in the episode, "tempus fugit", splinter and the turtles, who time-traveled into the future, were sent back to the present time, but the villain, viral, blasts splinter with a decompiler ray that scatters his bits all over the internet. while splinter wasn't seen much in the "back to the sewers" season, the focus of those episodes is the turtles' efforts to find splinter's data bits by traveling all over cyberspace. splinter is restored in the final episode and helps defeat the cyber shredder.