NINJAGO DRAGONS RISING SEASON 2 PART 1 SPOILERS!
So, after seeing Jay in part one of season 2, I began to wonder how Jay could become a villain, as many people have theorized (I love these theories so much, I would love to see him have a villain arc!).
Here's how I think it could happen with what we know about Jay now (sort of told in a story form....I'm a fanfic writer, so that's my default lol):
Jay was used to emptiness. Ever since he lost his memories, there was a void inside of him, a void created by not knowing. Not knowing who he was before the Merge. Not knowing his favorite color. Not knowing what he was like. Not knowing if anyone out there loved him. Not knowing if he even liked himself.
It was a numbing feeling, like staying still while the world moved around him, like being left behind as everyone moved ahead. He couldn't feel anything with that emptiness, that numbness in his heart. Perhaps feelings were something one gained from knowing who you were. Knowing where you came from. Knowing who loved you.
He pretended he could feel, that his world wasn't numb inside, and it worked to the people around him, but he could never trick himself.
Nothing in the Administration could fill that void. Nothing could make him feel much of anything. He tried to fill the void with paperwork, and then videogames, yet nothing could make him feel like there was something in him. That there was something about his life worth celebrating. Nothing made him feel like he was a person, someone with a history, someone people could like. Nothing made him feel real. Everyone at the Administration just treated him like another worker, which he guessed he was, and the emptiness grew.
The emptiness got bigger when he discovered that he could control lightning. He found that he had all that power, so much strength, yet no one to celebrate it with. Which made the power useless, didn't it? He couldn't use it in the Administration or else he could get terminated, he couldn't tell anyone, he couldn't do anything with it. It became just as useless as everything else about him, the him now and most likely the him from before.
The excitement he had felt soon disappeared, along with the worry. There was nothing he could do about it, and the numbness returned.
When he met that skeleton-person when the Administration was sent to find the machine known as Zane, Jay felt something change in him. The person had looked at him with confusion when he spoke up, and showed some care to how he felt about the job he was in. Sure, she was probably just trying to escape, but her words filled the emptiness, made him feel like a person, that there was something more to him that just a member of the Administration. And when he saw himself, dressed in something close to a ninja gi, in the yellow orbs reflection, he felt confusion and awe, the void filling once again.
It was in that moment that he wanted the void filled completely. He didn't want to live as an empty shell anymore. He wanted to be a person, someone more than an agent. And he hungered for it.
He was tired of being empty. He wanted to feel again. He wanted to be someone.
So, he escaped the Administration, leaving it as quickly as he could, searching, fighting to fill that void again, to feel more than numb, to find out who he could be. Could he be more than what he was? Was he meant to be someone incredible?
That was when Lord Ras found him. Ras promised Jay a life that he could be proud of, that would make Jay worth something, that his name would be known. That he could feel more than he had felt in years. That the void that Jay felt could be filled.
The emptiness in him screamed to be filled again, and he could already feel Ras' praises, his promises, filling it.
Jay didn't hesitate to put on the wolf mask that was handed to him.
And, with the resounding note of a gong, the emptiness was gone.
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"Generator"; 1569 words.
The Administrator has something to show Agent Walker.
...
Sure, he knew it wasn’t the first time he had been called to a one-on-one meeting with The Administrator, but it may as well have been. It wasn’t like he remembered any of their previous interactions; he was going in blind all the same.
When his fax machine first spat out the offending paper, he believed it had been sent to the wrong agent. But there was his name at the top, ‘Agent Walker’. There was the possibility that someone else shared his surname, but as far as he was aware he was the only agent without a first name.
The listed meeting room wasn’t her office, nor was it one of the Administration’s more conventional meeting rooms, complete with tables 30 people long but only one person wide and more fake potted plants than you could ever imagine. No, today he had been called down to the lowest floor of the Administration: the server room. The part of his brain that understood technology bristled at that; it would be much more effective to place the server room on a higher floor. Nonetheless, he wouldn’t say anything about that to The Administrator when he faced her - he would stick to his department, as all good employees did. The networks and communications department could handle that one.
The elevator down required two separate keycards: one was his standard agent ID, and the other digitally recognised him as a department manager. The former granted him permission to move between floors, yes, but only the latter allowed him access to the basement.
The ride down took 2 minutes and 43 seconds. He counted. No one else entered the elevator the entire journey.
When the elevator reached the basement and the doors slid open, The Administrator was standing on the other side of them. He hoped he would forget this meeting like the others, if just so he could become ignorant to the way he jumped at her sudden appearance.
“Agent Walker.”
He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Administrator, ma’am.”
She smiled. This did nothing to soothe his racing heart. “Come, let’s talk.” She beckoned and he followed her into the dark room.
It was large, but so were most rooms in the Administration. The realm reassignment department was tiny relative to the office rooms that the majority of their employees were stationed in. This room was about half the size of block 8E sub-block 185A A3/11√5. He could see three of the walls, dark stretches of concrete, sealing them in. The fourth that should’ve sat opposite to the elevator was obscured by rows upon rows upon rows of computer servers. A blue glow emanated from them and he grimaced at the thought of the voltage it would take to create a light that strong.
As he struggled to keep pace, The Administrator barely spared him a glance. “This may seem beyond your department, but trust me, your role will become clear soon.” She forewarned. She would never have him leave his department, he knew. That was the first rule of the Administration: Stay in your place. “What do you know of Lord Ras of the Wyldness?”
Lord Ras. He had heard that name. Some of the employees that hailed from Imperium had mentioned it in conversations coated with nothing short of hatred. The ‘outlander’ who had gained a position of such power in their otherwise closed society. That sort of talk only ever continued for a couple days before their new job turned their interest towards paperwork and mild office drama.
“Isn’t he the one trying to awaken ancient evils without a permit?”
The Administrator shot him a look, slow and venomous. “He is”, she nodded, “but that’s not important to us right now.” She walked towards him. He averted his gaze to the floor with stiffened shoulders but found that she only continued past him, down the alley of servers. She didn’t need to beckon him this time, he knew what he was meant to do. He followed.
There was little light between the pillars of computers. They were only between two rows of the many, but what he could see was endless. The towers sparked a theory in his mind about why she was mentioning the rogue lord. “We use a lot of power.” He started, testing the waters. The Administrator stopped walking and turned to face him, her silence commanding him to finish his speculation. “Lord Ras allied with Imperium by promising them power; do we need to ally with him too? To have enough power?”
The Administrator smiled and shook her head. Count two for smiles, and a contradiction - she must have expected him to guess wrong. “You’re right that we do plan to ally with him, but it is not out of need for power. We have all the power we could need.” She turned again and continued to weave her way through the computerised nest which was now composed of more than just server towers. Thick cables ran both overhead and underfoot, LEDs glowed from no visible circuitry, and the drone of electric humming and cooling fans only ever got louder the further they went.
Finally, they breached the sea of servers.
Now that he could see the wall they had been trekking towards all this time, he realised that it wasn’t made out of concrete the same as the other three walls. No, this one was glass. Despite this, nothing was visible from the other side. There was no depth at all, only pure light glowing an almost-white with its brightness (though when Walker inspected the way it lit up its surroundings, he realised it to be tinted pale blue).
In front of the glass wall, the cables reached their largest size before slipping underneath panels in the floor. The servers did not get within 10 metres of the wall. Instead, they stood guard in their rows, watching the tiny humans approach the divine light.
The Administrator hummed, snapping Walker’s attention back to her. She gestured towards the glass. “This is our power source. You can look, if you would like.”
He didn’t know if that was a good idea. Just looking at the glass from this distance was already beginning to hurt his eyes. Nonetheless, unsure if it was because The Administrator had told him to or because he chose to, he stepped forwards.
As he approached, he could feel the electricity in the air. It combed through his hair and bounced around a pit in his chest, dangerously close to the one that ached whenever he thought about the family he might’ve once had, before he forgot everything. He didn’t realise he was shaking with a strange sense of excitement until he was close enough to touch the glass and found himself unable to hold his hand still. He almost did touch the glass, but held back just before his fingers made contact. He still couldn’t see anything on the other side. Pale blue swallowed his vision.
He looked over his shoulder to The Administrator. She raised an eyebrow and jerked her head towards the glass again. He turned back. A bright light stared back at him.
He didn’t scream. This was unusual - Walker knew he was cowardly and anxious and that in any other scenario he would’ve jumped or fallen back or swung a punch - but something was different this time.
If anything, he stood closer than he did originally, watching the sparking lights with complete fascination. His breath fogged the glass.
“What is it?” He asked after what could’ve been anything between a second and a day, even though he couldn’t hear what he was saying over the pounding of his own heart.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The Administrator was at his side now. When had she moved? “It’s lightning.”
Like realising one’s hunger upon taking a bite of food, the word sparked an ache in the back of his head. “Lightning…” He knew what that was, of course, as well as where it came from. They must have captured it live from a storm. He had never seen a storm before, but he had heard anecdotes of them from newly recruited employees and field agents alike. He was jealous. Did all lightning look like this? Freckles and curls?
She watched as he pressed a hand to the glass. The lightning responded in kind, pressing the palm of its hand opposite to his. “We could let it go of course, but it would run away. Far from here.”
Far from here… No. They couldn’t let it free. Now that he had seen it, felt it, he knew he couldn’t bear to part with it. They had to keep it contained. He told The Administrator such.
She nodded and smiled again. “I knew you’d understand.”
He dropped his gaze to study the hand that would’ve held his if it could.
It was almost the same pale blue that shone through the rest of the glass, but somehow brighter. The similarity in colours made it hard to tell the form of the figure apart from its glow, but blue and yellow markings fanned out across its form like the branches of a pine tree. Lichtenberg figures, his mind supplied.
He looked up at its face, admiring its curls and running a hand through his own. He wondered if he’d at all resemble the figure before him if he looked in a mirror.
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The Administration. I have some things to say about this monstrosity.
DR spoilers under the cut:
LOL that Zane was the one who was the most knowledgeable about the Administration and proceeded to inform the audience about this new entity. Did not see that coming.
First clue something was off - when the portal that Lloyd and Arin jumped through disappeared, it turned into bubbles.
Then we get a first glimpse of this bureaucratic hell in the cubical maze. The multi-generation line for a permit made my blood pressure spike. Too close. 😭 You don’t know bureaucratic hell until you’ve tried getting permits for a project that turns into a multi month long process, massive fees and tons of back and forth and revisions and (pulls out hair) could have been handled internally between departments. (I’m looking at you City of LA). Not to mention driving into downtown LA is an equally soul crushing experience. But I digress. . .
Lloyd and Arin get their mini Matrix adventure “following the white rabbit” (except it is following the white ninja - haha get it?) which leads them to Zane (and be honest, we all thought it was going to be Jay).
Zane then gives us the low down on the Administration. Extreme power paired with gross incompetence. Managers sound like department heads, and the top dog is the Administrator (who we have yet to meet). And it used to be in the realm of madness before the merge. Interesting.
They somehow knew he was attempting to open a monastery portal (did it connect to the Administration?), teleported directly into the monastery and took Zane. Wow, they have powerful tech and surveillance.
The three ninja figure out that the Administration has immense power, yet all of their paperwork is pointless busywork and doesn’t really do anything. Ooofff if that’s not a dig on modern government and large corporations.
“It is impossible to tell the difference between mass incompetence and intentional malice.”
I predict that will be the theme of the Administration: it will be impossible to tell if they’re that stupid or that evil. Unfortunately, that’s how most governments and large corporations are. And they will have an important role in season two. Why go through all the effort to introduce this new land merged with a Ninjago if it doesn’t show up again? Will the top leader, the Administrator, be linked to Raz’s master?
Then we finally see Jay and it looks like he has figured out how to climb the ladder of the Administration’s strict hierarchy. Good for him. Get that executive suite! Get close to the Administrator so when your memories come back you can help your ninja team.
I am excited to see more of the Administration and Jay’s shenanigans next season. I hope he is a total dick to the cubical wagies.
What are your thoughts on the Administration? 
I’m looking forward to seeing how many references to The Office, Office Space, Dilbert, etc. Welcome to government work and corporate life. 😂😭
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