Strap in folks, because I couldn’t narrow it down to a single fav from this series, so buck up guys, because today we have a four-way tie! The fav(s) of the day are…
Reboot was a very special show. Not only was it the first all CGI show ever and singlehandedly innovated much of the technology, but it also featured great writing, great direction, and a lot of creativity. And it had some amazing characters, not the least of which was its main villain.
In fact, Megabyte might just very well be one of the coolest villains ever. He hasan awesome design that conveyed power, malice, speed, and intelligence, and he checked off just about every box off an awesome bad guy. Strong enough to throw around armored vehicles like toys? Check. Genuinely brilliant? Check. A thin veneer of class and manners? Check. Does everything with style? Check. Ends up being completely immune to the threat decay most animated villains suffer from and actually becomes more threatening, more ruthless, and more terrifying as the show goes on? Big check. Hell, he spends most of season three having actually defeated the good guys and ruling over all of Mainframe, and is only stopped from spreading his infection to the super computer at the very last second.
But most of all, credit has to be given to the late, great Tony Jay for giving him just the most awesome voice ever. Ever line is just so silky smooth, so dripping with malice and evil. Whether he be trying to manipulate the heroes, giving dastardly commands to his underlings, or just dropping the pretenses and making it clear that he is here to fuck shit up, every word just sends a chill down your spine.
But the best of it is, he actually wins! No, I’m serious, the final episode ends on a cliff-hanger, with a now more vicious than ever Megabyte having taken over Mainframe again and making it clear that he intends to hunt down the heroes one by one to eliminate them. This was done in hopes that it would drum up enough fan interest to get funding for a full continuation. Sadly, this never materialized and Reboot was cancelled for good, but I guess that does mean that Megabyte ends up the winner. And no, the Guardian Code doesn’t fucking count.
Plus he dueled Bob in an awesome guitar duel in what is probably the greatest moment in animation history ever, so that’s amazing.
However, his sister Hexadecimal is a different sort of beast entirely, but no less awesome. If Megabyte is the perfect example of lawful evil, than she is chaotic evil incarnate. The woman of a million masks is far more powerful than her already OP brother, and a million times crazier. She cares little for power and control. After all, she has it already, and would rather spend her time wreaking havoc just for the fun of it.
Hex isn’t all that active for a first season and a half, probably because the creators knew that a villain that powerful would be too much of a problem to keep trying to come up with a solutions for. But her rare solo episodes are among the series’ best, with the heroes barely managing to snatch victory by the barest of centimeters, and having to rely on their wits to do so. And she is just a joy to watch on-screen, with Shirley Millner obviously having a blast voicing her. She can go from kind and grandmotherly to downright seductive to shrieking with laughter at the carnage she’s about to unleash to driven by blind fury at the drop of a hat, and every conversation with her has the participants constantly shitting themselves, hoping not to upset her. And she knows it.
Hex also gets a rather fascinating character arc. As twisted as she is, her infatuation with Bob does give her some redeeming qualities, and he is smart enough to take advantage of that to get her to do the right thing on more than one occasion. He also is the only person to show her genuine kindness, and one act of mercy eventually does convince her to throw in with the good guys. Even then she’s great fun to watch, as it’s clear she’s only in it out of affection for Bob, and everyone just has to learn to work with that, because what else can they do? But in time she becomes an actual hero herself, giving her life for save the entire Net from the greatest threat the show has ever seen. And it’s awesome.
I’ll freely admit, when I wrote Yuuka Kazami in Imperfect Metamorphosis, I pretty much ripped off Hexadecimal’s personality for her, to…interesting results. But as much fun as Yuuka was to write, she doesn’t hold a candle to the original Queen of Chaos, long may she reign.
As far as kid characters go, little Enzo Matrix was…all right. He started off annoying as such characters do, but he did grow and mature and actually make himself useful, so his over-enthusiasm eventually became kind of endearing. And his struggles to prove himself once the heroes lose Bob was pretty fascinating.
But then the show flips the script. He loses a game and is forced to switch into Game Sprite mode to avoid being nullified, causing him and Andraia to leave wit the game. And when we do catch up with them, it is much later, and little Enzo is all grown up.
Matrix is every 90′s anti-hero all rolled into one. He’s big, he’s muscular, he’s gruff, he’s short tempered, he likes shooting things, he has all the angst, and he even has a cool mechanical eye to replace the one he lost in the games. Normally this sort of thing would be annoying, but the show does take a great deal of time to show how his insecurities and PTSD have shaped him into what he became, with him often having to face his own flaws in his quest to get home. Added to the fact that we already know the plucky kid he used to be instead of just getting to see him in flashbacks, and you got yourself some great television.
But while show doesn’t cut Matrix any slack when he screws up (which is awesome), it also doesn’t condemn him for changing like he did, acknowledging that what he went through was terrible and he did what he had to do to survive. Plus, it also doesn’t shy away from giving him a lot of genuine badass moments. And that final fight where he goes one-on-one with Megabyte? Pure awesome.
No raging angst machine is complete without someone level-headed to keep them in check, and AndrAIa is exactly that. A Game Sprite that befriended Enzo during a game and managed to trick the game itself into letting her stay with him. I admit, when I was a kid, I had wee bit of a crush on her, and was really interested in what this new character could bring to the story.
Like Enzo, she also has to do a lot of growing up to survive the games, maturing from an overly-literal fish-out-of-water into a cool and confident (and hot, I’ll freely admit it) warrior, who was the Ying to Matrix’s Yang. Their relationship was pretty great, from how they support one another to their bickering but always reconciling. AndrAIa is never one to take Matrix’s shit and will call him on it, but also be there to build him back up when he’s down.
Unfortunately, given how late in the series she appeared, AndrAIa doesn’t have much of a character arc of her own, which is a real shame. She’s a constant supporting character, and it did annoy me that she never really got much to do that wasn’t directly related to what another character was doing. Personally I would liked to see her have more agency and more of her own struggles to deal with instead of always being the one to help others with their own. Still, for what it’s worth, she is incredibly cool. I just wish she got to have more to do.
I come from the net. Through systems, peoples and cities to this place: Mainframe.
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