Truth and consequences: “Fame”

[akinoame]

In the course of one weekend, Ben Tennyson’s life has changed forever. A video revealing his identity went viral over the internet, and every media outlet on the planet sank their teeth into it. Reacting in the way that the media typically reacts, they flipped the hell out and posed a question: Ben Tennyson—threat or menace?

It’s gotten to the point that Ben can’t even leave the house because reporters are camped out in front of his door. Finally deciding that he needs to get out and hide at Julie’s, Ben heads out and in lieu of a statement, he turns Humongousaur and scares them off. But while things are quieter at his girlfriend’s, he can’t escape the news: Will Harangue, a cable news analyst who honestly acts like the lovechild of J. Jonah Jameson and Bill O’Reilly, spins the story to insist that Ben is a threat to the planet, and Julie has to quickly turn off the TV before Ben loses his temper completely. She suggests they take his new car (from Alien Swarm) out for a ride to clear his head, but on the way, they run into Kevin and Gwen, who have tracked down the person who posted the video. And Ben really wants to take out his frustration on the guy.

Julie proves to be the only one with any sense, as she stays in Bellwood while the boys head off, with Gwen desperately trying to keep them from doing anything stupid. But when they finally reach the apartment of the “mastermind,” they find he’s nothing more sinister than a ten-year-old fanboy in homemade cosplay, Jimmy Jones. Jimmy ran his own website and collected photos of the aliens from all over the country, and he managed to piece together Ben’s identity from the Omnitrix on all of the aliens and on Ben’s wrist in a rather unflattering photo of him. He’d never intended to ruin Ben’s life; on the contrary, he worships Ben and wanted the rest of the world to give him the accolades he deserved. But one of the aliens he’s seen is one nobody recognizes, and Jimmy brings up the top secret video footage someone leaked to him—at a NASA facility in Orlando, the new alien is blasting water at security guards. Knowing they have to head to Florida immediately, Ben and Gwen suggest borrowing Ship, but Kevin insists on using what he calls the “new” Rustbucket.

This turns out to be a retired, standard-issue Plumber space-jet, capable of supersonic speeds in the atmosphere and FTL in space. While they make the flight in a few minutes, Gwen uses its computers to hack into NASA’s database to find out that the facility in Orlando is building a starship. But everything is top secret, and when they get too close, the Air Force attacks. Kevin uses the lasers to shoot apart a plane, but Ben flies down as Jeffrey Jetray to rescue the pilot. Unfortunately, the Air Force isn’t exactly happy, and they arrest Ben upon landing. But Gwen and Kevin get the general to spring him, noting that while the aliens were supposed to be a secret, all of Earth’s governments know of the Plumbers and recognize their authority in these matters. And NASA needs their help. For the past fifty years, they’ve been working on a starship prototype that runs on 15% the speed of light, Project Orion (not to be confused with the modern Orion spacecraft replacing the space shuttles; the show’s Orion Project is based on the historical Project Orion that was scrapped thanks to the Partial Test Ban Treaty in the ‘60s that prohibits detonating nukes anywhere that’s not underground. Please, NASA, use some originality in your names). Orion is propelled by the detonation of nuclear bombs once clear of the atmosphere, and until now, the mysterious alien intruder has only been stealing shielding and other less dangerous items. Now he’s after the engine.

Ben and the team go to confront the thief. But to Ben’s annoyance, the Ultimatrix isn’t responding, insisting that there’s an unknown DNA sample nearby. With Ben unable to morph, Gwen and Kevin try to fight off the thief, but his blasts of water take them out fast. Ben tries to fight in human form, but what works on paper doesn’t work in reality, and his attempt at looking like Indiana Jones ends more like George of the Jungle. The thief bats him aside and continues to try to take the engine, but the Ultimatrix finally responds, scanning the DNA before letting Ben access Chromastone. Chromastone too is easily defeated—thrown into an electrical grid and knocked out while the thief escapes. When Ben wakes up, the General informs the team that it’s just gotten a whole lot more dangerous—Ben realizes with horror that the engine was the nuke, and the thief has just set them up the bomb.

Gwen tracks the thief to a cave underneath a lake (sidenote from actual Floridian: I’m not sure if there are caves under the lakes of Orlando. Alligators, probably; caves, I’m not so sure). As they spy on him installing the bomb into his ship, Ben realizes that like Kevin, the thief was only using these parts to repair his ship. The thief answers in the affirmative, but he’s desperate to go home, and they’re two minutes from launch. They warn him that detonating the bomb would wipe out central Florida, kill millions of people, and as Kevin points out, destroy a lot of great theme parks. But the thief won’t relent, and he throws his energy torch at them, which Gwen has to maintain a forcefield on so it won’t hit her and Kevin. Ben goes Spidermonkey and promptly gets his butt kicked again, but the Ultimate form does the job. Once they have the thief tied up and the bomb deactivated, they start interrogations. The thief is Bivalvan, from the Andromeda Galaxy, who was one of five aliens kidnapped by someone named Aggregor. Bivalvan managed to escape, but he doesn’t know what happened to the others, and he was desperate to get back to his small planet and home galaxy. While they leave him hanging so they can return the engine to NASA, Ben promises that they’ll call the Plumbers to give him a ride home, already excited about the prospect of new aliens not in the Ultimatrix.

The next day is school, and Ben can’t bring himself to walk in the front door. Julie points out that there’s no reason he should be scared of school when he can stare down a nuke, but Ben insists that he’s afraid everybody hates him. Julie kisses his cheek and reminds him that there’s at least one person who doesn’t hate him, and it gives him the courage to go inside. Everybody’s eyes are on him as he makes his way through the hall, and he stops cold when JT and Cash cut off his path. But to his surprise, JT starts clapping, followed by the rest of the students. JT insists that they’re all grateful to Ben for everything he’s done to protect them, and Ben begins to feel like maybe he’s getting the kind of attention Jimmy had hoped he would.

In the cave in Orlando, Bivalvan is surprised to hear someone coming for him, thinking the Plumbers have arrived sooner than Ben said they would. But instead, it’s Aggregor, who either tortures or kills him offscreen while insisting that nobody escapes from him.

Right off the bat, Ultimate Alien goes for what I like to call the “Unlimited” tone—the opening theme is fast-paced with electric guitars, and you see all of the aliens Ben will have in the Ultimatrix, reminiscent of the change from Justice League to Justice League Unlimited. The plot itself is also much more fast-paced, starting out as the simple issue of Ben dealing with negative attention from the media, only to find himself up to his eyeballs in intergalactic troubles before he can even blink, before having to cope with the pressure at school—similar to the second season of W.I.T.C.H. in execution. Where Alien Force emphasized it’s maturity and darker tone as opposed to the original in the two-part premiere (Ben’s maturity, Gwen’s maturity, more cohesive storyline, and the sense that they were all alone and had to grow up fast), Ultimate Alien seems to be trying to prove that things are going to be more epic this time around. Ben’s identity is no longer a secret, and he actually spends most of the battles in the first episode getting beat to a pulp, proving he’s going to need the edge the Ultimate forms provide him, all the while trying to deal with a distrustful world.

It’s clear that the plot this time revolves around our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. Bivalvan and four other aliens were kidnapped from there by a dangerous foe named Aggregor, but Bivalvan didn’t know what happened to the other hostages. I’m not sure if Bivalvan is his name or his race, and I’m not going to make assumptions one way or the other after the “Magister” incident with Labrid back in season one (which came back and bit the team when Ghilil showed up in season two). In any case, as the Omnitrix and the Ultimatrix only had DNA samples from the Milky Way, these new aliens are a mystery to the Ultimatrix, and Ben can’t wait to start adding Andromeda samples.

The Ultimatrix was introduced in “The Final Battle,” and though Alien Swarm was written before season three and thus features the Alien Force Omnitrix, the series takes a “don’t worry about it” approach to continuity anyway. One of the things that nods Alien Swarm is the Ultimatrix’s DNA scan feature; in the movie, the Omnitrix wouldn’t respond because it was picking up the Hive’s DNA from afar, slowly acquiring it over the course of the movie. Ben was unable to transform into any of his aliens as long as the Hive was near because of the scan. The same thing happens with the Ultimatrix, though it’s unclear if Ben would be okay to morph if he got clear of the scan range. And something that I failed to note in my review of “The Final Battle” is that the Ultimatrix sounds more like Albedo than it sounds like Ben. The Omnitrix sounded exactly like Ben, though without much in the way of emotion. The Ultimatrix was completed by Albedo, and it has the smug tone that’s always present in his voice. While both Ben and Albedo sound the same, there is that little difference in tone that tells them apart, and so it is for the Ultimatrix too.

We also see that going ultimate and back is a process of stages, rather than a model of say, Digimon evolutions. Ultimate Spidermonkey reverts to Spidermonkey first before transforming back into Ben, which indicates this may be the rule—otherwise Ben would have demorphed all at once. If the Ultimatrix has a time-out feature like the Omnitrix originally had (and though Dwayne McDuffie said it had once in Alien Force too, episode evidence disagrees with that), the issue of the ultimate feature might be an interesting obstacle. In any event, I’m intrigued to see how it will play out.

However, Ben may be having more problems with the new watch than “The Final Battle” led us to believe. When Kevin suggests that Ben go ultimate to scare off the reporters, Ben responds with a worried face, “I want to scare them, not me.” Nothing more is brought up about it, but Ben notes that it’s “weird” when he transforms back from Ultimate Spidermonkey, and for a brief instant following the demorph, his eyes flash. I’m not going to jump to any specific conclusions about this and suggest it’s a problem with the watch or latent Anodyte powers or Venjix or a Goa’uld, but it was odd to see. For all we know, this is perfectly normal for the Ultimatrix, but I did feel it was noteworthy.

God, I hope it’s not a Goa’uld. If it’s Ba’al, they’re all in trouble.

Ultimate Spidermonkey decidedly looks more badass than the decaf variety. A gorilla with multiple eyes on his head and four spider-legs sticking out of his body, he’s far stronger physically than the original, while still quite agile. He spits web out of his mouth now, and there’s enough of it that it ties up Bivalvan easily.

We also see some things with Gwen and Kevin’s powers. In reference to Gwen, it’s more a matter of the art. Season two of Alien Force started playing with sparkle effects and lighting, making her powers seem more like energy than glass (and of course the movie had to go with pure energy presumably because of tech restraints). But now, they’re applying the sparkle features much more liberally, like Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Remastered—even the opening sequence shows the effects. This is not a criticism; it makes things look more impressive, actually. Gwen’s forcefield bubble they dove under the lake in was designed as actually transparent with pink energy “edges” that wouldn’t have appeared that way in season one of Alien Force. As for Kevin, he’s benefiting from both his original powers and his stint as a “monster” in season three. He can absorb matter again, but now he can shapeshift his arms into weapons (in this episode, a mace) while he’s absorbed the material. No wonder Paradox was so insistent in “Time Heals” that Kevin go through the accident. This is definitely a plus.

As a Floridian, I must criticize something the art department did. In the middle of central Florida, you can see what looks like tall hills or small mountains in the background. Florida is very flat, and the only mountains we really have are Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain, and Splash Mountain, so this stuck out for me.

Another thing that bugged me was that Chromastone got electrocuted, and it severely hurt Ben. One of Chromastone’s abilities is redirecting energy, and he had no problem at the power plant in “All That Glitters” back in season one of Alien Force. This was very strange, but it was good to see him again, especially when even Ben admitted he didn’t think he still had him in the playlist, as we haven’t seen him since “The Secret of Chromastone” and Ben hasn’t been able to transform into him since he got killed in “Vengeance of Vilgax.”

I’ve got to admit that it’s fitting at the end that JT and Cash applauded Ben. The bully duo have been in all three of the series premieres: tormenting Ben in “And Then There Were 10,” playing on a rival team (and losing to him specifically) in “Ben 10 Returns,” and finally putting it all to bed and praising him in “Fame.” In a way, it’s like watching Bulk and Skull from Power Rangers go from the bullies in “Day of the Dumpster” to the heroes of “Countdown to Destruction,” the process of which Linkara beautifully covers in his History of Power Rangers series. This is the first time we don’t see them as Ben’s enemies or rivals; they stopped being his bullies in “The Gauntlet,” when Ben realized he was too grown up to be afraid of them anymore, but now they’re his supporters. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “friends,” but I definitely get the feeling from here that they’re on much better terms with him from here on out. Also, we see that it’s JT who specifically confronts Ben, where it usually was always Cash who started things. I said back in “The Gauntlet” that the paradigm has changed for the Cash/JT friendship, with JT taking on a more dominant role, and here it’s clear. JT’s the one who used to be Ben’s friend before becoming his bully, and he’s the one who talked Cash down so he could fight off the Techadon armor. So you know in a way that it has to be JT who thanks Ben. That history between them and JT’s new sense of courage and leadership had to be acknowledged.

“Fame” was written by Dwayne McDuffie. All main characters were reprised from Alien Force: Yuri Lowenthal as Ben and the Ultimatrix, Ashley Johnson as Gwen, Greg Cipes as Kevin, and Dee Bradley Baker as just about every single one of Ben’s aliens. Dee Bradley Baker also played Bivalvan. Vyvan Pham returned to play Julie; and Scott Menville returned as JT, also playing Jimmy. John DiMaggio played the General, Aggregor, and J. Jonah Jameson Bill O’Reilly Will Harangue.