Netflix Retrospective - ReBoot: The Guardian Code Season 2 Episodes 1-3

Hello Darkness, my old friend, ReBoot: The Guardian Code everyone

But I guess I owe somewhat of an apology to this show, because I’ve just found out that sourcerer is actually a real word, despite my spell check not recognising it, meaning a programmer that works with source code, it can also be spelt sourceror, though my spell-checker doesn’t recognise that either.

Last we left off, we were introduced to Hexadecimal, an old friend of Megabyte’s. Can the guardians defeat them both, and what about the spheres showing some mysterious origins for Austin’s father. Will there be an episode of passable quality? All this and more, let’s dive in.

Network Interface

We open with the sourcerer, doing what he does best, monologuing. He’s sent a trojan horse into the dyna-cell network, allowing him remote access to it. Austin and Tamra are rehearsing a bit for Parker. I guess he watched High School Musical or literally high school romantic comedy and thought, why not try that. It’s for his Media Arts Class apparently. Do these guys never do Maths, English or some subject you’d expect to be taught at a school. 

Austin and Tamra don’t take it too seriously and joke around. Turns out the Sourceror has hacked the network to try and narrow down the location by searching the network for people using certain key words. Of course, the key words (‘Guardian’, ‘Megabyte’ and ‘Sourcerer’) are fairly vague so he’s getting a lot of false positives.

But Tamra does happen to mention Megabyte and it’s picked up by Parker’s phone. The Sourcerer takes notice but thanks to the scene that follows, he dismisses it just as quickly, even doing so as they crop up again.

Back at Megabyte’s Fortress, Megabyte and Hexadecimal are arguing about petty sh*t, including the sphere when the Sourcerer interrupts, wanting Megabyte to widen the scope of their search. This is a terrible idea until you’ve come up with a way of eliminating all your false positives. You already have so many you missed the real thing, imagine having so many more to contend with. Hexadecimal finds Megabyte’s situation amusing.

The Guardians meet up in room 0, Trey and Vera already there, much to Parker’s disappointment. She’s blowing bubblegum, as they head in, mentioning enough about Megabyte for the Sourcerer to be interested again. Vera manages to detect the transmission and uses the gum to block the phone’s camera and microphone.

For some reason, Megabyte is passing through the Dyna-Cell Network, and Hexadecimal decides to be unpredictable and attack the network anyway, just as the Guardians arrive. Megabyte tries to stop Hexadecimal, sending his sentries to be defeated easily by the guardians.

The Department of Internet Security spot the Guardian Code and suspect the Sourceror is involved. Enigma attempts to attack hexadecimal but unleashes a sonic attack that hurts everyone around it, including dyna-cell security programmes. Enigma manages to pass through it but the sonic attack reveals the presence of Dark Code to the DIS, who order the network scrubbed to purge everything.

The Sourcerer wants an explanation from Megabyte who blames everything on the Guardians, The Sourcerer believes him, but with them there right now, he can’t be in their world, so the hack has failed. OK… I have questions about this frame of logic but we’ll move on.

Enigma manages to sneak up on Hexadecimal using her cloaking, and steals the code ball she took with her because she wanted to. She leads Hexadecimal into a tap, a cage made by Googz. With the anti-malware bots coming in fast, Megabyte is forced to withdraw without his sister. So much for shaking things up, though we haven’t seen the last of her. They drop her off at the Virusylum as Enigma gives the code sphere to Vector.

The head of the DIS wants the Guardian Code contained the next time is shows up, Hexadecimal befriends the cat virus which has managed to escape its cell because the Virusylum is poorly designed and we get a peak of what was inside the codeball. It’s about a year ago, and Austin is forced inside by his very worried sounding father. The DIS have shown up, wanting the Guardian Code for themselves, his father refused. Austin realises must contain his father’s memories.

It’s a strong enough start, it’s not great by any means and Hexadecimal ends up going down far too easily. But it starts moving pieces into place for the central arcs around Austin.

Rating 7/10

Zombie Army

We open with Austin running with some dramatic music, it’s another fakeout as it’s just Parker testing out his new drone. They end up coincidentally by Austin’s father’s grave marker, Austin can’t help but think given the new information of the DIS threat made against him, that his death wasn’t an accident.

Meanwhile the Sourcerer is busy doing what he does next, no not hacking, monologuing. He’s hacked into a decrepit system and begins restoring it, corrupting it with Dark Code, creating a ‘zombie army’ to infect unsecured computers and ‘bring humanity to its knees’

Austin comes home to find that Mark Rowin is still about, he has his father’s old laptop, under the guise of looking for old photos. This is a pretty poor cover story, either you can’t access the laptop, and you only need the hard drive or you can access the laptop and you can just copy the files over to a hard disk. Considering it was thought destroyed in the fire, Austin is concerned about the intel it may have on it, and gets Parker to follow with the drone, it leads them straight to the DIS building.

He begins to hack into the laptop, but isn’t using the DIS network, instead his own cell-service. This makes it easier for the Guardians to infiltrate but since the computer for some reason has no firewalls and anti-virus software, it’s also a prime target for the Sourceror’s zombie bots. They initially disrupt the Guardian’s visuals but that’s patched rather too quickly. They don’t respond as easily to their guns either.

Trey and Tamra are brought in to deal with the source of the zombie virus. They begin using their sealers to try and contain them but to no avail. Mark begins to download the encrypted Guardian files to a flash drive and deletes them from the laptop. He lies when his boss asks him about it, although she may have worked it out. Vector and Googz see this through the laptop’s camera and microphone. 

The zombie issue is becoming worse, but thankfully Vera has an idea, a ‘cyber scorcher’ yes, that sounds hilarious to me too, it’s a flamethrower in cyberspace, kay. Googz reverse the polarity of the neutron flow to draw the zombie bots back to their source but the Sourcerer soon counteracts it. Vector tries the Ghostbusters method of joining their flamethrowers together against the core, bringing the core down before the DIS can arrive.

The DIS take credit for it again, no surprise there but Austin gets a bigger surprise when Mark arrives to return the laptop. He then gives Austin the flash drive. Austin quickly gets Vera to decrypt it but soon after Vera notices a bug on the flash drive that she quickly destroys.

It’s another fairly decent episode, I hesitate to say good, because the zombie army element is really stupid, the threat is barely even credible in spite of its sheer size and it reveals little we as the audience didn’t already know.

Rating 7/10

Bee-Ware

These puns are getting worse

We open with the Sourcerer considering the deletion of megabyte and eating a bug. Parker is busy programming a virus extraction tool. Funny how the DIS hasn’t managed to do that, would make their work a lot easier. He’s doing it to impress Vera, since he’s been spending time with Trey lately.

Speaking of viruses, Megabyte hears from the Sourcerer, he wants Megabyte to come up with an idea to prove himself and not be deleted, for some reason. Megabyte considers a target of a child’s toy…

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry, my brain just needed to time to reboot (ha) after that one. The Wubbly-bee Plus server is his target, what the heck is a Wubbly-bee? They easily neutralise security and Megabyte begins his hack, the network is shaped like a bee-hive and is lead by a Queen Bee because this plot is stupid.

Parker comes to show Vera his tech but finds her with Trey and is downhearted. God, they’re stretching this one out, aren’t they? Cue tutoring revelation in 3, 2, 1… Whenever you like. Just before this get awkward, an alert sounds as they find out about the wubbly-bee attack and oh my god, it looks hideous. It has wi-fi interactivity because…

It’s a perfect time to demonstrate the virus extractor and with some encouragement from Vera he gets to work completing it. The end result of this corruption is he’s scaring little kids. OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

The tool is complete and Vera gets to work adding it to Googz’ power set as they head off to save the bees. The guardians arrive at the hive and we get such awful play on words as ‘Fragnificent.’ Googz gets to work with his extraction tool and successfully removes Megabyte’s influence. But the Sourcerer was impressed enough with this sh*t that he decides to take over, corrupting the server with dark code. 

Now, the situation has gone from scary to catastrophic, and the bees are now catching fire. The bees in the server are more dangerous than ever and making matters worse, Megabyte has been summoned to help. Googz and Enigma head into the hive to remove the Queen Bee and crown a new one, it’s that simple apparently whilst D-Frag and Vector face off against Megabyte’s forces. The Guardians prevail, including adding some extra protection, stopping the Sourcerer from just hacking them again and making Megabyte and his sentinels a prime target.

The bee toys have been recalled and there’s some group bonding. Trey heads off for whatever he’s up to, giving Parker time to be even more awkward with Vera. She heads off to do whatever with Trey, making Parker feel worse, despite the others believing it’s not a romantic thing. The others cite his accomplishments today to cheer him up.

Megabyte’s still around, as the Sourcerer has decided to change tact. He wants the Guardians captured and forced to hand over their technology to him. He knows they’re human.

For the most part this episode is fluff, I don’t care about the Wubbly bee, everything around its source code is stupid and I feel the Trey/Parker rivalry has started to become tedious.

Rating 5/10