Rush Zone S1 E8 "Fantasy Football Bot"

## Plot

Beast, the Lions' Rusher, takes his team's Shard and hides it in some equipment in a van, but a BlitzBot with a camera sees him. Sudden Death can see this from his spaceship. This appears with a sequence intertwined with OT telling Ish that the BlitzBotz are getting smarter and that they have to adapt. They can hide the Shards, but it's only a matter of time before Sudden Death finds them. In school, Ish is pulled inside his locker by Scream, who informs him that Sudden Death is planning a surprise attack. Scream shows him an image of a disguised BlitzBot, which leads to this hilarious conversation: "Calvin Johnson? What's he doing in space? He's Megatron." "Look closer. That is a Fantasy Football BlitzBot and he is coming. The players will not expect him on a weekday and without you they cannot protect the Shard!" "I told you, I'm grounded!" "You're going to have to figure something out." I laughed SO hard during that. Ish tells his mom that the team is practicing and that they're down a man, so he might get to play. Shandra tells him he has two hours. The BlitzBot is looking for the Shard, but then the *real* Calvin Johnson shows up. (Seriously? Not one BlitzBot decided to somehow prevent Johnson from coming so this wouldn't happen? No one? Not even Sudden Death? Yeesh!) Ish tells everyone that the bot is here for the Shard. Everyone tackles him as a split screen showing tackles is shown. Calvin Johnson tackles his look alike, but then the BlitzBot is on top of him. Beast lets out a lion roar to short circuit the bot and Ish punches through the robot's head to take out its power source. Ish realizes he's late getting back and in his haste doesn't shut his locker properly. A bully comes up and goes inside Ish's locker. (Wait, seriously? You were just waiting for Ish to come out of his locker so you could go inside it? That makes zero sense!) Sudden Death sees what happened with the Lions and orders all of his BlitzBotz to find him.

## Review

A good episode, especially since Calvin Johnson is one of my favorite players. Ish isn't handed any slack, since right after getting grounded, a bully has to go ahead and steal from him. As someone who was bullied, I know how that feels. Definitely not a high point in my life. More like one of my lowest. I also knows how Ish feels not to get picked by a team because he's small and people think he's not good enough. Some boys told me I wasn't good enough to play soccer with them because I fell down. I once learned that part of the human brain draws instant assumptions from things around them as a survival tool, but today, those assumptions are almost always wrong and hurtful to people. For example, I made my school's soccer team a few years ago. I scored my first goal (I prefer to play defense) and my team went undefeated. That's better than the boys' team by a lot, who as of now have never had an undefeated season, whereas with the girls' team it happens on a regular occurrence. We even had a few games end early because we scored so many goals there was no way the other team could catch up to us. Remember, even in our darkest times there's always someone full of light to give you hope.