TV Retrospective - Lab Rats Seasons 1 and 2

It’s time to do another retrospective on a Disney Sitcom, in the build-up to something for the 7^th anniversary. So for the next 2 weeks (yes, this is a 2-parter, the show’s got nearly 100 episodes) we’ll be looking at Lab Rats

Lab Rats in principle is something I should be quite interested in, and is the Brainchild of Chris Peterson and Bryan Moore, guys who are very experienced working together, being co-producers on ‘That 70’s show’ then being producers on TV movies. The show ran for 4 seasons and a total of 89 episodes, each season is different in length, it’s weird.

I’ll tackle Lab Rats the same way I tackled Austin and Ally, I’ll give a rundown of the opening episodes, then cover any important developments, new characters or anything worthy of discussion for the rest of seasons 1 and 2. I may also bring up some stuff to make points about next time.

We open with Crush Chop and Burn, and we’re introduced to Leo Dooley (Tyrel Jackson Williams), the everyman of the group. His mother Tasha (Angel Parker) has just married a rich inventor named Donald Davenport (Hal Sparks). On the lookout for his room in his new house, Leo comes across a panel, well, actually he falls into it and because the code is lousy, it opens up a secret elevator leading to a basement.

Inside he gets the surprise of his life when he comes across 3 kids. These are Adam (Spencer Boldman), Bree (Kelli Bergland) and Chase (William Trent). The rundown is these are lab-grown super-humans enhanced by bionic chips in their brains. Adam has super strength, near invulnerability and heat vision, Bree has super-speed and Chase has enhanced senses, can generate force-fields and has a ‘superior intelligence.’ Something which we’ll call into question on multiple occasions.

They have no experience of the outside world, being trained within the basement and fed through food pellets. We’re also introduced to Eddy (Will Forte) the house’s smart-home system that seems more than a little jealous of Tasha, and is generally bitter to anyone not named Donald. Leo has the bright idea of sending them to school, an experience they all kinda want, even though Adam, being the comic relief idiot, is not especially interested in learning.

Leo wants them to help improve his social standing which is bottom of the rung, as he receives wedgies from random passers-by whilst at school. The problem is, their bionic chips tend to glitch when they have heightened emotions. This results in Adam nearly setting the place on fire with his heat vision. No-one ever mentions this again.

Leo has been helped by them and wanting to do something for them in return, arranges for a school party to be relocated into their house, because this isn’t asking for trouble or anything. Donald and Tasha were out but they come back and see the party and Donald decides to send Adam, Bree and Chase away. Donald, seeing that Leo is going to miss them creates robotic duplicates of them to hang out with Leo at home, something Tasha does not approve of.

Seeing the opportunity though, Adam, Bree and Chase replace their robotic duplicates, much to Leo’s delight (he was not exactly thrilled with the robots either) but their attempts to keep this under wraps go horribly wrong when Tasha puts her foot down and tells Donald to get rid of the robots. Because the others took stupid pills and decided to listen to Adam, they hid in the recycling van which took them to the recycling centre, which is akin to a level of Crash Bandicoot, with chomping hazards and flame jets, each of them using one of their specific skills to help them through.

Leo goes after them, falling in himself, forcing them to go back and rescue him. Tasha and Donald soon uncover the deception and head there too. With everyone safe, Donald decides the kids need to experience a human life, go to school and whatnot but they need to keep their bionic abilities a secret, though how that’s possible after day 1 is a mystery to me.

The opening 2-parter is loaded with plot-holes, some of which come retroactively with future episodes, more on that later, but it holds a relatively interesting concept, with interesting characters to boot.

Commando App’s main conflict is about getting a seat at the popular table, yes, low stakes conflicts ftw. Anyway, we’re introduced to a few recurring elements here, first, the Commando app itself is a part of Chase’s bionics, it activates when Chase is under threat and enhances his strength, whilst giving him somewhat of a bloodlust, it’s essentiality an alternate personality they’ve come to name Spike. We’re also introduced to Trent (Eddie Perino), the resident bully and frequent antagonist and last and definitely least, Principal Perry, I cannot stand her. She’s the mean Headteacher that encourages the school’s status quo, a frequent antagonist and source of most of the gross humour. I’ll get to my biggest problem with her next time.

In the next episode, Leo’s wants to go to a dance with someone who’s name I’ll forget before I write this, Adam tries to help and ends up becoming her date himself. This will not be the last time he’s a bit of a love wrecker, Chase tries to intervene and the exact same things happens. Good on Tyrel Jackson Williams for showing off his dance skills.

Rats on a Train has the group on their first mission, stopping a runaway train blowing up a city. And here’s where a problem begins to creep in, a lot of their missions take on place on one-and-done sets, sets that don’t tend to have as much money thrown behind them because it’ll only be used for one episode. And that shows, the sets always look incredibly fake and cheap. There’s a running gag that Tasha, who’s a news reporter keeps attempting to cover the story but continually misses the train.

Smart and Smarter debuts Chase’s much better haircut. And the revelation that Chase ‘the smartest man on the planet’ is also a massive idiot. With a plot revolving around a school title, it’s frankly odd that Principle Perry doesn’t show up (not that I want her to). Exoskelton vs Grandma debuts Grandma Rose (Telma Hopkins) as a minor supporting character. I like her, she’s observant and commanding, though her aversion to the ‘weird’ means she’s not a good fit for this family structure, which is where the comedy comes from. The plot evolves one of Davenport’s inventions gaining sentience… Sure, why not?

Bionic Birthday Fail is one of my favourite episodes, I think because it focuses entirely on the family and some sh*t school drama. Not that those episodes are necessarily bad, but it just has the core cast. It’s Leo’s Birthday and unfortunately for him, his mother has been selected for a journalism award being presented on the same night. Adam, Bree and Chase, never having had a birthday party in their lives, try and arrange one but get so caught up in it, they forget to actually surprise Leo. Making matters worse, Donald tests his gift for Leo and ends up breaking it.

Leo’s one desire is to take part in simulated combat training and thanks to Chase he does exactly that, mimicking the abilities of the others. It’s a sweet episode about family and brotherhood. Billy Unger gets to show off his martial arts in actual combat too. Next up we have Death Spiral Smackdown, Donald leaves Bionic activating pellets in the kitchen, pellets they don’t even use anymore? What? We also find out that Chase has an override app that can take control of his siblings or shut down their abilities.

Next is “Can I borrow the helicopter” which introduces Leo’s actual love interest for the show, Jenelle (Madison Petis) I have complicated feelings about her, we’ll get to them next time, like most things really. In Chip Switch it’s revealed they can extract their bionic chips, which begs the question of why they don’t do that whenever they need to keep their bionics a secret. This is also the start of Adam making fun of Chase’s height, which confuses me somewhat since he’s the second tallest of the group.

Episode 15 is called Dude, Where’s My Lab? Get it? It’s funny because Hal Sparks was in an awful piece of sh*t. He played Zoltan. Quickly moving on, Night of the Living Virus introduces a number of Bree’s friends, a couple of whom we’ll see again. It also seems like this episode was filmed earlier on as Chase has gone back to his old haircut for this episode. Mission: Invisible serves somewhat of a point as Perry’s suspicions are raised about Adam Bree and Chase and she vows to find out what’s going on with them.

There’s not a lot of story in Lab Rats which really is a shame because this setup is ripe with story potential, but the breadcrumbs of a story start being laid in episode 19 – Concert in a Can, we’re introduced to the character of Marcus (Mateus Ward) someone who sucks up to Adam and Chase, less so Bree, but Leo doesn’t trust him. And his suspicions are proven right as he breaks a valuable guitar and blames Leo for it. I genuinely hate these kinds of episodes from shows but they are building him up as an antagonist so just this once, I’ll let it slide.

The season finale “Mission Space” has a number of revelations. First off, Chase unlocks a new bionic ability they pretentiously call Molecular-kinesis. The common term is telekinesis, it’s been used in media for years including the description of this very episode, it’s telekinesis. Second off, Marcus finds his way into the command centre and adds a surveillance camera. And the third we find out at the end he isn’t working alone.

Season 1 of Lab Rats establishes the core cast and key supporting characters. The conflicts are usually low-stakes but the finale begins dripping a larger story arc for the next season, I’m going to save my thoughts on this for a later review. The core 4 are great, Hal Sparks’ egotism as Davenport is hilarious and Perry hasn’t yet reached the height of annoyance she will in later seasons. The problems are pretty much constant throughout this show. It really could’ve done with a larger budget; the action is decent but rare.

In season 2, Davenport vows to hold Adam, Bree and Chase on a tighter leash, given that Marcus found the lab. Leo is their purported bodyguard and Marcus decides to take him out, locking him in a self-driving car with the destination set to the bottom of the ocean and the brakes disabled. Fortunately, they manage to rescue him just in time, but as Marcus overplays his hand to Leo, and reveals his involvement with that incident, he reveals one more trump card. He’s bionic and he knows Adam, Bree and Chase are also. If Leo doesn’t keep his mouth shut, he’ll spill the beans to the world.

Throughout the course of the show, Leo has been trying and more often than not failing to prove that he deserves a spot with the team, whether that’s stowing away on missions or giving a list of space sh*t to come back with. Anyway, episode 3 of this season, Missing the Mission sees Adam Bree and Chase indisposed due to being in detention with Perry. Leo has to help Davenport on his mission and actually contributes enough in a crisis for Davenport to officially give him a mission engineer spot on the team.

The next episode is called Quarantined. Adam, Bree and Chase jump forward in time to 2020… OK, not really, Bree becomes obsessed with random boy #220 and in her distraction contaminates herself with an unknown toxic substance. Davenport has created a barrier of invisibility conveniently forgetting about the invisibility cloak he invented last season. One other thing he invents that crops up a lot is a cyber-mask, a chip on your neck that disguises your face. Next up is Robot Fight Club, it's like Robot Wars, but without the house robots or hazards, in other words not as good. Chase and Leo team up and a good time is had, though shouldn’t these kinds of tournaments have weight classes or limits? Next…

Next up is Bro Down and I have to talk about the Chase/Adam dynamic, crap! Bree unlocks vocal manipulation abilities; can I talk about that instead?

“I’m sick of being his punching bag”

Sh*t! If one brother considers himself a punching bag to another, I’m sorry, that no longer qualifies as horseplay, that’s bullying. There’s a better (I don’t mean in terms of quality) episode in a later season to expand on this and don’t worry, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Instead let’s talk about another issue that’s started to crop up. ALL THE MISSIONS TAKE PLACE OFF-SCREEN!! Often, we’ll cut to a scene where they’ve just come back from a mission, but they don’t have the budget to show us any of it, and it factors into the plot barely at all.

Parallel Universe has a fairly standard plot to it, but one weird thing is the way parallel universe jumping works in this episode. Leo ends up in the body of his parallel earth counterpart, who happens to have bionic abilities. How? Also, the timeline reset when he got sent home because…

Spike’s Got Talent… Nah, I got nothing. Let’s move onto episode 10, where the plot threads dropped after episode 1 finally get picked up again. I guess there wasn’t much you could do with Marcus after he revealed himself as an absolute monster rather than an annoying prick but maybe the best workaround for that is to finish the story rather than letting it drag.

Whilst Adam, Bree and Chase are dealing with a Daven-teleporter mishap (Tele-davenporter is clever, for Adam at least) Leo follows Marcus to a secret lab. But because despite being the size of a mouse, he’s about as stealthy as an Ox, he gets caught and Marcus sicks his poorly animated transformer on him. Leo outsmarts him, despite him supposedly having the smarts of Chase, but his evidence is destroyed in another teleporter accident.

Unfortunately, Marcus has covered his tracks, so Leo couldn’t physically corroborate his evidence. Marcus’ ‘father’ promises that this night will be their last, so either the next 3 episodes all take place in one night, or this guy is a big, well… small, fat, well… thin, liar. In these 3 episodes they face such terrible foes as: the FBI, a monster truck and an annoying neighbour, it’s not even as exciting as that sounds.

OK, but Davenport 500 is the first of problem I’ll start complaining about a lot, that being them putting Perry in the episode when she really doesn’t need to be.

Our mystery man and Marcus finally make their move in a 2-parter called Bionic Showdown. And we open with a bit of a doozy. Our mystery man is the little brother of Donald Davenport. He just slips into the lab and deactivates Eddy, we then get a name for our mystery villain, Douglas Davenport, presumably their father was David Davenport, his father was Declan Davenport and his father was Damian Davenport, I could keep going but I think you get the point.

He faked his death because of reasons and thanks to Marcus’ bionic abilities and his superior fighting technique, they capture Donald and lock him in a cage made of glowing plastic that’s supposed to look like lasers. Turns out Douglas had been working at Davenport industries but Donald kicked him out for ‘turning into Dr Evil’

His plan for the bionic kids was to sell them as weapons to the highest bidders, basically, and now he’s back to do that again. Certainly took his sweet bloody time. Marcus gives his message to Adam, Bree and Chase, come and get him. Leo takes a small amount of pleasure in being right about Marcus, and then reveals to the others his bionic abilities. To help turn the tide, new mission suits… definitely not a marketing stunt there, nope

The first fight between the siblings and Marcus… why are you all taking him on one at a time, of course he’s gonna beat you hand to… oh, Chase took him down in one blow, that’s disappointing. Oh, was faking it, never mind. The Lab Rats are captured and Douglas does his best Darth Vader to end part 1.

The blue plastic they’re pretending are lasers block bionic signals, meaning they can’t use bionics to escape. Eddy takes Leo to Davenport’s secret weapons vault to arm up to go and rescue them. In the mean time

TIME 4 BACKSTORY

So, Donald and Douglas set up Davenport industries together and designed bionics so machines can do dangerous tasks that humans can’t but Douglas began implanting them in genetically engineered humans. The interface wasn’t designed to interface with their nervous system, hence why they sometimes glitch out when their emotions run high. And there’s a bunch of hidden code in their chips, hence the sudden new powers that keep cropping up. Donald took them away and raised them in safe environment to become heroes rather than weapons. I’m saving a rant about this for later, when I tear into Donald. You can look forward to that in part 2.

Douglas also installed a piece of software onto their chips called the Triton app, which allows him to control them. And we find out that Marcus is actually an android, remember this for later as I’ll need to bring that up. Douglas sees Leo coming and sends Marcus to deal with him and he seemingly does so. Though it’s not all fun for Douglas as Donald had put a block on their Triton apps, it buys them about 8 minutes.

In that 8 minutes they manage to escape and it’s time for round 2. It’s a pretty even match between them but Marcus gains the upper hand on the siblings, and then Leo arrives wearing the exo-suit, I hope the sentience bug was worked out of that. Anyway, he gets knocked down by Marcus but is saved as Adam unlocks a new ability, I think it’s supposed to be a shockwave. It causes the entire facility to collapse, Douglas sneaks out and Marcus is crushed by rubble. Yeah…

And as a resolution to the episode we get almost a carbon of Raven’s speech to Trigon. Douglas may have created them, but he was never their father.

The next episode shows that Davenport hasn’t forgotten about his invisibility cloak. I also swear we’ve had like a year’s worth of groundings and detention in this show. And this is the first time being grounded has ever factored into the plot. But enough about that, let’s skip ahead to the next episode, Avalanche!

The team are sent on a mission to find a fuel source for one of Davenport’s machines, in Antarctica. Unfortunately, there’s a major storm that could destroy the glacier where this fuel is found and make it unobtainable, there’s an Avatar joke there but I’m going to resist it. Donald calls for the mission to be scrapped, but Chase, feeling underappreciated, goes about it anyway. Leo uses said machine and freezes Janelle by accident, this is important for a later story. Chase gets caught in the storm and is rescued by the most unlikely of hands, Douglas’. May I just say that Douglas is hilarious in this episode, he was pretty funny in Bionic Brother showdown too.

Douglas tries to get into Chase’s head, he too has experience being equally as brilliant as his siblings but somewhat underappreciated. He offers to upgrade Chase’s bionics, giving him all 3 power sets. Chase seems interested and offers to sneak him into the lab so he can ‘perform the upgrade.’

Chase does so but Donald, Bree and Adam arrive quickly, Chase reveals that he just set a trap and they trap Douglas in ice. Adam fixes Janelle’s situation and it’s amazing she stays with him after this. Adam Up has a fun little main plot about cloning Adam, I can’t believe I put those words in that order, and introduces us to Kerry Perry, Principal Perry’s niece, she plays sweet and innocent in front of her aunt, but is in fact a total monster. It’s a worse version of the Marcus plot.

I was gonna skip over Llama Drama because it’s really boring but a couple of things need to be said. The laugh track seems to think falling dominos is hilarious, I don’t get it. Also, a llama had swallowed some nano-bots and Chase deduces they need a magnet to get them out. Pity none of you have a magnetism app capable of doing that, would really come in handy.

OK, I’ve not really talked about Trent but his character is just yikes… The guy claims in the Halloween special to be 7 years older than everyone else, but stole Leo’s clothes then invited others to take pictures… Someone needs to put this guy on a list, and in prison. Perry 2.0… If you thought Perry 1.0 was bad… she is, moving on.

We’ve got another episode where Chase forgets he has a magnetism app exactly when it would come in useful. We also get a Christmas special which tells us that Donald has been trying to harness Gamma Rays, those who forget the comics are doomed to repeat them. Perry shows up at the house and there’s all sorts of fun going on there.

Time for another episode about Trent, you know, everyone’s favourite 25-year-old bully. Trent is intrinsic of a larger problem this show has but unfortunately, we’ll have to wait till Brother Battle to fully see the extent of this. But here, Trent graduates high school, then immediately becomes a gym teacher. See, now his bullying becomes abuse, if it wasn’t already what with him being 25. SEND HIM TO PRISON!

And with that we’re onto the season finale: ‘No Going Back.’ Because some moron is stealing laptops from the school, Principal Perry’s set up a security checkpoint, this worries our bionic trio as of course it will go off detecting their bionics. And they’re right to be concerned as Chase is scanned and caught before the credits roll. They all get caught and although they don’t have the missing laptops, Perry is suspicious, suspicious enough to call a friend and securing an x-ray machine.

The news isn’t good back home either as Davenport discovers his cards have been maxed out fraudulently. The kids seem to forget that people are in earshot as they loudly discuss breaking the x-ray machine with Adam’s shockwave. It works but Perry claims to be able to repair

Things go from bad to worse back home as Donald discovers every computer system he owns has been hacked and all his data wiped. He calls in a favour from a friend in the FBI. Back at school, Perry is unable to repair the machine but the shockwave did some damage that almost kills everyone and they reveal their abilities to Perry whilst stopping it.

She heads off muttering about calling the police, FBI or whatever Will Smith would do, as the siblings return home, only to get the wrong impression when Davenport’s FBI friend shows up to investigate the hack. Deciding to honour a pact they made together a long time ago, they decide to disappear. When the FBI guy leaves, Perry pays a visit, promising to keep their bionics a secret in exchange for *checks notes* a rainbow pony… No, of course not, she wants a ton of cash. And the hits just keep on coming as Davenport’s accountants tell him someone forged his signature and liquidated his account, making him essentially broke, with all his assets seized, including the house.

They then find a message from Adam, Bree and Chase saying they’ve gone to protect them, with their GPS locators disabled. Given all the clues, Leo suspects that Douglas is back. Something they confirm when the security footage of the prison sees Douglas released by a mask-wearing badass. The season ends with the lab being blown up by Douglas.

As season finales go, this was a hell of an episode. It has a similar feeling to the ending of Power Rangers Turbo. Everything goes wrong at once, leaving our heroes facing an uncertain future. In a series that has consistently challenged and tweaked the status quo, this had the potential to do much more. Unfortunately, it’ll take a while longer before that actually happens.

Season 2 has more story to discuss than season 1, that said I’d be hard-pressed to call it stronger as a lot of the series’ main weaknesses begin here. References to off-screen missions, the godawful handling of bullying and Principal Perry outstaying her welcome.

We’ll be back next week to talk about s3 and s4