I noticed that I was pretty close to having seen all of the Cyberchase episodes through just catching random ones on TV and watching a few others here and there, so I watched the rest. Yeah, the show is still going on, and there's new episodes later this year. No, they haven't fixed Motherboard yet.
It's a pretty cool show; I initially started watching it because the Hacker, Buzz, and Delete are suspiciously similar to Dr. Robotnik, Scratch, and Grounder, respectively (though the roles of the tall and short henchmen seem swapped) and because I'm interested in a show that takes places in the Internet. I also saw a YouTube Poop by iteachvader comparing the two shows and comparing Robotnik and Hacker. And it's fun to hear Gilbert Gottfried as Digit, at least in the episodes from before he died.
Cyberchase has a very weird shift in focus from season 9 onward where it switches from a show about math concepts to a show about environmentalism, and I feel like it becomes a much weaker show, but I do still enjoy it and think it has its own charm. I think a show about the environment and science can be cool (for instance, I like what I've seen of Wild Kratts!) but it's really weird to specifically do it in a setting that takes place in the Internet?? I think that the worst offenders here are the episodes that emphasize pollution from traveling (Journey of a Thousand Food Miles, Sustainable By Design (though it's a minor focus here), Hacker's Birthday Bash) when pollution doesn't really make that much sense in a digital world setting. A season 1 episode, A Battle of Equals does actually play with the idea of pollution but it's reworked into being digital static that's a waste product of something and causes interference; it would have been nice to see more stuff like that, though maybe the messages the show are trying to send to kids about taking care of Earth might have been diluted a bit in the process. Though the show does have "Cyberchase For Real" segments specifically to show kids how the stuff they just saw applies to real life. This is also a series where portals are very prominently featured; A Change of Art features Hacker making a network of portals for fast travel and the tech they need for clean transportation clearly exists. That could be explained away, like portals requiring a lot of energy or some sort of resource they have to conserve. But part of me wants to see a cool utopia where they solve problems somehow using the tools they have available, like the static cleanup machines in A Battle of Equals.
Though, there are environmentalism and science lessons that don't feel like a mismatch with the setting; Creech's Creature Quandary is about habitat fragmentation and you can do that just fine with fantasy animals. Invasion of the Funky Flower taught about invasive species and that works fine too. Same with light/noise pollution, citizen science, water consumption, and other topics. It still feels kind weird to use this show specifically for it but I do think it works okay.
I have no idea why the theming changed so much in season 9. I guess it does make sense that at some point you kind of run out of basic math topics to explain to kids, and need to try something else? It would be really funny to have the characters get into more advanced math and have to save the day with eigenvectors or derivatives but that's just going to confuse the kids.
I felt like the earlier seasons did a good job at developing out characters and settings that I thought were bold and interesting, and a lot of the scenarios wouldn't feel out of place as simple puzzles in something that wasn't specifically aiming to teach math. For instance, The Emperor Has Snow Clothes has the characters trying to extrapolate where a storm is going to go, and A Change of Art and Spellbound both involve characters trying to work around their communicator devices malfunctioning. There's several season 5 episodes about trying to create inventions, and troubleshoot and make prototypes. The Wedding Scammer is pretty directly the characters getting presented with a series of puzzles to solve. All of this is fun and interesting to me in itself and the educational aspects don't get in the way of making something entertaining.
But there's also fun stuff that is specifically built on math concepts and makes it really prominent, like The Flying Parallinis shows off characters that are parallelograms and adds story context around them being circus performers who make use of their shape, and A World Without Zero turns the concept of zero into a character, with funny results when he decides to stop providing the concept of zero.
For specific interesting characters, Slider stuck out because he was played up to be really cool, and the story arc relating to him trying to find his father was interesting and had some aspects that felt meaningful, with some self-sacrifices. Also, his dad is voice acted by Tony Hawk?? Might be a good idea to try and rewatch some of that arc actually in order, because the show actually has continuity and I got the episodes in a jumbled up order from PBS Kids showing them randomly, (though the story is light enough that it's probably fine). Wicked is a secondary antagonist who has a lot of interactions with Hacker and is presented as a scarier and more competent villain. It would be interesting to see them actually manage to team up without getting into conflicts with each other and be a really serious threat together, though she hasn't really been a major part of the more recent episodes.
I think that the cool settings and ideas (and the way the show managed to connect it to math without making the educational aspects overbearing) were the show's biggest strength. The show also does a good job at having a lot of action and adventure without being violent; the antagonists are defeated through outsmarting them and solving puzzles, rather than physical confrontation, and a lot of the problems involve Hacker winning to some degree and then people having to figure out how to clean up and fix things. This is something that even seasons 9+ do a good job at (like Composting in the Clutch involves having to fix Hacker making a big mess of a baseball stadium, and then stopping his plot actually ends up being a side story in the episode because the main focus is on fixing the stadium.)
I am interested to see what the upcoming episodes are like. I would like to see more bold characters and locations, and I hope to see more of Wicked. And I hope they eventually cure Motherboard. I don't think the story would have to stop right there, and I don't think that her virus even really has much of an effect on episodes nowadays, so they might as well tie up that part of the plot that's just been hanging for ages with nothing done with it.