'Great Minds Think Alike' commentary & notes

I almost forgot, but since posting Blitz and Exile's respective character "analyses" it occurred to me that I should probably also repost the notes for the story the both them featured in over here.

REFERENCES:  

- This story heavily references the Road Rovers episode "Take Me To Your Leader", so...

GENERAL: 

- I wrote this story way back in 2014, well before I'd conceived of the STARS-verse, my RR crossover setting. I do consider Great Minds part of STARS. I'm probably going to eventually incorporate it into a one-shot collection I have planned to accompany the longer form stories for this setting, currently titled The STARS-verse: Constellations.

- The title Great Minds Think Alike just magically sprang into my mind one day. It seemed fitting when I saw Blitz and Exile unleashing Muzzle on Zachary Storm's henchmen together, and I'm sure Blitz likes to think he has a great mind. ;-)

- I love the ending with all of the Rovers as regular dogs saving the day, but I feel like more could've been done with this episode. They could've had a situation where some of the other Rovers, not just Blitz and Exile, are at each others' throats or something because of the situation between their masters, then coming together and using teamwork. Or maybe more exploration into Blitz and Exile's relationship. Some nice character development could have come out of that. But nope, instead we get Hunter stopping Storm, as is par for the course in the show. But at least he had the Space Rovers and Colleen's aid, which made things slightly more bearable.

I also didn't like how between Blitz and Exile, Blitz was made out to be the only one who thought his owner was in the right and thus came off looking worse then Exile did.

- In TMTYL, Storm's mind control machine is called the neural brain scrambler. That's a very redundant name, so I just dropped the "brain" part for Great Minds. I also decided to include a mention of Professor Hubert. It was never said how the world leaders were returned to normal after having their personalities altered, or if the effects just naturally wore off. I just chose to say Hubert whipped up some doohickey that restored them to normal. Also, what the heck happened to the neural scrambler? Did the Rovers just leave it on the bottom of the ocean, or did they try to get it, or what? 

Having thought about this, I've decided that for STARS, the neural scrambler will be making another appearance for a later story I have in mind. 

- At first I was going to have Blitz actually talk about how he didn't notice his master's excessively aggressive behavior, but as I thought about it, it seemed more in-character for him not to admit it out of shame. Some characters are open about their feelings, but I feel like a combination of pride plus his whole macho man attitude would keep Blitz from opening up about a lot of things (I go into this more in my analysis for him).

FUN FACTS:

- Something  I've noticed: anyone else find it interesting how aggressive and fearless Blitz is as a regular dog then he is as a Rover? Someone first brought this to my attention when they pointed out how he confronted the junkyard burglar back in the pilot. In TMTYL, he initially seems very willing to fight the "aliens", then, once he was a Cano-Sapien and actually got on their ship, lost his nerve.