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akinoameOld George (“Creature From Beyond”) arrives at Area 51 and casually kills two security guards before utterly destroying the entire facility. Probably including the Ark of the Covenant and the crystal skull alien. Meanwhile, Grandpa Max has gathered the team for a camping trip—possibly immediately after the spring cleaning last episode. While Ben lights the campfire as Swampfire, argues with Gwen over it not being overkill because he doesn’t have an alien named Overkill, and explaining to Kevin that he always announces his name to strike fear in the heart of his enemies (newsflash, Ben: You are not Batman), Max gets a call from Cooper. Our suddenly surprisingly hot techie dork in a Plumber’s uniform is at Area 51 getting no help from the Air Force on what happened during the obliteration of the facility. Because it’s the military. And it’s Area 51. Yes, it’s so secret even the aliens don’t know what’s going on. Cooper has no idea what’s going on, so he asks for help, so the whole team flies over to Nevada to investigate. They’re greeted by Col. Rozum, who refuses to explain what the high-tech facility underneath Area 51 is. Ben backtalks Rozum, backed up by Max (unsurprising, given what we learned about him and superior officers in “Moonstruck”), but when the team is ready to leave, Rozum confesses that it’s a prison for potential alien threats to homeworld security, kind of like a Space Guantanamo—and please hold all political comments and thoughts on Gitmo. Basically, it’s another thing they’ve borrowed from Stargate SG-1. Ben goes Big Chill and fazes through the floor to investigate, and he comes back horrified, giving vague descriptions of the horrible conditions the aliens have been living under for the past forty to fifty years. Remember that this is a sixteen-year-old who has been fighting for his life and the entire planet since he was a young child and adopted a flippant persona in order to survive the stress of knowing he may one day have to kill someone. This disturbs him. That’s a pretty good indication of how bad it is. Max is pissed and points out that the U.S. Air Force has violated so many kinds of galactic law when they’re provisionary signatories to the Casey-Kelley Accords, the main treaty of the galaxy (last mentioned in “Vengeance of Vilgax”), but Rozum insists that the U.S. did what needed to be done. Huh, that sounds familiar. Ben calls bullshit on the whole thing and insists that all 774 prisoners are going to be turned over to the Plumbers for proper processing, and Rozum is horrified to realize Ben’s count has excluded one. One of the prisoners has escaped.
In fact, this prisoner has managed to hijack Cooper’s ship, but Rath hitches a ride to try to stop it. After an amusing bit where Rath picks a fight with gravity (spoiler: gravity wins), the team discovers that the ship has crashed in a town nearby. Wonder how Nick and the rest of the gang from CSI original are going to handle that particular crime scene. They arrive to find the ship crashlanded, but nobody aboard. Failing to stop the self-destruct, they manage to keep the damage in the water at least and track down the chaos in town. They find an older police officer, who shamefully confesses that he’d begged for his life from the alien, who agreed to let him go when he learned the man had a family. Interesting, that. The team agrees to keep his secret and follow the trail of destruction to an alien that looks oddly like Randall from Monsters, Inc. (Artist’s rendition) After an amusing bit where Humongousaur lets out a “Oh, truck!” before getting hit by a semi, Ben fights the alien—who can turn invisible, and he’s watched this over and over, remember this—who reveals that he was a revolutionary back on his home planet before being exiled to Earth, captured by the Air Force, and then having to suffer under the knowledge that the revolution failed and his family was killed. Damn. Ben and Kevin try to convince him to settle the score and seek justice, but due to Kevin’s really dumb word choice, the prisoner is convinced that it’d be a great job to seek revenge instead and kill Rozum and his family. The prisoner disappears, and Gwen lowers her shield in surprise, and Ben yells out that it’s a trap, and sure enough, the prisoner attacks them and brings the warehouse down on their heads. The team races back to Area 51 to learn that Rozum flew back to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he’s normally stationed, and the trio rush over in the Rustbucket, unaware that their invisible enemy is hitching a ride. They arrive on base, and Gwen takes a look over at the Rustbucket, seeing a shadow. Then she asks the single dumbest question of the episode:
“Guys? Is there any chance the prisoner could have chameleon-like powers that would let him blend in with backgrounds so that he’s practically invisible?”
Ben follows it up with the dumbest answer of the episode:
“Sure. That could explain how he got out of your energy globe before.”
I’m sorry, but you saw this! In fact, you were the one who realized it was a trap, Ben! I hate when bad editing makes them look like idiots.
Tangent aside, the prisoner escapes, and Ben goes Wildmutt to track him—with an amusing bit where Gwen announces his name, since “He can’t talk, so somebody had to do it!” They manage to find the Rozum house, where Mrs. Rozum and the baby are totally oblivious to the danger they’re in. The prisoner is ready to attack (though hesitates), but Wildmutt is pretty much in a mood of “DON’T touch the baby!” by tackling him and trying to eat him, more or less. Gwen senses the alien’s mana and tries to guide Kevin where to hit, but I honestly wonder why she didn’t do it herself since it’s hard for Kevin to follow the directions and it’s not like she’s in a situation where she couldn’t help otherwise, like Bruce Wayne to Terry McGinnis in Batman Beyond. Rozum arrives, and the prisoner holds him hostage, threatening to kill him with the spike in his tail—but after he watches his family die just as the prisoner’s had. Ben decides he’s had enough of this bullshit and goes Ultimate Wildmutt, who can talk, much to the disappointment of Gwen. He attacks the prisoner, who begs Ben to kill him so he can join his family. Disheartened, Ben calls off the attack and demorphs, glaring at Rozum and asking if this guy really strikes him as a threat.
They return to the main part of Patrick AFB, and the Plumbers take away the prisoner, while the Ultimatrix catalogues the DNA (Melinisapien), unlocking it to Playlist 5. Proving he has a lousy sense of timing, Ben transforms, dubbing this one Overkill. Disgusted, Gwen and Kevin walk away, with Ben asking if it was too soon. Eh, he’s going to rename this one to ChamAlien anyway, which is a step down from Overkill, in my opinion. Rozum says that he wants to be there when the Plumbers interrogate the prisoner, and Max chews him out, insisting they won’t torture him like the Air Force had. They argue again over “what needs to be done,” and while Max warns Rozum that Earth violated interstellar law big time, Rozum insists that the choice between “a few hundred aliens” and the safety of the United States is an easy one, and he’ll make the same one every time. Disgusted, Max walks away.
This episode revisits two themes, though in the context of Col. Rozum. Rozum has been an ally of the team’s from the beginning of the series, when they retrieved the nuke belonging to Project Orion in “Fame.” Since then, he’s been assigned to the Air Force’s “Weird Stuff” task force—which apparently is the official name for it. Step down from “Stargate Command,” if you ask me. He might not be an actual friend to them, but he’s been a fairly decent ally. Now, he’s pretty much become their enemy, or at the very least, the relationship is strained, bringing an element of Cadmus to Ultimate Alien.
In Justice League Unlimited, the U.S. government got worried that the League got too big for its britches and would become a threat to national security. So they established Project: Cadmus, a shadowy organization funded by Lex Luthor that would defeat the League (specifically Superman) if they ever went rogue, as the Justice Lords had in “A Better World.” This backfired on them immensely, as Luthor was manipulating all of them from the start in an attempt to give himself superpowers, but he himself was being manipulated by Brainiac, who was trying to get a shiny new body out of the deal. I won’t spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it, but it was totally epic. The arc was born from the end of Superman: The Animated Series, took things from the second season of the original Justice League series, worked into the first season of JLU, and then by season two, they realized they had a full-fledged story going. It was the most awesome part of the series, bringing into question just how heroic our heroes were and pitting them against the government.
This episode takes the Cadmus Arc and twists it, keeping the heroes in a positive light while pitting them against the military, questioning them on two running themes from last season and the third season of Alien Force: “What makes a monster and what makes a man?” and “What needs to be done?” The first theme, born from Kevin’s identity crisis in AF season three—which in some ways is more the prologue to UA than the follow-up to the Highbreed Arc of seasons one and two—asks if there is any difference between alien or human. Is “humanity” an intangible quality within your heart, or is it impossible to have “humanity” if you’re not human? This theme has since evolved this season, begging the question of what counts as “human” or “real”—are mutants like Kevin, avatars like Eunice, Ultimatrix templates, and aliens in prison as deserving of life and choice as the normal definitions of “human” or “real” beings? Gwen kept trying to convince Kevin that his humanity was something completely independent of his physical appearance, and in a way, it was confirmed based on some of his actions near the end of last season, when he attacked the Warden in revenge for Kwarrel’s death (“…Nor Iron Bars a Cage”) and when he admitted that he tried not to attack Gwen because he knew he’d try to drain her energy (“Absolute Power”). Ben insisted in “The Transmogrification of Eunice” that Eunice and his aliens were all “real,” no matter what Azmuth believed, and the belief regarding the aliens may have some grain of truth in it, based on the deaths of Way Big and Swampfire/Ultimate Swampfire in “Ben 10,000 Returns.” Hell, in “Moonstruck,” Max argued that the Synthroids had no right to decide that their lives were more important than the life of a single Anodyte, Verdona, since all life was precious. The theme is continued here, when Rozum stands by the Air Force’s decision to lock up any aliens they’ve come across over the past few decades, simply because they might be a threat to national security. Ben and Max, however, believe in the words of our Lord and Savior, Optimus Prime: “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.” What? I can jump on the meme bandwagon every so often. They’re appalled by the conditions of the prisoners (and in Max’s case, just Ben’s descriptions of the conditions), and they’re determined to help them, even if it means going against their country and their ally. Rozum insists that he’s in the right, since it’s the country and possibly the planet at stake, and it’s a risk he’s not willing to take. But his methods make him out to be more of a monster than the monsters he’s locked away.
The second theme was a big one last season, the keywords “what needs to be done.” This was the shield Ben used to safeguard himself against any self doubt about having to kill Kevin in the miniarc. However, what he failed to realize was that Paradox was asking him to save Kevin rather than kill him, which was what Gwen was trying to get him to see the entire time. Typically, if you tell yourself that it’s something you “have” to do, it’s generally something you shouldn’t at all. And it holds true with Rozum. He believes that what he “has” to do is imprison any potential threat to the United States in what I’m sure is in no way political commentary on policies of the United States government in the wake of the War on Terror, and that means keeping any threats contained and neutralized. He doesn’t understand why Max and Ben are taking the aliens’ side instead of their own country. This is a matter of national security—Max at the very least should understand it. This may make him seem to be a monster, but sometimes, he who fights monsters must take care to become a monster himself, if it’s the only way to win—in a twist of Nietzsche’s famous quote in Beyond Good and Evil. So it’s appropriate that Ben and Max are the ones to stand against him, since Ben decided he was going to stop riding with the devil before he turned into a villain (to blatantly steal lines from Kamen Rider W and The Dark Knight) and because last episode showed that Max had been just as idealistic as his grandson once upon a time—and if this really is the immediate aftermath of “Moonstruck,” it would be on his mind.
The question, though, is what will become of Rozum and the United States’ relationship with Ben from now on. The only way to resolve it in JLU was to prove to Amanda Waller that Luthor was a total douche manipulating them from the start and that Superman would never cross the line that his Justice Lord doppelganger had burned in the sand. Unless this somehow ties into the Forever Knights arc—since their philosophy is very similar—I don’t know how they could do that. Ben’s got enough problems on his plate without becoming an enemy of the state, and Rozum honestly hasn’t shown up enough to really play with a sense of betrayal. But we’ll see what the implications are in the future.
Ben uses his first new Ultimate form of the new season (well, since Ultimate Ben in “Ben 10,000 Returns,” but that was 10-K anyway), Ultimate Wildmutt. He’s red and not as furry, with some kind of almost fishlike fin running up his back. And he can talk, which is a major change. Otherwise, we don’t see a whole lot from him, since the prisoner guilt tripped him into stopping.
“Prisoner Number 775 is Missing” was written by Peter David. The Prisoner (and by extension, ChamAlien) was voiced by Dee Bradley Baker.
In fact, this prisoner has managed to hijack Cooper’s ship, but Rath hitches a ride to try to stop it. After an amusing bit where Rath picks a fight with gravity (spoiler: gravity wins), the team discovers that the ship has crashed in a town nearby. Wonder how Nick and the rest of the gang from CSI original are going to handle that particular crime scene. They arrive to find the ship crashlanded, but nobody aboard. Failing to stop the self-destruct, they manage to keep the damage in the water at least and track down the chaos in town. They find an older police officer, who shamefully confesses that he’d begged for his life from the alien, who agreed to let him go when he learned the man had a family. Interesting, that. The team agrees to keep his secret and follow the trail of destruction to an alien that looks oddly like Randall from Monsters, Inc. (Artist’s rendition) After an amusing bit where Humongousaur lets out a “Oh, truck!” before getting hit by a semi, Ben fights the alien—who can turn invisible, and he’s watched this over and over, remember this—who reveals that he was a revolutionary back on his home planet before being exiled to Earth, captured by the Air Force, and then having to suffer under the knowledge that the revolution failed and his family was killed. Damn. Ben and Kevin try to convince him to settle the score and seek justice, but due to Kevin’s really dumb word choice, the prisoner is convinced that it’d be a great job to seek revenge instead and kill Rozum and his family. The prisoner disappears, and Gwen lowers her shield in surprise, and Ben yells out that it’s a trap, and sure enough, the prisoner attacks them and brings the warehouse down on their heads. The team races back to Area 51 to learn that Rozum flew back to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he’s normally stationed, and the trio rush over in the Rustbucket, unaware that their invisible enemy is hitching a ride. They arrive on base, and Gwen takes a look over at the Rustbucket, seeing a shadow. Then she asks the single dumbest question of the episode:
“Guys? Is there any chance the prisoner could have chameleon-like powers that would let him blend in with backgrounds so that he’s practically invisible?”
Ben follows it up with the dumbest answer of the episode:
“Sure. That could explain how he got out of your energy globe before.”
I’m sorry, but you saw this! In fact, you were the one who realized it was a trap, Ben! I hate when bad editing makes them look like idiots.
Tangent aside, the prisoner escapes, and Ben goes Wildmutt to track him—with an amusing bit where Gwen announces his name, since “He can’t talk, so somebody had to do it!” They manage to find the Rozum house, where Mrs. Rozum and the baby are totally oblivious to the danger they’re in. The prisoner is ready to attack (though hesitates), but Wildmutt is pretty much in a mood of “DON’T touch the baby!” by tackling him and trying to eat him, more or less. Gwen senses the alien’s mana and tries to guide Kevin where to hit, but I honestly wonder why she didn’t do it herself since it’s hard for Kevin to follow the directions and it’s not like she’s in a situation where she couldn’t help otherwise, like Bruce Wayne to Terry McGinnis in Batman Beyond. Rozum arrives, and the prisoner holds him hostage, threatening to kill him with the spike in his tail—but after he watches his family die just as the prisoner’s had. Ben decides he’s had enough of this bullshit and goes Ultimate Wildmutt, who can talk, much to the disappointment of Gwen. He attacks the prisoner, who begs Ben to kill him so he can join his family. Disheartened, Ben calls off the attack and demorphs, glaring at Rozum and asking if this guy really strikes him as a threat.
They return to the main part of Patrick AFB, and the Plumbers take away the prisoner, while the Ultimatrix catalogues the DNA (Melinisapien), unlocking it to Playlist 5. Proving he has a lousy sense of timing, Ben transforms, dubbing this one Overkill. Disgusted, Gwen and Kevin walk away, with Ben asking if it was too soon. Eh, he’s going to rename this one to ChamAlien anyway, which is a step down from Overkill, in my opinion. Rozum says that he wants to be there when the Plumbers interrogate the prisoner, and Max chews him out, insisting they won’t torture him like the Air Force had. They argue again over “what needs to be done,” and while Max warns Rozum that Earth violated interstellar law big time, Rozum insists that the choice between “a few hundred aliens” and the safety of the United States is an easy one, and he’ll make the same one every time. Disgusted, Max walks away.
This episode revisits two themes, though in the context of Col. Rozum. Rozum has been an ally of the team’s from the beginning of the series, when they retrieved the nuke belonging to Project Orion in “Fame.” Since then, he’s been assigned to the Air Force’s “Weird Stuff” task force—which apparently is the official name for it. Step down from “Stargate Command,” if you ask me. He might not be an actual friend to them, but he’s been a fairly decent ally. Now, he’s pretty much become their enemy, or at the very least, the relationship is strained, bringing an element of Cadmus to Ultimate Alien.
In Justice League Unlimited, the U.S. government got worried that the League got too big for its britches and would become a threat to national security. So they established Project: Cadmus, a shadowy organization funded by Lex Luthor that would defeat the League (specifically Superman) if they ever went rogue, as the Justice Lords had in “A Better World.” This backfired on them immensely, as Luthor was manipulating all of them from the start in an attempt to give himself superpowers, but he himself was being manipulated by Brainiac, who was trying to get a shiny new body out of the deal. I won’t spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it, but it was totally epic. The arc was born from the end of Superman: The Animated Series, took things from the second season of the original Justice League series, worked into the first season of JLU, and then by season two, they realized they had a full-fledged story going. It was the most awesome part of the series, bringing into question just how heroic our heroes were and pitting them against the government.
This episode takes the Cadmus Arc and twists it, keeping the heroes in a positive light while pitting them against the military, questioning them on two running themes from last season and the third season of Alien Force: “What makes a monster and what makes a man?” and “What needs to be done?” The first theme, born from Kevin’s identity crisis in AF season three—which in some ways is more the prologue to UA than the follow-up to the Highbreed Arc of seasons one and two—asks if there is any difference between alien or human. Is “humanity” an intangible quality within your heart, or is it impossible to have “humanity” if you’re not human? This theme has since evolved this season, begging the question of what counts as “human” or “real”—are mutants like Kevin, avatars like Eunice, Ultimatrix templates, and aliens in prison as deserving of life and choice as the normal definitions of “human” or “real” beings? Gwen kept trying to convince Kevin that his humanity was something completely independent of his physical appearance, and in a way, it was confirmed based on some of his actions near the end of last season, when he attacked the Warden in revenge for Kwarrel’s death (“…Nor Iron Bars a Cage”) and when he admitted that he tried not to attack Gwen because he knew he’d try to drain her energy (“Absolute Power”). Ben insisted in “The Transmogrification of Eunice” that Eunice and his aliens were all “real,” no matter what Azmuth believed, and the belief regarding the aliens may have some grain of truth in it, based on the deaths of Way Big and Swampfire/Ultimate Swampfire in “Ben 10,000 Returns.” Hell, in “Moonstruck,” Max argued that the Synthroids had no right to decide that their lives were more important than the life of a single Anodyte, Verdona, since all life was precious. The theme is continued here, when Rozum stands by the Air Force’s decision to lock up any aliens they’ve come across over the past few decades, simply because they might be a threat to national security. Ben and Max, however, believe in the words of our Lord and Savior, Optimus Prime: “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.” What? I can jump on the meme bandwagon every so often. They’re appalled by the conditions of the prisoners (and in Max’s case, just Ben’s descriptions of the conditions), and they’re determined to help them, even if it means going against their country and their ally. Rozum insists that he’s in the right, since it’s the country and possibly the planet at stake, and it’s a risk he’s not willing to take. But his methods make him out to be more of a monster than the monsters he’s locked away.
The second theme was a big one last season, the keywords “what needs to be done.” This was the shield Ben used to safeguard himself against any self doubt about having to kill Kevin in the miniarc. However, what he failed to realize was that Paradox was asking him to save Kevin rather than kill him, which was what Gwen was trying to get him to see the entire time. Typically, if you tell yourself that it’s something you “have” to do, it’s generally something you shouldn’t at all. And it holds true with Rozum. He believes that what he “has” to do is imprison any potential threat to the United States in what I’m sure is in no way political commentary on policies of the United States government in the wake of the War on Terror, and that means keeping any threats contained and neutralized. He doesn’t understand why Max and Ben are taking the aliens’ side instead of their own country. This is a matter of national security—Max at the very least should understand it. This may make him seem to be a monster, but sometimes, he who fights monsters must take care to become a monster himself, if it’s the only way to win—in a twist of Nietzsche’s famous quote in Beyond Good and Evil. So it’s appropriate that Ben and Max are the ones to stand against him, since Ben decided he was going to stop riding with the devil before he turned into a villain (to blatantly steal lines from Kamen Rider W and The Dark Knight) and because last episode showed that Max had been just as idealistic as his grandson once upon a time—and if this really is the immediate aftermath of “Moonstruck,” it would be on his mind.
The question, though, is what will become of Rozum and the United States’ relationship with Ben from now on. The only way to resolve it in JLU was to prove to Amanda Waller that Luthor was a total douche manipulating them from the start and that Superman would never cross the line that his Justice Lord doppelganger had burned in the sand. Unless this somehow ties into the Forever Knights arc—since their philosophy is very similar—I don’t know how they could do that. Ben’s got enough problems on his plate without becoming an enemy of the state, and Rozum honestly hasn’t shown up enough to really play with a sense of betrayal. But we’ll see what the implications are in the future.
Ben uses his first new Ultimate form of the new season (well, since Ultimate Ben in “Ben 10,000 Returns,” but that was 10-K anyway), Ultimate Wildmutt. He’s red and not as furry, with some kind of almost fishlike fin running up his back. And he can talk, which is a major change. Otherwise, we don’t see a whole lot from him, since the prisoner guilt tripped him into stopping.
“Prisoner Number 775 is Missing” was written by Peter David. The Prisoner (and by extension, ChamAlien) was voiced by Dee Bradley Baker.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-01 08:13 am (UTC)Kendra: Why does he yell out the name?
T.V: Why do you always say the name?
Us: OMGWTF!?!?
In soviet Russia, T.V watches you!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-01 02:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-01 05:56 pm (UTC)I have to agree with you when Gwen made that stupid comment about 775's invisible ability. For some odd reason, she reminds me of what Teppei might say in your Yang-Yin fan fiction. I supposed it's probably the nature of Gwen's phrase and Teppei's nature as the "comic relief" that reminded me.
Aside from this, I enjoyed this episode. I thought that it was really interesting and amusing with all of those comical bits (like Ben's "Oh, truck!" comment). Rozum doesn't strike me as a bad guy. Like Amanda from Justice League, he just wants to protect his nation when it comes to aliens, but he just have a different (and stupid) method and idealism about it.
Great review, Akino. I look forward into the next one next time. Good luck!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-01 07:11 pm (UTC)To be honest, Teppei is partially based on Kevin. And on Sokka. And a little bit on Power Rangers RPM in general, based on the way they lovingly poke fun at Power Rangers tropes. And I think based on the "Yang-Yin" crew's tendency to be deadpan genre savvy, I wanted to headdesk at how long it took Gwen and Ben to catch on.
In retrospect, I've got mixed feelings about this episode. I enjoyed it when I was watching it, but as I picked it apart, I had more issues. And it's strange because I found what I analyzed to be really interesting. But I think part of it might come down to the fact that the video cut out during the final battle, so I had to go and look for it online in order to do the review, and I hated having to put in the extra work just for a short scene.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-01 07:24 pm (UTC)Now will you please excuse me, I am going to go back and rewatch that scene where Rath is trying to hitch a ride and fought with gravity.