Headscratchers / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2012 S 4 E 10 Trans Dimensional Turtles

• How on Earth does this episode fit into established continuity? So many things don't make sense... Why didn't the 87 Turtles reference Turtles Forever? That and the fact that they built a different portal device would suggest that this episode took place before Turtles Forever. That opens up the plot hole of why they didn't reference these events in Turtles Forever. We could just say they didn't care to mention it for whatever reason, but then, why the intense fear of the Mirage Turtles? If one of them (Donatello, I think) had already seen them before, then why the extreme fear later on? Why didn't Donatello point out who they were? Let's move on to Krang now. Why is Krang willing to blow up the Multiverse now? He never showed any initiative for doing that in the original cartoon, or in Turtles Forever, where he was OPPOSED to it... What caused this? What on Earth is going on? TL;DR version: This episode and Turtles Forever can't be reconciled, so the only truly plausible solution is that they were two different sets of the '87 Turtles.
  • Seeing as these Turtles have the original voice actors and Turtles Forever didn't, it's easy to say these were the actual Turtles from the '87 series and the ones in Turtles Forever were from an alternate timeline. A coloring book perhaps?
  • OR, perhaps like the main page says, the episode takes place BEFORE Turtles Forever, despite it having a newly-established set of TMN Ts. Think about it: this way, '87 Krang won't have any desire to become an Omnicidal Maniac thanks to the events of this episode (and explains perfectly why he tries to help stop Utrom Shredder from doing it), and maybe the '87 Turtles are just going through a Saturday morning cartoon attitude of forgetting what recently happened.
  • The only issue there is that the 87 Turtles are FAR more competent here than in Turtles Forever, which established them as useless and cringeworthy to be around. While they're eccentric here and have all of their sometimes embarrassing 1980's silliness, they come across as far more useful here.
  • Another possibility is that Turtles Forever featured the Archie Comics version of the '87 Turtles.
  • Another answer could be that the '87 Turtles in Turtles Forever and the '87 Turtles in this episode come from realities that are similar to, but distinct from, the '87 cartoon series rather than being from that exact reality. The '87 Turtles in Turtles Forever are much more incompetent than the Turtles from the '87 cartoon, and the '87 Krang & Shredder in Turtles Forever end up with an upgraded Technodrome that never appears in the '87 cartoon. The '87 Krang in this episode is a member of the Kraang and cousin of Kraang Subprime whereas the Krang from the '87 cartoon is the disembodied brain of a reptilian overlord. Meanwhile, the Turtles in the '87 cartoon eventually banished Krang and Shredder to Dimension X and later fought and defeated Lord Dregg. Only the Prime Turtles and Prime Reality are the same between both this episode and Turtles Forever.
• Why were the "Turtles Prime" completely silent this time around? And where was the original Shredder?
  • He's probably already dead.