As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance
- The hand-sign to enter the Purple Dragons lair is showing the three middle fingers of one hand. This is almost exactly like the Foot Clan emblem, who run the Purple Dragons from behind the scenes.
- Speaking of the Foot Clan emblem, compared to what the original Ninja Tribunal's looks like, it looks more like a crown, perfectly fitting for a blood-thirsty alien warlord with a god complex.
- In H.A.T.E., when Casey's Mom reveals she saw Leo and Splinter. At first, it appears to show how all-knowing Mrs. Jones was. Then with more thought, it's most likely that Mrs. Jones was probably keeping an eye on April during her secret test of character and saw them helping. Of course, neither Splinter or Leo were aware of the test so they weren't being careful.
- This is almost 100 percent unintentional, but Ch'rell isn't the only stand in for Krang we have. Baxter Stockman is an egotistical scientist who later becomes a brain in a jar, and uses robot bodies all the time. It may seem like a bit of a stretch but it does seem a bit un-coincidental
- There seems to be confusion on Splinter and the Utrom's awareness of the Utrom Shredder's real identity. One season, they believed the Shredder is just an ordinary man but in later season, they are aware that he is Ch'rell. However if one watches the first Foreshadowing in Secret Origins, the way hologram Mortu said about the Turtles' knowledge about the Shredder is incomplete sounds like he has just figured out who he is. That's because he got information from the Turtles' and after listening about their stories against the Shredder, the hologram Mortu manage to piece together that the Shredder is Ch'rell. With that logic, the Utrom and Splinter assumes for a long time that the Shredder is working with Ch'rell but only after learning about his survival from decapitation that Mortu and the Utrom realizes that the two are one and the same.
- After his defeat in The Shredder Strikes, Part 2, Shredder makes it a point of going after the Turtles and eliminating them. Seems like common sense and simple revenge, right? But then Timing is Everything showed Shredder after his first defeat facing the more-skilled Turtles by way of time travel. He knew they would become more powerful and eventually defeat him (as Raph says), so his motives weren't pure revenge.
- Concept-art and plans for the Shredder's return in the second season of Fast Forward has Ch'rell taking over the body of a Triceraton. Guess where Ch'rell is? Latching onto the Triceraton's face. If this had been canon, it makes sense why Ch'rell attack Raphael; He wanted to take control over him.
- Upon learning anyone that bear the mantle of Shredder would result in a link to the original, it could explain part of Ch'rell and later, Karai's actions.
- Notice that Ch'rell in Season 3 has a more deeper voice compared to his high-pitched one in the past. This shows how far deep that power is corrupting Ch'rell.
- It's heavily implied that Karai was slowly being influenced by the Demon Shredder. Of course, she would find it hard to leave her father other than familial love. Had the Turtles not destroy the Demon Shredder, she could have turn out like her Same As It Never Was counterpart, allowing Ch'rell to turn Earth into an apocalyptic wasteland.
- In Mission of Gravity, Stockman refers to Chaplin's Mouser 2.0 robots as more of a side grade than an upgrade. This isn't just jealousy on Stockman's part, he also has a point. The original mousers were made for theft and were never meant for combat. The new versions are only useful in combat, and cannot be used for theft.
Fridge Horror
- In Sons of the Silent Age, fishmen's eggs were being threaten by a dismantled nuclear power plant. The Turtles blew it up so save the eggs. While not nuclear, the explosion probably released tons of toxic particles in the air and scattered them for miles.
- In The Trouble With Augie, the Brotherhood conquering planets simply to eat their inhabitants is already nightmarish enough, and the implication that they've done this more than once before is even worse. When the leader of the Brotherhood's true nature is exposed, his servant tells him their food supplies are nearly exhausted. Considering their food supplies consisted of an entire planet's worth of sapient people, one would hope that the dwindling food supplies aren't actually surviving people being kept in reserve like cattle to eat (hopefully he's just referring to already harvested food). And even though the Brotherhood are doomed by the end of the episode, if these surviving people are still alive, they'll still end up eaten like the rest of their people by the starving Brotherhood, having survived this long for nothing.
- Late in season 4 during Insane in the Membrane Stockman wants to be left to rest in peace. A season later in "Enter the Dragons" he wants to be left to "expire" in peace. He no longer views himself as a man but a machine.
- The 2003 Shredder himself. Like Dr. Robotnik from Sonic Satam, he is no longer a comic relief, bumbling buffoon. 1987 Bebop and Rocksteady would be killed on the first day of the job since this Shredder doesn't tolerate failure. This Shredder is possibly the most evil Shredder in the media. He is murderous and ruthless.
- Donnie's infection comes as this since he is able to potentially infect any living organism that is within his vicinity, meaning he carried that infection throughout his time-travel mission into the prehistoric past and his time at the Zodac's dimension. Thankfully, the meteor destroyed the dinosaurs before the infection could do real damage and the Zodac's dimension only had the Brotherhood for it to spread to.
- In Adventures in Turtlesitting, Mikey, Raph, and Leo don't recognize Don after he double mutated. The only reason Casey and April knew was because they were there when he double mutated. What happened have happened if Don had mutated when he was alone? Would his family and friends have killed him unknowingly? Assume he had been attacked by the beast? Or would he, from their point of view, simply vanish from their lives while leaving no trace behind?
- Possibly mixed with Harsher in Hindsight. An un-produced episode of the Ninja Tribunal season was going to reveal that Hun and The Garbageman were conjoined twins separated at birth by a back-alley surgeon. That was horrific enough that it got the episode scrapped by the network, but it gets even worse when who realize that it was hinted at two seasons earlier during Same As It Never Was. Brings the Shredder's punishment of Hun and Stockman to an all-new level of "apropos."
- In The Shredder Strikes Back, Part 2, many of the Foot Ninjas are knocked out by the Turtles and Master Splinter, so when the Shredder blows up the shop (and by extension, the apartment above), it can be assumed that they perished in the resulting explosion. Although Stockman says in Tales of Leo that "there's no conclusive proof to say anyone, turtle or human, perished in the fire," that still doesn't mean that all of the Foot Ninjas escaped the blast; it merely means that Stockman doesn't have enough data to prove it.
- In The Real World, Part 2, Leo fails to phase Raph out of his AU, and the last thing he sees is Raph driving off a cliff as a result of not being able to steer while mid-phase. His Big "NO!" wasn't just frustration - the plot had to move on pretty quickly, but Leo must have spent the next chunk of that episode thinking he'd just killed Raph until Splinter managed to phase him back.
- When you find out in the sixth season that the turtles weren't even Chunin-level ninjas so far in the series, it's even more horrifying what they were up against with Shredder and the like. It also creates a massive Harsher in Hindsight for Leo's Heroic BSoD in Season 4 - he was obsessed with training himself and his brothers to the point that no one could ever beat them again, when they were literally amateurs.
- Mikey's grenade stunt with that Triceraton was Played for Laughs, but this teenage boy literally blew someone up and laughed about it.
- The people Shredder kidnapped and mutated were eventually cured, but the next episode is the City At War arc, makes you wonder if they were caught in the crossfire during the conflict.
