Hearts in the right places: “Primus”
Jan. 18th, 2010 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameVilgax listens to the praises of his people, but he feels hollow. Suggesting that it’s because of the nagging little facts that Ben is still alive, in possession of the Omnitrix, and foiling his plans, Psyphon implies that Vilgax strike first. But Vilgax doesn’t want to act recklessly. Besides, Ghostfreak has given him just what he needs to gain control of the Omnitrix (“Ghost Town”). And it’s all with one little word: Primus.
Ben and the team are fighting a red Techadon (“The Gauntlet”) when suddenly the Omnitrix stops working. When he fails to get it to work again, the Omnitrix insists it must return to Primus. In a green flash of light, it teleports him, Gwen, and Kevin to a strange alien world with a treacherous jungle, large metallic insects, and a central volcano that oozes a strange green lava that looks oddly like the background of Ben’s transformation sequences. When the Omnitrix flies off Ben’s wrist and is taken by one of the metallic insects, the team follows it to a cave on the side of the volcano, where Vilgax is fighting Humongousaur. Humongousaur loses badly and demorphs, shocking the team when it turns out it’s Azmuth. He goes Rath for round two, and though he holds him off, the battle’s taken its toll on him. Ben is determined to try to help Azmuth, but Gwen and Kevin force him to hide while they defend Azmuth. Without the Omnitrix, Ben wouldn’t stand a chance in this battle. Vilgax soundly defeats them all, and Ben despairs as he watches the battle, particularly when Vilgax removes the Omnitrix from Azmuth’s unconscious body.
Fortunately, Vilgax has no clue what he’s doing, and when Azmuth refuses to tell him how to use the Omnitrix, he throws him across the cave, near Ben’s hiding place. While Vilgax’s attention is on the watch, Ben rushes over to his former mentor and tries to reassure him that everything will be okay. Azmuth tries to tell Ben to escape, but Vilgax is holding Kevin and Gwen hostage. Though Azmuth warns Ben that it’s hopeless, Ben insists that he’ll think of something and heads out, reminding him that he’s the hero. They only find themselves in chains and wearing neural inhibitors to block their powers, and Vilgax threatens to drop them into the Codon Stream—the green lava—if Ben doesn’t cooperate. When the coast is clear, Azmuth reveals himself and explains everything—that the planet is Primus and the Codon Stream is the genetic database for the Omnitrix. Vilgax, having overheard all this, appears and threatens to destroy Primus if Azmuth doesn’t tell him how to use the Omnitrix, but Ben insists that Azmuth has been covering for him the entire time. He says that he’s the only one who knows how to use it and that he’s willing to tell Vilgax so long as he spares his friends. Vilgax agrees on the condition that Ben dies after, and Ben agrees to the terms. Once freed, Ben does what is widely regarded (at least by the others) as the single stupidest thing in all of history: He activated the Omnitrix on Vilgax’s wrist.
Vilgax transforms into Goop, but he doesn’t have much time to enjoy the victory. Ben leaps up and grabs the artificial gravity generator and turns it off, forcing Vilgax-Goop to go splat on the ground. Reaching down, Ben then pulls the Omnitrix free, forcing Vilgax to transform back while he puts the watch back where it belongs on his own wrist. When Vilgax tries to attack in retaliation, Ben goes Cannonbolt to fight back, but they soon end up hanging precariously over the Codon Stream. Holding onto Cannonbolt’s leg, Vilgax insists that if he’s going down, he’s taking Ben with him, but Cannonbolt just kicks him off before pulling himself back up and demorphing. But like any episode of Power Rangers, the battle isn’t over yet. The Codon Stream’s bio-energy has a strange effect on Vilgax, making him grow to Godzilla size. And though they’re lacking in Megazords, Ben does have Way Big on his side. He effortlessly kicks Vilgax’s ass and, while Azmuth watches on with a smile, tosses him right out of the volcano and out of the atmosphere.
Azmuth decides that it’s probably time to hide Primus again and explains that the effects of the Codon Stream will wear off of Vilgax soon enough. When Ben asks if he’s made up for breaking the Omnitrix, Azmuth answers no. But when pressed, he admits that he will let Ben keep the Omnitrix, simply telling him, “You are welcome.”
Azmuth created the planet Primus (or at least, put the Codon Stream there) as a database for all the alien DNA collected for the Omnitrix. The Codon Stream runs freely throughout the planet, and the Omnitrix acts as a wireless receiver downloading the data. To collect the DNA samples, he also created the metal insects, Volaticus biopsis (“flying biopsy”—an accurate description), to fly around the galaxy and bring the DNA back to the Codon Stream. The Omnitrix has a built-in safeguard if Primus is ever threatened. It immediately teleports to the planet and looks for Azmuth, who is also alerted and beams down there. Unfortunately, Primus is also an instant supervillain lair, what with the easy access to a volcano full of a glowing mutagen, and this makes it a perfect location for Vilgax to set a trap, then get supersized when he falls in.
Let’s review, people: in the real world, falling into a lava pit full of mutagen would (a) drown you, (b) burn you, or (c) give you cancer. Vilgax becomes Megazord-sized. I love cartoon science so much more than real science.
In a lot of ways, this episode is similar to Secret of the Omnitrix. In the original, Ben had to face the hard truth that Azmuth might deactivate the watch for good, and he began to wonder if he was fighting because it was the right thing to do or because he liked being a hero. In the end, Gwen reminded him that he was the one who had been doing all that good, not the watch, and he proved himself to Azmuth by insisting on fighting a seemingly hopeless battle. Now, five years later, Ben’s lost the respect Azmuth had gained for him from that battle, but he’s put on the path of redemption when once again he refuses to just give in and save himself. He improvises his way through a hopeless situation and offers his own life in exchange for his friends’ and the planet. And of course the battle—Way Big vs. Vilgax—is a direct homage to Secret of the Omnitrix, with Azmuth unable to hold back a nostalgic smile as he watches Way Big send Vilgax flying through the atmosphere again.
Ben’s ego has clearly been an issue all season, but perhaps his problems extend into his psychoanalytic ego as well. After losing the Omnitrix, Ben says, “Without it, I’m just…” and leaves it hanging for his friends to finish. Again, compare this to Secret of the Omnitrix, where he’s desperate to find a way to keep the Omnitrix and, to cover up admitting he was afraid he’d lost Gwen, he said that he was powerless against Vilgax without the watch. Where in the original, Gwen re-affirmed Ben’s belief in himself by pointing out that it was his heart that made him a hero, in “Primus,” the others reinforce Ben’s lack of belief in himself. He’s a liability to them in battle. Gwen has to constantly defend him, and Kevin has to save him when he gets pulled into the Codon Stream by the love child of the Kraken and the trash chute monster from Star Wars. He can’t even travel through the jungle on his own—Kevin has to clear a path for him through the tangled vines, and he’s getting slimed on by the various critters, like a turtle-snail that apparently escaped Avatar: The Last Airbender. And Kevin, being Kevin, mocks Ben the whole time for it. Ben’s on the sidelines for every fight. When he wants to go in and defend Azmuth against Vilgax, Gwen and Kevin order him to hide because of the danger.
Contrast all of this to “Ben 10 Returns.” When he found Max’s holoviewer hinting to him that he needed to put on the Omnitrix again, Ben was incredibly reluctant. He admitted to Gwen that he used to love it because it made him feel special; now he had enough accomplishments as Ben Tennyson that he didn’t need the ego boost. There was the heavy implication that he no longer loved the Omnitrix because of what it was going to cost him. As Gwen said, “That’s it for normal.” When he did put it back on, it was with a heavy determination, like the old warrior who had sworn he would never again take up the sword and now had to go back on his word to himself. When the Omnitrix failed to work in his first battle, he improvised as a human to fight until the watch recalibrated. And even with the watch, he doubted himself and his power. He wasn’t sure he was strong enough to face the threat, and he thought he was lost without Max’s guidance. It’s a striking difference from his insistence throughout “Primus” of “Who’s the hero?”
Ben’s changed from doubting the alien and cherishing the human to doubting the human and cherishing the alien. He’s defining himself by the Omnitrix now, the way he had as a kid. He doesn’t seem to know who he is without it anymore. Consider the case of Ben and the Omnitrix in the trifold mind schema of psychoanalysis: id, superego, and ego. The aliens are the id, raw instinct. Rath is aggression or thanatos (the death instinct), Big Chill is propagation or eros (the life instinct, primarily sexual), and Ghostfreak is…well, Ghostfreak—and definitely a thanatos. Those three are all examples of what happens when Ben’s guiding intelligence doesn’t show through. This is the superego, and we’ve seen what happens when Ben is taken out of the equation. In “Vengeance of Vilgax,” the escaped aliens ran amok, purely aggressive because all they were was instinct. Both id and superego must be balanced by the ego, which in psychologically healthy individuals is on an equal footing with the superego and larger than the pre-developed id. According to Freud, the ego was a slave to the mechanisms of the id and superego, which seems to be the case with how Ben regards himself. However, other psychoanalysts saw the ego as more influential than Freud did. The ego had the important job of controlling the impulses of both the id and the superego, reality testing, regulating emotion, logically thinking, among others. In short, the ego became a voice of reason. We’ve seen Ben act in that role before, with his friends and of course with Bellicus and Serena. However, he’s certainly not acting like this now. He doesn’t seem to know who Ben Tennyson is anymore, lost in the id of the aliens and the (now occasional) superego instilled into him from the responsibility of the Omnitrix—namely through Max and Azmuth. But there is still hope. When Azmuth was injured fighting Vilgax, Ben immediately ran to help him, assuring him everything would be okay. He was more worried about the fact that Vilgax had the Omnitrix than the fact that he didn’t have it anymore. And when his friends were in danger, twice he offered to sacrifice himself to save them—even when Azmuth was pretty much willing to sacrifice all three of them to save the universe. Azmuth is beginning to trust him again as Ben proves he still remembers that a hero is nothing without a heart to guide him.
It’s interesting to note that when Ben pulled himself up from the Codon Stream pit, there was a flash of regret on his face, and Gwen and Kevin had to assure him it wasn’t his fault that Vilgax fell, that Vilgax would have killed him otherwise. It’s a brief moment, immediately overshadowed by Vilgax’s return, but it shows that Ben still has issues about killing. This may prove to be a problem in the finale, just as his hesitance to kill played a major role in the end of “War of the Worlds.” Furthermore, Ben is beginning to own up to his responsibility. He asks Azmuth if they’re okay again, seeking forgiveness and approval. While he doesn’t get it in full, Azmuth does begin to trust him again, enough to allow him to continue using the Omnitrix. It’s the first time since “Vengeance of Vilgax” that Ben really has shown any remorse or hint that he knows he was responsible for the accident, and it shows he may be well on his way to redeeming himself completely.
“Primus” was written by Charlotte Fullerton. Dee Bradley Baker reprised his role as Psyphon, and Yuri Lowenthal once again provides the voice of the Omnitrix. James Remar and Jeff Bennett also reprised their respective roles of Vilgax and Azmuth, as well as their Omnitrix forms.
Ben and the team are fighting a red Techadon (“The Gauntlet”) when suddenly the Omnitrix stops working. When he fails to get it to work again, the Omnitrix insists it must return to Primus. In a green flash of light, it teleports him, Gwen, and Kevin to a strange alien world with a treacherous jungle, large metallic insects, and a central volcano that oozes a strange green lava that looks oddly like the background of Ben’s transformation sequences. When the Omnitrix flies off Ben’s wrist and is taken by one of the metallic insects, the team follows it to a cave on the side of the volcano, where Vilgax is fighting Humongousaur. Humongousaur loses badly and demorphs, shocking the team when it turns out it’s Azmuth. He goes Rath for round two, and though he holds him off, the battle’s taken its toll on him. Ben is determined to try to help Azmuth, but Gwen and Kevin force him to hide while they defend Azmuth. Without the Omnitrix, Ben wouldn’t stand a chance in this battle. Vilgax soundly defeats them all, and Ben despairs as he watches the battle, particularly when Vilgax removes the Omnitrix from Azmuth’s unconscious body.
Fortunately, Vilgax has no clue what he’s doing, and when Azmuth refuses to tell him how to use the Omnitrix, he throws him across the cave, near Ben’s hiding place. While Vilgax’s attention is on the watch, Ben rushes over to his former mentor and tries to reassure him that everything will be okay. Azmuth tries to tell Ben to escape, but Vilgax is holding Kevin and Gwen hostage. Though Azmuth warns Ben that it’s hopeless, Ben insists that he’ll think of something and heads out, reminding him that he’s the hero. They only find themselves in chains and wearing neural inhibitors to block their powers, and Vilgax threatens to drop them into the Codon Stream—the green lava—if Ben doesn’t cooperate. When the coast is clear, Azmuth reveals himself and explains everything—that the planet is Primus and the Codon Stream is the genetic database for the Omnitrix. Vilgax, having overheard all this, appears and threatens to destroy Primus if Azmuth doesn’t tell him how to use the Omnitrix, but Ben insists that Azmuth has been covering for him the entire time. He says that he’s the only one who knows how to use it and that he’s willing to tell Vilgax so long as he spares his friends. Vilgax agrees on the condition that Ben dies after, and Ben agrees to the terms. Once freed, Ben does what is widely regarded (at least by the others) as the single stupidest thing in all of history: He activated the Omnitrix on Vilgax’s wrist.
Vilgax transforms into Goop, but he doesn’t have much time to enjoy the victory. Ben leaps up and grabs the artificial gravity generator and turns it off, forcing Vilgax-Goop to go splat on the ground. Reaching down, Ben then pulls the Omnitrix free, forcing Vilgax to transform back while he puts the watch back where it belongs on his own wrist. When Vilgax tries to attack in retaliation, Ben goes Cannonbolt to fight back, but they soon end up hanging precariously over the Codon Stream. Holding onto Cannonbolt’s leg, Vilgax insists that if he’s going down, he’s taking Ben with him, but Cannonbolt just kicks him off before pulling himself back up and demorphing. But like any episode of Power Rangers, the battle isn’t over yet. The Codon Stream’s bio-energy has a strange effect on Vilgax, making him grow to Godzilla size. And though they’re lacking in Megazords, Ben does have Way Big on his side. He effortlessly kicks Vilgax’s ass and, while Azmuth watches on with a smile, tosses him right out of the volcano and out of the atmosphere.
Azmuth decides that it’s probably time to hide Primus again and explains that the effects of the Codon Stream will wear off of Vilgax soon enough. When Ben asks if he’s made up for breaking the Omnitrix, Azmuth answers no. But when pressed, he admits that he will let Ben keep the Omnitrix, simply telling him, “You are welcome.”
Azmuth created the planet Primus (or at least, put the Codon Stream there) as a database for all the alien DNA collected for the Omnitrix. The Codon Stream runs freely throughout the planet, and the Omnitrix acts as a wireless receiver downloading the data. To collect the DNA samples, he also created the metal insects, Volaticus biopsis (“flying biopsy”—an accurate description), to fly around the galaxy and bring the DNA back to the Codon Stream. The Omnitrix has a built-in safeguard if Primus is ever threatened. It immediately teleports to the planet and looks for Azmuth, who is also alerted and beams down there. Unfortunately, Primus is also an instant supervillain lair, what with the easy access to a volcano full of a glowing mutagen, and this makes it a perfect location for Vilgax to set a trap, then get supersized when he falls in.
Let’s review, people: in the real world, falling into a lava pit full of mutagen would (a) drown you, (b) burn you, or (c) give you cancer. Vilgax becomes Megazord-sized. I love cartoon science so much more than real science.
In a lot of ways, this episode is similar to Secret of the Omnitrix. In the original, Ben had to face the hard truth that Azmuth might deactivate the watch for good, and he began to wonder if he was fighting because it was the right thing to do or because he liked being a hero. In the end, Gwen reminded him that he was the one who had been doing all that good, not the watch, and he proved himself to Azmuth by insisting on fighting a seemingly hopeless battle. Now, five years later, Ben’s lost the respect Azmuth had gained for him from that battle, but he’s put on the path of redemption when once again he refuses to just give in and save himself. He improvises his way through a hopeless situation and offers his own life in exchange for his friends’ and the planet. And of course the battle—Way Big vs. Vilgax—is a direct homage to Secret of the Omnitrix, with Azmuth unable to hold back a nostalgic smile as he watches Way Big send Vilgax flying through the atmosphere again.
Ben’s ego has clearly been an issue all season, but perhaps his problems extend into his psychoanalytic ego as well. After losing the Omnitrix, Ben says, “Without it, I’m just…” and leaves it hanging for his friends to finish. Again, compare this to Secret of the Omnitrix, where he’s desperate to find a way to keep the Omnitrix and, to cover up admitting he was afraid he’d lost Gwen, he said that he was powerless against Vilgax without the watch. Where in the original, Gwen re-affirmed Ben’s belief in himself by pointing out that it was his heart that made him a hero, in “Primus,” the others reinforce Ben’s lack of belief in himself. He’s a liability to them in battle. Gwen has to constantly defend him, and Kevin has to save him when he gets pulled into the Codon Stream by the love child of the Kraken and the trash chute monster from Star Wars. He can’t even travel through the jungle on his own—Kevin has to clear a path for him through the tangled vines, and he’s getting slimed on by the various critters, like a turtle-snail that apparently escaped Avatar: The Last Airbender. And Kevin, being Kevin, mocks Ben the whole time for it. Ben’s on the sidelines for every fight. When he wants to go in and defend Azmuth against Vilgax, Gwen and Kevin order him to hide because of the danger.
Contrast all of this to “Ben 10 Returns.” When he found Max’s holoviewer hinting to him that he needed to put on the Omnitrix again, Ben was incredibly reluctant. He admitted to Gwen that he used to love it because it made him feel special; now he had enough accomplishments as Ben Tennyson that he didn’t need the ego boost. There was the heavy implication that he no longer loved the Omnitrix because of what it was going to cost him. As Gwen said, “That’s it for normal.” When he did put it back on, it was with a heavy determination, like the old warrior who had sworn he would never again take up the sword and now had to go back on his word to himself. When the Omnitrix failed to work in his first battle, he improvised as a human to fight until the watch recalibrated. And even with the watch, he doubted himself and his power. He wasn’t sure he was strong enough to face the threat, and he thought he was lost without Max’s guidance. It’s a striking difference from his insistence throughout “Primus” of “Who’s the hero?”
Ben’s changed from doubting the alien and cherishing the human to doubting the human and cherishing the alien. He’s defining himself by the Omnitrix now, the way he had as a kid. He doesn’t seem to know who he is without it anymore. Consider the case of Ben and the Omnitrix in the trifold mind schema of psychoanalysis: id, superego, and ego. The aliens are the id, raw instinct. Rath is aggression or thanatos (the death instinct), Big Chill is propagation or eros (the life instinct, primarily sexual), and Ghostfreak is…well, Ghostfreak—and definitely a thanatos. Those three are all examples of what happens when Ben’s guiding intelligence doesn’t show through. This is the superego, and we’ve seen what happens when Ben is taken out of the equation. In “Vengeance of Vilgax,” the escaped aliens ran amok, purely aggressive because all they were was instinct. Both id and superego must be balanced by the ego, which in psychologically healthy individuals is on an equal footing with the superego and larger than the pre-developed id. According to Freud, the ego was a slave to the mechanisms of the id and superego, which seems to be the case with how Ben regards himself. However, other psychoanalysts saw the ego as more influential than Freud did. The ego had the important job of controlling the impulses of both the id and the superego, reality testing, regulating emotion, logically thinking, among others. In short, the ego became a voice of reason. We’ve seen Ben act in that role before, with his friends and of course with Bellicus and Serena. However, he’s certainly not acting like this now. He doesn’t seem to know who Ben Tennyson is anymore, lost in the id of the aliens and the (now occasional) superego instilled into him from the responsibility of the Omnitrix—namely through Max and Azmuth. But there is still hope. When Azmuth was injured fighting Vilgax, Ben immediately ran to help him, assuring him everything would be okay. He was more worried about the fact that Vilgax had the Omnitrix than the fact that he didn’t have it anymore. And when his friends were in danger, twice he offered to sacrifice himself to save them—even when Azmuth was pretty much willing to sacrifice all three of them to save the universe. Azmuth is beginning to trust him again as Ben proves he still remembers that a hero is nothing without a heart to guide him.
It’s interesting to note that when Ben pulled himself up from the Codon Stream pit, there was a flash of regret on his face, and Gwen and Kevin had to assure him it wasn’t his fault that Vilgax fell, that Vilgax would have killed him otherwise. It’s a brief moment, immediately overshadowed by Vilgax’s return, but it shows that Ben still has issues about killing. This may prove to be a problem in the finale, just as his hesitance to kill played a major role in the end of “War of the Worlds.” Furthermore, Ben is beginning to own up to his responsibility. He asks Azmuth if they’re okay again, seeking forgiveness and approval. While he doesn’t get it in full, Azmuth does begin to trust him again, enough to allow him to continue using the Omnitrix. It’s the first time since “Vengeance of Vilgax” that Ben really has shown any remorse or hint that he knows he was responsible for the accident, and it shows he may be well on his way to redeeming himself completely.
“Primus” was written by Charlotte Fullerton. Dee Bradley Baker reprised his role as Psyphon, and Yuri Lowenthal once again provides the voice of the Omnitrix. James Remar and Jeff Bennett also reprised their respective roles of Vilgax and Azmuth, as well as their Omnitrix forms.