The Zeta Project – 21onwire

Zee and Ro find Ro’s brother, Casey, who’s working as a reporter for a vid-news station. When Casey’s boss pressures him to turn our heroes in for the exclusive story, Casey has to weigh family loyalty against career advancement.

Media by Borg4of3
Review by Matt Zimmer

Voices:
Diedrich Bader as Zeta / Zee
Julie Nathanson as Ro
Kurtwood Smith as Agent Bennet
Dominique Jennings as Agent Rush
Blayn Barbosa as Bucky
Lukas Haas as Casey MacCurdy
Luray Cooper as Owl Man
Charles Kimbrough as Pat Jensen
 

Ro finally finds her brother in an episode that raises questions that will never be answered.

While on the run Bucky sends Ro a message: he’s located her brother
Casey. He is a reporter and she and him have a short talk and decide to meet. Casey’s boss overhears the conversation and informs him that
Rosalie is a fugitive with a renegade synthoid and that if he brings them in he will have the story of his life. He says he has to think about it. Later, Casey and Ro are reunited and he tells her what he can remember about their family and how her grandfather used to call her a
Little Bulldozer. Then NSA agents West and Rush corner Zeta and Ro on a trolley car. Casey makes a distraction and they escape while Zeta saves the passengers. Later Casey finds out his boss has called Bennett.
Bennett offers not to prosecute Rosalie if Casey will help him find
Zeta. Casey agrees.

After deciding to meet Casey on the Bay Bridge Zeta and Ro arrive to find themselves surrounded. Ro is furious with her brother’s betrayal but Casey arrives by hovercopter and tells her to trust him and she goes aboard. While his boss tries to get Zeta’s capture on camera Casey moves in for a better shot by putting himself in front of the NSA copters allowing Zeta to escape. He lets Ro off the copter and she escapes with
Zee. Bennett tells Casey he will be watching him while his boss says his career in camera news is over to which Casey says he will just have to go back to text news. Ro overhears this and it causes her to check out a text page for a Little Bulldozer for sale. There Casey leaves her a message saying that he will keep in touch with her and that since he is back in text news he will be writing articles about how Zeta saves people and is in fact a hero.

This is one of those episodes that make me wish this show wasn’t cancelled. It’s a decent episode in and of itself but the idea of Zeta having more supporters out there in the media is a great one and it’s frustrating that it will never be followed up on since Kids WB pulled the plug. That said, there wasn’t really anything in this episode that was outstanding. Despite the fact that Ro has been trying over the course of the entire series to find her family it’s a little disappointing that it is done in such a pedestrian manner. You never really doubt whether or not Casey will do the right thing in the end so the story has little dramatic impact. The scenes between Casey and Ro were good but they almost only make you wish there were more of them in the episode.

The animation was passable. It wasn’t as consistent as the rest of this season has been but it was okay. I think I DID like the designs for the
Owl and Squirrel superheroes at the beginning in the comic book convention which seemed to be a sly dig at the Alex Toth inspired designs of Batman: The Animated Series. Other than that the animation was pretty pedestrian.

A decent episode that I could tell was laying groundwork for something better down the line that the writers never got a chance to explore.

Story: ***
Animation: ***
Average: ***