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akinoameA bored caretaker at a nursing home is playing computer solitaire and talking on the phone about one of his charges, an old man known only as George who’s sitting in front of the TV. George has been there since the ‘70s, but anything remotely interesting about him is mitigated by the fact that he apparently has Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, the Forever Knights discover a large seal with an infinity symbol, covered in ancient runes. Squire Winston is acting as their translator, but he can’t quite make out what everything means because, you know, ancient runes. So, when there’s an ancient seal with a warning label in a dead language that you can barely translate, what’s your first course of action? Drill, baby, drill. So, it’s no surprise that when a strange light pours out of the seal and the Knights get attacked. Besides, just because it has an infinity symbol on it doesn’t mean it’s yours to play with. But at the same time, George suddenly reacts and starts clutching a gold coin with an infinity symbol on it, and I have flashbacks to the DA’s fake galleons in Order of the Phoenix. He gets out of his wheelchair and walks out the door, with the caretaker only noticing after the feeble, ancient man has gotten the hell out of dodge. Worst nursing home ever.
The team drives to that rock quarry you always see in Doctor Who, with Ben asleep in the back of the car. On a sidenote, where the hell is his car anyway? It’s only made a cameo since “The Transmogrification of Eunice.” And honestly, Gwen and Kevin need to stop picking on him about falling asleep. Only last week, he was having nightmares of his ex-girlfriend’s father coming to kill him and then his ex-girlfriend kidnapped his girlfriend and then sacrificed her life to save him. I think the guy’s earned some rest. They venture down into the quarry and find abandoned helmets and swords, the cracked seal, and a trail before more Forever Knights arrive. Kevin makes the prerequisite Monty Python joke, saving me from having to do it, and Ben asks which splinter cell they’re part of (Urian, Patrick, Driscoll, etc.). Sir Cyrus, their leader, argues that he’s part of the true path, set down by the Knights’ founder, the First Knight. A battle ensues in which Cyrus is stupid enough to try to take Ben hostage, but before the team can really have fun beating the shit out of these guys, Winston straightens things out for the Knights, so Cyrus calls a truce. There is obvious UST between Winston and Gwen that leaves Kevin feeling threatened, but it doesn’t stop Winston from having to admit that during the mysterious explosion/attack/whatever, he bravely ran away. Gwen determines that the seal has magic, and Cyrus is aghast at the suggestion that a Forever Knight would use magic. Because no true knight would ever side with magic. Ignore that whole thing with Arthur and Merlin. On an ironic English history note, Alfred Lord Tennyson was the one who renewed interest in Arthur’s legend in the 19th century, but I’m pretty sure this is a coincidence. Anyway, the Knights receive word of a mysterious bright light in the city and disappearing civilians, so the two groups decide to investigate. And wouldn’t you know it? There’s an attack. A weird looking blob of a creature has attached tendrils to a police officer’s temples and appears to be feeding off of him. Cyrus orders his men to fire, Ben shouts no, Gwen throws up a shield, and Ben decides he needs to kick some Forever Knight ass, since the team doesn’t want innocents hurt. Gwen rushes in to save the officer, but she’s likewise mindraped—and trust me, when she gives her account of it afterward, “rape” sounds pretty damn accurate. Kevin armors up with some metal and attacks, freeing her. The creature tries to sink its tentacles into him too, but turns out that Kevin’s somehow immune. The creature decides this is the perfect time to escape and plows through the Forever Knights, taking Winston with him. Naturally, this leads to everyone’s favorite pastime: Blame Ben. While the Knights go and do just that, Gwen explains to the others that the creature calls itself the Lucubra, and it was fishing around in her brain. When the Knights come over with their game of “It’s all Ben’s fault,” Ben defends himself by saying they would have been arrested for shooting an officer and Winston still would have been kidnapped, so there. Gwen manages to convince Cyrus to hand over Winston’s pack full of notes, and the gangs split up—Knights to the north and the team to the south, and Kevin makes them promise to call each other for backup before attacking.
Gwen thinks that the seal prevented the Lucubra from crossing over to our dimension, and she manages to track Winston down through his belongings. But by accident, she connects to the Lucubra’s mind and sees its memory of the attack. Still, she manages to get what she needs, and they head to find Winston. Unfortunately for them, the Knights had the same idea and put a tracking device in the pack, so now they can track the team tracking Winston. In the Abandoned Warehouse District, Ben and Kevin decide that they were vague enough about when to contact the Knights (even though Kevin had clearly said “before” attacking), so it’s not really breaking a promise if they attack now and call for backup later. Gwen snarks that they’d be good in politics, and somehow that scares me more than anything else this show has had to offer through the years. Before going to what Gwen calls the “nuclear option,” she creates platforms for them to spy on the Lucubra as it feeds off the people it’s attacked so far. But she loses focus, under its control again, and the platform disappears. Ben goes Goop just in time to save their lives, and when Gwen wakes up, she realizes that the Lucubra is feeding off of thoughts and energy from the parietal lobe of the brain, which is active during prayer and meditation. Can anybody in neuroscience confirm that for me? ‘Cause I don’t think it came up in my psych classes. And in any case, why is the Lucubra attacking to people’s temporal lobes in order to nom on the parietal? Whatever. Kevin insists that Gwen stays out of the battle because of the two consecutive attacks on her mind, and he oddly tries to insist that it’s a team thing and not because he’s worried about her. You wouldn’t think they’ve been dating for over a year now. Gwen insists she’s strong enough, and Ben compromises by sending Gwen to watch the back door and act as reinforcement if necessary. But he’s worried too, so he and Kevin agree to finish this fast. Unfortunately, the boys don’t know how to fight quietly, so after less than a minute, Gwen hears them getting their asses kicked by zombies and decides she needs to go in and save them again. But Cyrus arrives and says that if she wants to save them, she’ll have to go through the Knights first. Sweeter words have never been spoken to her as she gleefully beats the crap out of the Knights. But the Lucubra attacks her again, so Ben goes straight to the NRG option and blasts it, breaking her free. The Lucubra tries to attack NRG, but Ben realizes that his metal suit is protecting him just like metal armor had protected Kevin before. So you mean that if the Forever Knights had effing worn their goddamn helmets, this wouldn’t have happened?! Idiots. Kevin runs to Gwen and uses his powers (as seen in “Plumbers’ Helpers” and “Too Hot To Handle”) to let some of his armor coat Gwen, covering the front and top of her head as a “tinfoil hat.” Now using protection (…you try thinking of a way to say it without sounding obscene), Gwen’s ready to seal the Lucubra away. NRG blasts it into a big hole in the ground, and Gwen creates the seal from mana, saving everyone and repairing the floor while she’s at it. Guess she learned that one from Grandma (who repaired the house in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”). Winston tells Gwen that he tried to fight it off, and Kevin’s still jealous. But Cyrus tells the Squire to keep away from the “alien scum,” somehow managing not to stab them in the back again, but given that they’ve kicked his ass twice already when he’s tried it, he’s deciding not to hope three’s a charm. Ben just tells them to hurry up and leave so he can go back to bed. Once outside, Cyrus warns Winston that Ben and the others are “alien spawn” and will “contaminate” him given the chance. Oy, your racism’s showing, dude. But Winston’s eyes flash green for a moment when nobody’s looking, and it’s clear that if he’s been contaminated by anything, it’s by the Lucubra.
And old George returns to the original seal, as lost as ever.
As far as the quality of this episode goes, I have to say it’s “okay.” It’s certainly not a bad episode, but it’s not enjoyable enough to be considered a good one. And I think that comes down to the fact that there’s nothing new about it. This episode treads a lot of old ground, and unfortunately, it doesn’t do a good job of exploring the old topics in new ways. The idea of an extradimensional creature being the threat is straight out of “Paradox,” when the time-warped Hugo was running around trying to figure out what the hell was going on. We’ve seen mind-controlling villains done much better before, and especially just an episode ago with the Hive Queen in “Revenge of the Swarm.” The truce with the Forever Knights until they can defeat an escaped creature is a total rehash of “Be-Knighted,” including the Squire with the crush on somebody on the team (Winston and Gwen, and you can’t tell me that the Squire from “Be-Knighted” didn’t have a mancrush on Ben). The human-against-alien racism is also from “Be-Knighted,” which had tied in as a counterpoint to the Highbreed’s racism in seasons one and two of Alien Force.
And I think this is my problem with the season so far. Some of the episodes feel like they should have been in Alien Force, but were dropped due to whatever reason (such as time constraints) and then recycled for Ultimate Alien. For example, the Ben/Julie breakup. It really feels like something that probably should have been handled onscreen in season three of Alien Force, given Ben’s personality shift and issues brought up between the two in episodes like “Don’t Fear the Repo.” But for whatever reason—possibly because Julie had made so few appearances until that point—they dropped the plot element and Julie ended up incredibly supportive of Ben in “Fame”…until “Duped” happened. Their relationship seemed to ping-pong between supportive and healthy on both sides to absolutely ridiculous, coming back to sweet and awesome in “Hero Time.” Then “The Transmogrification of Eunice” revealed there was an offscreen breakup, but it was resolved the very next episode in “Eye of the Beholder,” which even had elements that felt more in-line with season three of Alien Force than season two of Ultimate Alien. We didn’t have anything that really felt like progression of the subplot until “Revenge of the Swarm” actually showed some consequences.
Likewise, “Creature From Beyond” feels like a Highbreed Arc episode. The racism theme, the history of the Forever Knights, the odd UST between an already dating Kevin and Gwen, Ben sticking to his guns on not killing innocents or enemies—all of this screams Highbreed Arc to me. Hell, it might even explain why Ben’s car has gone MIA again—he didn’t have one until the end of Alien Swarm, and it might have made things a little too easy to have an extra driver around (someone who could check another side of the city on foot or take Gwen home so she’s not a liability in battle, or hell, someone who doesn’t mind scratching his paint job a little just to run down the Lucubra). If it really was a dropped Alien Force episode, it’s probably because it was too similar to “Be-Knighted”. They just didn’t do as good a job reworking it to fit Ultimate Alien.
We get to see Chromastone flying for the first time since the revelation that he could do that in “The Secret of Chromastone,” and we actually get to see a transformation sequence for Armadrillo—with the armor forming over Ben’s body.
And while I normally try to keep my crackpot theories to myself, I think I have an explanation for George and the whole First Knight thing. Now, they seem to be pretty heavily implying that the ancient George is the First Knight who established the Forever Knights, but “Be-Knighted” revealed that the Forever Knights were established with the goal of eradicating the alien Dragon they discovered and locked away, which had been a thousand years ago—one thousand years after Cyrus’s sect claims the First Knight sealed away the Lucubra. And George is already known to be very, very old—it’s possible he’s nigh-immortal. It’s entirely possible that if he is the First Knight, he could have fought the Dragon a millennium later.
So. A knight named George. A dragon. I think he might be St. George. I originally thought along the lines of Arthurian legend, given the magical seal, but when I rewatched this and saw that his name was George (because I’m not going to remember names of minor characters that have only been mentioned once on the first go-around), I realized this was probably the more likely case. The legend of St. George and the dragon appears to have been adapted from various myths, including Perseus saving Andromeda and the Babylonian myth of Marduk slaying Tiamat—and acknowledging that (like Stargate SG-1) would neatly avoid stepping on any toes with the Catholic message the story tries to get across…even though I’m pretty sure that modern Catholics can agree that this story probably never happened and was just a fanciful story brought back from the Crusades.
“Creature From Beyond” was written by Len Uhley.
The team drives to that rock quarry you always see in Doctor Who, with Ben asleep in the back of the car. On a sidenote, where the hell is his car anyway? It’s only made a cameo since “The Transmogrification of Eunice.” And honestly, Gwen and Kevin need to stop picking on him about falling asleep. Only last week, he was having nightmares of his ex-girlfriend’s father coming to kill him and then his ex-girlfriend kidnapped his girlfriend and then sacrificed her life to save him. I think the guy’s earned some rest. They venture down into the quarry and find abandoned helmets and swords, the cracked seal, and a trail before more Forever Knights arrive. Kevin makes the prerequisite Monty Python joke, saving me from having to do it, and Ben asks which splinter cell they’re part of (Urian, Patrick, Driscoll, etc.). Sir Cyrus, their leader, argues that he’s part of the true path, set down by the Knights’ founder, the First Knight. A battle ensues in which Cyrus is stupid enough to try to take Ben hostage, but before the team can really have fun beating the shit out of these guys, Winston straightens things out for the Knights, so Cyrus calls a truce. There is obvious UST between Winston and Gwen that leaves Kevin feeling threatened, but it doesn’t stop Winston from having to admit that during the mysterious explosion/attack/whatever, he bravely ran away. Gwen determines that the seal has magic, and Cyrus is aghast at the suggestion that a Forever Knight would use magic. Because no true knight would ever side with magic. Ignore that whole thing with Arthur and Merlin. On an ironic English history note, Alfred Lord Tennyson was the one who renewed interest in Arthur’s legend in the 19th century, but I’m pretty sure this is a coincidence. Anyway, the Knights receive word of a mysterious bright light in the city and disappearing civilians, so the two groups decide to investigate. And wouldn’t you know it? There’s an attack. A weird looking blob of a creature has attached tendrils to a police officer’s temples and appears to be feeding off of him. Cyrus orders his men to fire, Ben shouts no, Gwen throws up a shield, and Ben decides he needs to kick some Forever Knight ass, since the team doesn’t want innocents hurt. Gwen rushes in to save the officer, but she’s likewise mindraped—and trust me, when she gives her account of it afterward, “rape” sounds pretty damn accurate. Kevin armors up with some metal and attacks, freeing her. The creature tries to sink its tentacles into him too, but turns out that Kevin’s somehow immune. The creature decides this is the perfect time to escape and plows through the Forever Knights, taking Winston with him. Naturally, this leads to everyone’s favorite pastime: Blame Ben. While the Knights go and do just that, Gwen explains to the others that the creature calls itself the Lucubra, and it was fishing around in her brain. When the Knights come over with their game of “It’s all Ben’s fault,” Ben defends himself by saying they would have been arrested for shooting an officer and Winston still would have been kidnapped, so there. Gwen manages to convince Cyrus to hand over Winston’s pack full of notes, and the gangs split up—Knights to the north and the team to the south, and Kevin makes them promise to call each other for backup before attacking.
Gwen thinks that the seal prevented the Lucubra from crossing over to our dimension, and she manages to track Winston down through his belongings. But by accident, she connects to the Lucubra’s mind and sees its memory of the attack. Still, she manages to get what she needs, and they head to find Winston. Unfortunately for them, the Knights had the same idea and put a tracking device in the pack, so now they can track the team tracking Winston. In the Abandoned Warehouse District, Ben and Kevin decide that they were vague enough about when to contact the Knights (even though Kevin had clearly said “before” attacking), so it’s not really breaking a promise if they attack now and call for backup later. Gwen snarks that they’d be good in politics, and somehow that scares me more than anything else this show has had to offer through the years. Before going to what Gwen calls the “nuclear option,” she creates platforms for them to spy on the Lucubra as it feeds off the people it’s attacked so far. But she loses focus, under its control again, and the platform disappears. Ben goes Goop just in time to save their lives, and when Gwen wakes up, she realizes that the Lucubra is feeding off of thoughts and energy from the parietal lobe of the brain, which is active during prayer and meditation. Can anybody in neuroscience confirm that for me? ‘Cause I don’t think it came up in my psych classes. And in any case, why is the Lucubra attacking to people’s temporal lobes in order to nom on the parietal? Whatever. Kevin insists that Gwen stays out of the battle because of the two consecutive attacks on her mind, and he oddly tries to insist that it’s a team thing and not because he’s worried about her. You wouldn’t think they’ve been dating for over a year now. Gwen insists she’s strong enough, and Ben compromises by sending Gwen to watch the back door and act as reinforcement if necessary. But he’s worried too, so he and Kevin agree to finish this fast. Unfortunately, the boys don’t know how to fight quietly, so after less than a minute, Gwen hears them getting their asses kicked by zombies and decides she needs to go in and save them again. But Cyrus arrives and says that if she wants to save them, she’ll have to go through the Knights first. Sweeter words have never been spoken to her as she gleefully beats the crap out of the Knights. But the Lucubra attacks her again, so Ben goes straight to the NRG option and blasts it, breaking her free. The Lucubra tries to attack NRG, but Ben realizes that his metal suit is protecting him just like metal armor had protected Kevin before. So you mean that if the Forever Knights had effing worn their goddamn helmets, this wouldn’t have happened?! Idiots. Kevin runs to Gwen and uses his powers (as seen in “Plumbers’ Helpers” and “Too Hot To Handle”) to let some of his armor coat Gwen, covering the front and top of her head as a “tinfoil hat.” Now using protection (…you try thinking of a way to say it without sounding obscene), Gwen’s ready to seal the Lucubra away. NRG blasts it into a big hole in the ground, and Gwen creates the seal from mana, saving everyone and repairing the floor while she’s at it. Guess she learned that one from Grandma (who repaired the house in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”). Winston tells Gwen that he tried to fight it off, and Kevin’s still jealous. But Cyrus tells the Squire to keep away from the “alien scum,” somehow managing not to stab them in the back again, but given that they’ve kicked his ass twice already when he’s tried it, he’s deciding not to hope three’s a charm. Ben just tells them to hurry up and leave so he can go back to bed. Once outside, Cyrus warns Winston that Ben and the others are “alien spawn” and will “contaminate” him given the chance. Oy, your racism’s showing, dude. But Winston’s eyes flash green for a moment when nobody’s looking, and it’s clear that if he’s been contaminated by anything, it’s by the Lucubra.
And old George returns to the original seal, as lost as ever.
As far as the quality of this episode goes, I have to say it’s “okay.” It’s certainly not a bad episode, but it’s not enjoyable enough to be considered a good one. And I think that comes down to the fact that there’s nothing new about it. This episode treads a lot of old ground, and unfortunately, it doesn’t do a good job of exploring the old topics in new ways. The idea of an extradimensional creature being the threat is straight out of “Paradox,” when the time-warped Hugo was running around trying to figure out what the hell was going on. We’ve seen mind-controlling villains done much better before, and especially just an episode ago with the Hive Queen in “Revenge of the Swarm.” The truce with the Forever Knights until they can defeat an escaped creature is a total rehash of “Be-Knighted,” including the Squire with the crush on somebody on the team (Winston and Gwen, and you can’t tell me that the Squire from “Be-Knighted” didn’t have a mancrush on Ben). The human-against-alien racism is also from “Be-Knighted,” which had tied in as a counterpoint to the Highbreed’s racism in seasons one and two of Alien Force.
And I think this is my problem with the season so far. Some of the episodes feel like they should have been in Alien Force, but were dropped due to whatever reason (such as time constraints) and then recycled for Ultimate Alien. For example, the Ben/Julie breakup. It really feels like something that probably should have been handled onscreen in season three of Alien Force, given Ben’s personality shift and issues brought up between the two in episodes like “Don’t Fear the Repo.” But for whatever reason—possibly because Julie had made so few appearances until that point—they dropped the plot element and Julie ended up incredibly supportive of Ben in “Fame”…until “Duped” happened. Their relationship seemed to ping-pong between supportive and healthy on both sides to absolutely ridiculous, coming back to sweet and awesome in “Hero Time.” Then “The Transmogrification of Eunice” revealed there was an offscreen breakup, but it was resolved the very next episode in “Eye of the Beholder,” which even had elements that felt more in-line with season three of Alien Force than season two of Ultimate Alien. We didn’t have anything that really felt like progression of the subplot until “Revenge of the Swarm” actually showed some consequences.
Likewise, “Creature From Beyond” feels like a Highbreed Arc episode. The racism theme, the history of the Forever Knights, the odd UST between an already dating Kevin and Gwen, Ben sticking to his guns on not killing innocents or enemies—all of this screams Highbreed Arc to me. Hell, it might even explain why Ben’s car has gone MIA again—he didn’t have one until the end of Alien Swarm, and it might have made things a little too easy to have an extra driver around (someone who could check another side of the city on foot or take Gwen home so she’s not a liability in battle, or hell, someone who doesn’t mind scratching his paint job a little just to run down the Lucubra). If it really was a dropped Alien Force episode, it’s probably because it was too similar to “Be-Knighted”. They just didn’t do as good a job reworking it to fit Ultimate Alien.
We get to see Chromastone flying for the first time since the revelation that he could do that in “The Secret of Chromastone,” and we actually get to see a transformation sequence for Armadrillo—with the armor forming over Ben’s body.
And while I normally try to keep my crackpot theories to myself, I think I have an explanation for George and the whole First Knight thing. Now, they seem to be pretty heavily implying that the ancient George is the First Knight who established the Forever Knights, but “Be-Knighted” revealed that the Forever Knights were established with the goal of eradicating the alien Dragon they discovered and locked away, which had been a thousand years ago—one thousand years after Cyrus’s sect claims the First Knight sealed away the Lucubra. And George is already known to be very, very old—it’s possible he’s nigh-immortal. It’s entirely possible that if he is the First Knight, he could have fought the Dragon a millennium later.
So. A knight named George. A dragon. I think he might be St. George. I originally thought along the lines of Arthurian legend, given the magical seal, but when I rewatched this and saw that his name was George (because I’m not going to remember names of minor characters that have only been mentioned once on the first go-around), I realized this was probably the more likely case. The legend of St. George and the dragon appears to have been adapted from various myths, including Perseus saving Andromeda and the Babylonian myth of Marduk slaying Tiamat—and acknowledging that (like Stargate SG-1) would neatly avoid stepping on any toes with the Catholic message the story tries to get across…even though I’m pretty sure that modern Catholics can agree that this story probably never happened and was just a fanciful story brought back from the Crusades.
“Creature From Beyond” was written by Len Uhley.
Kapaychan
Date: 2011-03-29 11:22 pm (UTC)I couldn't be buggered to write my own review of this episode because I did feel that it was on the dull side. I watched it once and I thought that was enough so I couldn't write about it. It became clearer to me why after reading this review. It WAS done before, so it's all kinda meh. But the one thing I perked up about it was the use of a magical seal. Maybe a potential indication for some magic-related seasonal arc? Maybe it'll jump start the return to that gateway to everywhere concept introduced in "Where The Magic Happens", especially since the interdimensional villains thing is looking important.
Re: Kapaychan
Date: 2011-03-30 12:16 am (UTC)Okay, that makes sense. Given different things you're supposed to be focusing or shutting out, that would happen. And huh, just realized that I totally called it on Gwen looking into neuroscience articles back when I wrote "Tabula Rasa."
While it was a relief to have a reassuringly average episode following last week's emotional rollercoaster ride, it was just a little too average. There wasn't enough explored in a new way. Though I do hope that we'll see more interesting things done with magic. And hopefully, it'll rub off on the Forever Knights. I haven't exactly enjoyed them as villains throughout their run.
Re: Kapaychan
Date: 2011-03-31 10:25 pm (UTC)You are so psychic! XDDDD Somehow, I'm not surprised that she would. I bet she's even subscribed to science articles or something.
There hasn't been any indications of them being particularly interesting, the Forever Knights as villains classify under average so their episode are also just as average. XD They don't make an impact on me either, even back then in the original series when they were played out as more of a threat than in the more recent series. Maybe this season will give them a chance to make that mark. Hopefully.
Re: Kapaychan
Date: 2011-04-01 03:48 pm (UTC)I think the biggest problem I have with the Forever Knights is that they don't seem to fit in the larger Ben 10 world. Sure, I like the idea that there are enemies that are quite literally more "down-to-earth" for Ben to face, but really? A bunch of Ren Faire rejects? This is what you're going with? Ben has at any point in any of the series 10 super-powered aliens at his disposal. I'm supposed to believe that he's being overrun by guys in steel armor? Advanced weaponry or not, these guys are increasingly more obviously the equivalent of sending the knights from Monty Python and the Holy Grail against Superman.