Zorro Generation Z - Crime Wave

Been a while since I  reposted the reviews of the pilot, if you don't know what the heck this is go check out those ones first.

Our return to Pueblo Grande opens on a pair of guys working a crane hauling something called “life chips.” One notes that a shipment of these got stolen the week before, which is why the pier’s crawling with guards. Not that he expects anything to happen, because it’s not like this city has enough crime to warrant a pair of wisecracking superheroes. Two unaffiliated superheroes, even.

Right on cue, a magenta submarine built to look like a shark for some reason surfaces and a bunch of ninjas jump out. The guards might have more luck fighting off the ninjas if they remembered their guns still work outside the range of a spinning kick.

The ninjas get into the crane and lower the life chips into their sub just as what looks to be ¾ of the Pueblo Grande police force shows up and fails to apprehend them before they get away. All the cops manage is to rip off one ninja’s yin-yang necklace, and since none of them notice it that was probably a complete accident. Then again, since the mayor’s also in charge of most organized crime in the city he probably hires the most incompetent cops he can find.

That's not even close to what bolos are for but...whatever.

After the insipid theme song, things resume on a beach volleyball at night. The girls’ team, led by Maria Martinez, is up 10-0. Because Diego, who’s on the other team, isn’t as aware of his surroundings as you’d hope for a superhero whose powers are knowing kung-fu and having a lightsaber, it’s 11-0 after he runs into Bernardo.

Diego passes the ball back a little too hard and it rolls to the water, where it’s stopped by a bunch of considerate surfer dudes. The leader introduces himself to Maria as Manu (that’s weird. Suddenly wish I was playing Quest for Glory III instead of watching this cartoon), and Maria gives her name in that unsubtle sort-of-embarrassed tone meant to indicate she’s blown away by his hotness. Which seems wrong for a character who’s made out to be the polar opposite of who’s-her-face from that apple book I’ve been reviewing. Manu and his buddies depart to cut some waves, bidding Maria “aloha.”

Bernardo’s magic crime alert watch goes off and the boys realize the life chip shipment was hit, so they make a lame excuse and leave. Cut to Zorro riding toward the scene of the crime. Along the way he proves to have actually done his homework on life chips, which is totally inconsistent with how he was shown before to treat crime-fighting like the same thrill ride he treats motocross as, while leaving the brain work to Bernardo. Not really sure why he couldn't glance over a block of text brought up by Bernardo explaining what they do, which is automatically diagnose the illness of whoever they’re injected in.

Diego even knows they were meant for a children’s hospital, and thinks whoever stole them must be real jerks. Which might have something to do with why they’re stealing in the first place.

Zorro finds the fallen yin-yang necklace, but the cops find him. Furthering my suspicions about the police department’s hiring process, they seriously fall for a “hey, look over there!” trick and Zorro gets away. He surmises it can’t be a coincidence that the dock workers are part of a union run by a Don Chino, and heads to Chinatown to make some inquiries. Sort of blurring the lines on what does what in this outfit.

Don Chino proves to be a guy who doesn’t look or sound Asian at all despite the pathetic attempts to give him the diction of someone who speaks English as a second language: “This necklace has symbol of El Rey Beach gang. Surfers that used to work for Chino, but not no more. Most likely they stole life chips.”

The unmistakable sign of this other gang is a yin-yang symbol. One of the most generic images used to indicate “coolness” in the world. Why do I get the feeling the people behind this thought back to when T & C Surf Designs were really hot for their understanding of surfers?

Settling back into his more familiar behaviors, Zorro steals some of his dim sun, then cracks open a fortune cookie and notes it says “You will be visited by a dark stranger. Whaddaya know, these things really do work!” Ha ha.

By the way, since we know now that the guys who stole the life chips used to work for Don Chino but not anymore, does Zorro's logic that Chino runs the union that works that dock, therefore he must know who stole the life chips make any sense?

Next day at the beach, Diego’s spying on Maria with binoculars (creep) when she meets up with Manu and his friends. And Manu has…a yin-yang tattoo on his arm! He MUST be mixed up with those ninjas who stole the life chips, there’s no other explanation! “This is not good, on so many levels.” Care to name a few? I mean, Zorro and Scarlet Whip have expressed a little interest in each other a few times, but I never got that off Diego and Maria. If you get the difference. And again, the surfer dude has a yin-yang tattoo. So?

In his little hideout Diego angsts to Bernardo about what to tell Maria, since he as Diego would never know about life chips or criminal organizations. Trying to get the character back on track, huh? His concerns make sense. So warn her as Zorro. That solves every sticking point with telling Maria what’s going on. As the resident superhero he’d have a reason to know what life chips are, know about members of the underworld, and to take an interest in the welfare of the family of local officials all in one go. And if she asks too many questions, he's a mysterious masked avenger, so he even has a reason not to give specifics.

Yeah the mayor tries to make Zorro look like a criminal, but that doesn’t really seem to work. I mean, the plot for a whole episode was hiring guys to impersonate Zorro and make him look bad. Which suggests Zorro generally enjoys a positive reputation. Why doesn’t he suit up and warn Maria?

This is even assuming Manu has a greater interest in Maria than some action with a redheaded hottie, and that having a yin-yang tattoo proves he and his friends are the ones who stole the life chips. But because this is a brainless cartoon, he has and it does, and we’d better move along before I let myself go off on another rant.

Diego gets it into his head to make friends with Manu and his gang too, but the next day he still goes up to Maria and tries to warn her that he thinks they’re suspicious. She thinks he’s jealous that she’s more interested in Manu. After warning her to watch herself again, he goes over to Manu and his buddies to try and make friends. Which Maria, being an intelligent and self-acuated woman, finds kind of hypocritical.

Saying he’s a friend of Maria’s, Diego introduces himself, points out their necklaces and says he found one just like them. Manu identifies it as the one he’s missing and not as something you could buy at any crummy gift store in a beach city. Diego says he’ll tell them where he found it that night under the pier, and not to tell Maria.

That night he tells the surfers he knows they’re the ones who pulled off the life chip heist and he wants in because he’s a bored rich kid looking for kicks. So saying, they kick him. After he manages to hold his own against the five of them, Manu thinks maybe they can do something with him. If he can surf, that is. Diego picks up the gauntlet, and agrees to meet them at Punto Muerto to show them his stuff. Have I mentioned how often the writers use the word “bro” to sound with it?

By the way, you guessed it. The bad guys of the episode are surfers. That’s why it’s called “Crime Wave.” I’ll wait until you’ve stopped applauding that stroke of genius to continue the review.

Back in the hideout Diego angsts to Bernardo because he can’t surf. Bernardo’s thoroughly amused because he already has the answer to this problem, some kind of bionic wetsuit that makes it so he can, in fact, surf. Um, when the hell did Bernardo invent that? And WHY?? Anyway, the magic surf suit works, Diego does indeed prove himself the big kahuna of the hour, and Manu welcomes him to their gang. He tells Diego to meet them at the Puerto Grande (I thought it was Pueblo Grande) Yacht Club the next night, and invites Maria to “hang” with them that night.

What's that Skippy? You think the idol's cursed?

Diego shows up at the yacht club, and for some reason walks up to Mayor Martinez’s personal yacht, which he says to himself looks like someone’s having a fiesta on it. Uh, no it doesn’t. It looks like it’s moored. That’s it. For some reason he goes aboard and finds out Manu and his buddies are hijacking the yacht. They want to be modern-day pirates, and now they have a boat to do it with. With a luxury yacht, huh? I can see it having all kinds of unregistered weapons because it belongs to the crooked mayor after all, but the episode advances nothing of the kind. And seriously, a yacht as a pirate ship?

How many fiestas can you find in this picture?

They even kidnapped Maria after she helped them get on the boat. Not so tough without her laser whips, is she? Even though she’s wearing a backpack that obviously has all her Scarlet Whip stuff. What kind of pirates are these guys that they didn’t take it away and go through it for anything valuable?

Just so you know, I didn't skip any scenes. Manu says Maria helped to get them onto her dad's boat, but not why. Did their relationship get more time in the original script? Did she somehow know they were crooks and hoped to capture them? We'll never know.

Seeing as they plan to dump Maria now that they have her dad’s yacht, Diego tries to warn them that they, you know, robbed from “the powerful and very dangerous” Mayor Martinez, implying there are at least widespread rumors he’s not quite the man of the people he pretends to be. Manu’s sure Martinez’s bark is worse than his bite, and just to tie everything up with a neat little bow, adds that if Don Chino paid them what they were worth before, maybe they wouldn’t have to steal life chips and backstab their former bosses now.

In order to get away so he can become Zorro and save Maria at the same time, Diego pretends to throw her overboard and talks her through being a good hostage. The surfer ninja pirates follow them chanting “Heave-ho!” Who the hell says that anymore? They make a break for it and swim to shore, where Maria says she’ll stay so she can change to her superhero identity, and Diego asks no questions and runs off so he can change to his. And Maria’s never going to think about how uncharacteristically heroic Diego was, how he used her as a weapon against a bunch of ninja pirate surfers as a matter of course, and how he ran off just before Zorro showed up.

Once suited up Zorro angsts to Bernardo about how he’s supposed to get back out to the stolen yacht to round up Manu and his buddies before they can pull off their first aquatic robbery. Bernardo immediately has a solution, a shell that fits around his motorcycle and turns it into a jetski. There’s even a special gimp suit that goes with it. Why the hell doesn’t Diego know about any of these things? Does Bernardo enjoy seeing his friend get all stressed out when he can’t find a solution? I know they’re teenagers but they’re also the self-appointed protectors of a city where the same guy who runs the police runs the crime, too. Maybe they should be a little more professional about this? The “witty” banter doesn’t necessarily have to stop, but the guy doing the legwork should know what all his options are.

By the way, they're in the back of a semi. Where the hell is this thing rising up from?

By way of contrast, watch some Kamen Rider W. Not only are the heroes kind of goofy while still being professional about their self-appointed responsibilities, it’s about five million times more entertaining than this show. They even have a gizmo that plugs into their motorcycle to turn it into a jetski too, and manage to make it cool.

You even learn what an anomalocaris is, so it's educational too!

Zorro picks up Scarlet Whip, who was just waiting on the beach and not commandeering a speedboat or anything to take care of this on her own. Why did she even suit up if had no way of getting back out to the yacht? She tells him how the life chip thieves are out on that boat like he'd have any other reason to be out there with a jetski. They do get back to it and start having it out with the “pirates.” Scarlet Whip, of course, takes on the two girls among the group. Whip points out to one Sheila that Manu got while the getting was good, leading her to dismally exclaim “To think I was gonna lend him my surf wax.” There’s a double entendre in there somewhere.

Oh crap...Zoobilee Zoo!

They’ve soon rounded up the evil surfers and a police launch that already picked up Manu pulls up to collect his friends. Zorro even found the life chips on the boat, and carves a Z into the side before he and Scarlet Whip zoom away.

A surprisingly partial newscast reveals how the life chips were returned, “thanks to the courageous efforts of Zorro and the Scarlet Whip.” So if they’re generally regarded as heroes, why couldn’t Zorro warn Maria before, again?

Since wronged crime bosses like to keep things personal, Mayor Martinez is seen back on his yacht, about to make Manu and the other evil surfers walk the plank. Whoa, that’s not dark at all for a supposedly-humorous kiddie superhero cartoon.

Zorro Generation Z - A New Generation, Part Deux

When last we left our so-called "hero," Zorro managed to deal with the crooked mayor’s thugs but still found himself trapped in City Hall before a sassy redhead with laser whips of her own showed up. With me? Good.

Like the priority-deficient teenagers they are, Zorro and the whip-toting lady immediately start bickering about how they don’t need each other’s help, completely forgetting that Martinez has Zorro’s dad in a headlock. Alejandro says he wishes he was still in jail and Martinez ponders joining him. Dang, even the people in the show are starting to think like me.

The show isn’t done making Martinez look like a chowderhead, though. When he calls for more guards our fiery-haired heroine, who to save some bother is called the Scarlet Whip (like Zorro’s Black Whip but changed at the last minute), points out that when he put zappy bars on the doors to keep Zorro from getting away he also made it so the rest of his guys couldn’t get in. She knows the mayor has a secret exit, which she cuts open with her laser whips.

Zorro ushers Scarlet Whip into the secret passage after Alejandro, meaning he’s putting this unknown quantity between himself and not only the man he came here to rescue but his father, before carving another Z into the floor and zipping down the stairs with a promise to be watching Martinez. And the zappy bars? Turns out Garcia had a remote to turn them off the whole time. These are our villains, you say?

At the Fox Den, Bernardo is surprised when the de la Vega’s TV-Irish maid, Mrs. McAllister, comes in and asks if those young “hooligans” who she’s “raised since you were knee-high to a grasshopper” thought she wouldn’t find her way in. Since the first button on that keypad opens the door, no, it’s not much of a surprise. With one last Irishism she tells Bernardo to get over his surprise and man the computer like a good sidekick.

While they descend the staircase Zorro tries to find out how Scarlet Whip knows so much about the mayor but Alejandro angrily tells them to “save it for later. Get better acquainted, date, get married! Do whatever you costumed freaks do, but first get me out of here!” Are we supposed to like the cynical but good-hearted parent more than the characters who get the most screentime? Hmmm, a show where Alejandro’s the main character. That’d be a new spin on the superhero parody.

They get to the bottom only to find the exit surrounded by police.

There’s some more fighting, some more bickering, some more Z-into-butt slashing. They escape when Bernardo remote controls the super-bike into jumping the roadblock (in dramatic slo-mo, of course, even Garcia saying “Holy frijoles!”) and shooting a bunch of flares. Although you wouldn’t think that’s all they were from how Zorro graciously warns his enemies to take cover right before they go off. Rather than follow, Scarlet Whip disappears back up the secret passage. Alejandro’s image takes a hit when he gets home and berates Diego for not trying to find him. What??

For Pete's sake, according to the writer’s bible the reason Diego was away racing motorcycles at the beginning of the show was Alejandro hoped getting him out of the city for a while would protect him from Martinez. Now it’s all you’re a failure as my son for not taking on someone who not only has the police at his beck and call but organized crime, too.

While we’re on the subject, wouldn’t the go-between for the mayor’s office and the police department be someone higher up than a sergeant?

Just so you know I’m still paying attention, the little matters of the city confiscating the de la Vega’s house and the rumors Martinez was spreading about Alejandro being a crook are never brought up again. This show has a shorter attention span than I do.

Cut to the bedroom of the mayor’s daughter, Maria, where he almost finds out her shocking secret–that she’s the fiery-maned heroine who helped save Alejandro. Look, Maria? If you come home from superheroing and just throw your suit and weapons on the bed, you’ve got a lot to learn about keeping a secret identity. Especially if you freaking live with your archenemy. “I’m definitely gonna have to be more careful,” indeed.

Speaking of learning we find out tomorrow’s the first day of college for our three young leads. And while Diego proves a hot commodity on the airhead market, he finds a confident, independent girl like Maria doesn’t buy his whole smooth operator routine like anyone with two brain cells to rub together and thinks he’s nothing but a slacker who just wants to get girls and have fun. It’s funny because they have the same relationship whether they’re masked or not and don’t even realize it! HA!

A week later, Martinez is cheesed that Itchy hasn’t turned up anything about where Zorro’s hiding. Maybe you’d get better results if you stopped leaving the brainwork to this guy! Changing directions, Martinez calls in Don Skull, a former pro wrestler with a metal-plated head. For no real reason he’s mad at Itchy and throws him across the room. Then again, he’s Itchy.

They plan to set a trap by attacking a homeless shelter, and Don Skull breaks a chair. Wouldn’t you?

Don Skull accosts the guy who runs the shelter (which has had its public funding slashed by the eeeeevil mayor. Thank you, we get it), which indeed prompts Zorro to appear. “Who ya callin’ a freak, ya freak?” he asks before kicking Skull aside. So people with prosthetic parts are freaks?

I ain't good enough for yer little soup kitchen cuz I got a deformity, is that it??

Some of the incompetent goons from before show up to reinforce Skull, and Scarlet Whip shows up as well, but while she and Zorro are having another bicker fest about who’s the better hero one of the bad guys shoots her off the roof she was on. That was pretty funny, even if it was at the expense of these two super-cool masked avengers of the night.

The bad humor persists as the crooks pounce the two and start pummeling them, only for the writers to pull that reprehensible gag where the guys keep up the pounding but the guy they’re supposed to be hitting appears in the background without them noticing.

Hey guys, can we hang out and beat up superheroes too and stuff?

Skull does eventually notice and charges up his head in preparation to crush Zorro like a bug, but is thrown into the air and lands on his metal head. Meanwhile, the bad guys are still beating on nobody. Scarlet Whip finally gives her name on camera. Finally the other bad guys stop beating on nobody and take a shot at our heroes.

Seriously, he's charging up his head.

If only I'd known doing a handplant off a girl's head was the key to dating success...

With Don Skull's last attempt foiled the crooks run away, meaning that after all this the masked avengers only caught one bad guy. For some reason Scarlet Whip seems impressed by Zorro. Hell, they didn't even catch Don Skull, because they tell him to crawl back to the mayor and warn him they'll be keeping an eye on him. Good job, idiots. All you accomplished was inconveniencing Don Skull for the couple minutes it'll take him to get out of the handcuffs. There's no reason he can't come back with more guys and attack the shelter again.

They imply they'll REALLY come down on Don Skull if he comes back to this one particular place, but he fights them again in a couple of other episodes. Are they doing that every time they beat him? Can they really spare the attention to protect one shelter? And as I said, it's not like this scares Don Skull into steering clear of these two. Next time he sees Zorro, rather than going "oh crap I better get out of here," Skull tries to shoot him with a missile launcher.

Anyway, Scarlet Whip's car drives itself too. Does she have some kind of super-genius supplying her like Bernardo? Or are laser whips and cars with autopilot normal in 2015?

Just to rub salt in the wound Zorro leaves a big skid mark Z on the street outside city hall. And we go out on one last incomprehensible “Andale, Tornado! We ride!”

I just saved a homeless shelter, I've earned a little vandalism.

Zorro Generation Z - A New Generation

Sure Dino Squad's worthy of all the mockery one has to unload, but the company that owns it does have a catalogue containing some quality children’s entertainment. But then there’s…BKN. They’re a company who’ve been around in one form or another since at least the early 90’s as a third party distributor despite consistently picking up some of the cheapest, lamest cartoons around (at least, they were when this review was first written. A few months later it appeared they finally went under and their homepage disappeared). Gunk like that lame Kong cartoon released to compete with the surprisingly enjoyable cartoon based on the lame Tristar Godzilla, that cartoon that’s mostly Mad Max with a little Highlander mixed in, and Legend of the Dragon, recipient of the most generic title of all time. Their only show I’ve ever liked in an unironic manner was King Arthur and the Knights of Justice, and I’d be hard-pressed to actually tell you why.

One particularly loathsome piece of their output was Zorro Generation Z, a cartoon taking a classic hero and giving him a futuristic coat of paint. Hey, it worked for Batman and the Phantom, didn’t it?

Just so you know that’s not sarcasm. Batman Beyond and Phantom 2040 are both very entertaining shows, even taking the Peter Chung artwork of the latter into account.

If you have to tell us how cool things are, they're not.

For those who might be unfamiliar with the character, Zorro was the secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega, a nobleman in Spanish Colonial California who donned a mask to battle corrupt officials. After upbraiding the forces of injustice he’d always carve a Z into something with his sword before riding off on his trusty steed Tornado. Possibly the most well-known version is the old Guy Williams TV show, with Bernado the comical mute confidant and Sgt. Garcia the comical pudgy right hand man of the real bad guy. If nothing else, that’s the one the guys who made this show seemed to be working from.

And you may have heard that the movie a young Bruce Wayne saw the night his parents were blown away was The Mark of Zorro.

 The pilot opens in a sepia-toned flashback where all seven and a half years of Diego de la Vega is being told a secret by his grandfather when father Alejandro comes in and lightly remonstrates granddad for filling the boy’s head with wild stories.

The secret is…being Zorro's a family tradition.

Jump ahead to 2015, when Diego’s a strapping young man who enjoys a bit of motocross. What he doesn’t enjoy is his dashboard bleeping “EMERGENCY” and forcing him to pull over and find out from his mute bro (as in best friend) Bernardo that his father’s gone missing.

And…theme song! From this we learn some valuable information, like our hero’s “avenging evil’s dare,” “his engines light the sky, prepared to fight or die,” and he catches pink-haired women who fall out of buildings.

Instead of a sword he’s got a “Darth Maul”-type lightsaber (Their words, straight from the writer's bible [I didn't steal this. Anyone who wanted to could download this from BKN's website when it was still up]. It doesn’t appear to be the final version, though) that doubles as some kind of lightsaber whip.

Back to the show, we meet our bad guy, Mayor Martinez. He’s your standard TV politician who’s not just corrupt, he’s a flat-out supervillain. Which is weird because the same guy who does his voice also does the previous Zorros whenever we see one. It’s weird listening to them giving Diego advice in flashbacks or spirit visions when they sound just like the head bad guy.

Vote Martinez '06!

“Tell me, Senor,” he asks of a strung-out-looking guy with a hook for a hand, telling us this is going to be one of those shows that uses Superfriends Spanish. That is, to come off as all ethnic they pepper the dialogue with foreign words, but only the kind everyone regardless of background knows (amigo, andale, burrito, etc.).

Strung-out hook guy is Don Itchy (Don being the title of any criminal who actually does work in this show), who the mayor forces to read a newspaper headline about Alejandro’s disappearance, namely that foul play is suspected, and the suspect is Martinez. The plan was for Itchy (Itchy?) to make it seem like he’d been exposed as a criminal and went on the run. Itchy protests Alejandro’s too popular with the common man, and they’d never listen to him that the guy was a criminal. Itchy’s anything but a reputable criminal (he stabs himself with his own hook a couple times during the conversation. How long has he had that thing?), but he’s smarter than his boss. Who would take his word for anything, and who would expect that anyone would? Martinez threatens him to try harder.

Cut to the basement where Alejandro’s out cold in a broom closet. Guess they needed to establish that the mayor actually was responsible for his disappearance, but given this is a superhero show and there’s no doubt Martinez is the bad guy…not really.

Since the de la Vega estate is crawling with the mayor’s thugs, Diego and Bernardo sneak in through a secret passage that lets out into a manhole cover in the estate’s huge front lawn. The secret of their entrance immediately goes to hell when Bernardo falls down and the goons immediately try to kill them with lasers.

As they run across the yard dodging the henchmen’s fire Bernardo does these gymnastics moves, which is a little strange since Diego had to tackle him out of the way of the opening salvo. Which Bernardo totally saw coming.

They manage to get to the roof but are blown off by a guy with some kind of sniper rifle/laser bazooka and fall through a skylight, surviving their gigantic fall (through glass) unharmed because they landed on a rug.

The goons find them and try to kick them out, saying the mayor’s seized the property. Right after trying to gun them down, and the one attempting the non-lethal solution is the one who tried to shoot them off the roof. Bernado tazes the guy holding him, and it turns out his little stun gun works great as a missile launcher too as he shoots it at the ceiling. This squashes the guy trying to get them off the property without killing them with a chandelier and the rest with random roof debris. Is that any way to thank someone for trying to save your life?

The boys escape by opening a secret passage. This they do by pushing the first button on a panel hidden behind some books. It looks like it should be a code lock, so why isn’t it?

No one will ever penetrate this airtight security system!

Then again why is it so easy to open considering what the boys find on the other side? Which is the Fox Den, Zorro’s Batcave. At least they don’t make us wait for it and Diego decides the city could use a new hero right away.

As the henchmen flee for some reason we find out the bad guys in this show are like the ones in Guyver, because they melt into nothing when they die. Where’s the guy who got hit with the chandelier?

Back at the broom closet Mayor Martinez comes in, revealing both his involvement and his plan to make it seem like Alejandro, who’s running against him, was using campaign money for his own decadent lifestyle. With the trouble Diego gave to his boys at the mansion, Martinez is moving Alejandro a cell in his own office because that, he thinks, will be safer. “Diego has nothing to do with this!” Alejandro protests as he’s dragged away. “I swear if you harm him, you’ll never be rid of me!”

Come oooooon, man! I'm trying to threaten you back here!

At the Fox Den (nobody on the outside wonders what’s on the other side of that big stained glass window in the wall?), Bernardo is putting the finishing touches on some kind of Z-shaped gadget that will probably do something garish and stupid and supposedly cool. He tries to wake up Diego to show it to him, but Diego tells him to go away to show his slackerness despite his heroic aspirations, or something.

Seriously, what's the story?

 Turns out this thing is the lightsaber/whip thing we saw from the theme song. When Diego tries it out he slices a computer in half, sheepishly remarking he needs some practice. And we see a part of the room we didn’t before that has gigantic comic booky computers and a souped-up custom motorcycle (the Tornado-Z).

Alejandro somehow doesn't know all this is in his house?

Based on some kind of intel Bernardo’s come up with, they decide to break into city hall. What intel?

We see Martinez at a press conference in the next scene where some reporters bring up beliefs that Martinez is behind his rival’s disappearance. To which Martinez menacingly answers “people who spread such vicious lies should be very, very careful.” And he thinks having his daughter and police liason vouch that he was in his office all night proves he had no involvement in Alejandro’s disappearance (a belief the writers thankfully don’t share, as the reporter who brought up the accusations points out he could’ve had henchmen do it). No wonder he has to kidnap the other candidates to get reelected.

I am NOT an evil mastermind! How dare you suggest I am!

Also at the conference, the bumbling, slobby Sgt. Garcia who for some reason is Martinez’s right-hand-man tells Martinez’s daughter, Maria, to just sit there and look pretty. And yet the show apparently wants us to think of him as a mostly sympathetic character who has a bad boss. Stalking away from the podium Martinez tells Garcia to call Don Itchy because it’s time to take care of Alejandro “permanently.”

What is this show trying to say? That the Zorro of the future is the latest in a long line of Zorros, and that he also has a Bernardo and a Sgt. Garcia in his supporting cast, just like the old version? That’s kind of a stretch. And before you balk that I’m assuming too much, that’s exactly what the show says. There’s an episode later where the current Zorro goes back in time and meets the original Zorro. And the original Sgt. Garcia.

Or maybe it was just head trauma.

Diego Zorros up for the first time, and with this show’s first intonation of “Andale Tornado! We ride!” he mounts his super-bike blasts into the night to the strains (and to borrow a phrase, that’s exactly the right word) of his theme song. By the way, the “Andale, Tornado! We ride!” thing is another thing borrowed from classic Zorro. Where Tornado was a horse. The bike isn’t alive like KITT, so what gives? Are they counting on kids to have seen the Guy Williams Zorro?

After arriving at city hall Zorro has Bernardo download the blueprints to find the best way into the mayor’s office, but the results are basically “climb straight up the outside.” Which he does by using his laser whip to wrap around handy extending ledges. Then inside of five seconds Bernardo disarms security for the entire building from his desktop.

Swinging in through the window and finding the panel that opens his father’s cell behind a painting, Zorro blasts it open and this opens the door too. Isn’t there something about control panels that act like that on the Evil Overlord List?

You can bet the doors on MY secret prison cells don't open when you shoot the security panel.

Alejandro tells him to get back to the funny farm, seeming to prefer being found dead in a river a few weeks later, but Zorro cuts his cynical dad a way out.

This is the path of his cut...

...and this is the hole it makes?

Martinez and some of his goons arrive, and despite asking for Don Itchy by name the guy’s nowhere to be seen.

They try to blow Zorro and his dad to kingdom come, but their dustbusters are no match for Zorro’s…cape? In one afternoon Bernardo managed to put together the laser whip, the Tornado-Z and invent a laser-proof cape? Dang.

And signature shoes, too.

Zorro handily pounds the henchmen (love how they use the sound of bare hands smacking together when he dusts his off despite wearing gloves) before carving his calling card into the mayor’s butt. Seriously. You can be forgiven for not knowing but it’s usually the mark of a bad show when the villain decay starts in the debut episode.

Martinez covers all the exits with electrified force fields so that while Zorro got in and saved Alejandro, what good will it do him if he can’t get back out?

So the guy walks into a bar, he says "ouch."

Just when all seems lost another masked freak appears, this one a shapely redhead with two laser whips of her own. Nobody else uses laser whips but these two, so where do you get them?

Zorro can’t wait to see what happens next, but lucky for us, we’ll have to.