Who do you think will be the last one standing, despite the fact that it is difficult to see the four turtle brothers being separated at all? Will the most disciplined fighter of them all, Leonardo, win? Raphael— the personification of fury and madness with two hands? The technological prodigy and perhaps the smartest turtle in the room is Donatello.
Or Michelangelo, the jovial guy who shouts “Cowabunga” whenever he gets the chance? However, the TMNT creators have already provided an answer, and it is by far the worst thing we could have ever imagined taking place. Let us know who you believe it would be in the comments.
The creators of the Turtle-verse, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, present an apocalyptic tale of murder, retribution, and, yes, the last ronin of the Hamato Clan, over 5 action-packed issues in the The Last Ronin mini-series, which IDW will publish in October 2020.
The sequel to this series, which is set in the future but is not a part of the canonical timeline, was already revealed at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2022. But who precisely is this ninja without a master?
What does he want? And why do we refer to it as the darkest TMNT tale ever? In this episode of The Last Ronin mini-series – Explored, we will respond to all of those questions and more.
Infiltration and Execution – The Revenge of the Last Turtle Begins!
Issue #1 begins with a mutant turtle watching over New York City from its other shore; but, because of his black bandana, we are unable to identify which turtle it is. The environment has gotten so awful due to pollution and global warming that it has been ten years since Planet Earth was truly inhabitable.
The rivers that encircle New York City now contain more toxic sludge than water. The turtle’s siblings caution him that crossing the river would be like swimming through a sewage tank, but he does so nonetheless because, at the end of the day, he is a mutant rather than a human. We see a future New York City with walls around the boundaries, search beacons scanning every square inch of the land, and a giant Foot Clan Tower, well, towering above everyone and everything in the Big Apple.
He informs his brethren that he will see them on the other side. When the turtle finally makes it across the water, he observes that the security is at best inadequate, noting that the Foot are more concerned with keeping people inside and are not exactly expecting attacks from the outside world. He calls this the Foot’s greatest mistake and throws himself over the rusted barbed wire, telling himself that it is now or never will be.
The moment our lone turtle began his quest for retribution, however, he encountered a difficulty—more accurately, a multitude of them—which his brothers reprimanded him for. At this point, it becomes apparent that the brothers he is speaking to are not actually… there. This last warrior’s spirit and mind must have been destroyed by the trauma of losing his family because he was talking to his other three brothers when they were obviously not present while hallucinating.
The last ronin, however, is ready to go the extra mile and is aware that his goal has not changed regardless of how he feels or how he feels mentally as he points a sai in the direction of the Foot Tower. As the owner of the bike swears to track him down for taking her ride, he snatches one of the bikes outside of Hilty’s and rides it to his destination. However, our hero does not seem to mind.
After all, there is something to be said for hiding in plain sight, and this old turtle had learned a few new tricks, as we can see in the panels when he easily blows up the Foot Tower’s base. However, as his brothers point out, his landing lacks grace, and he ultimately agrees with them that he needs luck to complete this task because he enters the NYC territory of the Foot Clan by means of a good old fashioned sewage conduit.
His brothers are doubting his strategy as he moves into the Delta Quadrant, but he thinks back to the earliest teachings their father and master taught them: strike hard, move quickly, know what to do when, and most importantly, never give up. The final ronin calms his brothers by reminding them that while they may remove the turtle from the sewer, they cannot remove the sewage from the turtle.
Our avenger is forced to rely on his innate instincts and relentless training to make it all the way to the actual tower when the manhole cover he exits through begins blasting sirens throughout the quadrant as if to immediately shut him down. This attracts the attention of numerous cybernetically enhanced Foot ninjas, or Synjas as one of the hallucinations calls them, and our avenger is left with no choice but to use his instincts and training to survive.
After bashing in the heads of more than a few sorry Synjas with his metallic tongfas, and crashing a hovering cop car into a billboard in an attempt to “fly”, the last ronin decides to stick to leaping over rooftops. Sticking to what he does best, he exclaims that he is coming for Oroku Hiroto (pronounce: Oh-Row-Coup He-Row-Toe) as we cut to the very man he is hunting down. Oroku Hiroto: the bastard son of Karai, grandson of the Shredder, current Master of the Foot Clan and iron-fisted ruler of New York City.
The last-living member of the Oroku clan summons his Captain and enquires whether his eyes are deceiving him or there has been an actual security breach. After the Captain confirms that it is the latter, Hiroto decides that this intrusion should be turned into an example: he wants all units in-pursuit to broadcast their efforts live to all the citizens of NYC, and he also commissions them to use lethal force.
He sums up the “lesson” he wants to teach to his city in three words: Pursuit, Capture and Execution. In like 2 pages, he has already established himself as being worse than the Shredder, thanks to his overtly-militant approach to what he is being told is an intrusion from a member of the “lower classes” and his general air of grandiose delusion. But as evil as he himself might be, his underlings sure are rather single-minded because the last ronin is able to leap over multiple Synjas and successfully infiltrate the upper level of the Foot Tower.
After dispatching several Soldiers and Elites using his unparalleled discipline, the last ronin nearly makes it to Oroku Hiroto, but his overzealous pursuit catches up with him. After bulldozing through multiple Foot operatives like a one-man army, he comes up against flying mousers designed by the evil scientist Baxter Stockman himself, who also helped Hiroto create the Synjas and is in an alliance with him.
Hiroto realises that the infiltrator isn’t a lower-class citizen but one of the mutant turtles that this clan has been fighting against for decades and lets loose everything he has on him. Though the ronin is able to knock out the smaller mousers with EMPs generated through his tongfas, he falls victim to the sheer momentum generated by a gigantic mouser that takes him through the window of the level they were at and all the way down onto the street.
As he falls, he thinks to himself that it can’t end like this. Every bone is his body was crushed by the fall, and he was coughing up blood but all he could think of was his mission. He growled at the Foot Master and called Hiroto a coward, but he knew he was on the edge here. So, the last ronin made his escape into the sewers, and the Synja pursuing him were misled by the same young woman whose bike he had stolen at the beginning of the issue.
Young Ms. Jones followed the ronin’s trail and realised that he had lost way too much blood and would die any moment, so she rushed after him into the sewers as well. The scene cuts back to Hiroto who is talking to Karai; well, her unconscious body currently kept in stasis, but you get what we mean. The last scion of the Oroku Clan is musing that he had finally gotten rid of the mutant menace once and for all, but he couldn’t understand exactly how one of them survived the attack he made on them a decade ago.
His mood is ruined by his captain, who informs him that the terrorist is still alive. The scene cuts back to the sewers, where the last ronin is giving himself a final speech. He knew this was a suicide mission from the start, but he kept at it anyway because he wanted to go out with honour, fulfilling his duty to his clan. He lays out weapons and bandanas that are all too familiar to us; a bo staff, a pair of nunchuks, a pair of sais, and a broken katana.
He takes out a book that belonged to his father – Master Splinter – and picks up the katana to go out on his own terms. But just as the last ronin is about to commit seppuku (pronounce: Sep-Poo-Coo), he bleeds out and falls unconscious; that’s where the Jones girl finds him and she is shocked. The last couple of pages show the last turtle wake up in a room that looks like it’s in their old sewer lair.
His brothers are giving him a rough time – as usual – but something is off. He realises that this isn’t a dream and when he snaps back into reality, he also realises that he is in the old lair, yes, and the person he was talking to was none other than April O’Neil; his dear old friend.
The last ronin looks confused at his condition, having clearly been saved by Jones, but the one who is more confused is April, because she couldn’t understand who Mikey was talking to, revealing that the last ronin was none other than Michelangelo!
Betrayal, Ambush, Death(s) and Vengeance – How Michelangelo Became The Last Ronin
Issue #2 opens with April having a flashback to the night that marked the beginning of the end for the turtles. She and Casey had decided to tell the guys that they were going to get married, and they were on their way to April’s home from the lair. The couple was extremely happy, but little did they know that these might be the last moments they shared with each other.
Because just as Casey made to check on their progress, Raph burst into their house, bloody and battered, and started clearing a table. Donatello and Michelangelo were close behind with Master Splinter in between them. Their sensei had been wounded – bad – by an ambush from the Foot Clan who had chosen to break the truce that Karai and Leonardo had established.
Leo was acting as rear guard while April tended to Splinter’s wounds. She’s a good enough medic, but Splinter’s injuries were too severe; he was bleeding out and needed a doctor to help him, otherwise the turtles would be fatherless and masterless in one fell swoop. Leo agreed that they needed to move Master Splinter, but before any of them knew it, Raphael had sneaked out of April’s home to go against the Foot and Karai by himself.
The red-bandana brandishing turtle had always been known for his fierce temper and fiercer fighting skills, but something told Leonardo that this particular night smelt of doom. That’s when the flashback ends, and we see that April has lost 2 limbs, presumably due to something that happened the same night. She calls out to “Casey” to help her put on her prosthetic limbs as the scene cuts back to Michelangelo, who is discussing just how crazy it is that April is still alive with the ghosts of his brothers.
Mike says that the explosion knocked him out so hard that he temporarily lost his memory for days. Ghost Raph says it’s yet another miracle that April is still alive, and Ghost Donnie adds that surviving that explosion should’ve been impossible. Ghost Raph quips that he must’ve missed that one when Ghost Leo sarcastically implies that he went and did something stupidly hot-headed that got him killed instead. This starts an argument between the ever-arguing turtles and Mikey loses it at the apparitions of his brothers.
He screams that he knew it was a one-way ticket from the beginning and that he did it for their family and their honour… but he stops short at that last word. Mike gathers himself and his resolve, saying he knows he should be dead but because he isn’t, he will finish what their father started. He pours 4 cups of green tea; one for himself and 3 for his dead brothers. They lift their cups and Michelangelo vows that he will kill the Last Oroku and avenge his family, just as we go back into the past to see Raph’s “stupid mistake”.
Turns out, he ran after Karai and her entire contingent alone, ditching Casey – who wanted to join him – and his brothers, who kinda wanted to kill him as well for doing this. Raphael catches up to Karai, who intends to settle the score once and for all, and engages all her soldiers by himself. How much time did it take for the sole turtle to cut through dozens of Foot ninjas? We can’t tell you.
But what we can tell you is that by the time Raph came face-to-face with Karai, his shell was pocked with arrows, his body had several cuts on it, he had a slight limp, but every other Foot Soldier was dead, and the only one left standing was Karai. Raph and Karai engaged in a vicious battle, hurling insults at one another, and it looked like Raph had her beat when he took her and jumped into the East River.
But Karai managed to whip out a kunai underwater and bury it in Raph’s throat, shockingly killing the most-fierce turtle of them all. We see his sai sink into the river that was bloody by this point as the scene cuts back to the present with April chastising Mikey for getting out of bed this early. She tells him he needs to rest to get back to full strength, but Mike shakes it off by saying he needed some tea.
Turns out, even a decade old tea leaves can give you a brilliant cuppa. Mike doesn’t mind it, and April only drinks coffee these days, so the beverage situation is sorted. She catches Mike staring at her prosthetic limbs and tells him they’re a souvenir from their last meeting before observing they had a lot of catching up to do. As April whips up some breakfast using real eggs from the black market – none of that synthetic, salmonella stuff for her, thank you – she notes that Mike’s stunt had really rattled Hiroto’s cage.
Mike tells her that wasn’t the plan, and she says she knows, but the results of his actions stand as they are. She notes that he only survived the fall because his mutation had progressed and made him far stronger than he used to be, and Mikey agrees, saying if he had been younger he’d have died. But his newfound healing factor didn’t do anything for his head, which was still fuzzy, thus making it even more confusing for him when April called “Casey” for breakfast; because as far as he recalled, Casey Jones was dead.
That’s when we got the reveal that this Casey was actually April and Casey’s daughter; Casey Marie Jones. Sorry, too many Caseys in a couple of sentences, but you get our point, right? Anyway, April’s daughter walks in and introduces herself as a huge fan of the turtle brothers. Evidently, her mom had regaled her with stories about the good ol’ days, and she even recognized Mikey as “the funny one”, but as April said, they had a LOT of catching up to do because there was nothing funny about Michelangelo anymore.
In the meantime, Oroku Hiroto had replaced his former captain and given his new one the order to crackdown on New York City – inside and outside of the walls – to find the last ronin. He reminds his new captain of the future that awaits failures, as we see the last captain’s skull being feasted upon by carrion crows. The scene cuts back to the lair where Casey and Mike enter the old training room.
Casey reveals that she had been practicing martial arts since she was a kid, and that she knew instantly what Mike was preparing for when she found him. Mike thanks her for keeping his family’s belongings safe and when she asks him where he was all this time, he explains how he became the way he is now. After his family’s death, Michelangelo lost his spirit. He made his way into the snowy peaks of a mountain, unaware of the effects it would have on his non-acclimated body, looking for an answer of some kind, but all he found was suffering.
His mutant nature kept him from freezing to death, so he decided to isolate himself and hone his mind and soul. Michelangelo entered a state of deep meditation and reflection, going through his father’s book multiple times and thinking solace to be his ultimate fate. But in the end, he was attacked by a few locals who wanted to toy with him before putting him down, and that is what pissed him off.
There was no honour in what they were doing to him; so he cut them down and resolved to finish what his father had started. Mikey travelled the world perfecting the many techniques that his father had collected in his journal over the years, and when he was ready, he took a ship from Italy to NYC to finish his mission. The last page of his journal reminds him what he must think of when going up against the last Oroku: No Peace.
He takes his journal from Casey, telling her he’s still got work to do, to which she replies that her crew will help him out. Mikey opposes this, telling her he doesn’t want to be responsible for any deaths besides his own, but he can tell Casey is not one who will be dissuaded so easily, so he gives in, musing whether she takes after her father or her mother, as the issue closes with April O’Neill clutching the head of a Fugitoid robot.
Recollection & Retribution – The Plan to Eradicate Oroku Hiroto Formulates!
Issue #3 opens with another flashback, but this time from the perspective of the bad guy. At 16 years old, Oroku Hiroto is sworn in as the leader of his clan, following the critical injuries suffered by Karai and the death of his grandfather Shredder. He tells his generals that he was destined for this position, and as he claims his birth right, he issues his first command as clan head; he invites the leaders of the Hamato Clan to a parley, stating that the war has gone on too long and it was time to speak of peace.
Back in the present, Hiroto talks to his unconscious mother, and tells her that he is about to remind the citizens of New York City exactly who their master is and why. He then broadcasts a holographic message to the entirety of NYC, claiming that the 2 decades that New York spent under him are the most prosperous in its history, but that an intruder had tried to take that away from all of them by trying to kill their beloved leader.
He broadcasts Mikey’s picture across Times Square and says that there will be a city-wide search warranted for him and anyone who tries to harbour the turtle will suffer a fate worse than his. Hiroto then implements Martial Law in New York City, as his Synjas literally water-board people off the streets. Casey’s crew realises the gravity of the situation and tries to contact her ASAP as we cut back to the lair where Mike and his ghost bros are discussing young Ms. Jones.
The rest of the turtles remark that Casey is way over in her own head and doesn’t have the kind of training they had to be able to go up against the Foot, but Mikey reminds them that they were exactly the same as her in their own youth. He says that every action they have ever taken has culminated into this moment, which ends up getting interrupted by the very topic of conversation.
Casey apologizes for disturbing Mike – he WAS talking to himself, after all – and tells him that her mom wants to see him in her lab. She also tells him she is going topside to survey the scene, and Mike tries to stop her, but she just tells him she doesn’t need his permission and guides him to the lab. That leaves the conversation gnashing his teeth and thinking about just how stubborn this young girl was – and way too young to be doing all this old-people stuff, besides.
But Mikey sucks it up and goes to see April where he gets another surprise in the form of Professor Honeycutt; or whatever is left of him, anyway. The Fugitoid head April whipped out at the end of the last issue belonged to the turtles’ robotic friend, and the two survivors then give us a further recollection of the events that led them here. Turns out, Splinter decided to actually accept the invitation for a parley, hoping that the losses that both sides had suffered would be enough to make Oroku Hiroto see that peace was the only real solution.
Mike, Leo and Donnie are all sceptical but their master is a true follower of the ninja way and would not decline an invitation that was made observing the utmost respect. Professor Honeycutt helped Donnie put together a cloaking mechanism that would keep him and his father safe all the way to Japan if nothing went sideways, and Splinter told Leo to keep their strikers in a neutral position.
If it appeared that his side had been aggressive in America whilst engaged in peace talks in Japan, the whole thing could’ve fallen over. Leo agreed with his father and the two teams split up: Splinter & Donatello would travel to Japan while Leo & Mikey would stay in New York and oversee things there with Casey, April, Honeycutt and the rest of their guys. But no sooner had Splinter & Donnie taken off that the nefarious Baxter Stockman made a final play to acquire the Fugitoid.
He used his ground forces to track the turtles to April’s store on Bleeker and Sullivan and unleashed a hellish assault on Leonardo’s forces. As he scrambled to formulate a response team, Casey charged Mike with protecting April and Honeycutt. Casey then joined the fray along with his boys but it became painfully clear very soon that these Foot Ninjas were different from the usual ones; that’s because this was technically the debut appearance of those pesky Synjas, and it took all of Leo’s concentration to defeat multiple waves of them.
Honeycutt realizes that Stockman is somehow tracking him and threatens to self-destruct if the professor doesn’t stop his assault. He was hoping that his greed would outweigh his bloodlust but he was wrong, because Stockman simply blew up all his machines in the vicinity, claiming if he couldn’t have Honeycutt, then no one would. In the aftermath, only Mike, April and Honeycutt survive, if you can call the survival of their current state, that is. Back on the surface, Casey meets up with her crew and realizes what has transpired.
They immediately decide to rendezvous underground and split up into teams to increase their odds of survival. Casey tells her team to stick to the sewers but breaks that rule herself looking to cut down on time. In the process of doing so, she ends up attracting the attention of Foot Synjas, but it turns out she’s a one-woman wrecking machine, because she doesn’t even break a sweat while dispatching them.
But she realises she is running out of time and needs to get back to her mother soon, just as we return to the lair where April is taking blood samples from Mike to ostensibly track the progress of his mutation. He asks her if Honeycutt is still alive, and she says she doesn’t know, but she thinks he is, as she has deduced that Stockman managed to hack Honeycutt, which was how he found them that night.
And then she recounts her own story of survival; following the blast, remnants of Leo’s strike team saved her and got her immediate medical attention. April had lost an arm, a leg, and was somehow still pregnant with a healthy foetus. It took her months of extensive physical and mental therapy to get back on her feet – emotionally and literally – but she managed to do it. When she left the hospital, she had a shiny new arm, leg and a baby, so she decided to go to the old lair because it was the only place she could think of as being safe anymore.
The same strike team members helped her recover Honeycutt’s head, and having recalled her own story, she asks Mikey to tell her his. After the blast, turns out Mikey got blown entire city blocks away, which explain the concussion alright. He tried to contact Donatello from the lair but he was too disoriented to do anything else.
So he grabbed all the weapons he could from the lair and stowed himself on a plane to Japan, intent on warning his father and brother personally. He tells April he didn’t know what else he could do, and she tells him that that’s his survivor’s guilt speaking, and he truly is blameless. She tells him there is a way that they can beat Hiroto, and that’s when Casey walks in demanding to hear it, filling them both in on the situation upstairs.
April lays out her plan: every piece of tech that the Foot used these days was designed by Baxter Stockman, who operated off of a private island far away from the Foot Tower. Her idea was simple: infiltrate Baxter’s fortress, find him, and disarm all his tech using Professor Honeycutt’s latent consciousness.
Only one problem, though; there was a one in a billion chance of this succeeding, something Mikey points out as well. But April tells him this is the only shot they will ever have, so he agrees to do it, and is shown a rather sick armoured vehicle by April who says Donatello would’ve been proud of the design.
Elsewhere, Oroku Hiroto stalks New York City, rambling like a madman, talking about not getting abandoned anymore and how he was better than Shredder himself. The lunatic resolves himself to end his family’s long-lasting war with the turtles himself if that’s what it takes, which moves us on to the next part of the last ronin’s saga.
Assault on Baxter’s Isle – The Last Ronin Attacks alongside his new protégé
Issue #4 opens up with Mike and Casey pinned down in the heat of battle. Mike calls in to April but his radio is worthless. He bemoans the fact that he told them this was a bad idea, but Casey gets him back on the job at hand. She tells him that her team can handle the gun tower while April works on getting back online but Mike vetoes the idea. He asks her team to lay down suppression fire whilst he creates an opening and wades into the front lines by himself.
Mike leaps over his cover and orders Casey to drop tonnes of smoke bombs, to which she replies, “Yes Sensei”, indicating she had officially become his disciple. Mike starts cutting through mousers like butter and thinks to himself that this is too easy, when we see Baxter Stockman in his fortress. The evil genius is so ignorant of his position that he puts down this full-scale assault on his facility to “junk-divers looking for loot” and pays no mind to it.
He just turns his bots up to lethal force and gets right back to his research. In the meantime, Mikey is having a bit of a struggle trying to take on so many mousers at once, so Casey lends him a foot by kicking one’s metallic head clean off his shoulders.
Mike chides his student for terrible discipline but backs it up by saying her initiative was excellent. Casey takes pride in the fact that she is finally learning what it is to be a real ninja, as we cut back to a few days before the attack. Michelangelo was observing Casey at her daily training and noted that her technique was decent but she had picked up some bad habits. Ghost Leo wants to see what she could do with ten years of real training, but Ghost Raph reminds him they don’t have 10 years.
Mikey says he is going to train her regardless because if she was going to fight, she better learn how to do it well. He sneaks up on her and tells her that she had basically wasted all her time working on moves she couldn’t even execute properly. He says that all she did was just basic cardio, which gets Casey worked up. Mike pushes her by asking her to hit him as hard as she can, and calling her a child when she refuses to do so.
After getting Casey sufficiently mad, he proceeds to outclass her at every step, avoiding all her attacks while pointing out their flaws. In the end, he hasn’t even broken a sweat, whilst Casey is running on fumes. He tells her to reflect on how she could have done all that differently. The brash child starts taking out her frustration on the wall so he twists her arm a bit; and we do mean that literally.
Mike ends up telling Casey that he is willing to train her to fight for real, and this sends her over the moon because Casey grew up idolizing the turtles and having one of them become her sensei was legit her dream come true. He informs her that training begins the next day and asks her to cut her hair when April tells him Splinter would’ve been proud of what he was doing here. Mike is worried he might have overstepped a boundary but April reminds him that they were all Splinter’s children and that she was actually glad he was doing this for Casey.
Then she asks him to finish his story, and so he gets right back to explaining how he got to America again. After landing in Japan, he made his way to the ancestral home of the Hamato Clan where he met Master Shinichiro. Mikey had been asking his fellow clansmen about his father and brother, but so far all he had gotten was the same sullen look from every single one of them.
When he came face-to-face with Shinichiro, he begged him for news on his family members’ lives. Mikey was desperate, and after a long silence, Shinichiro told him that there are people, creatures, teachers, warriors, heroes and legends… and that his father, Master Splinter, was all of them. Turns out, Oroku Hiroto had betrayed his father and brother at the official parley. After calling his “guests” to a graveyard for the meeting, Hiroto ambushed them with Foot ninjas aplenty.
Master Splinter immediately got to work, cutting through the undisciplined Foot ninjas like a hot knife through butter. Donatello and the rest of the Hamato envoys followed his lead, but their superior skill wasn’t enough to make up for Oroku’s numbers’ advantage. Hamato clan members were starting to give ground, so Hiroto ordered his archers to get ready for the final attack.
Splinter taunted the last Oroku into attacking him head-on, putting his pride as a warrior before practical sense; and tragically, that was what got him and his son killed. As Splinter hurled his katana into Oroku Hiroto’s chest, the Foot Clan loosed countless arrows onto him and Donatello. The Hamato Clan reinforcements forced the Foot into retreat by raining arrows on them, but it was too late. They couldn’t save Splinter and Donatello, and Shinichiro ended up becoming the bearer of bad news for Michelangelo. Mike’s heart sank then.
He found the answers he came looking for, but they were steeped in tragedy. The Hamato Clan offered to take him in as one of their own and give him a place he could call home, but that didn’t feel right to him, so he went into the mountains and began his isolation and meditation.
After getting attacked by ignorant villagers, he decided he had to end the feud himself, and that’s how he got to training and getting back into the states. He tells April even if he knew she were alive back then, his mission would’ve remained the same, and she tells him she understands. She’s actually very happy about what ended up happening because Casey has taken to Mikey like he took to Splinter, but that’s when something unexpected happens.
Mike accuses April of setting him up to become Casey’s sensei, and it is revealed that Casey is a mutant herself. Turns out, spending years in close proximity with the turtles had affected April and Casey Jones Sr. to the point that their child was born a mutant. Young Ms. Jones wasn’t growing a shell anytime soon, but she did have superhuman strength and endurance, which was enough for April to take Mike’s blood samples and track the progression of her mutation.
Mike is understandably upset but he agrees to keep this a secret for his oldest surviving friend, and then prepares to meet April’s “other friends”. These friends turn out to be the very strike team that we see in the opening of this issue. Mike and April learn that Hiroto and Baxter have a very strained relationship and surmise that this is possibly their best chance to immobilize The Foot without their knowledge.
Given that Baxter and Hiroto hated each other, they probably wouldn’t interfere in each other’s affairs until the last possible moment, and that gave them enough leverage to take out the nerve centre of the Foot Clan’s mostly-robotic army. Mike and his team are able to infiltrate Dr. Baxter’s island fortress successfully, though to call it easy would be an insult to Stockman’s genius. The man is a leading robotics expert, after all.
He keeps Mike and Co. pinned down with heavy fire and electrical action, but that’s when April O’Neil shows up to the party. She takes out every mouser in the area with her armoured tanker and slams it right into Stockman’s command centre, where she finds a powerful enough energy source to plug Honeycutt’s head into. Baxter Stockman catches up with her and eats a backhand from April for breakfast, but ends up losing his ultimate battle of technological supremacy with the Fugitoid, because at that moment Honeycutt activates and disintegrates Baxter Stockman’s entire body, destroying himself in the process as well.
After Stockman has been dealt with, the nanobyte swarm that used to be Honeycutt enters all of Stockman’s systems, infecting them with a virus that effectively shuts down all Foot tech and defence systems across New York City. Hiroto immediately puts his private army on high alert as the city falls into lawlessness around him.
On Baxter’s Isle, Casey exclaims they’ve won, but her mother reminds her that this victory was simply in a battle. The war remains, and Michelangelo is not willing to pay the price he had to pay to get to Baxter anymore. This will be the final showdown between the Oroku and Hamato Clans, and he intends to protect everyone else with his death.
The Final Battle – Oroku Hiroto vs Hamato Michelangelo and the Birth of a New Era
Issue #5 opens with Michelangelo in deep thought. Ghost Donatello muses that he has only ever once been in Splinter’s room – and that was when he was still alive. Ghost Raph asks him to cut the crap because he’s concerned that Mike has been sitting around for too long, and surprisingly enough, Ghost Leo backs him up. He says that Mikey had the perfect opportunity to strike; he had Hiroto on the ropes with the attack on Baxter and if he hadn’t pursued, they’d have likely won.
Donnie backs Mikey by saying he understands the pressure he’s under, what with him being the last turtle and all, and Raph just mocks him for being such a weakling. Mike snaps at his dead brother’s hallucination, saying he wished he could bring him back to life so he could kill him again, but he also realises that he has a duty to fulfil. When he came to New York, he thought he was alone, but he now had people he needed to protect and a student he wanted to pass his bushido on to.
The assault on Baxter’s Isle caused too many casualties and Mike isn’t prepared to let that happen again to the people he cares about. So he asks Raph to can it and suits up one last time. Leo pipes up asking about his attack plan and Raph suggests a frontal assault – as expected – but Mike finally asks them all to shut up. He says that their deaths weighed too heavily on him for him to be doing this with them right now.
Mike finally voices his feelings and lets his brothers know that the cycle of vengeance was too much for the others to bear. They protest and call his accusations hurtful and Mike knows that, but he’s done all he could for them. He asks his brothers’ hallucinations to leave and never come back, and finally, they do. After getting rid of his guilt and the voices in his own head, Mike scribbles something in Master Splinter’s Journal and leaves it at the lair before heading out one last time.
Meanwhile, Casey and her Resistance members are baffled by the way the citizens are looting and destroying the city. She calls mob mentality a virus as she receives an update from one of her peers. Apparently they’ve been trying to establish a connection with the other resistance leaders in order to create safe zones from where they can launch attacks at the Foot Tower, but the landlines weren’t exactly up to their speed.
And there was something worse happening in the sewers; they were about to get flooded. The explosion at Baxter’s Isle broke the water systems of NYC and the sewers were getting flooded as they spoke. Casey rushed back to the lair to find her mother and her sensei and to her shock, she only found the former. As for the latter, all she could find was Splinter’s Journal, and she immediately understood what had happened; Michelangelo had gone off to battle Hiroto by himself without even informing any of them.
She punches the bricks off a wall in frustration but her mother restrains her and reminds her that this fight of his began long before she even met Mikey and the guys. She also admits that she wasn’t sure when to tell her daughter that she was a mutant like the rest of the guys, but it was too late to explain in detail now. Casey was too young to understand what vengeance meant, but she was old enough to know that Mike was family and when it comes to fighting for your family, you stay with them all the way to the end.
She firmed up her resolve and headed after her sensei, who was approaching Foot Tower with breakneck speed. In the meantime, Oroku Hiroto was losing his mind over the fact that his worthless subordinates couldn’t even contact Stockman. He commands that half of all his soldiers be deployed to guard his level, and the other half be deployed into the streets as riot police.
He also commands his captain to bring him his armour, because it was time he went on a mutant hunt. As if to stand him up at every possible level, Mike detonates thermite bombs in the same place he had entered the Foot Tower from in the first issue to launch a direct attack on the last Oroku; but the bomb turned out to be too powerful and alerted every Foot Clan member in the building of his presence.
Michelangelo prepared to fight actual ninjas for a change, and thought to himself that Hiroto only had two options now: fight or flight, and he was itching for him to choose the latter. After relying on Synjas for 2 decades, the regular Foot soldiers had lost their discipline; Mike left a Kill Bill scene in his wake, musing that they also didn’t want to fight for their current master.
After dispatching of a giant guard and a giant robot guard – in that order – Michelangelo finally comes face to face with the man he’s been chasing for 5 issues. Oroku Hiroto stands above him donning his own armour and berates Mikey for what he is. In response, Mike threatens to kill his mother, thinking that would inflict psychological damage, but Hiroto is a true psycho and kills his mom himself, claiming she abandoned him in his childhood and that he only kept her alive as a pet.
Oroku Hiroto then slips on the visor of his nanobot armour and the Last Shredder attacks the Last Ronin in earnest. Their fight takes them all over the Foot Tower, and also around it. Massive explosions alert the rest of the city to the situation that is unfolding but Casey can’t help but worry for her sensei. Mike notes that Hiroto isn’t as mindful a fighter as he should be, but he also says that his armour practically makes him invulnerable.
Every time Mike looks for a weak spot, Hiroto just covers it up with the nanotech. So he tries to taunt him into leaving an opening to he can create a weak spot of his own. The scene shifts to the sewers where Casey is worried sick about her mother. The rising water levels mean that she is going to have to swim to her to save her, so she gets all her resistance members to evacuate and wait for her signal.
She apologises to Mike for going against his order but also says that he has what he wanted: a one-on-one fight to the death with Hiroto. Casey locates her mother, gets a breath of air, punches off falling rocks to protect her and then heads off to look for her sensei once they both make it to safe ground. April managed to fix the pumps and also injected a tracker in Mike, so she could locate him just in case. Before her daughter leaves, she urges her to be careful. Mike is finally finding his footing with Hiroto.
He’s hurt, slowing down, and his reflexes are not what they were at the beginning of the fight but his experience kicks in. He blinds Hiroto with a flashbang and then stabs Raph’s sai into his palm, finally creating his own weak spot. The Last Shredder pulls out the sai and breaks it in half, confident of his own victory, but just then his Tower explodes and his focus completely shifts to his former seat of power.
Mikey uses the first rule of martial arts to his advantage and socks Hiroto off the building, right at the crossing of Bleeker and Sullivan, the site of his brothers’ deaths. Mikey stabs him with Leo’s katana as he descends on Hiroto and then kicks it through him for good measure. Oroku makes to give up and forfeit but Mike’s rage takes over. He lifts a manhole cover intent to finish the job, but Hiroto makes use of that moment to slice through his abdomen. Mike regroups by smashing Oroku in the head with Donatello’s staff and leaps into the sewers.
The Last Shredder follows him, covering up his own wounds with his armour and calling him out for cowardice. Michelangelo finally pulls out the nun-chucks he hasn’t lifted this entire mini-series and lays the smackdown on Hiroto’s candy butt. The two are pumped out into the rivers and Mikey prepares for his last stand.
Given his current physical condition, this was do-or-die, but he preferred to do-then-die. Mike punched the Last Oroku silly, until he quite rightfully lost his own mind and tried to blow them both up by causing his suit to short-circuit. Sadly for him, Mike was a mutant, and that kind of electricity was nothing to him. Oroku Hiroto, on the other hand, was a human being standing in a body of water that had just electrocuted himself.
His corpse bubbled up to the surface after taking a plunge, rolled over, and then stopped moving. Michelangelo pulled himself to the shoreline just as Casey showed up. She was wracked with grief at seeing her master die, and told him that she was just as much his family as his brothers. Mikey makes her understand that that is why he had to do this alone. He left Splinter’s Journal to guide her on her path to becoming a great ninja, but had amended a particular phrase on the last page to give her the most important lesson of them all.
Where his father had taught his sons to find “No Peace” in their endeavours, Michelangelo urged Casey to “Know Peace” all the beauty that it filled life with. Mike passed away with his oldest friend and his protégé looking on, and bidding him a last farewell. He woke up in a yellow-tinted room – the same room that he woke up in in issue #2 – and found his brothers surrounding him.
They were about to go topside for some fresh air, and the loser would be stuck with the dishes for a week. Mike is slow to catch on, as always, and ends up coming last, so his brothers tease him. Then Casey shows up, throwing Raph’s claim that Mike had cut the cheese in his face by reminding him that whoever smells it deals it. And Master Splinter shows up saying he can’t speak to Raph’s flatulence, but he can safely say that New York City smells like home. Mikey reunites with his loved ones in the afterlife as the mini-series comes to an official end.
In the epilogue, we see Casey training in the lair and musing how she wished her sensei could’ve seen her progress. She talks to her mom about the progress she has made on an experiment and asks what they’re going to eat when her mother says she’ll probably be working late. But Casey says she isn’t talking to her, she’s talking to them, as the final panel shows us four turtles in a glass dome, with Casey asking them to grow up quick because she has so much to teach them.
Marvelous Verdict
The Last Ronin is one of the best TMNT stories we’ve ever read, period. It’s not just the fact that it’s Michelangelo that ends up becoming the avenger, it’s also the fact that to us, it makes sense. Mikey has always been the one guy in the group who never took himself seriously. Donnie, Leo and Raph always had one thing or the other to focus on, but Mike was a light-hearted dude through and through. So, it would be understandable for him to lose all that sense of humour and turn into a stoic assassin-type ronin after losing it all.
The Last Ronin is an excellent study in character progression and apocalyptic storytelling without putting too many bells and whistles on the whole thing. It’s 5 issues packed with meaningful dialogue, imagery and plotlines that are simple enough to pull off in such a short time frame but with the intended emotional impact. You should go out of your way to read it, if only to show your friends one entire run of TMNT media where Mikey doesn’t say Cowabunga. Trust us, it’ll be worth it!