Should you watch this, Wiki this, or wait for the recap? Watch it!
The Turtles find an old game of Mazes and Mutants and decide to enact a real-life version of their tabletop roleplaying game – not realising that it’s all a ploy by a dangerous new mutant to keep them trapped in the game forever!
“Mazes and Mutants” is, of course, a thinly veiled reference to Dungeons and Dragons, what with the alliteration and location/monster structure of the title. Although there’s no furthering of the series arc, it’s a fun episode to see the Turtles in new costumes acting out RPG characters. There’s even an onscreen explanation of what LARPing is!
I don’t know about you, but watching this episode prompted me to get into D&D again. It’s fun to see the Turtles just being teenagers and doing random silly acts that all teenagers do. It’s a good episode that builds on character, and reuses character models to create funky situations.
Highlights
Turtles in their Dungeons and Dragons Mazes and Mutants costumes
It’s a riot! Really, so the picture captions should tell you their character classes, but here it is again for reference – Leo the Knight, Donnie the Wizard, Raph the Barbarian, and Mikey the Elf (archer). You also get Leatherhead in a cameo as the dragon they have to defeat in its lair of gold coins. So many D&D/Hobbit/LOTR references! Good to know that the creators are just as geeky as me, er, us.
Sir Malachi the wizard
Sir Malachi is a little weird at first – don’t we already have a bird mutant in the series (Pete)? But he slowly grows on you when you realise he’s not evil, and you can definitely see him as a future ally of the Turtles. Maybe he’ll return in another Dungeons and Dragons themed episode – with Shredder and company LARPing as evil warlords!
Raphael gets turned into a chicken
Raph is always grumpy, so it’s fun to see him get taken down a peg a little when Sir Malachi gives him a chicken head. Grumpier Raph is funnier, especially since he’s already grumpy when he’s forced to get into his Barbarian schtick. Just as he warms up to being a Barbarian – boom! He offends Sir Malachi and gets cursed with a horrible head.
Letdowns
The final battle
The way they win the fight at the end of the episode is rather cheesy – using the power of belief/disbelief, they defeat Sir Malachi’s creations and return to the sewers. It’s a little too touchy-feely for a Turtles episode, since you’d expect them to find some clever solution to save the day.
Really, the highlight of this episode is just seeing the Turtles playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s the closest crossover we’ll ever to Game of Thrones or LOTR too! And finally, it’s just a ploy to sell toys. I’m going on Amazon now to get my LARP Turtles. Are you?
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