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akinoameOn another planet—either in the middle of a swamp or an industrial waste site—Papa Vreedle has Argit tied up, requesting his help. To give his boys a chance at a better life, he signed them up at the Plumbers’ Academy—which Argit laughs at, because honestly? Octagon and Rhomboid? However, Daddy doesn’t see anything funny about the situation. His boys are failing their exams, and he needs Argit to fix the grades, or else.
On Earth, Ben and Gwen are heading to the site of a downed ship, with Gwen criticizing Ben the entire way. When he finally gets fed up with her arguing with him, Ben gets her to admit that she’s mad at him for his insistence on having to kill Kevin and that she blames him for this latest mutation. Ben tries to reason with her that Kevin’s too far gone to bring back, but in the middle of their discussion, he ends up running down Argit.
…Cheers, anybody?
Argit plans to turn himself in, since he’s now on the run from Kevin. He’d come to Earth to get equipment from Kevin, but his old buddy was understandably pissed about all of the constant doublecrosses. And in his psychotic state, he decided that he should kill Argit. Makes perfect sense to me. Gwen’s reluctant to run a “weasel relocation program,” but Ben’s more willing to hear him out. Argit suggests police protection, since Los Soledad would be an obvious place to hide (not to mention everyone in the Null Void hates him), and Ben realizes that they could take him into the Plumbers’ Academy. He plans to use Argit as bait to lure Kevin there. All the cadets will have their chance to shoot him, which will wear him down enough for Ben to take him out. Say it with me, folks: This is a BAD PLAN. Argit pretends to refuse to go, but they offer him the choice of going with them or staying and getting killed by Kevin. Obvious choice. Ben starts up the Rustbucket, and Gwen yells at him for playing airline captain, but none of them notice that Kevin managed to slip a tracking device on Argit. As they take off, he starts beating on the ship, not having any idea how to use the Big Chill powers he absorbed. Ben yells at him over the intercom to use his ghost powers. Brilliant, Ben—piss him off and teach him how to use his powers. With Kevin inside the cargo bay, Ben immediately starts picking on him—but casually. As with everything right now, this pisses Kevin off, and he tells Ben to stop acting like they’re still friends. As with just about everything right now, this pisses Ben off too, and he goes to the Ultimatrix until Gwen gets him to stop. She tries to reason with Kevin, but Crazy Kevin Logic dictates that real friends wouldn’t stand in his way when he’s trying to kill Argit. Also, real friends wouldn’t steal his car. Gwen tries to point out that they hadn’t stolen it, that he’d left it behind since “Forge of Creation,” but Crazy Kevin Logic trumps Earth logic, and he attacks them. Jetray tries to hold him off, but to no avail, and Gwen’s forced to open the cargo bay doors in midair, hurling Kevin and the car out. Ben asks for an explanation, and Gwen admits that it was either this or Kevin killed them, since he was too strong and crazy for them—everything that Ben had been saying from the start. Ben just tells her that he wanted to hear it from her at last, and they high-tail it to the Academy.
The headmaster, Magister Coranoc, is pleased to see Ben and Gwen, having apparently known them as kids—presumably, at some point during the five year gap between Ben 10 and Alien Force, the two attended the Academy. He has great respect for the Tennyson family and would do anything for them…until he sees Argit. Since, after all, he runs a school, not a prison damnit. It gets worse when he hears Ben’s stupid-as-all-hell plan to use his rookies as Red Shirts, and he calls the Tennysons to the principal’s office while he sends a cadet off to escort Argit somewhere for lockup. However, Argit fakes illness during the walk of shame and insists he has to go to the bathroom (which incidentally, is the Male Humanoids, Squids, and Greys bathroom). The guard falls for it and gets paralyzed, but he’s just a student, so I’ll cut him some slack. While Coranoc gets progressively more pissed off at Ben for his plan, getting to the point where he’s tempted to lock him up too (and a sheepish Ben tries to play the “saved the universe” card, which got him out of this stuff back in “Don’t Fear the Repo”), nobody bothers to question Argit as he stalks the hallways, carrying the cadet’s stolen badge. Yep, because even if you don’t have a uniform and he doesn’t look like anyone who belongs there, if he has a badge, he’s a-ok! No wonder these guys keep getting slaughtered this season. He ducks out of sight and manages to stumble into the cafeteria, where the Vreedles are enjoying a huge pile of food. Clad in uniforms and crew-cuts, the probational cadets are determined to make their daddy proud…so he doesn’t kill them. Again. …Ladies and gentlemen, this is messed up. Argit tells them to play dumb around him—or rather, be themselves, but pretending they don’t know him. He manages to find the room with the test score server and knocks out the cadet there while he checks the Vreedles’ sad, sad grades. Turns out that they couldn’t even manage to spell their own names right, and he starts hacking their scores higher. Meanwhile on the bridge, cadets there notice Kevin approaching and signal a red alert, forcing everyone to run out and get ready for their first time in combat—well, except for the Vreedles, who stay in the cafeteria because they couldn’t figure out what was going on.
As expected whenever you send a bunch of rookies on a mission to shoot a dangerous guy, they’re taken out fast. Kevin blasts fire at them, knocking them out. Not about to let the cadets get killed on his watch, Magister effin’ Coranoc quips, “Get off my station!” and shoots Kevin. Sadly, it doesn’t do much, as Kevin just morphs his Diamondhead arm into Goop’s and grabs him. His plan gone to hell in record time, Ben arrives and distracts Kevin long enough for Coranoc to shoot Kevin with his sidearm and get free. Badass. But Kevin’s not about to be out-badassed by a side character, and he blasts him with water, courtesy of either Water Hazard or Bivalvan. Gwen rescues Coranoc while Ultimate Humongousaur clashes with Kevin, and Argit realizes that he’s totally screwed. He retrieves the Vreedles—who predictably have some problems with “playing dumb”—and has them face Kevin with whatever weapons they have. At the same time, Kevin manages to KO Ultimate Humongousaur, reverting Ben to human form. He picks up the unconscious and completely helpless Ben, ready to blast fire at him—willing to grant him a fast death “for old time’s sake.” Gwen manages to blast him repeatedly and saves Ben, but Kevin sends an electrical attack her way, which knocks her out. The heroes out of commission, the Vreedles take their opportunity to save the day, launching a fusion grenade at Kevin. At which point Argit points out they did NOT think through the idea of throwing a nuke ready to explode in an area they can’t escape from. Fortunately, Ben wakes up and goes Echo Echo, using sonics to contain the explosion. When it’s not enough, Ultimate Echo Echo contains it with his sonic disks and flies right out the window, launching it into space before getting caught in the blast.
This is the point where Argit is totally screwed, and Kevin starts beating the utter shit out of him. When he has Argit at his mercy—or lack thereof—Gwen tells him to stop, but he turns on her as she tries to reason with him. He shatters an energy construct still on her hands, sending her flying back, then holds an electrical blast inches from her face as she watches him helplessly. Knowing she’s about to die and knowing she can’t reach him anymore, Gwen starts crying—possibly for the first time in all three series. Kevin looks away, then lets her go, out of respect for what they had together. He escapes without another incident, and Gwen wipes her tears away. Coranoc manages to retrieve a limping Ultimate Echo Echo, who is only “pretty banged up” for surviving a nuke. Ben transforms back, and Coranoc reveals that Argit didn’t survive. However, Ben knows better than to assume anyone on this show is ever really dead, and he wakes him up, then throwing him back on the floor. Turns out that Argit’s people can shut off their pulse to fool their enemies, and this is how Argit has managed to live this long. And since he’s attacked two cadets and still has fourteen outstanding arrest warrants, Argit is taken into custody, and Coranoc orders the only two cadets still standing to take him away—the Vreedles.
As Argit’s taken away, Ben goes to join Gwen, who’s staring out the window. Gwen explains that Kevin got away and sadly expresses her barely renewed hope that they can save them. Unfortunately, Ben points out that maybe they can’t anymore.
In Alien Force, the two episodes just before the season finale are rather weak—with the notable exception of “Vendetta.” However, none of them ever really ties into the overall story of the season: “Birds of a Feather” and “Unearthed” included details and revelations all but ignored by “War of the Worlds,” and “Above and Beyond” and “Vendetta” had nothing to do with “The Final Battle” at all. Ultimate Alien season one, however, knows the story it wants to tell, and once that story picks up steam, there’s just about nothing to stop it. Once the Aggregor arc took off in “Escape From Aggregor,” only “Hero Time” and “Reflected Glory” broke pace—though admittedly, given the apparent lack of a time lapse between “Fused” and “Ultimate Aggregor,” “Hero Time” is very noticeably shoehorned in. And with the Kevin arc underway, the writers know that they need to stick with it all the way through. This is no time to focus on the auxiliary cast members or subplots—we want to see what happens with Kevin as the villain.
Plotwise, “Enemy Of My Enemy” is the same as “Nor Iron Bars a Cage”—Kevin goes on a rampage of revenge, Ben and Gwen try to stop him. However, “Nor Iron Bars” was strong because the main focus was Kevin’s history and how he managed to learn how to be human again the last time, and how he lost the one person who ever really got through to him. Similarly, “Enemy Of My Enemy” focuses much more on the character plot, and this time, it deals with Ben and Gwen. Moreso than the conflict between the Tennysons and Kevin, the real conflict is between the Tennyson cousins themselves. Both of them have different approaches to how to handle Kevin, and they clash. Ben believes that Kevin’s too far gone to be saved now—he’s too strong and too crazy, and they’ve failed to get through to him every time. All they can do is prevent him from killing someone and put him out of his misery. Gwen, however, won’t give up on him.
In the absence of Kevin, there’s a very noticeable hole in the team’s roles—there’s no Lancer to the Hero, no Green personality type to balance out the Red. And since nature abhors a vacuum, Ben and Gwen shift roles to fill this void. Ben becomes the cynic and Gwen the optimist, and this fits perfectly with how their characters have progressed throughout this season and the last season of Alien Force.
Ben has always been the optimist—a bit of a messiah, to be honest. He detests killing and refuses to give up on anyone or anything. It was this belief in the inherent good in everyone that led him to trust Kevin in the first episode of Alien Force and from there, win over Reiny and eventually save the entire Highbreed race. However, this season, he’s been broken down. People like Will Harangue and Captain Nemesis have proven that sometimes, people really are douchebags underneath it all. Losing the Andromeda Five twice has horrified and enraged him, since he’s never before lost anyone he’d sworn to protect. Aggregor knew exactly which buttons to press for him and played him like a fool. It’s no surprise that Ben would become jaded after some time, and the loss of his best friend to the dark side is the last straw. He can’t save anyone anymore, and he now knows that he was never able to get through to Kevin. The real reason he’d trusted him was because when he was ten, he traveled to the future and saw that Kevin would one day join him, then betray him again; and part of that knowledge remained with him, subtly influencing his actions at fifteen. It was never anything he’d done, and in fact, it’s partially his fault that this has happened to Kevin. Ten-year-old Ben was the one who gave Kevin the idea to absorb the Ultimatrix—though it was Kevin’s choice to do so, Ben and Gwen had been unconscious at the time—and Gwen holds the Ben of now responsible. When she confirms what Ben suspects about her blaming him, he’s clearly hurt by the admission, and he tries to calmly reason with her about his point of view.
Gwen’s role on the team has been the nurturer, the Mama Bear. Her role’s always been very roughly defined, but in season three of Alien Force, we did see more of what she was made of. She’s drawn to Kevin’s darkness and does everything she can to help him heal. Her protective instincts toward anyone she cares about leads her to pretty much blow the shit out of anyone who threatens them—forget the consequences to herself. This is clear in “War of the Worlds” and “Hit ‘Em Where They Live,” when she goes Anodyte. But like Ben, she’s been slowly shifting roles, even before Kevin lost it. She’s begun trusting people she has no reason to—just as Ben had—and she does what she can to help them. The most obvious is Charmcaster in “Where the Magic Happens,” and it seems as though she did manage to get through to her and build bridges with her mortal enemy—both figuratively and literally. However, it has come back to bite her in the ass, as in “Too Hot to Handle” and “Reflected Glory.” P’andor turned out to be an evil dick, and Cash and JT turned out to just be dicks. It was only natural that she’d eventually drift into the role that Ben has played for so long, as the messianic hero. However, it never became obvious until Ben was no longer in that position. It would be very easy to write an entire story here where she’s the real hero. With Ben as the cynical, broken hero, now it’s very clear that Gwen’s the one who has to keep fighting, believing that there’s always a better way. The arguments Gwen and Ben have now are very similar to the arguments Ben and Kevin had in Alien Force, particularly about Ben’s hesitance to kill or sacrifice anyone. Now, it’s Gwen who has to stick to her code while Ben tries to convince her that hope is lost. It doesn’t mean one or the other is right; it just means that they’ve changed dramatically from who they used to be, particularly Ben.
We finally get to see the Plumbers’ Academy that was mentioned back in “Above and Beyond,” and to be honest? It’s not too bad. It’s set up not too unlike the Watchtower in Justice League Unlimited, only the rings resemble the emblem of the Plumbers. The interior is also reminiscent of the Watchtower, or of the Green Lantern headquarters on Oa, with many cadets of various races around (really giving you that Green Lantern feeling)—including apparently, a handful of Stormtroopers from Star Wars. And as I mentioned before, their principal is a complete badass. It’s nice to see some Plumbers who aren’t cannon fodder once in a while.
Kevin displays a couple of new alien powers. He’s able to morph the Diamondhead/Brainstorm arm to take on Goop’s properties, and he can generate yellow electricity and shields just like Brainstorm. He’s also able to generate water like Water Hazard and Bivalvan—which makes sense, since he’d have a double dose of that power from the Ultimatrix and Aggregor.
“Enemy Of My Enemy” was written by Len Uhley. Voice credits at a later date.
Update as of 9/3/11: And that later date is here. Pops Vreedle was played by Jeff Glenn Bennett while Rob Paulsen and John DiMaggio returned as Rhomboid and Octagon respectively. DiMaggio also played Coronach (I was close with the spelling this time).
On Earth, Ben and Gwen are heading to the site of a downed ship, with Gwen criticizing Ben the entire way. When he finally gets fed up with her arguing with him, Ben gets her to admit that she’s mad at him for his insistence on having to kill Kevin and that she blames him for this latest mutation. Ben tries to reason with her that Kevin’s too far gone to bring back, but in the middle of their discussion, he ends up running down Argit.
…Cheers, anybody?
Argit plans to turn himself in, since he’s now on the run from Kevin. He’d come to Earth to get equipment from Kevin, but his old buddy was understandably pissed about all of the constant doublecrosses. And in his psychotic state, he decided that he should kill Argit. Makes perfect sense to me. Gwen’s reluctant to run a “weasel relocation program,” but Ben’s more willing to hear him out. Argit suggests police protection, since Los Soledad would be an obvious place to hide (not to mention everyone in the Null Void hates him), and Ben realizes that they could take him into the Plumbers’ Academy. He plans to use Argit as bait to lure Kevin there. All the cadets will have their chance to shoot him, which will wear him down enough for Ben to take him out. Say it with me, folks: This is a BAD PLAN. Argit pretends to refuse to go, but they offer him the choice of going with them or staying and getting killed by Kevin. Obvious choice. Ben starts up the Rustbucket, and Gwen yells at him for playing airline captain, but none of them notice that Kevin managed to slip a tracking device on Argit. As they take off, he starts beating on the ship, not having any idea how to use the Big Chill powers he absorbed. Ben yells at him over the intercom to use his ghost powers. Brilliant, Ben—piss him off and teach him how to use his powers. With Kevin inside the cargo bay, Ben immediately starts picking on him—but casually. As with everything right now, this pisses Kevin off, and he tells Ben to stop acting like they’re still friends. As with just about everything right now, this pisses Ben off too, and he goes to the Ultimatrix until Gwen gets him to stop. She tries to reason with Kevin, but Crazy Kevin Logic dictates that real friends wouldn’t stand in his way when he’s trying to kill Argit. Also, real friends wouldn’t steal his car. Gwen tries to point out that they hadn’t stolen it, that he’d left it behind since “Forge of Creation,” but Crazy Kevin Logic trumps Earth logic, and he attacks them. Jetray tries to hold him off, but to no avail, and Gwen’s forced to open the cargo bay doors in midair, hurling Kevin and the car out. Ben asks for an explanation, and Gwen admits that it was either this or Kevin killed them, since he was too strong and crazy for them—everything that Ben had been saying from the start. Ben just tells her that he wanted to hear it from her at last, and they high-tail it to the Academy.
The headmaster, Magister Coranoc, is pleased to see Ben and Gwen, having apparently known them as kids—presumably, at some point during the five year gap between Ben 10 and Alien Force, the two attended the Academy. He has great respect for the Tennyson family and would do anything for them…until he sees Argit. Since, after all, he runs a school, not a prison damnit. It gets worse when he hears Ben’s stupid-as-all-hell plan to use his rookies as Red Shirts, and he calls the Tennysons to the principal’s office while he sends a cadet off to escort Argit somewhere for lockup. However, Argit fakes illness during the walk of shame and insists he has to go to the bathroom (which incidentally, is the Male Humanoids, Squids, and Greys bathroom). The guard falls for it and gets paralyzed, but he’s just a student, so I’ll cut him some slack. While Coranoc gets progressively more pissed off at Ben for his plan, getting to the point where he’s tempted to lock him up too (and a sheepish Ben tries to play the “saved the universe” card, which got him out of this stuff back in “Don’t Fear the Repo”), nobody bothers to question Argit as he stalks the hallways, carrying the cadet’s stolen badge. Yep, because even if you don’t have a uniform and he doesn’t look like anyone who belongs there, if he has a badge, he’s a-ok! No wonder these guys keep getting slaughtered this season. He ducks out of sight and manages to stumble into the cafeteria, where the Vreedles are enjoying a huge pile of food. Clad in uniforms and crew-cuts, the probational cadets are determined to make their daddy proud…so he doesn’t kill them. Again. …Ladies and gentlemen, this is messed up. Argit tells them to play dumb around him—or rather, be themselves, but pretending they don’t know him. He manages to find the room with the test score server and knocks out the cadet there while he checks the Vreedles’ sad, sad grades. Turns out that they couldn’t even manage to spell their own names right, and he starts hacking their scores higher. Meanwhile on the bridge, cadets there notice Kevin approaching and signal a red alert, forcing everyone to run out and get ready for their first time in combat—well, except for the Vreedles, who stay in the cafeteria because they couldn’t figure out what was going on.
As expected whenever you send a bunch of rookies on a mission to shoot a dangerous guy, they’re taken out fast. Kevin blasts fire at them, knocking them out. Not about to let the cadets get killed on his watch, Magister effin’ Coranoc quips, “Get off my station!” and shoots Kevin. Sadly, it doesn’t do much, as Kevin just morphs his Diamondhead arm into Goop’s and grabs him. His plan gone to hell in record time, Ben arrives and distracts Kevin long enough for Coranoc to shoot Kevin with his sidearm and get free. Badass. But Kevin’s not about to be out-badassed by a side character, and he blasts him with water, courtesy of either Water Hazard or Bivalvan. Gwen rescues Coranoc while Ultimate Humongousaur clashes with Kevin, and Argit realizes that he’s totally screwed. He retrieves the Vreedles—who predictably have some problems with “playing dumb”—and has them face Kevin with whatever weapons they have. At the same time, Kevin manages to KO Ultimate Humongousaur, reverting Ben to human form. He picks up the unconscious and completely helpless Ben, ready to blast fire at him—willing to grant him a fast death “for old time’s sake.” Gwen manages to blast him repeatedly and saves Ben, but Kevin sends an electrical attack her way, which knocks her out. The heroes out of commission, the Vreedles take their opportunity to save the day, launching a fusion grenade at Kevin. At which point Argit points out they did NOT think through the idea of throwing a nuke ready to explode in an area they can’t escape from. Fortunately, Ben wakes up and goes Echo Echo, using sonics to contain the explosion. When it’s not enough, Ultimate Echo Echo contains it with his sonic disks and flies right out the window, launching it into space before getting caught in the blast.
This is the point where Argit is totally screwed, and Kevin starts beating the utter shit out of him. When he has Argit at his mercy—or lack thereof—Gwen tells him to stop, but he turns on her as she tries to reason with him. He shatters an energy construct still on her hands, sending her flying back, then holds an electrical blast inches from her face as she watches him helplessly. Knowing she’s about to die and knowing she can’t reach him anymore, Gwen starts crying—possibly for the first time in all three series. Kevin looks away, then lets her go, out of respect for what they had together. He escapes without another incident, and Gwen wipes her tears away. Coranoc manages to retrieve a limping Ultimate Echo Echo, who is only “pretty banged up” for surviving a nuke. Ben transforms back, and Coranoc reveals that Argit didn’t survive. However, Ben knows better than to assume anyone on this show is ever really dead, and he wakes him up, then throwing him back on the floor. Turns out that Argit’s people can shut off their pulse to fool their enemies, and this is how Argit has managed to live this long. And since he’s attacked two cadets and still has fourteen outstanding arrest warrants, Argit is taken into custody, and Coranoc orders the only two cadets still standing to take him away—the Vreedles.
As Argit’s taken away, Ben goes to join Gwen, who’s staring out the window. Gwen explains that Kevin got away and sadly expresses her barely renewed hope that they can save them. Unfortunately, Ben points out that maybe they can’t anymore.
In Alien Force, the two episodes just before the season finale are rather weak—with the notable exception of “Vendetta.” However, none of them ever really ties into the overall story of the season: “Birds of a Feather” and “Unearthed” included details and revelations all but ignored by “War of the Worlds,” and “Above and Beyond” and “Vendetta” had nothing to do with “The Final Battle” at all. Ultimate Alien season one, however, knows the story it wants to tell, and once that story picks up steam, there’s just about nothing to stop it. Once the Aggregor arc took off in “Escape From Aggregor,” only “Hero Time” and “Reflected Glory” broke pace—though admittedly, given the apparent lack of a time lapse between “Fused” and “Ultimate Aggregor,” “Hero Time” is very noticeably shoehorned in. And with the Kevin arc underway, the writers know that they need to stick with it all the way through. This is no time to focus on the auxiliary cast members or subplots—we want to see what happens with Kevin as the villain.
Plotwise, “Enemy Of My Enemy” is the same as “Nor Iron Bars a Cage”—Kevin goes on a rampage of revenge, Ben and Gwen try to stop him. However, “Nor Iron Bars” was strong because the main focus was Kevin’s history and how he managed to learn how to be human again the last time, and how he lost the one person who ever really got through to him. Similarly, “Enemy Of My Enemy” focuses much more on the character plot, and this time, it deals with Ben and Gwen. Moreso than the conflict between the Tennysons and Kevin, the real conflict is between the Tennyson cousins themselves. Both of them have different approaches to how to handle Kevin, and they clash. Ben believes that Kevin’s too far gone to be saved now—he’s too strong and too crazy, and they’ve failed to get through to him every time. All they can do is prevent him from killing someone and put him out of his misery. Gwen, however, won’t give up on him.
In the absence of Kevin, there’s a very noticeable hole in the team’s roles—there’s no Lancer to the Hero, no Green personality type to balance out the Red. And since nature abhors a vacuum, Ben and Gwen shift roles to fill this void. Ben becomes the cynic and Gwen the optimist, and this fits perfectly with how their characters have progressed throughout this season and the last season of Alien Force.
Ben has always been the optimist—a bit of a messiah, to be honest. He detests killing and refuses to give up on anyone or anything. It was this belief in the inherent good in everyone that led him to trust Kevin in the first episode of Alien Force and from there, win over Reiny and eventually save the entire Highbreed race. However, this season, he’s been broken down. People like Will Harangue and Captain Nemesis have proven that sometimes, people really are douchebags underneath it all. Losing the Andromeda Five twice has horrified and enraged him, since he’s never before lost anyone he’d sworn to protect. Aggregor knew exactly which buttons to press for him and played him like a fool. It’s no surprise that Ben would become jaded after some time, and the loss of his best friend to the dark side is the last straw. He can’t save anyone anymore, and he now knows that he was never able to get through to Kevin. The real reason he’d trusted him was because when he was ten, he traveled to the future and saw that Kevin would one day join him, then betray him again; and part of that knowledge remained with him, subtly influencing his actions at fifteen. It was never anything he’d done, and in fact, it’s partially his fault that this has happened to Kevin. Ten-year-old Ben was the one who gave Kevin the idea to absorb the Ultimatrix—though it was Kevin’s choice to do so, Ben and Gwen had been unconscious at the time—and Gwen holds the Ben of now responsible. When she confirms what Ben suspects about her blaming him, he’s clearly hurt by the admission, and he tries to calmly reason with her about his point of view.
Gwen’s role on the team has been the nurturer, the Mama Bear. Her role’s always been very roughly defined, but in season three of Alien Force, we did see more of what she was made of. She’s drawn to Kevin’s darkness and does everything she can to help him heal. Her protective instincts toward anyone she cares about leads her to pretty much blow the shit out of anyone who threatens them—forget the consequences to herself. This is clear in “War of the Worlds” and “Hit ‘Em Where They Live,” when she goes Anodyte. But like Ben, she’s been slowly shifting roles, even before Kevin lost it. She’s begun trusting people she has no reason to—just as Ben had—and she does what she can to help them. The most obvious is Charmcaster in “Where the Magic Happens,” and it seems as though she did manage to get through to her and build bridges with her mortal enemy—both figuratively and literally. However, it has come back to bite her in the ass, as in “Too Hot to Handle” and “Reflected Glory.” P’andor turned out to be an evil dick, and Cash and JT turned out to just be dicks. It was only natural that she’d eventually drift into the role that Ben has played for so long, as the messianic hero. However, it never became obvious until Ben was no longer in that position. It would be very easy to write an entire story here where she’s the real hero. With Ben as the cynical, broken hero, now it’s very clear that Gwen’s the one who has to keep fighting, believing that there’s always a better way. The arguments Gwen and Ben have now are very similar to the arguments Ben and Kevin had in Alien Force, particularly about Ben’s hesitance to kill or sacrifice anyone. Now, it’s Gwen who has to stick to her code while Ben tries to convince her that hope is lost. It doesn’t mean one or the other is right; it just means that they’ve changed dramatically from who they used to be, particularly Ben.
We finally get to see the Plumbers’ Academy that was mentioned back in “Above and Beyond,” and to be honest? It’s not too bad. It’s set up not too unlike the Watchtower in Justice League Unlimited, only the rings resemble the emblem of the Plumbers. The interior is also reminiscent of the Watchtower, or of the Green Lantern headquarters on Oa, with many cadets of various races around (really giving you that Green Lantern feeling)—including apparently, a handful of Stormtroopers from Star Wars. And as I mentioned before, their principal is a complete badass. It’s nice to see some Plumbers who aren’t cannon fodder once in a while.
Kevin displays a couple of new alien powers. He’s able to morph the Diamondhead/Brainstorm arm to take on Goop’s properties, and he can generate yellow electricity and shields just like Brainstorm. He’s also able to generate water like Water Hazard and Bivalvan—which makes sense, since he’d have a double dose of that power from the Ultimatrix and Aggregor.
“Enemy Of My Enemy” was written by Len Uhley. Voice credits at a later date.
Update as of 9/3/11: And that later date is here. Pops Vreedle was played by Jeff Glenn Bennett while Rob Paulsen and John DiMaggio returned as Rhomboid and Octagon respectively. DiMaggio also played Coronach (I was close with the spelling this time).
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-08 09:37 pm (UTC)Ben's really doing his best to fit in with the Green personality type while still hanging on - noticeably by a thread at this point - to his semi-humorous nature. (Probably helps that he's been wearing green since, what - the original series?) Gwen's doing pretty good herself in filling Ben's shoes as the Red, so to speak, by sticking to her guns no matter what her cousin says and not giving up hope. (No, her deciding to pick the color red to wear since last year's AF season 3 had no ultimate decisions on that front.) Yes she's admitted that Kevin might be too far gone but she's still determined to help him.
And what can I say about
guano locoCrazy Kevin? (Quit looking at me like that; you know it's true.) He's just letting his unbalanced mind take him wherever he wants by taking out whoever's done him wrong in the past 5-6 years. While the finale in 2 days will obviously bring us full circle by having him confront Ben and Gwen, these past two episodes have done wonders by reminding us that Kevin did have enemies beyond planet Earth and in his crazed state of mind, he feels they need to be permanently put down.Green meets Green, and both - Ben and Kevin - feel the other need to be put down for good. Hopefully Red will be able to get both to quit acting like they're in a schoolyard fight.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-09 02:00 am (UTC)Yeah, Kevin...well, let's just say if I slip up and call him Kouichi, don't be too surprised. There's a REASON I've been listening to "With Broken Wings" on repeat.