Speed Racer: TNG S2 E13

## Plot

Since this is a standalone episode, there's no recap. Speed and Conor are spying on Spritle and waiting for him to go to sleep. Now that all of the faculty is asleep, the "game" can begin, but they leave to tie up campus security first, so they can have free run of the school. So it's like the plot of *Breakfast Club*, but it takes place at night? Speed uses the Mach 6 and its unique abilities to trap the security guys in a canyon. All of the students put on gauntlets to play a game called "Gotcha!" Everyone's gauntlet contains a holographic profile of who their secret target is. The goal is to tag their target and avoid being tagged themselves. They'll keep being assigned new targets until only one player is left standing by sunrise. The game is forbidden by the school, so they also have to avoid waking up any faculty. A recording of Conor tells Annalise that the rules say that you can't stay inside a car for more than ten minutes, so she gets out to search for her target on foot. Speed and Lucy run into Jared and Jesse, but none of them are their targets. Jesse runs off and chases after X. They wind up in an evil looking control room. X escapes and runs outside, and Jesse follows him. Annalise sees them and tags Jesse, since he was her target. After she leaves though, he disappears, leaving only his gauntlet behind. Lucy wonders if she really is Speed's target and is just partnering up with her to get her to lower her guard. He assures her that she's not his target, and she swears that she's not out to get him either. They see the dropped gauntlet on the ground, but think that someone just dropped it when they were tagged. Mitch tags a student named Tyler, and freaks out when he disappears. Two students named Alex and Jennifer are laughing loudly from trying to tag each other, and accidentally wake up Professor Aniskov. When he tries to take them back to their dorms though, he disappears. The girls also disappear when they high five each other. Mitch runs into X and tells him what he saw, but he doesn't believe him. Mitch tries to leave to show him, but someone locks them in. Speed and Lucy run into two more gauntlets, and decide that this is getting creepy. They scream when they're caught by… Spritle. He woke up when he heard strange noises, and asks them what they're doing up at this hour. Speed admits that they're playing Gotcha. They can't take off the gauntlets. A recording of Conor tells them that they can't remove them until they're out of the game, and repeats the last part like a broken record. Spritle tries to pull it off, but can't, and before he can get his tools, he disappears in front of them. Annalise frees X and Mitch from the cafeteria. Mitch tries to tell her that they need to stop the game, but she tags him, and admits that she locked him in so he'd only have one way out. She and X see him disappear, and when they hug each other, they also disappear. Speed and Lucy meet up with Conor and Chim-Chim. Anyone who gets tagged, or touched with a gauntlet is disappearing. Conor doesn't know why this is happening. He made the gauntlets with scrap metal that he found in the salvage yard. They head there and see that he got the metal from old parts used in the construction of the school's virtual track. They get back to the school before they're eliminated for going too far from the playing area. Conor can't override his original commands. Speed and Lucy go outside to try and warn people, but no one is left. When they get back, they see that Conor is gone. Chim-Chim shows them a recording. Conor figured out that it's the antimatter that's been zapping everyone. He said something about getting to the control room to stop it, but then he disappeared due to fiddling with his gauntlet. Lucy and Speed head there and see a sparking console that Jesse broke earlier while trying to tag X. They hear voices, but can't understand them. They have no idea how to fix this, and they're the only two left. They don't think that the police would believe them. Speed apologizes to Lucy for everything that's happened between the two of them lately, and any misunderstandings they've had, and she apologizes to him too. When she was getting friendly with Alpha Leader, it made him jealous. She tells him that Alpha didn't mean to her what *he* means to her. Even though they know they'll disappear if they touch each other, they do so anyways and kiss. They're teleported to a blank white space, which is where everyone else is. Conor tells everyone that it's not entirely his fault. Jesse damaged the circuits in the control room while trying to tag X, which set off a short circuit that accidentally triggered an interactive side effect of the game gauntlets, which Conor made out of discarded metal from the virtual track, which, unbeknownst to him, was still reactive. This means they're inside the virtual track. The only way to undo it is to reverse the track's polarity from inside the control room. Luckily, Chim-Chim opens a portal that lets them all leave. Everyone else leaves to either sleep or avoid being punished, but Conor is caught by Spritle. All this episode really did, besides attempt a child friendly version of a temporary apocalypse, was finally resolve the romantic tension between Speed and Lucy. That's literally the only reason I watched it.