okay so like. lab rats: bionic island is not real, season 4 is the worst one, it's very disorganized, etc etc yes BUT. i think the angst potential of the bionic soldiers was very interesting and so under-explored.
bc like. what the hell happened with all these kids? krane basically just kidnapped them, wiped their memories, and implanted them with bionics, right? and then controlled all of them with the triton app. that's just crazy to me. bc it's like. none of these kids are like adam, bree, and chase at all when it comes down to it. they had actual families. they were not MADE to be bionic. there's a line that i keep thinking about from bob that's like "i keep asking them where they grew up, but they all just say, 'i don't know, i don't remember'!". that's so sad to me. they had families and lives that they just may never find their way back to.
and this all makes it even more depressing that they consider krane their father in bionic rebellion (sebastian especially). these are just random fucking kids. who maybe just got unlucky and were randomly picked by krane to be part of his army, or maybe were chosen for some particular reason (which is honestly kind of worse bc if any of them realized there was actually a reason, that just makes it feel more like it was somehow their fault even though it wasn't). but in the end none of these kids are related to each other, at all. they consider themselves to kind of be one big group of siblings now, but that's only because they were all put through the same trauma. and also. if they were chosen by krane for a reason. then what the fuck happened with characters like spin? or bob? they're both so young. why would krane have picked them? it gets more disturbing the more you think about it. they also are all probably not going by the names their parents gave them either. because they all got renamed to designations (S1, S2) and then renamed again when krane stopped controlling them.
and finally on the note of them not being made to be bionic the way adam, bree, and chase were: that is its own angst potential. i think the showrunners kind of forgot that they established that about the chips, that adam bree and chase can't even switch chips for a day without messing things up because they aren't built to handle each others chips. if that's really the case, then some random teenagers probably also can't handle being implanted with bionic chips? they should all be experiencing a lot more difficulties due to that. it would be fun for the difference between all of them and abc to be highlighted in a way that is not just "abc are old models" anyway. because given the actual lore of the show, no, they're probably NOT old, they're the only ones whose chips WORK PROPERLY ALL THE TIME. krane got his technology from douglas. he doesn't know how to do bionics himself, and he would not be able to make it work correctly with kids he pulled off the streets once douglas left. there's just no way.
okay thanks bionic soldiers rant over.