Parental alienation therapy via Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
When real life is stranger than fiction
I walked into my living room to find my daughter (at the time 5) and stepdaughter (9) engrossed in an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the 2012 animated series. Despite the fact that I had turned my daughter on to the series as soon as I’d discovered it the year prior, AND despite the fact that the 1986 animated series had been a cornerstone of my childhood, I had yet to learn the storyline in any depth — but I was about to get a massive crash course.
“That’s Karai,” my daughter said, grabbing my hand and pointing to a badass, angry looking young woman in metal armor. “She’s really Splinter’s daughter, but Shredder kidnapped her when she was a baby.”
“Yeah,” her sister chimed in, “but she doesn’t know that Splinter is her real father yet because Shredder’s been brainwashing her.”
“Oh,” I said, and sat down.
I proceeded to watch the concluding arc to season 2 with the girls, in which Karai finally discovers who she is and changes alliances after being won over by the gentle but persistent love of her brothers, the turtles, and by her oldest brother Leo’s dogged determination to bring her back into the family, and ultimately, as all epiphanies tend to grow from: the truth.
That moment when she meets Splinter face to face, intending to betray him, but then sees the photographs of him with her mother — and of the three of them together. When she sees the truth of her past with her own eyes. When she believes, and stops calling him Master Splinter, and instead calls him father — and is that a tremble in her voice?
That moment when Splinter takes his daughter by the shoulder and tells her:
“You are whoever you choose to be, not who others would make you.”
“Now Karai is good,” my daughter says with happy finality. I start to cry.
“But why did Shredder steal her from her dad?” her sister turns and asks, with genuine concern and confusion on her face as her eyes subconsciously flit to look for her absent brother. And we all understand that this is not a question about the plot (which they…
