BEN 10: ALIEN FORCE -- DCAU fans take note!

[Christopher]

This week, writer Matt Wayne and director Butch Lukic ask, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" No, it's not about Ben and the gang traveling to Exo III and battling Ruk and Dr. Korby. It's about Gwen meeting her grandmother Verdona, who turns out to be an alien. Yep, like the other superpowered kids on this show, Gwen (and apparently Ben as well) is the product of the Plumbers' astonishingly prolific screwing around with aliens. Honestly, what is it with them? Does the Plumber manual require the practice of rishathra, the ritual practice of sex to seal an agreement as seen in The Ringworld Engineers? Or do humans just somehow make aliens insatiably horny? (Mars needs women!)

Anyway, turns out that Kevin was right -- Gwen's powers aren't magic, but the inborn abilities of her alien ancestors, a race of carefree energy beings. Once Verdona learns who Gwen and her friends are (after an initial battle which she engages in more for fun than self-defense), she wants to take Gwen away with her for training, a process that would take most of a human lifetime. When Gwen decides she'd rather stay with her friends and family, Verdona decides she's just not thinking straight and will see things more clearly once her human body is destroyed and her inner essence freed.

Naturally, the team objects to that, and the obligatory battle ensues, with Ben manifesting a new form, "Spider Monkey," which is basically a multi-limbed, multi-eyed blue simian with the ability to shoot webs from... I'm not sure I want to know, but it's not the wrists. But ultimately Gwen is able to talk Verdona down and convince her she has good reasons for wanting to stay human.

This was a good episode, a character-driven, emotional story rather than a tale of confronting evil. Verdona wasn't malevolent, but simply an alien being with an alien set of priorities. And we got a lot of insight into Gwen, even meeting her mother and father. (In a nice touch, Gwen's mother clearly loathed her mother-in-law Verdona, but that was never focused on directly, just included without comment as a bit of character texture.)

I'm still a little unclear on Ben's relationship to Verdona. I think she's his biological grandmother. But apparently Gwen is the only one of Verdona & Max's descendants to have the "spark" of magic; neither Gwen's father, Ben's father, nor Ben himself possesses it. Maybe it's a girl thing, like a recessive X chromosome trait. Still, I can't help but wonder if Ben's alien ancestry (assuming that is the case, and that his father and Gwen's aren't half-siblings) is a factor in his ability to use the Omnitrix. I hope the show addresses that at some point.

 

[Christopher]

This week is a standalone with a nice dual-meaning title, "The Gauntlet," written by Robert Hoegee and directed by Dan Riba. It opens with our heroes battling an opponent in a robotic armor of some sort, and when they destroy it, one of its gauntlets survives. It falls into the possession of local bully Cash and his sidekick JT (seen in at least one episode of the original series and in the live-action movie), and it takes over Cash and amplifies his aggression toward Ben, leading him to throw down a more figurative gauntlet and call Ben out for a fight.

It's a pretty nice commentary on bullying and how pathetic it is, with Cash ultimately being made to realize that his true strength is shown, not by giving in to the suit-amplified impulse to do violence to others, but by refusing to let that aggression control him. As someone who was constantly bullied as a child, I appreciate a story like this. Also, there's some good character work in the episode, and some almost Whedonesque moments of verbal humor.

However, it has a number of conceptual flaws. Mainly, Kevin's ability to absorb the attributes of the materials he touches has suddenly been retconned into something less like Marvel's Absorbing Man and more like the X-Men's Husk; when he turns to stone, it's shown to be merely a surface layer, as we see when the armor suit's weapons blast off chunks of it and expose his skin and clothes underneath. Which isn't consistent with the superstrength he gains from absorbing stone and metal, or with what we've seen about his transformations in other episodes.

Also, Ben apparently uses his abilities in public in his hometown, as does Gwen, but the consequences of this "outing" of their powers are not addressed. The parking lot where the climactic battle occurs is shown to be empty, as though the people evacuated the area, but it's hard to believe there wouldn't have been people hanging around on the outskirts or looking out of neighboring windows, recording the whole thing on their camera phones.

More generally, there are too many standalone episodes lately. The idea of the series is supposedly that the characters are tracking down other Plumber kids with superpowers and assembling a team, but we've only seen that touched on in two or three episodes so far.

 

[Dusty Ayres]

Anybody want to bet that Ben & Gwen will be the object of a 'ship by the producers?

EDIT: Oops, looks like the 'ship's already happened, but between Gwen & Kevin as mentioned here.

 

[Christopher]

Anybody want to bet that Ben & Gwen will be the object of a 'ship by the producers?

I'd bet heavily against that, because I doubt Cartoon Network would consider incest a suitable subject matter for a children's show. They're cousins, remember? First cousins.


Anyway, I just realized I forgot to comment on this week's new Omnitrix alien, which was perhaps the most novel one we've seen. Called Goop, it's kind of hard to describe. It's basically a large blob of green slime with a tiny flying saucer hovering over it. The saucer apparently contains Ben's consciousness and telekinetically/magnetically/somehow controls the slime blob to take on a desired form, the default being a slim humanoid. The blob can take any amount of punishment or be blown apart and then be reassembled as soon as the saucer gets close enough to regain control and draw it back into the mass. Obviously the way to defeat Goop is by striking at the flying saucer, but the armored thing Ben was battling here never thought of that.

 

[Autobot]

I've been enjoying the show, just saw the repeat of the one with Mike Morningstar, "All That Glitters". Keeping my interest.

 

[Autobot]

Just saw a GREAT episode of Ben 10! Where...

Spoiler: Episode "Max Out"

We finally find out what's happening with Grandpa Max! And... the ending... it can't be.... nooooo!

Great episode, thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope we get a followup to this episode's ending, I mean it can't be as final as we're led to believe.

 

[Christopher]

Been a few weeks since we had a new episode, and I was tempted to stop posting these reviews due to the lack of responses. But this episode, "Paradox" (written by Jim Krieg, directed by Butch Lukic), was quite well done. Like any story involving time travel, it had some logic problems one had to wink at, but overall it handled time travel in a novel, quirky, and imaginative way, and turned out not to be predictable. The script was also well-written, with some clever and offbeat dialogue, particularly from the character of Paradox, who was well-played by David McCallum. The animation was also very good this week, with some excellent character work. I liked the look of the opening black-and-white flashback sequence. Somehow, perhaps because of the lack of the show's distinct color palette, that sequence looked very Justice Leaguey to me. The general in charge of the experiment (credited as General Groff, played by Richard McGonagle) could practically have been JLU's General Eiling.

If the episode has a drawback, it's that it's too standalone; but I've complained about that before. I think I just have to accept that the show is not as strongly arc-driven as the producers' comments back at the NY Comic-Con led me to believe. Still, it's a little annoying to have Ben, Gwen, and Kevin dealing with all these standalone crises in their hometown when they're supposed to be searching the country and assembling their team of Plumber kids as Max instructed.

No new Omnitrix aliens this week, although we got brief appearances by, I think, four established ones -- Chromastone, Swampfire, Jetray, and Humongosaur. When Ben was trying to battle the anomaly-creature-thingy, I wondered why he didn't try using Big Chill, the form that can turn intangible, to avoid being touched by it. But perhaps being intangible wouldn't have protected him from the time field or whatever around the being. Still, it's odd that it didn't occur to him to try.

Actually, looking over the list, I see that nine new aliens have now been introduced, leaving only the mystery form Alien X (shown only in silhouette in the main titles). That alien's being saved for the season finale, which is three episodes from now.

 

[Christopher]

Looks like I let these reviews fall by the wayside a while back, since nobody seemed to be responding. So I skipped reviewing a couple of episodes, which were okay but nothing special. But CN showed the much-hyped season finale tonight, so I figured that was worthy of comment.

The episode (written by Matt Wayne and directed by Butch Lukic) was "X = Ben + 2" (formerly reported as "X Equals Ben Plus 2"), and featured the final Omnitrix alien, known as Alien X (as in Roman numeral ten and as in "unknown"). From all the hype and mystery, I was expecting something really big and dramatic, but what we got here was a little disappointing. The story tended toward the comedic; nominally the Earth was in imminent danger of destruction, but from a bunch of goofy froglike aliens and their Brooklyn-accented emperor, a threat that seemed like something more suited to the original, younger-skewing Ben 10 series.

And Ben's selection of Alien X had no particular significance to it. I was expecting him to, say, face a threat that none of his other selves could handle and then be left with no choice but to try this one. But there should've been some explanation of why he hadn't tried it before. After all, you'd think that once he got the upgrade to the Omnitrix, he would've wanted to test out all its forms and practice with them. But all we got was Ben saying "This seems like as good a time as any to try this one" with no explanation of why he never had before.

Alien X itself turns out to be this big humanoid form with stars inside, like a humanoid-shaped portal into a celestial void. It's a being of almost limitless power, but almost never uses that power; after an initial act that's essentially a miracle, Alien X becomes completely immobile and has to be carried around like a statue. Meanwhile, "inside" Alien X, Ben is in human form floating in a void, facing two masklike beings, one (Serena) representing love and compassion, the other (Bellicus) rage and aggression. They're two aspects of the alien, totally deadlocked and never agreeing to act. Ben gives them a third, a voice of reason whose task is to break their constant deadlocks -- and they don't want to let him go. But even with him around, he can barely get them to agree on anything. So the greatest power in the universe is all but useless. Eventually, Ben somehow manages to convince them to let him go -- we weren't actually shown how he did that -- and saves the day using his Swampfire form. What an anticlimax.

(Oh, and I didn't recognize his voice during the show, but it turns out that Bellicus is played by Kevin Conroy! I think this may be the first time I've heard him do voice work outside a Batman project.)

Now, I expected from what had been hinted before that Alien X would turn out to be very powerful but have a serious cost. But I wasn't expecting something like this. It's fairly imaginative, I suppose, but kind of underwhelming. I mean, where do you take the concept from here? Either he never uses Alien X again, or he's forced to and we end up with the same old scene of Ben trying to wheedle a consensus out of the two big green theater masks. It seems like a fairly limited concept.

Also, I have to wonder just how "the most powerful being in the universe" got encoded into the upgraded Omnitrix. But I guess that's one of the many mysteries that have yet to be revealed.

And that's another way in which this season finale disappointed. It had essentially zero arc relevance. It didn't answer any questions except "Who's the tenth alien?" It didn't bring previously established threads together and answer lingering questions. It was just another episode.

All told, this series hasn't lived up to its initial promise. It's well-made, and more enjoyable for someone of my age than the original show, but it hasn't turned out to have the kind of evolving storyline that was initially suggested, both by the pilot and by the panel I attended at the New York Comic-Con. Or rather, it should have an evolving storyline, it's set up a number of threads, but it's done little to advance them or tie them together. And that's frustrating. If they're supposed to have this all-important mission to unite all the Plumbers' kids into a team, then why did this episode begin with Ben, Gwen, and Kevin loafing around in Kevin's car, drinking smoothies and arguing about whether to go to the lake or the auto show? What's the point in giving the characters a mission if you're not going to show them pursuing it?

 

[Gojirob]

You're right on about Alien X. While not a bad ep all by its lonesome, it met neither the criteria of a season ender or the incredible hype - "This way to the Egress!!"

One dangling thread--and maybe it isn't a thread at all, just a background mention - that never seems to be addressed is Ben and Gwen being born so close together, time-wise- its at least the same day, if not the same time. It gets brought up a few times, but never seems more than trivia for die-hard fans.

The Verdona ep got me thinking about it - if Ben and Gwen are connected somehow by that same-day birth, and if Verdona thinks Ben has more the attitude she likes, could she use that to switch them around, so to speak? She's like Lxwana mixed with Q, so I hope we see her again.

The only thing I can say about this ep (the most overhyped since Avatar's 'Secret Of The Fire Nation', which was better than this in any event) is that maybe they're saving the amp-up for S2. One would hope, anyway.