Alas, Wise doesn’t divide his subplots up wisely and all of the backstory about Chakahachi is spewed out a mile a minute at the start of the third act. Chakahachi frees Lotsu of the spirit of his wife and the two ghosts then go to live in the urn, restoring New York to normal.įor this show, those are some really elaborate concepts (especially considering we’d just come off of another f-g “shrinking episode”).
Eventually, we learn that Chakahachi’s wife was reincarnated as Lotus Blossom, hence her feelings of restlessness. When he’s freed, he starts transforming New York into Feudal Japan so he can continue his search and keeps the Turtles busy by siccing the spirits of his samurai retainers on them. His spirit recreated the world of Feudal Japan inside his urn so he could continue searching for her, but obviously he never found her because the world in his urn was just a fantasy. He was a great magician/shogun of Feudal Japan, but died while searching for his missing wife. Michelangelo goes to the oven to pull out a pizza, pulls out a tire which is there FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER and then says to the audience that the moral of the episode is “Search for happiness and you find… an old… tire…?”Ĭhakahachi’s story is surprisingly interesting and, again, feels underdeveloped and rushed because there’s only 22 minutes to get this thing done. In fact, I almost want to say that Wise was well aware of these shortcomings and put a lampshade on them in the final parting zinger before the credits. The script is TRYING to make a statement, but it’s really clumsy. I mean, you’ve got Lotus Blossom, feeling like she was born in the wrong century, and then you’ve got Chakahachi using his powers to turn the modern world into Feudal Japan so that he can feel at home. The ideas are all there, but they aren’t developed enough to feel organic to the conflict. It then sort of becomes background noise in the last two segments as she randomly jumps into unsolicited tangents about her place in the universe. Lotus’s desire to find her place in the world is only briefly touched upon in the first act, where she has a prophetic dream of the Turtles and Chakahachi tugging her in two directions. The romantic relationship between her and Leo is done away with completely and it’s instead a story about how she, as a ninja, doesn’t feel like she “belongs” in the 20th century.Īs I said earlier, there are a lot of big ideas in this episode and the lack of polish really squanders them. While I didn’t really care much for Lotus Blossom’s first appearance, and I really can’t stand Renee Jacobs’s voice for her, she benefits from this episode’s more elaborate story. It’s especially refreshing coming after a slew of episodes that were retreads of older plots.
There are a lot of big ideas in this script and “Farewell Lotus Blossom” has one of the more unusual plots in the whole series.
This was a good episode that had so much potential to be a great episode, if only it had gone through a second draft or something. However, when the spirit of Chakahachi is freed from the Urn, he begins using his magical powers to transform New York into Feudal Japan. When the Turtles take a job guarding the cursed Urn of Chakahachi, the Shredder tricks Lotus Blossom into stealing it for him. “Farewell Lotus Blossom” (written by David Wise)