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akinoameP’andor is desperate to escape his containment suit, and he’s offered a million dollars to whomever can pop open his can. After numerous failures, the last to arrive is Kevin, who pulls out some taedenite from his toolbox. P’andor is surprised to discover that Kevin is an Osmosian, much less that he has taedenite, but Kevin easily manages to make a hole in the suit. Unfortunately, his badge starts picking up high levels of radiation, so he calls it quits. P’andor isn’t exactly happy and offers 100,000 to any of the last three candidates to bring Kevin back, and Kevin has to fight them to escape. None of these three are named, so I’ll have to use nicknames just to tell them apart. The first is a totally insane reject from the 80s, who carries around a buzzsaw and has the word “Buzz” printed on his T-shirt. Hmm, I think I’m going to name him “Aldrin.” Another is an apparent strongman from the circus, who fights with a giant hammer. I know this pun has already been used in canon, but I’m going to stick with a theme and call him “Armstrong.” And the last one is a mad scientist type with a laser scalpel or something. Him I’m going to call “Collins.” Kevin escapes them easily, but he leaves behind the taedenite, which is just what P’andor needs.
When Kevin gets back, Ben and Gwen have struck out on their quest to find the rest of the Andromeda Five, but he lets them know about P’andor. Ben’s not exactly happy when he hears that Kevin had gone looking for profit, much less that there was radiation involved. Kevin insists to them that they can’t free P’andor, though Gwen argues that it’s cruel to leave him in there to starve to death, if he can’t feed from inside. When they catch up with P’andor and his crew, they’ve stolen a drill to attach the taedenite to, and Gwen attempts to reason with him. But her powers have a bad reaction with the suit, and she’s sent flying into a wall. Kevin attacks in fury, but he’s also defeated, and Ben is pissed enough by his friends getting hurt that he goes Ultimate Humongousaur…and nearly causes a cave-in. P’andor and the others escape with the drill, leaving Ben holding up the ceiling while Kevin and Gwen argue, and Kevin finally goes off alone. But since the drill failed, P’andor realizes he really does need Kevin and sends Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins to attack him. Kevin’s run off the road and kidnapped, waking up in a canyon, where P’andor tosses him the taedenite. Kevin refuses to do anything “stupid,” but when the trio make a slight about Gwen, he attacks…only for P’andor to take the hit, letting the taedenite cut him free. Kevin stares in horror as P’andor flies free from his suit, but Ben and Gwen arrive, saying that they wanted to be sure Kevin didn’t do anything stupid.
As P’andor feeds from some electrical wires, Gwen tries to reason with him again, telling him that his form is dangerous to humans and they’ll get him offworld. But P’andor enjoys the energy Earth has to offer, and he attacks her. Jetray saves her and leaves her with a worried and relieved Kevin just before flying after P’andor, who’s heading toward a nuclear power plant. Ben tries to reason with him, posing as Bivalvan, but P’andor refuses to listen to an old friend, and Ben has to fight. Kevin and Gwen join him, having repaired P’andor’s suit, but it’s clear soon that with all the radiation, only the boys can handle the exposure for long, since Gwen’s body is still 100% human. Gwen provides support from the control room as Big Chill plays distraction long enough for Kevin to absorb the carbon rods of the reactor to drain P’andor’s power. To get P’andor in the suit, Ben goes Ultimate Cannonbolt, trapping P’andor, the suit, and Kevin, who manages to morph the suit around P’andor, then fuses the hands into cuffs.
Two Plumbers arrive to take P’andor away, but en route, they’re attacked by Aggregor’s ship. TheRed Shirts Plumbers are sucked out into space, and old Greg approaches the third of his escaped prisoners…
Parts of this episode are similar to the Alien Force season one episode “Kevin’s Big Score,” but it only serves to show how much Kevin’s changed since then. In both episodes, Kevin breaks from the team to try and resolve a mistake he’s made after one of the team fights him over it. Neither Ben nor Gwen buy his tough guy loner act and arrive to help him. And taedenite is involved. But here, it’s a matter of Kevin knowing he’s right, and he’s trying to fix his mistake and prove he’s right about the situation, no matter what Gwen says.
Kevin and Gwen have been an item since at the very least the end of “War of the Worlds,” though it’s clear that it’s kind of a complicated relationship. They disagree a lot, but ultimately, they still love each other. Usually, we see the relationship strain coming from Kevin doing something stupid, Gwen being mad at him for it, with the implication that Gwen is always right and Kevin’s always going to make her worry. But here, it’s a role reversal. Gwen’s wrong this time, and it’s her mistakes that scare the shit out of Kevin. He knows he made a mistake leaving the taedenite behind, but he insists to Gwen that there must be a reason P’andor was put into that suit. We see immediately that he’s not willing to endanger people by releasing a radioactive alien, no matter how much money is involved, giving him a definite sense of integrity. Though Ben argues with him about how he nearly endangered an entire city, Kevin insists that he didn’t open the suit, and Ben actually lays off him after pointing out that he’d left behind the taedenite. Ben doesn’t go and try to blame him, the way he would have back in Alien Force, proving that although he’s mad, he does believe in Kevin and he knows the most important thing is to find P’andor before he can get his suit open.
Gwen is so insistent on trying to help P’andor (to the point that even Mr. Best Friend of the Supreme Highbreed Ben Tennyson himself says that a Gwen-inspired idea of trying to make friends with P’andor is stupid) that she doesn’t consider the danger he poses. She thinks of P’andor as an escapee, thanks to their experiences with Bivalvan and Galapagus—Bivalvan was ultimately just desperate to fix his ship and go home, and Galapagus wanted Ben’s help. She forgets that these are dangerous aliens from another galaxy, and even though they were all captured by Aggregor, it doesn’t mean they’re all good guys. After she’s hurt by P’andor’s blast, she apologizes to Kevin and tells him it’s okay to say he told her so. But Kevin accepts her apology gracefully and points out that she never once held it over him when she was right, so the one time when he’s right and she’s wrong, he’s going to do the same. He’s placed in the positions she’s usually been in up until now: he’s the one who’s got to worry about her safety in battle, he’s got to come up with the solution to the problem, and he’s got to handle it all with maturity. It puts their relationship on much more even ground.
The major theme this episode is “fight smart, not hard.” Gwen has brought up in the past (namely “Be-Knighted”) that the boys have a tendency to think with their fists first, which often gets them in trouble. Pissing off Ben and Kevin leads to them making mistakes: Ultimate Humongousaur nearly causes a cave-in, and Kevin’s enraged attack accidentally frees P’andor from his suit. But just because Gwen is more coolheaded than them this time, it doesn’t mean she’s thinking clearly either. She’s too quick to trust P’andor, and it places her in danger several times. She insists on trying to stand by Kevin and Ben in battle, but Kevin tells her she has to get out of there for her own safety. By heading into the control room, she’s able to be their eyes and ears, a kind of Oracle for them. She’s got the benefit of seeing what they’re more likely to miss, and gives them an effective strategy. Similarly, Ben decides to try Ultimate Cannonbolt when he figures it’ll probably give him an edge that original flavor wouldn’t have. But the biggest example of fighting smart instead of hard comes from a new feature of Kevin’s powers. When he absorbs material, he’s able to morph it around something—something we’ve seen alluded to in shots from “All That Glitters” and “Plumbers’ Helpers.” When Ultimate Humongousaur is straining to hold up the collapsing cave ceiling, Kevin uses this ability to fill in the cracks in the stone, reattaching it. This is also how he repairs P’andor’s suit and manages to get it back on him, further restraining him by binding the arms together. Without this ability, they never would have been able to win.
We finally learn why P’andor (and by extension, Ben’s new scan of him, NRG), was locked in his box. His form is made of pure radioactive energy and dangerous to humans at the very least. Ben and Kevin were protected by the nature of their powers: Ben can transform into an alien that isn’t affected by the radiation, and Kevin can absorb a material that blocks it (such as the carbon rods). Gwen, however, was completely at risk, as she’s still in human form (despite her Anodyte powers—she is not an energy being in form). Other aliens we get to see are Ben’s scan of Bivalvan (Water Hazard, though Ben has not named him yet; he was specifically posing as Bivalvan to gain P’andor’s trust) and Ultimate Cannonbolt. Ultimate Cannonbolt, like Ultimate Big Chill, is mostly a recolor. The yellow on his body is replaced with silver, though it is spiky. We honestly don’t see much to his powers other than he’s strong enough to contain the struggling P’andor, Kevin, and the suit. We also see that like in “Fame,” the Ultimatrix can be a total bitch when it scans new alien forms. Again, Ben was locked out of the transformations because of the scan. I find it amusing that this didn’t happen when it came to the pacifist Galapagos.
Internal Ultimate Alien continuity keeps Jimmy Jones (“Fame”) a relatively important character to the team, even if he’s not shown again. He remains in contact with Ben and the others, sending them tips on the Andromeda Five whenever they appear. We also see that Kevin apparently kept some of the taedenite from the Alien Force episode “The Con of Rath,” where they’d taken what they needed to fix their ship’s engines. Apparently, part of what makes taedenite so valuable is that it’s the hardest mineral in the galaxy. Kevin absorbs it, but unlike in “Kevin’s Big Score,” he apparently has a much better handle on it. The absorption rate doesn’t go out of control the way it had a whole series ago, which may indicate that Kevin learned a lot more from his mutation than just to morph his limbs into weapons. However, on an artistic note, I have to say I’m not hot on the taedenite armor. It’s too smooth for his facial features, looking very odd. With other transformations, we see that he generally doesn’t look all that different, though it looks like he’s got deep shadows under his eyes (similar to how he’d looked as a kid in the original), but it’s not as jarring as the taedenite.
For all this episode really is a Kevin episode, I did like the handling of the team dynamic. Ben and Gwen immediately know that Kevin plans on correcting his mistake or that he’ll at the very least get in trouble, so they tail him when he heads off and gets himself kidnapped. Ben and Kevin fight together (albeit inadvertently, since Ben didn’t plan that far ahead) in the final fight against P’andor when all Gwen can do is give them advice, and they do well. And probably the best point was when Gwen was blasted by P’andor in midair. You see the complete horror on the boys’ faces as she starts to fall, and then Ben quickly turns Jetray, grabs her and without hesitation, leaves her with Kevin. It’s quiet and fast, but that means a lot more. It’s clear that Ben completely approves of the relationship between Gwen and Kevin and that he wholeheartedly trusts Kevin with her no matter what. No matter where you sit on the shipping debate—be it Gwen/Kevin, Ben/Gwen, Ben/Kevin, or the odd Gwen/Julie—it says everything about the way the three are and that level of trust among them.
“Too Hot to Handle” was written by Marty Isenberg. Yuri Lowenthal played “Aldrin,” Fred Tatasciore played “Armstrong,” and John DiMaggio played “Collins.”
When Kevin gets back, Ben and Gwen have struck out on their quest to find the rest of the Andromeda Five, but he lets them know about P’andor. Ben’s not exactly happy when he hears that Kevin had gone looking for profit, much less that there was radiation involved. Kevin insists to them that they can’t free P’andor, though Gwen argues that it’s cruel to leave him in there to starve to death, if he can’t feed from inside. When they catch up with P’andor and his crew, they’ve stolen a drill to attach the taedenite to, and Gwen attempts to reason with him. But her powers have a bad reaction with the suit, and she’s sent flying into a wall. Kevin attacks in fury, but he’s also defeated, and Ben is pissed enough by his friends getting hurt that he goes Ultimate Humongousaur…and nearly causes a cave-in. P’andor and the others escape with the drill, leaving Ben holding up the ceiling while Kevin and Gwen argue, and Kevin finally goes off alone. But since the drill failed, P’andor realizes he really does need Kevin and sends Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins to attack him. Kevin’s run off the road and kidnapped, waking up in a canyon, where P’andor tosses him the taedenite. Kevin refuses to do anything “stupid,” but when the trio make a slight about Gwen, he attacks…only for P’andor to take the hit, letting the taedenite cut him free. Kevin stares in horror as P’andor flies free from his suit, but Ben and Gwen arrive, saying that they wanted to be sure Kevin didn’t do anything stupid.
As P’andor feeds from some electrical wires, Gwen tries to reason with him again, telling him that his form is dangerous to humans and they’ll get him offworld. But P’andor enjoys the energy Earth has to offer, and he attacks her. Jetray saves her and leaves her with a worried and relieved Kevin just before flying after P’andor, who’s heading toward a nuclear power plant. Ben tries to reason with him, posing as Bivalvan, but P’andor refuses to listen to an old friend, and Ben has to fight. Kevin and Gwen join him, having repaired P’andor’s suit, but it’s clear soon that with all the radiation, only the boys can handle the exposure for long, since Gwen’s body is still 100% human. Gwen provides support from the control room as Big Chill plays distraction long enough for Kevin to absorb the carbon rods of the reactor to drain P’andor’s power. To get P’andor in the suit, Ben goes Ultimate Cannonbolt, trapping P’andor, the suit, and Kevin, who manages to morph the suit around P’andor, then fuses the hands into cuffs.
Two Plumbers arrive to take P’andor away, but en route, they’re attacked by Aggregor’s ship. The
Parts of this episode are similar to the Alien Force season one episode “Kevin’s Big Score,” but it only serves to show how much Kevin’s changed since then. In both episodes, Kevin breaks from the team to try and resolve a mistake he’s made after one of the team fights him over it. Neither Ben nor Gwen buy his tough guy loner act and arrive to help him. And taedenite is involved. But here, it’s a matter of Kevin knowing he’s right, and he’s trying to fix his mistake and prove he’s right about the situation, no matter what Gwen says.
Kevin and Gwen have been an item since at the very least the end of “War of the Worlds,” though it’s clear that it’s kind of a complicated relationship. They disagree a lot, but ultimately, they still love each other. Usually, we see the relationship strain coming from Kevin doing something stupid, Gwen being mad at him for it, with the implication that Gwen is always right and Kevin’s always going to make her worry. But here, it’s a role reversal. Gwen’s wrong this time, and it’s her mistakes that scare the shit out of Kevin. He knows he made a mistake leaving the taedenite behind, but he insists to Gwen that there must be a reason P’andor was put into that suit. We see immediately that he’s not willing to endanger people by releasing a radioactive alien, no matter how much money is involved, giving him a definite sense of integrity. Though Ben argues with him about how he nearly endangered an entire city, Kevin insists that he didn’t open the suit, and Ben actually lays off him after pointing out that he’d left behind the taedenite. Ben doesn’t go and try to blame him, the way he would have back in Alien Force, proving that although he’s mad, he does believe in Kevin and he knows the most important thing is to find P’andor before he can get his suit open.
Gwen is so insistent on trying to help P’andor (to the point that even Mr. Best Friend of the Supreme Highbreed Ben Tennyson himself says that a Gwen-inspired idea of trying to make friends with P’andor is stupid) that she doesn’t consider the danger he poses. She thinks of P’andor as an escapee, thanks to their experiences with Bivalvan and Galapagus—Bivalvan was ultimately just desperate to fix his ship and go home, and Galapagus wanted Ben’s help. She forgets that these are dangerous aliens from another galaxy, and even though they were all captured by Aggregor, it doesn’t mean they’re all good guys. After she’s hurt by P’andor’s blast, she apologizes to Kevin and tells him it’s okay to say he told her so. But Kevin accepts her apology gracefully and points out that she never once held it over him when she was right, so the one time when he’s right and she’s wrong, he’s going to do the same. He’s placed in the positions she’s usually been in up until now: he’s the one who’s got to worry about her safety in battle, he’s got to come up with the solution to the problem, and he’s got to handle it all with maturity. It puts their relationship on much more even ground.
The major theme this episode is “fight smart, not hard.” Gwen has brought up in the past (namely “Be-Knighted”) that the boys have a tendency to think with their fists first, which often gets them in trouble. Pissing off Ben and Kevin leads to them making mistakes: Ultimate Humongousaur nearly causes a cave-in, and Kevin’s enraged attack accidentally frees P’andor from his suit. But just because Gwen is more coolheaded than them this time, it doesn’t mean she’s thinking clearly either. She’s too quick to trust P’andor, and it places her in danger several times. She insists on trying to stand by Kevin and Ben in battle, but Kevin tells her she has to get out of there for her own safety. By heading into the control room, she’s able to be their eyes and ears, a kind of Oracle for them. She’s got the benefit of seeing what they’re more likely to miss, and gives them an effective strategy. Similarly, Ben decides to try Ultimate Cannonbolt when he figures it’ll probably give him an edge that original flavor wouldn’t have. But the biggest example of fighting smart instead of hard comes from a new feature of Kevin’s powers. When he absorbs material, he’s able to morph it around something—something we’ve seen alluded to in shots from “All That Glitters” and “Plumbers’ Helpers.” When Ultimate Humongousaur is straining to hold up the collapsing cave ceiling, Kevin uses this ability to fill in the cracks in the stone, reattaching it. This is also how he repairs P’andor’s suit and manages to get it back on him, further restraining him by binding the arms together. Without this ability, they never would have been able to win.
We finally learn why P’andor (and by extension, Ben’s new scan of him, NRG), was locked in his box. His form is made of pure radioactive energy and dangerous to humans at the very least. Ben and Kevin were protected by the nature of their powers: Ben can transform into an alien that isn’t affected by the radiation, and Kevin can absorb a material that blocks it (such as the carbon rods). Gwen, however, was completely at risk, as she’s still in human form (despite her Anodyte powers—she is not an energy being in form). Other aliens we get to see are Ben’s scan of Bivalvan (Water Hazard, though Ben has not named him yet; he was specifically posing as Bivalvan to gain P’andor’s trust) and Ultimate Cannonbolt. Ultimate Cannonbolt, like Ultimate Big Chill, is mostly a recolor. The yellow on his body is replaced with silver, though it is spiky. We honestly don’t see much to his powers other than he’s strong enough to contain the struggling P’andor, Kevin, and the suit. We also see that like in “Fame,” the Ultimatrix can be a total bitch when it scans new alien forms. Again, Ben was locked out of the transformations because of the scan. I find it amusing that this didn’t happen when it came to the pacifist Galapagos.
Internal Ultimate Alien continuity keeps Jimmy Jones (“Fame”) a relatively important character to the team, even if he’s not shown again. He remains in contact with Ben and the others, sending them tips on the Andromeda Five whenever they appear. We also see that Kevin apparently kept some of the taedenite from the Alien Force episode “The Con of Rath,” where they’d taken what they needed to fix their ship’s engines. Apparently, part of what makes taedenite so valuable is that it’s the hardest mineral in the galaxy. Kevin absorbs it, but unlike in “Kevin’s Big Score,” he apparently has a much better handle on it. The absorption rate doesn’t go out of control the way it had a whole series ago, which may indicate that Kevin learned a lot more from his mutation than just to morph his limbs into weapons. However, on an artistic note, I have to say I’m not hot on the taedenite armor. It’s too smooth for his facial features, looking very odd. With other transformations, we see that he generally doesn’t look all that different, though it looks like he’s got deep shadows under his eyes (similar to how he’d looked as a kid in the original), but it’s not as jarring as the taedenite.
For all this episode really is a Kevin episode, I did like the handling of the team dynamic. Ben and Gwen immediately know that Kevin plans on correcting his mistake or that he’ll at the very least get in trouble, so they tail him when he heads off and gets himself kidnapped. Ben and Kevin fight together (albeit inadvertently, since Ben didn’t plan that far ahead) in the final fight against P’andor when all Gwen can do is give them advice, and they do well. And probably the best point was when Gwen was blasted by P’andor in midair. You see the complete horror on the boys’ faces as she starts to fall, and then Ben quickly turns Jetray, grabs her and without hesitation, leaves her with Kevin. It’s quiet and fast, but that means a lot more. It’s clear that Ben completely approves of the relationship between Gwen and Kevin and that he wholeheartedly trusts Kevin with her no matter what. No matter where you sit on the shipping debate—be it Gwen/Kevin, Ben/Gwen, Ben/Kevin, or the odd Gwen/Julie—it says everything about the way the three are and that level of trust among them.
“Too Hot to Handle” was written by Marty Isenberg. Yuri Lowenthal played “Aldrin,” Fred Tatasciore played “Armstrong,” and John DiMaggio played “Collins.”
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-31 03:15 am (UTC)It was somewhat surprising to see Gwen not be the one who's always right in this, as it shows that even her pacifistic-like approach isn't always the correct course of action. She can learn from this and adapt just as much as Kevin did in this episode. Comparing her to Oracle's a nice touch, and it's a definite career path for her to consider someday-though, she'll be able to move around and whatnot.
Seeing Ben go Ultimate twice is awesome and hopefully we'll get to see more of what Ultimate Cannonbolt can do next time around as time restricted him from doing anything else. Though the hero showed off his own traits just as well-trusting Kevin, approving of how far he and Gwen have gone...him getting pissed off when Gwen and Kevin got in the hot seat wasn't completely new, but it was more than exciting to witness again.
Ben and co. are going to have to be on their toes when it comes to the last two hiding aliens, J.J. going around trying to discredit him and having a near-legion of fans who admire him everywhere he goes.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-31 03:28 am (UTC)Said Superman to Batman once: "You know, Bruce, you're not always right." I thought that very thing when Gwen had to apologize to Kevin.