Why do you think Cyrus never thought to use the techno blades to stop the overlord himself?
Politics.
Since Cyrus is basically the dictator of the city now (or as close as Ninjago has ever and will ever get to one), he’s got to keep his image up.
In real life, we actually had people freak out about lanes being closed on a bridge, to the point where the governor might not be able to receive his party’s nomination in the next presidential election. In other words, a conspicuous power outage that sends all of the extremely dangerous technology to the ground (especially the flying cars, as those could cause lots of casualties), isn’t going to help Cyrus’s reputation.
However, if he can get the Ninja involved - a third party whose reputation would only be strengthened in a situation like this - it turns into a win-win: Cyrus doesn’t look bad, the Ninja get practice, and the Overlord still gets his ass kicked back to hell. Simple!
Dead Men Can Still Speak: Julien's Role in S3 and Its Consequences
I would like to inform the fandom that LEGO did something extremely dangerous with the release of this recent soundtrack...
...just as I suspected they would.
STUPENDOUSLY SEVERE SPOILERS.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Basically, it's exact details on The Final Theory, the resolution of the 'plot hole' that currently exists, and Zane's origins and fate.
Certainty: 95%
Obviously, the first thing it proves is that Julien is still relevant. As I've commented on in a few places, Remembering Father is not Zane's theme; it's solidly Julien's. Naturally, the fact that it's still appearing even though he's finally actually canonically confirmed to be dead is one warning sign, but it goes even beyond that. The music is far too quiet in certain moments for me to add more specific evidence to this argument, but I have more than a feeling that when Zane was in a trance off in the woods (right before Pixal stole the Techno Blades) it played very briefly.
If that's true, that's a count of at least two times where a dead man's theme has made an appearance, which is far more than coincidence for its appearance.
Especially with the theme of this season.
See, there's a problem in the Ninjago timeline that's been brought about by this new season: namely, that history no longer repeats itself.
Ninjago has previously taken its ordered timeline very seriously; every event that has so far occured has had a parallel in recent (or not-so-recent) history, even down to such things as:
Garmadon commanding the Skeletons once more in All or Nothing
Julien's two deaths, with both technically occuring under unknown circumstances (long story)
The Serpentine becoming entombed again in The Day Ninjago Stood Still, and (presumably) being released again in Black Out (to parallel Ninjago's ancient history of entombing them, and Lloyd first releasing them in Rise of the Snakes)
The Overlord fighting against a character heavily associated with gold, losing, and re-emerging at a later point in time (ancient history, Rise of the Spinjitzu Master)
I could name lots more, but I promised to keep this post short. The point is, with all three of the enemies the Ninja have faced so far, there's been some sort of event in the past that had been used to foreshadow the Ninja fighting them.
And then Cyrus, the Overlord virus, and the Nindroids all come out of nowhere.
Why is this concerning?
Imagine for a moment that Julien took Cyrus's place in that equation.
And the funny thing is, it's actually very easy to account for the other two pieces with Julien substituted in.
As I've implied before, there's literally no way Cyrus could have remodeled Ninjago City that quickly, especially working alone. The kind of innovation that has sprouted out of Ninjago City over a maximum period of about two years would take a large team of city planners, engineers, and citizens at least fifty years. And that's not even counting the speed of innovation - that's assuming that they would want to just tear down the city and rebuild it with the current technology. All in all, the total time would come down to about or about a hundred times longer than the longest amount of time that could have passed between S2 and S3.
In other words, Cyrus cheated.
As for how, let's look at Julien. We can easily assume that he was ninety or ninety-five when he died, and that the events shown in Tick Tock took place over anywhere from forty to fifty years. This would put Julien anywhere from forty to fifty-five years old when he turned on Zane. This makes sense, considering his appearance.
Let's assume that Zane was made fifty years ago. Fifty years ago from today would have been in 1964. This was the keyboard of the spiffiest computer at that time, IBM's System 360:
And this phone was the stuff:
In other words, Zane is about as old as these no-remaining-purpose-other-than-as-collectibles antiques.
And yet, for some mysterious reason, Pixal was told by the Overlord to get Zane's blueprints and make an army out of him, when it would have been much easier for Pixal to use her own blueprints for the updating process.
This suggests that, for some reason, Zane is more 'compatible' with Ninjago City's current technology than Pixal is.
Once we take into account these three factors - history repeating itself, Ninjago City's technology coming out of nowhere, and Zane's implied 'compatability' - the answer is quite obvious:
Julien was once in Cyrus's current position.
Setting the scene: Julien's in his mid-to-late twenties. He's basically fresh out of college, probably with some sort of computer science/engineering degree. He takes up work at some sort of company, and he's really good at his job. He rises through the ranks quite quickly and lands a place in some sort of R&D department, where he shortly gets involved in at least one project.
One is building artificial humanoids, and probably quite a few different versions of them. The other is working on an artificial intelligence to help run this incarnation of Ninjago City, which - you guessed it - looks almost exactly like Ninjago City currently does (probably though not necessarily minus Borg Tower).
And there you have it: all three players in the grand cosmic equation that would end up repeating itself later.
But it goes further than that: The AI that they're working on starts to malfunction, because, as this is the first time anyone has ever tried a project like this, the scientists have no idea what they're doing, and are basically making it up as they go along. Suddenly the AI is in control of the army next door.
This is when everything starts to crash and burn.
Ninjago City is basically leveled. Julien is the only one of the team to get out of the city in time. He's all alone, paritally at fault, and needs to make sure that anyone and everyone he's ever known is left behind. He needs to make it look like he died in the chaos.
So he moves out to the middle of nowhere, in a forest of hostile creatures, where no one sane would want get within five miles of him.
While out there, he attempts to redeem himself by making a mishmash version of the two projects: Zane, the body of an android with the mind of a city-controlling AI.
(Believe it or not, this could actually explain Zane's sixth sense; his AI, if it comes from the source I've specified, would want very close attention to detail. Whatever magic Spinjitzu possesses would, in theory, allow the AI to reach for an uncertain distance into the future - based on previous patterns, I'd estimate about six to ten episodes ahead.)
And it works, with flying colors. Fast forward to near-modern day. Cyrus finds a box of stuff in the basement of some old building. It's blueprints for all of these fantastic inventions no one has ever even heard of, and a collection of handwritten notes. Among them, there's flying cars, floating highways, wireless electricity, androids, and various other projects that that R&D team had been working on a long, long time ago. Cyrus realizes that this could really help the shattered Ninjago City, and brings it out of the dark once more.
Sooner or later he finds out about Zane, an android of close specifications to the blueprints he found. Which allows him to find out about Julien. Because Cyrus isn't stupid, he puts two and two together and decides that he better shut up. Not only that, but before he starts to make any of his own, he decides he better 'improve the design' so that any copyright/patent claims that could come from that 'crazy old man' could be fended off quite easily.
And suddenly, all of the problems I pointed out are resolved. Gone. Poof.
Naturally, this has to make an appearance, and it's very easy to explain how it will: Zane's power source, as I've implied a few times before, is a disguised memory tank.
I'm not exactly sure about how the formatting is going to work - if I had to guess, it'd work like a video diary, especially since Zane (probably...) wasn't around at the time of the events I described.
Obviously, this is going to have a huge impact on Zane's mental stability, as shown in the chart from this post.
In the long run, though, it's going to set him up for an especially powerful second True Potential. Well, more like the medium-run, but whatever.
