If there’s one thing Bionicle fans know, it’s that every time you think Teridax is finally dead, it was really all part of his MASTER PLAN.
Does it require some strained logic to answer why he really needed to pretend to be defeated? Sure.
Does it mean Teri must have been practically psychic to know things would actually go his way? Pretty much.
Did it happen enough to verge on cliché? Quite possibly.
BUT……
Was it cool? Yes, yes it was.
So, with that in mind, it’s a little hard to buy that getting hit on the head with a planet was the end of Teridax’s plan.
Now, Greg undoubtedly never intended it to end like that, and if he’d had more time, it probably would have gone on longer. (Sidenote: I personally think Teridax wouldn’t have controlled the GSR for too much longer even if Bionicle had continued – it’s hard to draw out a story for too long when your Big Bad has already attained God Mode. That’s climactic, endgame stuff right there. The only exception would be if future years had stuck to the 2009 formula and kept the MU in the background indefinitely to kick the climax down the road a few more years.)
But I digress. Because “That was my plan all along!” is synonymous with Teridax, I wanted to try a little thought experiment. What if losing to Mata Nui on the surface of Bara Magna was just another part of Teridax’s plan?
This would require a few things to make even contrived sense:
- Teri’s goal would need to be something even bigger than all the power that came with being the Great Spirit
- It probably required Spherus Magna being restored and the MU being destroyed
- However, it probably did not require that all MU inhabitants die – in fact, some might still be needed
So what could Teridax have wanted that couldn’t be satisfied even with godlike power? I think that can be answered with two plot details that were rapidly gaining prominence by 2010: the Great Beings and the multiverse.
Consider: The Great Beings could create things like the GSR and the Mask of Life, which could rival his power even as the Great Spirit. Additionally, the multiverse contained many, possibly infinite, Great Spirits (whether controlled by his own counterparts, by more attentive Mata Nuis, or by other people entirely) that might challenge him as well.
My idea goes like this: as we know, Mata Nui’s mission was to collect data on alien societies for 100,000 years, then return and reform Spherus Magna. This would have automatically activated some mechanism to instate whatever successful system of governance Mata Nui had discovered on Spherus Magna. By reforming Spherus Magna, Teridax caused this mechanism to activate, but by destroying the GSR, and any social data it gathered, he caused the process to malfunction. This leads to a series of events that flushes the Great Beings out of hiding. Over the next few years of story, Teridax, working through his minions (some of whom were survivors of the MU), manages to get the drop on the remaining Great Beings (because even they never realized his plan could STILL be ongoing). He probably kills some and subjugates or possesses the rest.
This would lead to the reveal that the Great Beings were not idle for the last 100,000 years. They had already realized that Mata Nui might fail, so they were working on something else in secret: a successor to the GSR, this time the size of a planet, that they had been building in a massive pocket dimension. This one was designed to take the entire populace of Spherus Magna and bring them on a last ditch mission to traverse universes until it found one where their planet was whole and its inhabitants could live in peace. (But realizing that their counterparts in other universes might have had the same idea, and be willing to go on the offensive for it, they had also armed it.)
Revealing to everyone that he is alive, Teridax makes his way onto this new Great Spirit Robot, but he can’t take it over (too repetitive, gotta keep it a little bit fresh). Instead, he activates it, causing it to initiate its programming and automatically teleport everyone on Spherus Magna to the lands inside of it. Then it begins to traverse interdimensional space.
(At this point, the focus shifts to a different universe for a while, like the setting change in ’09, giving new fans a jumping on point. I imagine the new setting is a tropical island that superficially resembles the early years of Bionicle, but with a new story and where everyone has a brand new but nostalgic character design, sort of like a Bionicle equivalent of Ninjago Legacy.)
Then, returning to the main plot thread, everyone thinks Teridax is going to take over this GSR like he did the last one. (He won’t though; I’m deliberately avoiding that kind of rehashing.) So they hatch a plan to have a good character take control preemptively – which fails. The strain of controlling something so powerful drives him mad. Teridax reveals he foresaw even this, which is why he didn’t repeat his previous plan. However, the creation of an insane, heavily-armed, dimension-hopping, super-god robot plays perfectly into his real plan: annihilating every Great Spirit that could stand in his way.
And thus, the final arc: TOTAL MULTIVERSAL WAR!
Guys, I’m not gonna lie. That was super over-the-top and I wrote all of it in one fevered sitting. There may be gaping plot holes (I think it requires Teridax to have way more knowledge about the Great Beings than he canonically did, for starters…) so let me know if you spot any. If you have additional ideas, add them. I’d love suggestions too.