Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Terrifics #20 by Gene Luen Yang, Stephen Segovia, Brent Peeples, Matt Santorelli and Protobunker, on sale now.
The Terrifics have encountered their share of strange villains and absurd threats, often confronting them with their own willingness to go big and bizarre. But now the team is confronted with perhaps the most bizarre figure in the multiverse: Bizarro!
While the Superman villain tries to enact his plans to change the timestream to get rid of all technology, the Terrifics end up getting a major upgrade to the T-Sphere that might make their coming battle with Bizarro a lot easier thanks to a blast from the past.
The Terrifics and The Nostalgia Bomb
The Terrifics have been confronted by Bizarro and his world's equivalent of the team, the Terribles. While the Terribles fight the Terrifics to a standstill, Bizarro busts his way throughout the Terrifics' base in search of a power source for their time machine. While the team initially fears that they're trying to steal Mister Terrific's energy generators, it's revealed that in actuality Bizarro went into Phantom Girl's room and stole the pendant left behind by her mother. This was actually a fragment of the Phantom Zone, which gives Bizarro the ability to harness the power for his own intentions.
His actions drag the entire timeline back to the 1990s, where most of the team is overcome with nostalgia caused by the Bizarro version of Phantom Girl. Figment Girl, unlike Phantom Girl and her ability to phase herself and others through solid mater, can make something out of nothing, essentially operating as a low-level reality warper. As the timeline continues to move backwards, Phantom Girl beats back her Bizarro-counterpart, and the Terrifics find themselves heading to the 1980s in a period-appropriate super ship.
Voltron Vs. Bizarro
Along with the surroundings and their costumes, the T-Sphere transforms with the changing timeline, too. When it reaches the 1980s, the T-Sphere becomes a massive giant fighting robot with five colorful robot lions as its limbs. All five Terrifics quickly pile into the ship, so it's unknown which hero gets which section of the robot as their own. However, it's also unmistakably based on the popular '80s series Voltron.
The original Voltron television series aired from 1984 to 1985. Constructed using the animation from a completely different Japanese anime, Voltron centered around a group of five teens, who use intergalactic lion robot/space ships to fight galactic evil. The five robots could even combine into a singular giant fighting robot when trouble got serious enough. Its popularity is referenced directly by Metamorpho, who reveals he used to watch the show when he was growing up. The show was enough of a success that an entire franchise was built from the initial series, which even continued all the way into last year with Netflix's long-running Voltron: Legendary Defender.
Now it appears the Terrifics are going to get their own chance to pilot a similar ship, taking it with them to confront the Terribles in the 1960s.