love-Usagi-so-much-it-hurts The Samurai Usagi Yojimbo crossover.  What a thing to save for your final season.

In addition, we get a disc two, with the puzzling – entertaining, but puzzling, because Why? and Why Was It Four Parts? – time traveling monster mash-up, which brought Dracula and Frankenstain into canon, and then the two part When Worlds Collide, which is sort of average, but does a good job of putting a cap on space adventurey loose ends.

The lack of extras, and the disparity between those two groups of episodes – the latter ones mentioned being totally quality, just that the former grouping are SO GODDAMNED GOOD – knocks off our star.