Way of the dumpster: “The Stone of Threbe”

[akinoame]

The Lurdings are mining rocks when they discover a strange, seven-pointed, star-shaped stone that glows bright green. Meanwhile, on Earth, Blunk’s stink is driving off customers at the Silver Dragon right before the big health inspector visit that we never see, so Hay Lin recruits the other girls into giving him a bath. Because clearly, this is what the plot needs to focus on. Blunk keeps escaping into dumpsters—and I honestly can’t be bothered to make the prerequisite Rita Repulsa joke—Will decides to set aside the “Never use your powers for personal gain” rule Caleb insisted they follow and declares that it’s morphin’ time.

Meanwhile, Cedric puts the stone on display at Ye Olde Bookshop, and out on the street, a girl who is clearly Elyon based on her hair, clothes, and voice, starts having a reaction to it. She takes the stone and leaves. At that very moment, the Guardians suddenly lose all their magic, but for some reason, remain in Guardian form instead of human form. After a few misadventures, the girls make it back to the Silver Dragon, where Yan Lin realizes that this must be the cause of the Star of Threbe, created by the Mage ages ago to locate the young Heir to the Throne of Meridian—which back then was pretty much a house rather than a castle. The Star rendered powerless all who would keep the girl from coming home, including the pterodactyls—I’m not making this up—but it could not be destroyed. Realizing that it could easily be used for evil, her father threw it into the Volcano of Mordor Threbe, but obviously, that didn’t do anything to destroy it because the Mage said it couldn’t be destroyed. Now, the Guardians’ only hope of regaining their powers or returning to their normal forms is for the Star to change hands, but that would mean that Phobos would discover who his sister is.

To make matters worse, Phobos sends a giant Venus flytrap to attack the train, for some odd reason. Lamenting the loss of their powers and how they shouldn’t have abused them even though that wouldn’t have changed anything at all, the girls go to fight. Caleb insists that you don’t need powers in order to fight, but any chance of awesomeness with Caleb kicking ass or the girls fighting without powers is lost by the fact that they’re pretty much just climbing the bridge and stabbing at the plant’s stem, trying to cut it off from its roots. At that point, Elyon returns to the bookstore and apologizes to Cedric for taking the Star even though she doesn’t know why she did. Cedric tries not to take it, but Elyon insists, and the moment it changes hands, the girls get their powers back and start kicking ass the way they know how. So much for any moral they could have learned from this. They save the train, but Yan Lin points out how utterly fucked they are that the Star of Threbe has done its work. That downer is badly subverted by karma hitting Blunk, throwing him into a car wash.

But at Ye Olde Bookstore, Elyon joins Cedric for the first day of her new part-time job…

I really should not hate this episode. It continues the Missing Princess arc and does set up a really threatening end by delivering Elyon right into the hands of evil all while she fails to realize what she’s gotten herself into. But so much of this makes me headdesk.

The conflict of the episode comes from the Star of Threbe. At least a thousand years ago, when Meridian was still peaceful—which totally contradicts Yan Lin’s explanation in the first episode that it’s a dimension of evil—the King and Queen completely failed at watching their daughter, and she wandered away from their picnic site in search of a butterfly. Despite the fact that we’re talking about a very little girl who can’t possibly walk that far that fast and a wide, open space that doesn’t offer much in the way of hiding places, her parents went to the Mage for help. I’m guessing they must have been really inattentive that day. The Mage used the Heart of Kandrakar and a rock to create the Star of Threbe, warning the parents that if they used this, it couldn’t be destroyed and might one day serve their enemies. Being desperate, they agreed.

The Star’s powers are as such: it draws the missing Princess to it, overriding her will. She walks home while an energy field nullifies the powers of anyone who might try to stop her. Or creates a forcefield that prevents a pterodactyl from eating her. Because Meridian has or had pterodactyls. I’m not questioning it.

What I do question is why the Star leaves the Guardians in Guardian form without any of their powers. See, first of all, it’s supposed to render powerless anyone who tries to stop the Princess from going home. The Guardians are not an immediate threat and are in fact trying to give a smelly Passling a bath the entire time. And even if it’s regarding potential threats, Elyon takes the Star out of Ye Olde Bookstore, her will completely overridden. She then walks out. My best guess is that she goes to her house, which would be considered “home,” otherwise she’s wandering around town for no purpose whatsoever until she can walk back to the very place where she started. But no, that would be stupid.

Second, why are they still in Guardian form? This makes no sense. If the girls have lost their powers, they should lose their Guardian forms—it’s part of their powers. To continue the Power Rangers jokes I can’t help but make after seeing the damn pterodactyls, it’s like when Tommy got stuck as the Black Ranger in Dino Thunder: the tights are still part of your powers. At least Dino Thunder made it clear that weird shit was going on with Tommy’s powers, given that he went invisible after.

Finally, I come to what really drives me nuts about this episode: the tacked-on moral. I hated it in the Ben 10 episode “Kevin 11,” and I hate it just as much here. Superhero shows have to make a show of this moral never to use their powers for personal gain (the first rule of the Power Rangers, as set in stone by Zordon), and normally it doesn’t come up. But when they want to have their kid heroes abusing their powers, they really go about it the wrong way.

First, we’ve already seen the girls misusing their powers. Multiple times. And the team’s given each other hell for it. If this is supposed to be the grand moment when they decide they need to stop abusing their powers, this is the worst possible episode to do it in. The girls don’t lose their powers because they’re using them unwisely; they lose them because an outside influence is activated. Even if they hadn’t transformed to try to bathe Blunk, they still would have lost their powers. Only then, they would have been trapped in human form and capable of focusing on the real issue of the Star of Threbe rather than bemoaning their misuse of their powers.

Second, nothing is learned from this. Even ignoring the fact that they’re still going to use their powers on Earth for stupid little things, the one chance they have to prove to themselves that they don’t need powers to be heroes, they blow it. What should have been a climactic battle where they do all they can to try to win without powers, only to be saved at the last moment by the return of their powers is instead a tedious show of them climbing a bridge with shovels, trying to sever the plant from its roots. It looks terrible, and it’s worse when you consider the fact that Caleb fights without powers everyday, and this is one of the few chances he has to actually show off in front of everybody. Hell, he and Irma just the previous episode took on Phobos and Cedric while cosplaying as knights and pulling off a frickin’ Rider Kick! Wouldn’t that have been the better lesson on learning not to rely on your powers as much?

In short, I hate this moral. If only because every time I’ve seen it utilized, it’s mishandled. Instead of teaching the heroes to value their natural abilities, it just makes them look stupid.

Phobos says that “after a thousand years of searching,” the Star is finally his—which would have to mean that his predecessors in evil were probably searching for it for a thousand years, since no matter how old he is, his sister was only born twelve years ago. Also, in the flashback, the Mage is wearing a jewel on her forehead that resembles the Jewel of Weira of the next season. No clue if Weisman did that on purpose or not.

“The Stone of Threbe” was written by Bob Dolan Smith.

Comments

[tigerpetals.livejournal.com]

Since the Star of Threbe was made to get the Heir of Meridian home, that part of the plot makes sense. Elyon didn't go home in the episode, because home in this case would be Meridian, not whatever the Heir thinks/feels is home.

I don't understand why a person shouldn't use magical powers for their own gain. It's as valid as using any other talent or skill to do something, unless you're entering a contest to test one specific ability and you deceive people by using some other ability to make yourself look competent in what is being tested.

I prefer not to think about the timeline, because I don't like it. I figure you're right about who was searching for the Star.

[akino-ame.livejournal.com]

At the same time, there is a portkey at the bookstore. It's the closest way to home. There's no reason for Elyon to just walk past it and wander aimlessly throughout the city before going back to where she started. It's still weird, even if you think about it that way.

What really irritates me about this episode is that moral. I understand the need to put in a moral like "don't cheat" in a children's show where the heroes have powers that would make it easy to cheat. It's one reason why I liked seeing the way Phobos applauded Will for using her powers to win the swimming competetion in "V is for Victory," thereby shaming her into realizing what she was turning into at this rate. It was a lesson not to become so focused on winning that you're willing to use dirty methods.

But every time I see this moral, it's never handled well. Worse, it feels tacked-on here because there is no direct causation between "using our powers to give Blunk a bath" and "losing our powers." If it was an explicit punishment because the Oracle or someone thought that they weren't showing they weren't worthy of the power, I could at least somewhat buy it. But it's a total coincidence, which renders this annoying moral completely pointless.

[tigerpetals.livejournal.com]

I guess I can spin it if I want to make it not look so bad. It's like how people do things they're not supposed to all the time, and if you do that as a kid and something bad happens to you, even if it's a coincidence, you can still expect someone to tell you that's what you get for doing whatever it is that you did. The moral doesn't stop the girls from using their powers for personal gain, like Will cheating and making an Astral Drop to do chores and Cornelia making herself look older to get a guy. So it actually subverts the moral of the day episode cliché, both because the moral doesn't make sense and because they ignore it anyway.

Having the Oracle or someone else punishing them would be more of a heavy-handed thing, and this way it makes sense that they wouldn't learn a lesson and refrain from such behavior: the events of this episode don't really teach the purported moral, so why take them as a cautionary tale?

But this is purely me making something up to justify the episode.

[akino-ame.livejournal.com]

They definitely seem to be trying to push this moral, especially at the end with Will saying that she learned her lesson and with karma taking care of Blunk's stink. But it just doesn't work given the context.

Either way, I hate the way this moral gets used every time I've ever seen it, and I want it to die in a fire. Preferably set with superpowers.

[galistar07.livejournal.com]

I don't like this episode so much either. It's probably my least favorite one of all. But only the part where WITCH's bad day story. But I do like the part where they revealed Elyon as the true Queen of Meridian.
Anyway, this was a nice review to read. Good luck with the next one and with your Yang Yin fanfiction as well.

[akino-ame.livejournal.com]

I do like the suspense they built up. But everything leading to that just made me headdesk. I hate that moral with a passion.