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akinoameAggregor reaches the Door to Anywhere, a magical portal to literally anywhere in the universe, so long as you speak the location’s True Name. Saying what sounds like “Yahwahtoxic,” he manages to open the portal to a dimension filled with mana that nearly repels Gwen. But he escapes before the others can follow, and the runes on the Door fade. Ben proves he apparently has a photographic memory by writing them down perfectly and shrugging off Gwen and Kevin’s shock, but Gwen doesn’t know how to pronounce the runes, having been self-taught in magic and its language. Anticipating all of Gwen’s counterarguments, Ben convinces her to go look for someone she needs to help. Unfortunately, none of them expected it to be Charmcaster. Charmcaster reacts the usual way, but when she hears that Gwen needs her help to get into a dimension filled with mana, well, she agrees. The girls return to the Door, where Ben’s guessed Kevin’s 20 Questions in two (since Kevin only ever picks cars, ships, or weapons), and Charmcaster confirms that the runes are the Gate address to Leger Domain—the natives’ name for Yahwahtoxic. They pass through, and Gwen immediately notices that her powers are stronger and sparkling, and Charmcaster explains that all the magic in the universe passes through there. It’s ruled by a tyrant named Adwatia (whose name was used as an oath by Galapagus in Escape From Aggregor), who is the most powerful mystic ever (despite Greg saying that Aldabrans are immune to the effects of mana, but hey—guano loco Osmosian). He possesses the Alpha Rune, the source of all magic and its True Name, and the others realize that it must be a Map fragment. And despite everything, Charmcaster is willing to help them—since she wants revenge. She’d originally come from Leger Domain, and Adwatia enslaved her people and killed her father.
After managing to avoid some golems and some cyclopean pterosaurs known as Scrutins who act as Adwatia’s eyes and ears, they reach a broken bridge in the middle of Mordor. It’s over a pit that produces auditory hallucinations, and Charmcaster hears her father, Spellbinder, calling her to join him, bringing her to tears as she nearly jumps (Excuse me while I remember Galatea’s goodbye to Dr. Hamilton in “Panic in the Sky,” Trakeena at Scorpius’s deathbed in “Heir to the Throne” and freakin’ Azula with her hallucinations of her mother in “Sozin’s Comet”). Gwen sees through Adwatia’s BS and grabs Charmcaster before she can fall, reminding her that her father wouldn’t want her to kill herself. Snapping back to reality, Charmcaster explains that the area is a mystic sinkhole, and for all Gwen’s powerful, she’s not enough on her own to be able to forge a bridge to the other side. Ben reminds the girls that together, they do have the power, and Gwen and Charmcaster join hands and create a bridge, ignoring the disparaging voices and sense of despair trying to bring them down. Once everyone crosses, the girls hug each other, caught up in the moment, and the femme-slash fans go wild. They realize how awkward it is and let go, with Gwen pointing out that Charmcaster still wants to kill her, but Charmcaster admits that now, she’d only go for “badly hurt.”
Making it to Adwatia’s Citadel, they fight off his watchdog, apparently named Powerfang (I had a hard time with the names this episode, I’m sorry). Once they throw it off a cliff, Adwatia shows up and attacks them. Pissed, Charmcaster attacks him, and he recognizes her as Spellbinder’s daughter. Knowing she’s not strong enough on her own to defeat him, Charmcaster looks to Gwen, and they join hands again and blast him. Unfortunately, it’s not enough, and all four of them are encased in mystical pink amber, but Humongousaur manages to go Ultimate and break free. Proving that in a battle between Voldemort and a nuke, the nuke would win, Ultimate Humongousaur shoots him, but in the chaos, someone managed to snatch the Alpha Rune—Aggregor, of course. Greg reveals the true nature of the Map fragment and thanks Ben for helping him, and Ben is pissed that once again, Greg used him to do the hard work while he took the Map. I’ve got to say, Aggregor’s got style that way.
Without the Alpha Rune to hold it together, Leger Domain is falling apart. Charmcaster wants to stay and stop Adwatia while he’s weak, but Ben convinces her to open the portal to the Door to Anywhere, promising that once they defeat Aggregor and save the universe, they’ll return to free her people. Speaking Earth’s True Name (which is apparently “Etrea,” but again, I had a hard time with the names), Charmcaster gets the portal open…but watches as it closes, letting her new allies escape while she stays. They realize that the runes Ben wrote down are gone, indicating that they can’t return to Leger Domain. Gwen realizes that Charmcaster knew this and planned it from the start, intending to stay for the one chance she had to free her people. Ben promises Gwen that they’ll return someday to help Charmcaster, but right now, they’ve only got one last Map fragment and one last chance to save the universe.
We see more of how magic works in this universe, thanks to Charmcaster’s explanations through Leger Domain. Words are very powerful in magic, explaining why Charmcaster’s spells usually need a long incantation that typically leaves her open to attack while Gwen’s Anodyte abilities are direct mana-manipulation and don’t require spellwork. Names are especially important (if you’ve ever watched Doctor Who: “The Shakespeare Code” or read Madeliene L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, you certainly know the power of a name), and True Names are used to invoke power. To access the Door to Anywhere, you must say the True Name of wherever you’re going, and not its common name like Leger Domain or Earth. Charmcaster also reveals that she keeps her True Name a secret—neither Charmcaster nor Caroline (used as an alias in “In Charm’s Way”) is her True Name, which seems to need to be protected.
Leger Domain looks very much like a pink version of the Null Void, and I once again get flashbacks to the dimension where Hawkgirl kicked Cthulhu’s ass (Justice League: “The Terror Beyond”). All mana in the universe flows through there, and because Gwen is an Anodyte, her powers are exponentially increased. When Gwen and Charmcaster join forces, Gwen basically acts as a battery while Charmcaster provides the skill and focus. The physics of the place are screwy, such as the sky and the earth not being parallel, and the whole place is full of ruins. The inhabitants include Charmcaster’s people, the golems (some of whom Charmcaster freed, and thus are loyal to her), Scrutins, Powerfang, and the biggest dick in the mystical dimension, Adwatia. Adwatia believes that all living beings “steal” mana from him and he enslaved all of the beings in Leger Domain. The golems are muscle, the Scrutins are surveillance, and Powerfang is a watchdog for the Citadel. The first and the last are outmuscled by the team, but the Scrutins require a little power from Charmcaster, who puts a stationary disillusionment spell on the quartet so they won’t be seen.
We also finally get some rounding out of Charmcaster’s character. Over the past three series, she’s provided tantalizing hints behind her characterization, but never anything meaty to work with. For the episode that finally gives her backstory and true motivation, I’m glad to say that we got Matt Wayne. He wrote some of the best character studies in Alien Force (“Kevin’s Big Score,” “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and “Inside Man,” to name a few), and he proved he had an excellent handle on Gwen. Gwen is the second main focus in this episode, as she comes to trust and even care about Charmcaster, the star of the episode. The boys are mostly in the background, with Kevin offering a few jokes here and there and Ben mostly back at his season 1/2 Alien Force personality (especially his personality in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”). Charmcaster’s character has only really been explored in terms of her obsession and conflict with Gwen, but Wayne turns the tables here, showing Gwen’s character in terms of how she begins to care about Charmcaster while letting Charmcaster stand on her own.
Charmcaster’s backstory is that she was born in Leger Domain, her people enslaved to the will of Adwatia, their crackpot would-be god. Charmcaster’s father, Spellbinder, was apparently the only person who ever gave Adwatia real trouble; when Charmcaster manages to hurt him, Adwatia realizes by her power that she must be Spellbinder’s daughter, which indicates what kind of power her father must have had. Sadly, Spellbinder was killed trying to help Hex and Charmcaster escape Leger Domain. Charmcaster was apparently old enough to remember the incident clearly and to vow to herself that she’d one day return and free her people.
The backstory is told to us straight, without the aid of any flashbacks (contrast, say, Kevin’s backstory in “Vendetta”). Normally, this would be suspicious, but Charmcaster’s character moments throughout the episode indicate she’s telling the truth this time. She starts crying and nearly steps off the bridge of suicide and has a hard time pulling herself together while Gwen tries to talk sense into her. That’s not something you can fake. And no matter how much Gwen expects her to betray them, she never does. She stays behind in Leger Domain after ensuring that the others escape, and with the Alpha Rune gone and the dimension falling apart, you know it can’t be a bid for power; she was desperate. And of course, Adwatia confirms the whole thing by all but bragging that he’d killed Spellbinder. Like a girls’ night out version of “Alone Together,” this episode pretty much puts to rest the long-standing enmity between Charmcaster and Gwen.
The scene that really gives this away is the scene that made the femme-slash fans squee: the hug. Caught in the moment, Charmcaster and Gwen hug unexpectedly, then pull apart in embarrassment, though Charmcaster admits that she no longer feels as hostile toward Gwen. Gwen is no longer her nemesis, and her request for help at the very end against Adwatia indicates that they’re becoming something like friends. I’m not entirely sure if this was intentional or not, but their antagonistic relationship both begins and ends with a hug. In the original series episode “Tough Luck” (yes, I saw this episode too—I’m not completely adverse to the original series), Charmcaster tricked Gwen into trusting her by telling her about how abusive Hex was and how she didn’t want to be forced into being evil. To steal the Keystone of Bezel Gwen had at the time, Charmcaster hugged her. When Gwen realized that the Keystone was missing, she knew that Charmcaster had betrayed her, and from then on, they were enemies. It’s fitting, then, that when Charmcaster tells Gwen that she no longer wants to kill her, that it comes right after the two girls hug. Charmcaster’s true intentions have been revealed, and they’ve had to bury the hatchet to make it this far. While it’s hard to say just how far Charmcaster’s changed by the end, you know that she’s more than changed for the better—she’s been changed for good.
In my last review (for “Deep”), I said that the theme this season seems to be building on is “team.” I think that I was a little too limited in that, and now, I think it’s probably love. I know, it sounds corny, but love is definitely at the heart of everything—the romantic love of Kevin and Gwen and Ben and Julie, the familial love of the Tennysons, the friendship between Ben and Kevin, and just about everything that falls under the domain of “love.” And love is what motivates Charmcaster here. Her love for her father and her people motivates her to stop hating Gwen and to work with her and the others, and to stay behind while the world falls apart around her. We can also reason that it’s the same love that motivates her to stay with her abusive uncle and to do every dirty trick imaginable to gain power. To quote Queen and David Bowie in “Under Pressure”:
’Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for the people on the
Edge of the light and love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is ourselves under pressure.
This need to care about those “on the edge of the light” like Charmcaster is what keeps this very odd team together, making Gwen and Charmcaster form a respect and friendship mirroring Ben and Kevin’s early on in Alien Force, and making Ben vow to help Charmcaster one day. Charmcaster couldn’t do it alone any more than Ben, Gwen, or Kevin can defeat Aggregor alone, and that might be more at the heart of the theme than my original thoughts on the matter.
Something to note: Charmcaster seems to use daisies a bit in her magic. She used a couple of razor-sharp ones to free herself from Adwatia’s trap, and when she and Gwen were about to fall on a bunch of stone spires, she created a bed of flowers to safely break their fall. Other power notes come from Kevin, who generated spikes on his body when he absorbed Powerfang’s teeth, showing a bit more creativity from him. Also, I find it very interesting that Ben was immediately set on helping and trusting Charmcaster the moment he heard her story. It seems to be his saving people thing coming into effect again, but it’s an odd contrast to his personality now. The Ben of Alien Force believed in second chances and never once let himself think that someone couldn’t be saved—this is the Ben we see here. But in Ultimate Alien, he’s become more jaded and takes his enemies’ actions more personally. Aggregor especially presses his buttons in a way that no villain has before. I wonder if Ben is taking Kevin’s very unusual situation of changing sides (since he’d been insane when he was evil) as the rule instead of the exception, but that contrast with his regard for Aggregor is too striking. I’m interested to see how that develops with him. And I hope that this time, we actually get to see the liberation of another dimension this time instead of them just showing up in the middle of the season finale (I’m looking at you, “Voided”).
“Where the Magic Happens” was written by Matt Wayne. Adwatia and the hallucination voice of Spellbinder were voiced by John DiMaggio.
After managing to avoid some golems and some cyclopean pterosaurs known as Scrutins who act as Adwatia’s eyes and ears, they reach a broken bridge in the middle of Mordor. It’s over a pit that produces auditory hallucinations, and Charmcaster hears her father, Spellbinder, calling her to join him, bringing her to tears as she nearly jumps (Excuse me while I remember Galatea’s goodbye to Dr. Hamilton in “Panic in the Sky,” Trakeena at Scorpius’s deathbed in “Heir to the Throne” and freakin’ Azula with her hallucinations of her mother in “Sozin’s Comet”). Gwen sees through Adwatia’s BS and grabs Charmcaster before she can fall, reminding her that her father wouldn’t want her to kill herself. Snapping back to reality, Charmcaster explains that the area is a mystic sinkhole, and for all Gwen’s powerful, she’s not enough on her own to be able to forge a bridge to the other side. Ben reminds the girls that together, they do have the power, and Gwen and Charmcaster join hands and create a bridge, ignoring the disparaging voices and sense of despair trying to bring them down. Once everyone crosses, the girls hug each other, caught up in the moment, and the femme-slash fans go wild. They realize how awkward it is and let go, with Gwen pointing out that Charmcaster still wants to kill her, but Charmcaster admits that now, she’d only go for “badly hurt.”
Making it to Adwatia’s Citadel, they fight off his watchdog, apparently named Powerfang (I had a hard time with the names this episode, I’m sorry). Once they throw it off a cliff, Adwatia shows up and attacks them. Pissed, Charmcaster attacks him, and he recognizes her as Spellbinder’s daughter. Knowing she’s not strong enough on her own to defeat him, Charmcaster looks to Gwen, and they join hands again and blast him. Unfortunately, it’s not enough, and all four of them are encased in mystical pink amber, but Humongousaur manages to go Ultimate and break free. Proving that in a battle between Voldemort and a nuke, the nuke would win, Ultimate Humongousaur shoots him, but in the chaos, someone managed to snatch the Alpha Rune—Aggregor, of course. Greg reveals the true nature of the Map fragment and thanks Ben for helping him, and Ben is pissed that once again, Greg used him to do the hard work while he took the Map. I’ve got to say, Aggregor’s got style that way.
Without the Alpha Rune to hold it together, Leger Domain is falling apart. Charmcaster wants to stay and stop Adwatia while he’s weak, but Ben convinces her to open the portal to the Door to Anywhere, promising that once they defeat Aggregor and save the universe, they’ll return to free her people. Speaking Earth’s True Name (which is apparently “Etrea,” but again, I had a hard time with the names), Charmcaster gets the portal open…but watches as it closes, letting her new allies escape while she stays. They realize that the runes Ben wrote down are gone, indicating that they can’t return to Leger Domain. Gwen realizes that Charmcaster knew this and planned it from the start, intending to stay for the one chance she had to free her people. Ben promises Gwen that they’ll return someday to help Charmcaster, but right now, they’ve only got one last Map fragment and one last chance to save the universe.
We see more of how magic works in this universe, thanks to Charmcaster’s explanations through Leger Domain. Words are very powerful in magic, explaining why Charmcaster’s spells usually need a long incantation that typically leaves her open to attack while Gwen’s Anodyte abilities are direct mana-manipulation and don’t require spellwork. Names are especially important (if you’ve ever watched Doctor Who: “The Shakespeare Code” or read Madeliene L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, you certainly know the power of a name), and True Names are used to invoke power. To access the Door to Anywhere, you must say the True Name of wherever you’re going, and not its common name like Leger Domain or Earth. Charmcaster also reveals that she keeps her True Name a secret—neither Charmcaster nor Caroline (used as an alias in “In Charm’s Way”) is her True Name, which seems to need to be protected.
Leger Domain looks very much like a pink version of the Null Void, and I once again get flashbacks to the dimension where Hawkgirl kicked Cthulhu’s ass (Justice League: “The Terror Beyond”). All mana in the universe flows through there, and because Gwen is an Anodyte, her powers are exponentially increased. When Gwen and Charmcaster join forces, Gwen basically acts as a battery while Charmcaster provides the skill and focus. The physics of the place are screwy, such as the sky and the earth not being parallel, and the whole place is full of ruins. The inhabitants include Charmcaster’s people, the golems (some of whom Charmcaster freed, and thus are loyal to her), Scrutins, Powerfang, and the biggest dick in the mystical dimension, Adwatia. Adwatia believes that all living beings “steal” mana from him and he enslaved all of the beings in Leger Domain. The golems are muscle, the Scrutins are surveillance, and Powerfang is a watchdog for the Citadel. The first and the last are outmuscled by the team, but the Scrutins require a little power from Charmcaster, who puts a stationary disillusionment spell on the quartet so they won’t be seen.
We also finally get some rounding out of Charmcaster’s character. Over the past three series, she’s provided tantalizing hints behind her characterization, but never anything meaty to work with. For the episode that finally gives her backstory and true motivation, I’m glad to say that we got Matt Wayne. He wrote some of the best character studies in Alien Force (“Kevin’s Big Score,” “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and “Inside Man,” to name a few), and he proved he had an excellent handle on Gwen. Gwen is the second main focus in this episode, as she comes to trust and even care about Charmcaster, the star of the episode. The boys are mostly in the background, with Kevin offering a few jokes here and there and Ben mostly back at his season 1/2 Alien Force personality (especially his personality in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”). Charmcaster’s character has only really been explored in terms of her obsession and conflict with Gwen, but Wayne turns the tables here, showing Gwen’s character in terms of how she begins to care about Charmcaster while letting Charmcaster stand on her own.
Charmcaster’s backstory is that she was born in Leger Domain, her people enslaved to the will of Adwatia, their crackpot would-be god. Charmcaster’s father, Spellbinder, was apparently the only person who ever gave Adwatia real trouble; when Charmcaster manages to hurt him, Adwatia realizes by her power that she must be Spellbinder’s daughter, which indicates what kind of power her father must have had. Sadly, Spellbinder was killed trying to help Hex and Charmcaster escape Leger Domain. Charmcaster was apparently old enough to remember the incident clearly and to vow to herself that she’d one day return and free her people.
The backstory is told to us straight, without the aid of any flashbacks (contrast, say, Kevin’s backstory in “Vendetta”). Normally, this would be suspicious, but Charmcaster’s character moments throughout the episode indicate she’s telling the truth this time. She starts crying and nearly steps off the bridge of suicide and has a hard time pulling herself together while Gwen tries to talk sense into her. That’s not something you can fake. And no matter how much Gwen expects her to betray them, she never does. She stays behind in Leger Domain after ensuring that the others escape, and with the Alpha Rune gone and the dimension falling apart, you know it can’t be a bid for power; she was desperate. And of course, Adwatia confirms the whole thing by all but bragging that he’d killed Spellbinder. Like a girls’ night out version of “Alone Together,” this episode pretty much puts to rest the long-standing enmity between Charmcaster and Gwen.
The scene that really gives this away is the scene that made the femme-slash fans squee: the hug. Caught in the moment, Charmcaster and Gwen hug unexpectedly, then pull apart in embarrassment, though Charmcaster admits that she no longer feels as hostile toward Gwen. Gwen is no longer her nemesis, and her request for help at the very end against Adwatia indicates that they’re becoming something like friends. I’m not entirely sure if this was intentional or not, but their antagonistic relationship both begins and ends with a hug. In the original series episode “Tough Luck” (yes, I saw this episode too—I’m not completely adverse to the original series), Charmcaster tricked Gwen into trusting her by telling her about how abusive Hex was and how she didn’t want to be forced into being evil. To steal the Keystone of Bezel Gwen had at the time, Charmcaster hugged her. When Gwen realized that the Keystone was missing, she knew that Charmcaster had betrayed her, and from then on, they were enemies. It’s fitting, then, that when Charmcaster tells Gwen that she no longer wants to kill her, that it comes right after the two girls hug. Charmcaster’s true intentions have been revealed, and they’ve had to bury the hatchet to make it this far. While it’s hard to say just how far Charmcaster’s changed by the end, you know that she’s more than changed for the better—she’s been changed for good.
In my last review (for “Deep”), I said that the theme this season seems to be building on is “team.” I think that I was a little too limited in that, and now, I think it’s probably love. I know, it sounds corny, but love is definitely at the heart of everything—the romantic love of Kevin and Gwen and Ben and Julie, the familial love of the Tennysons, the friendship between Ben and Kevin, and just about everything that falls under the domain of “love.” And love is what motivates Charmcaster here. Her love for her father and her people motivates her to stop hating Gwen and to work with her and the others, and to stay behind while the world falls apart around her. We can also reason that it’s the same love that motivates her to stay with her abusive uncle and to do every dirty trick imaginable to gain power. To quote Queen and David Bowie in “Under Pressure”:
’Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for the people on the
Edge of the light and love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is ourselves under pressure.
This need to care about those “on the edge of the light” like Charmcaster is what keeps this very odd team together, making Gwen and Charmcaster form a respect and friendship mirroring Ben and Kevin’s early on in Alien Force, and making Ben vow to help Charmcaster one day. Charmcaster couldn’t do it alone any more than Ben, Gwen, or Kevin can defeat Aggregor alone, and that might be more at the heart of the theme than my original thoughts on the matter.
Something to note: Charmcaster seems to use daisies a bit in her magic. She used a couple of razor-sharp ones to free herself from Adwatia’s trap, and when she and Gwen were about to fall on a bunch of stone spires, she created a bed of flowers to safely break their fall. Other power notes come from Kevin, who generated spikes on his body when he absorbed Powerfang’s teeth, showing a bit more creativity from him. Also, I find it very interesting that Ben was immediately set on helping and trusting Charmcaster the moment he heard her story. It seems to be his saving people thing coming into effect again, but it’s an odd contrast to his personality now. The Ben of Alien Force believed in second chances and never once let himself think that someone couldn’t be saved—this is the Ben we see here. But in Ultimate Alien, he’s become more jaded and takes his enemies’ actions more personally. Aggregor especially presses his buttons in a way that no villain has before. I wonder if Ben is taking Kevin’s very unusual situation of changing sides (since he’d been insane when he was evil) as the rule instead of the exception, but that contrast with his regard for Aggregor is too striking. I’m interested to see how that develops with him. And I hope that this time, we actually get to see the liberation of another dimension this time instead of them just showing up in the middle of the season finale (I’m looking at you, “Voided”).
“Where the Magic Happens” was written by Matt Wayne. Adwatia and the hallucination voice of Spellbinder were voiced by John DiMaggio.
