A reporter’s gut instinct: “The Big Story”
Mar. 7th, 2011 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameAn enthusiastic reporter-in-training stumbles on the story of his life, even though everyone around him tells him to just stick to easy stories. But after pleading with his sempai, he finally gets the chance to investigate, and it turns out that things are even more serious than he thought. Evil creatures from another world are snatching people, and it’s up to a journalist to become a hero…wait, no, that’s Kamen Rider Ryuki, isn’t it? It’s Ultimate Alien? Let me start again.
After getting a lead that an upcoming meteor shower is going to be weird as all hell, Jimmy Jones heads to the forest outside Bellwood to record it for his blog. Sure enough, while he’s out there, a meteor strikes a mountain cave, but when he goes to investigate, he only finds a strange alien plant inside. Jimmy takes this well. And then it attacks him, dragging him deeper into the cave. Make your own hentai joke here. Not long after, at the local nuclear power plant, the team is fighting Sevenseven, whom Rath insists on calling “Karate Man.” Karate Man—I mean, Sevenseven—is left tied to a lamppost, and Gwen fails miserably at delivering a heroic oneliner to the point that not even the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” could salvage it. Jimmy catches up to them and tries to explain that he just saved the world from an imminent alien weed infestation, but nobody’s convinced. Worse, he blacked out in the middle of the attack and lost his camera, so he has no evidence. He tries to convince them to check it out, but only Ben will agree to go along, since they’re bros like that (see “Eye of the Beholder”). They arrive at the creepy cave, and Ben decides to go ahead to check it out. However, he’s gone an unusually long amount of time before he calls out that it’s okay. Jimmy follows Ben in and sees that absolutely nothing is inside. Ben suggests that Jimmy might have dreamed the whole thing, since sometimes when he eats late at night, he has nightmares so vivid that he wakes up hitting the Ultimatrix. Ben, sweetie? I don’t think that’s normal. Get help, and not from a ten-year-old this time. Jimmy reluctantly agrees with Ben, since there’s no evidence to suggest otherwise, and he offers him some peanuts, but Ben insists he’s allergic. I’m sure this is a totally unimportant fact only here for our fanfiction and RP journals.
But later, Jimmy is running his personal “weird stuff” algorithm on his computer when he picks up a sudden spike in water usage near Bellwood. Reasoning that water = plants, he knows that he must have been right, and he returns to investigate deeper into the cave. He finds a strange pod attached to the wall, but he doesn’t think much of it because the alien plant is there, and much larger than before. And worse, Ben is standing right there in front of it, taking orders. Jimmy makes a run for it, and Ben tries to investigate outside. Knowing that he’s knee-deep in the middle of a vast alien conspiracy, Jimmy snaps a picture of Ben for irrefutable evidence, then escapes. He tries to show Gwen and Kevin his irrefutable evidence, but the photo’s blurry and the water charts don’t make enough sense to convince them. So he decides to go to the one person who would believe him that there’s a vast alien conspiracy with Ben in the middle of it. Yeah, you know who it is: Will Harangue. He’s kind of convinced, if only to add to his growing list of “Shit That Proves Ben Is A Menace,” which I’m pretty sure includes global warming and the neighborhood dog constantly barking. Jimmy’s desperation in even turning to Harangue for help convinces Gwen that there must be something that has him spooked, and she drags Kevin along to investigate just what it really is.
After the disaster that was his guest appearance on The Harangue Nation, Jimmy stops by the supermarket to pick up more peanuts. Excuse me for a minute: Where is his mom? And what the hell does she think he’s been doing all night? He says himself that he had to take the bus to get to Bellwood, and then he appears on a cable news show, and now he’s all alone in a supermarket where he’s obviously going to get attacked by an angry alien superhero. I know his mom is kind of oblivious, but really. There is a line between “oblivious” and “neglectful,” and she’s coming dangerously close to crossing it.
So, unsurprisingly, Ben confronts Jimmy in the store and tries to lure him out, with Yuri Lowenthal using his best “Hello, Clarice” voice. Jimmy’s reporter gut tells him that he’s not going to survive if he stays anywhere near him, so he makes a break for it, hunted down throughout the store by Humongousaur. Once he finally escapes, he rides his bike in a desperate attempt to flee from Cannonbolt (in what I have to admit looks like a much better handled homage to the chase scene from Race Against Time). He calls Gwen for help, and she insists that she and Kevin saw the cave and they’re coming to help. When she and Kevin finally catch up to him, she calmly insists that everything is going to be okay and that Jimmy should get in the car. But Jimmy’s instincts are screaming, “Stay the hell away!” and sure enough, Ben comes to a stop right behind him, and all three drag him off to the cave. Yes, this is possibly the most horrifying episode ever, with all the potential jokes we can make. The trio reveal that Jimmy is somehow naturally immune to the evil plant’s absorption, and they want to know why. He’s tied to the wall next to three pods, and when he looks inside, he sees Ben, Gwen, and Kevin unconscious. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Pod People plan to absorb everyone on Earth, to unite all minds in one harmonious garden.
The plant tries to form a pod around Jimmy, but some of the peanuts fall out of his backpack. The tendrils back away, and Jimmy realizes that the plants are allergic to peanuts. You know, this is something you really should anticipate when invading a new alien world. At the very least, don’t forget to bring your epi pen. Anyway, the plants start to burn and melt when exposed to peanuts, so he flings them at the pods to free the others. Ben is the first to escape, but without the Ultimatrix because his Pod version removed it. Apparently, the matching DNA means it’s easy to take. The Pod People arrive and fight their real counterparts, but it turns out that even though they supposedly have the exact same DNA, they’re lacking the original flavor’s powers. Well, except for the stolen Ultimatrix, and Chromastone attacks when Pod Gwen and Pod Kevin’s plant powers don’t do much and they’re easily defeated. Jimmy solves the problem by throwing some peanuts at Pod Ben, which burns him even through Chromastone’s form. I’m telling you—epi pen! Ben rushes forward as his copy tries to use the Ultimatrix again, but it manages to change hands mid-transformation. Swampfire the original discovers that the Pod People are immune to his control over all plants, so he decides to deal with Pod Ben by horrifically setting him on fire. Ben, I’m going to say it again: You have issues.
But though the Pod People have been defeated, the Pod itself is still alive. The plant attacks, and when they manage to lure it out of the cave, Ben tells Jimmy to run. The team isn’t doing very good at all, with Gwen and Kevin held hostage and Swampfire doused in some kind of slime that solidifies around him. As the plant tries to swallow them whole, Jimmy decides it’s time he saved the day. He makes a heroic leap off the mountain, hurling his backpack full of peanuts into the beastie’s maw, then slides down the tendrils like a little badass. Okay, well, he does hit a rock and then falls to the ground, but it was still badass The plant drops Swampfire during its apparent anaphylactic shock, which gives him the chance to go Ultimate. He frees the others, then tosses some bombs into the plant’s mouth because apparently Jimmy can’t have all the glory today. The plant explodes, and Jimmy realizes in disappointment that he never recovered his camera, so nobody’s going to believe him about saving the whole damn world. But Ben assures him that they believe him at least, and he commends him for being a real reporter. Gwen insists that from now on, they’ll take him more seriously, and Kevin adds, “No matter how nutty you sound,” displaying the proper use of pun delivery, much to Gwen’s dismay.
When we’re first introduced to Jimmy, he’s the young fan who revealed Ben’s identity online, inadvertently making a huge mess of his life. Still, Jimmy has always been portrayed sympathetically, and here is no exception. He is meant to be the fandom incarnate, and by being the hero of the day, it allows us to feel like we could be heroes too.
But I think even more importantly, Jimmy is a reporter first, fan second. His devotion to uncovering the truth leads to the horrifying realization that his hero might be up to something, and he never once falters from his quest to get to the bottom of it. When he sees “Ben” in the cave, he immediately heads to Gwen and Kevin with the evidence. And when they don’t believe him, he goes to Will Harangue for help—something I’ll get to in a minute. He trusts his instincts, which turns out to be a really good strategy, otherwise the planet would be overrun with Pod People…assuming they weren’t entirely destroyed by the first PB&J eating kindergartener that passed by. And he never backs away from danger. When Pod Ben chases him down throughout the grocery store, he relies on his wits to get him through. He first manages to slow him down by spilling oil all over the floor, causing him to slip and crash into a display of peanuts; then he stops him with Diet Coke and Mentos. And of course, he’s the one who gives Ben the chance to free himself from the plant by making that insane leap of faith to throw the peanuts into it. Sure, maybe I would have liked to see Jimmy take a Super Soaker full of peanut oil to the plant, slip on a pair of shades, and toss off some nut-related quip before shooting it dead, but he was really damn badass for a non-powered ten-year-old.
As my last point on the kid, I want to talk about him and Will Harangue as foils. They represent the general gist of the world around Ben: the youth see Ben as a hero and rockstar, and the adults see him as a threat and a menace. But more than anything, they have very different views on journalism altogether, and I think it can be easily compared to media bias in the news today. We’ve seen how Will Harangue manipulates the news to suit his message. The most infamous case was “Video Games,” when he doctored footage of Ben trying to stop him from destroying the frickin’ Washington Monument to make it look like Ben was doing it in the first place. When he gets Jimmy’s shaky evidence proving there’s something going on with Ben and an alien conspiracy, he spins it into a story about how Ben is leading an invasion. Jimmy, however, insists that all he’s saying it that Ben may be involved—not that he’s definitely leading it. Harangue even harasses the kid on TV while trying to expand his story to make Ben look worse, and it pisses Jimmy off. Jimmy, meanwhile, never stops looking for the truth, even if it might prove his preconceptions wrong. While Harangue is always safe in his studio, Jimmy is out there alone trying to fight his way to the truth. It is always the truth with Jimmy, even if he’s looking for a scoop. He’ll have his crazy theories, but at the end of the day, he knows that as a reporter, he is responsible for giving the public the hard facts and not just an interesting story.
Something to clear up: It’s implied later that the Ben that was talking to Jimmy in the cave had been Pod Ben all along, given the long wait between Ben going into the cave and then calling Jimmy inside. So it’s unknown if Ben really is allergic to peanuts or if he does have vivid nightmares of Vilgax hiding in his closet so he has to go to the Ultimatrix. Either way, Pod Ben knew exactly how to imitate Ben effectively at first, before Jimmy caught him in the act. And finally, we get an actual date for the first time in the series: this episode takes place on Thursday, May 25. This is a date they totally pulled out of their asses, given that this year, May 25 is a Wednesday. And next year is a leap year, so it’s not then either. It all fits with the ambiguous timeframe of the Ben 10 series anyway, but it’s nice when we find out when everything’s going on. Assuming that another year hasn’t passed, it’s only been a few months since the series began (which might have been sometime in February, if Gwen’s comment in Alien Swarm was accurate). This makes sense, given the time-sensitive nature of the Map of Infinity quest and how many episodes seemed to take place immediately after one another, along with the shoehorned-in episodes like “Hero Time” and “Reflected Glory.”
This episode was brought to you by Reese’s.
“Big Story” was written by Jim Krieg and Ernie Altbacker.
After getting a lead that an upcoming meteor shower is going to be weird as all hell, Jimmy Jones heads to the forest outside Bellwood to record it for his blog. Sure enough, while he’s out there, a meteor strikes a mountain cave, but when he goes to investigate, he only finds a strange alien plant inside. Jimmy takes this well. And then it attacks him, dragging him deeper into the cave. Make your own hentai joke here. Not long after, at the local nuclear power plant, the team is fighting Sevenseven, whom Rath insists on calling “Karate Man.” Karate Man—I mean, Sevenseven—is left tied to a lamppost, and Gwen fails miserably at delivering a heroic oneliner to the point that not even the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” could salvage it. Jimmy catches up to them and tries to explain that he just saved the world from an imminent alien weed infestation, but nobody’s convinced. Worse, he blacked out in the middle of the attack and lost his camera, so he has no evidence. He tries to convince them to check it out, but only Ben will agree to go along, since they’re bros like that (see “Eye of the Beholder”). They arrive at the creepy cave, and Ben decides to go ahead to check it out. However, he’s gone an unusually long amount of time before he calls out that it’s okay. Jimmy follows Ben in and sees that absolutely nothing is inside. Ben suggests that Jimmy might have dreamed the whole thing, since sometimes when he eats late at night, he has nightmares so vivid that he wakes up hitting the Ultimatrix. Ben, sweetie? I don’t think that’s normal. Get help, and not from a ten-year-old this time. Jimmy reluctantly agrees with Ben, since there’s no evidence to suggest otherwise, and he offers him some peanuts, but Ben insists he’s allergic. I’m sure this is a totally unimportant fact only here for our fanfiction and RP journals.
But later, Jimmy is running his personal “weird stuff” algorithm on his computer when he picks up a sudden spike in water usage near Bellwood. Reasoning that water = plants, he knows that he must have been right, and he returns to investigate deeper into the cave. He finds a strange pod attached to the wall, but he doesn’t think much of it because the alien plant is there, and much larger than before. And worse, Ben is standing right there in front of it, taking orders. Jimmy makes a run for it, and Ben tries to investigate outside. Knowing that he’s knee-deep in the middle of a vast alien conspiracy, Jimmy snaps a picture of Ben for irrefutable evidence, then escapes. He tries to show Gwen and Kevin his irrefutable evidence, but the photo’s blurry and the water charts don’t make enough sense to convince them. So he decides to go to the one person who would believe him that there’s a vast alien conspiracy with Ben in the middle of it. Yeah, you know who it is: Will Harangue. He’s kind of convinced, if only to add to his growing list of “Shit That Proves Ben Is A Menace,” which I’m pretty sure includes global warming and the neighborhood dog constantly barking. Jimmy’s desperation in even turning to Harangue for help convinces Gwen that there must be something that has him spooked, and she drags Kevin along to investigate just what it really is.
After the disaster that was his guest appearance on The Harangue Nation, Jimmy stops by the supermarket to pick up more peanuts. Excuse me for a minute: Where is his mom? And what the hell does she think he’s been doing all night? He says himself that he had to take the bus to get to Bellwood, and then he appears on a cable news show, and now he’s all alone in a supermarket where he’s obviously going to get attacked by an angry alien superhero. I know his mom is kind of oblivious, but really. There is a line between “oblivious” and “neglectful,” and she’s coming dangerously close to crossing it.
So, unsurprisingly, Ben confronts Jimmy in the store and tries to lure him out, with Yuri Lowenthal using his best “Hello, Clarice” voice. Jimmy’s reporter gut tells him that he’s not going to survive if he stays anywhere near him, so he makes a break for it, hunted down throughout the store by Humongousaur. Once he finally escapes, he rides his bike in a desperate attempt to flee from Cannonbolt (in what I have to admit looks like a much better handled homage to the chase scene from Race Against Time). He calls Gwen for help, and she insists that she and Kevin saw the cave and they’re coming to help. When she and Kevin finally catch up to him, she calmly insists that everything is going to be okay and that Jimmy should get in the car. But Jimmy’s instincts are screaming, “Stay the hell away!” and sure enough, Ben comes to a stop right behind him, and all three drag him off to the cave. Yes, this is possibly the most horrifying episode ever, with all the potential jokes we can make. The trio reveal that Jimmy is somehow naturally immune to the evil plant’s absorption, and they want to know why. He’s tied to the wall next to three pods, and when he looks inside, he sees Ben, Gwen, and Kevin unconscious. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Pod People plan to absorb everyone on Earth, to unite all minds in one harmonious garden.
The plant tries to form a pod around Jimmy, but some of the peanuts fall out of his backpack. The tendrils back away, and Jimmy realizes that the plants are allergic to peanuts. You know, this is something you really should anticipate when invading a new alien world. At the very least, don’t forget to bring your epi pen. Anyway, the plants start to burn and melt when exposed to peanuts, so he flings them at the pods to free the others. Ben is the first to escape, but without the Ultimatrix because his Pod version removed it. Apparently, the matching DNA means it’s easy to take. The Pod People arrive and fight their real counterparts, but it turns out that even though they supposedly have the exact same DNA, they’re lacking the original flavor’s powers. Well, except for the stolen Ultimatrix, and Chromastone attacks when Pod Gwen and Pod Kevin’s plant powers don’t do much and they’re easily defeated. Jimmy solves the problem by throwing some peanuts at Pod Ben, which burns him even through Chromastone’s form. I’m telling you—epi pen! Ben rushes forward as his copy tries to use the Ultimatrix again, but it manages to change hands mid-transformation. Swampfire the original discovers that the Pod People are immune to his control over all plants, so he decides to deal with Pod Ben by horrifically setting him on fire. Ben, I’m going to say it again: You have issues.
But though the Pod People have been defeated, the Pod itself is still alive. The plant attacks, and when they manage to lure it out of the cave, Ben tells Jimmy to run. The team isn’t doing very good at all, with Gwen and Kevin held hostage and Swampfire doused in some kind of slime that solidifies around him. As the plant tries to swallow them whole, Jimmy decides it’s time he saved the day. He makes a heroic leap off the mountain, hurling his backpack full of peanuts into the beastie’s maw, then slides down the tendrils like a little badass. Okay, well, he does hit a rock and then falls to the ground, but it was still badass The plant drops Swampfire during its apparent anaphylactic shock, which gives him the chance to go Ultimate. He frees the others, then tosses some bombs into the plant’s mouth because apparently Jimmy can’t have all the glory today. The plant explodes, and Jimmy realizes in disappointment that he never recovered his camera, so nobody’s going to believe him about saving the whole damn world. But Ben assures him that they believe him at least, and he commends him for being a real reporter. Gwen insists that from now on, they’ll take him more seriously, and Kevin adds, “No matter how nutty you sound,” displaying the proper use of pun delivery, much to Gwen’s dismay.
When we’re first introduced to Jimmy, he’s the young fan who revealed Ben’s identity online, inadvertently making a huge mess of his life. Still, Jimmy has always been portrayed sympathetically, and here is no exception. He is meant to be the fandom incarnate, and by being the hero of the day, it allows us to feel like we could be heroes too.
But I think even more importantly, Jimmy is a reporter first, fan second. His devotion to uncovering the truth leads to the horrifying realization that his hero might be up to something, and he never once falters from his quest to get to the bottom of it. When he sees “Ben” in the cave, he immediately heads to Gwen and Kevin with the evidence. And when they don’t believe him, he goes to Will Harangue for help—something I’ll get to in a minute. He trusts his instincts, which turns out to be a really good strategy, otherwise the planet would be overrun with Pod People…assuming they weren’t entirely destroyed by the first PB&J eating kindergartener that passed by. And he never backs away from danger. When Pod Ben chases him down throughout the grocery store, he relies on his wits to get him through. He first manages to slow him down by spilling oil all over the floor, causing him to slip and crash into a display of peanuts; then he stops him with Diet Coke and Mentos. And of course, he’s the one who gives Ben the chance to free himself from the plant by making that insane leap of faith to throw the peanuts into it. Sure, maybe I would have liked to see Jimmy take a Super Soaker full of peanut oil to the plant, slip on a pair of shades, and toss off some nut-related quip before shooting it dead, but he was really damn badass for a non-powered ten-year-old.
As my last point on the kid, I want to talk about him and Will Harangue as foils. They represent the general gist of the world around Ben: the youth see Ben as a hero and rockstar, and the adults see him as a threat and a menace. But more than anything, they have very different views on journalism altogether, and I think it can be easily compared to media bias in the news today. We’ve seen how Will Harangue manipulates the news to suit his message. The most infamous case was “Video Games,” when he doctored footage of Ben trying to stop him from destroying the frickin’ Washington Monument to make it look like Ben was doing it in the first place. When he gets Jimmy’s shaky evidence proving there’s something going on with Ben and an alien conspiracy, he spins it into a story about how Ben is leading an invasion. Jimmy, however, insists that all he’s saying it that Ben may be involved—not that he’s definitely leading it. Harangue even harasses the kid on TV while trying to expand his story to make Ben look worse, and it pisses Jimmy off. Jimmy, meanwhile, never stops looking for the truth, even if it might prove his preconceptions wrong. While Harangue is always safe in his studio, Jimmy is out there alone trying to fight his way to the truth. It is always the truth with Jimmy, even if he’s looking for a scoop. He’ll have his crazy theories, but at the end of the day, he knows that as a reporter, he is responsible for giving the public the hard facts and not just an interesting story.
Something to clear up: It’s implied later that the Ben that was talking to Jimmy in the cave had been Pod Ben all along, given the long wait between Ben going into the cave and then calling Jimmy inside. So it’s unknown if Ben really is allergic to peanuts or if he does have vivid nightmares of Vilgax hiding in his closet so he has to go to the Ultimatrix. Either way, Pod Ben knew exactly how to imitate Ben effectively at first, before Jimmy caught him in the act. And finally, we get an actual date for the first time in the series: this episode takes place on Thursday, May 25. This is a date they totally pulled out of their asses, given that this year, May 25 is a Wednesday. And next year is a leap year, so it’s not then either. It all fits with the ambiguous timeframe of the Ben 10 series anyway, but it’s nice when we find out when everything’s going on. Assuming that another year hasn’t passed, it’s only been a few months since the series began (which might have been sometime in February, if Gwen’s comment in Alien Swarm was accurate). This makes sense, given the time-sensitive nature of the Map of Infinity quest and how many episodes seemed to take place immediately after one another, along with the shoehorned-in episodes like “Hero Time” and “Reflected Glory.”
This episode was brought to you by Reese’s.
“Big Story” was written by Jim Krieg and Ernie Altbacker.