Endpoint Analysis: Ultimate Alien
Apr. 16th, 2012 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameThis is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say:
This is the end.
The end of an era. The end of Dwayne McDuffie and Glen Murakami’s run on Ben 10. When they began, the series had run a good two to three years under its creators, Man of Action, who wrote it as a bit of a homage to comic books, aimed at the 6-11 boys watching and making their parents buy toys. As the fans began to grow up and Man of Action moved on, McDuffie and Murakami took the reins, expanding the target audience a bit by including fan-favorite Kevin and trying to cement the series more in hard sci-fi. When fans reacted negatively, they reversed their decisions and reintroduced the mystical elements of the show, continuing the comic book traditions the series started with: retcon it to make it more realistic and re-retcon it when that backfires.
This formula brought them from Alien Force, the story of Ben growing up and maturing as a hero on his own, supported by his friends; to Ultimate Alien, Ben taking the lead as a public figure and having to make hard decisions about the enemies he’s facing and the friends he’s won. Which has now brought us to the end, as a seasoned yet new crew takes the reins for Ben 10: Omniverse, apparently attempting to bring the series once more to its roots.
And unfortunately, this is also the end of my interest in the series.
This has been a long time coming. Last year, in February, Dwayne McDuffie died from complications after emergency heart surgery. And it was then that I knew that I wouldn’t watch Omniverse if he didn’t work on it. Unlike probably a good portion of the fanbase, I didn’t grow up with comics, nor with much in the way of TV. I read a lot as a child, and the first superhero shows I saw were when I was nine years old, with Superfriends reruns and Batman: The Animated Series and the budding DCAU. From there, I was hooked, becoming more and more attracted to the mature storylines that the DCAU offered, while still loving fun stuff like Teen Titans during high school and college. McDuffie was the whole reason I even gave Alien Force a chance, because I’d loved Static Shock and his work on Justice League. When Ben 10 first aired, I was in my first year of college. It was this show about a ten-year-old kid and the aliens he could turn into, while he traveled the country over the summer with his grandfather and cousin. And I had no interest in it. I was eighteen and I had three younger siblings. I really had no desire to watch something centered around kids who’d drive me nuts. And drive me nuts Ben and Gwen did every time I tried to watch it. Sure, there were some episodes I thought were pretty strong, such as “Ken 10” and Secret of the Omnitrix, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.
And then Alien Force came along, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shaungarin urged me to watch it again, as he has with Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, and Pretty Cure. Since he’s got a 3 for 3 success rating in getting me to watch stuff, I checked it out—but only because I saw that the crew was from my beloved Justice League Unlimited and Teen Titans.
And you know something? I loved it. Even when it was bad, I loved it. I loved watching Ben grow and mature, and I liked seeing Gwen be a calming influence, a confidante for Ben and second-in-command as he had to learn how to make decisions on his own, and I loved watching Kevin go from villain to hero. It was exactly the kind of series that appealed to me. I even went back and started giving the original a chance, and while I still have to say it’s not my cup of tea, I can appreciate it a bit better.
Then Ultimate Alien rolled around, and I was even more hooked than before. The Aggregor storyline giving way to the Kevin storyline, with intense drama and major character development and consequences—it was the stuff of dreams. By this point, I’d finished watching some Kamen Rider series and Power Rangers RPM, and I loved the deep character analysis that this whole story arc was going into, just like I got out of my favorite toku.
But then something happened, and it’s what I call the “second story slump.” The second season or second story arc begins, and it really isn’t as strong, or it doesn’t know where it’s going. I heard about it happening in JLU as the Cadmus story arc completed and the Legion story arc began, and I saw it in AF with the Vilgax story arc. And it happened here. For a long time, season two of UA didn’t have a story arc. But I was okay with it because it produced a good amount of solid oneshots, like “Revenge of the Swarm” (at the time), “Ben 10,000 Returns,” and “Moonstruck.” But when the Dagon story arc kicked off, I found it lacking. And episodes came that absolutely infuriated me, including triggery material and copouts in characterization and story. The magic—or alien hard science, if you prefer—was gone. And since it was after McDuffie’s death, I couldn’t help but feel—especially since “Ben 10,000 Returns” was the only episode he’d written until that the end—that without him, Ben 10 was seriously lacking something special. And as rumors of reboots and unappealing character designs surfaced, I already knew that I couldn’t watch the sequel. Not with the Maestro gone.
Now, McDuffie would probably roll his eyes at this lament from a twenty-four-year-old who doesn’t read comics and hardly watches TV anymore and never grew up with this stuff. Or maybe he’d be touched, who knows? All I know is that the series no longer appealed to me, and my inevitable goodbye to Ultimate Alien was going to be a goodbye to Ben altogether (minus the forays in fanfiction and RP, of course, but that’s all going to be based in the past stuff).
So this endpoint analysis is probably going to be the hardest I’ll ever do, even more so than the three-part analysis I have to do for Kamen Rider Ryuki. It’s going to be messy and emotional, but I’ve been invested in this show for four years. I realize that it’s not as long as some of the rest of the fandom, but it’s hard to say goodbye, and it’s hard to sort through disillusionment and pain and find the love that never ends.
With those words said, let’s dive into the series itself.
Ultimate Alien started off on a high point, completely changing the game. In the finale of Alien Force, Ben gained the Ultimatrix, a specialized Omnitrix created by Albedo that could evolve his alien forms into their Ultimate forms, ala Digimon or Pokémon. On top of that, another major change occurred. For six years, Ben had been able to hide his heroics, maintaining a secret identity. But one ten-year-old boy was smart enough to put together all of the mysterious alien appearances and link them to a single symbol, finally linking that to Ben. The video he posted went viral on the internet, and Ben instantly became a celebrity. This all crashed into his first intergalactic incident, where an evil Osmosian like a future evil Kevin gone horribly, horribly right, abducted five powerful aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy and tried to use their powers to gain the Map of Infinity, which would lead him to the Forge of Creation, where he could absorb the powers of a baby Alien X and become a god. This season was wrought with intense drama and character development, as we explored what made a hero and how even those who fell from the light could still be saved from the darkness.
I’ve gone over how effing awesome season one was in my Season Summation. While he wasn’t well developed as a character separate to himself, Aggregor was a great dark reflection of both Kevin, and of Ben too. He was clearly based off of Kevin 11,000 from the original series what-if episode “Ken 10,” but when you get down to it, he was also a great character foil for Ben. He was the first villain who ever truly outwitted Ben, and he was much more well-versed in the art of war. Ben’s greatest strength until that point had not been his physical power, but his mind and heart. He was the man with a plan, the one who could come up with something that was just crazy enough to work, and his goodheartedness kept him from straying into the dark side.
But as DVD Verdict points out, there is a gimmick that is similar between Ben and Aggregor, and it’s the ability to take on the powers of other aliens. With the Ultimatrix, Ben can easily scan their DNA and become a copy of them. Aggregor uses his powers to absorb one-tenth of their powers, and seeks to take on their full powers, all in an attempt to gain the powers of a baby Celestialsapien—what does it matter if you can only get one-tenth of infinity? Ben uses his powers peacefully, never harming whomever he scans. Aggregor hurts those he absorbs, and when he becomes Ultimate Aggregor, we’re led to believe that he killed the Andromeda Five.
With this dark reflection set up, Ben’s character went into its darkest spiral. His temper was shorter, and he was clearly smarting after every defeat. Greg played him like a secondhand fiddle, and he fell for it every time. Meanwhile, Kevin was becoming wiser in the background, leading to his heroic sacrifice where he gave into the monster inside of him in order to save the universe. What had really propelled Ben’s descent into darkness was the fact that the “Ben Way,” the tao that he followed where he fought for peace, where he tried to make friends, and where he always saved the people, didn’t work against Aggregor. And now, his greatest success, the only one of his enemies that he managed to turn into a friend, had to absorb his powers and went mad, became his enemy once more. This led Ben to essentially say, “Fuck it,” to the whole thing and completely misinterpret Paradox’s message to him that he would do “what needs to be done” as “kill Kevin dead.” However, Ben never had it in him to kill anyone, and really, the end where Gwen guilt trips him into saving Kevin is just as much her calling his bluff. The Tao of Ben is that there’s always another way—this is what has defined him as a hero, and it is the entire basis of his fighting style. He doesn’t have to sink to the level of the bad guys. He doesn’t have to kill. He can remain a hero, pure and true.
And then came season two.
I don’t want to dump on season two, mostly because I think I’ve complained enough during the reviews themselves. Its first problem was following such a strong first season. How do you top the climax that is “Forge of Creation” and the wonderful resolution of “Absolute Power”? The team has proven their bond under the worst possible circumstances, and they’ve all come out stronger. We saw Kevin’s dark side, and we saw Gwen’s light, and we saw Ben edging closer and closer to the darkness. So clearly, you’ve got to do something epic, something that will test Ben’s mettle once more and really play with the possibility that Ben might give into his great power too, right?
Well, not exactly. The second problem with this season is that it started off without a clearly defined arc. The season started off with oneshot episodes, most of which were pretty good and accomplished a good amount of character development. But at the same time—they were oneshots! It took until episode seven to reveal what the main plot was, when even season three of Alien Force made it obvious from the first episode that Vilgax was the main threat that season. A consistent problem with Ben 10 is that it’s not very good at sticking to a single plot thread for very long; like its hero, it has a lack of focus on a specific goal. It runs around with apparent ADHD, starting up new subplots and forgetting about them for a season or more. “Enemy of My Frenemy” aired a year and four months after we left Charmcaster in Ledgerdomain at the end of “Where the Magic Happens”…thirty-one episodes later. We never did find out what happened to Aggregor after “Forge of Creation” until a throwaway line in “Night of the Living Nightmare,” and that was Albedo telling us anyway. Returning to the main plot is abrupt and confusing; the last six episodes before the last three episodes of season two apparently took place over the course of two weeks, with about half of them having to take place over the course of multiple days. It was a shock returning to the Forever Knights plot and discovering that in the time it took for Ben to defeat six of his enemies, they hadn’t gotten a damn thing done.
And the third problem is the buildup and payoff. I’m going to say it again: The Forever Knights are not interesting villains for Ben 10. They are a gimmick, and that gimmick doesn’t mesh well with the story of a boy with a watch that can transform him into different aliens. You want normal people using innovative technology to stand toe-to-toe with superpowered individuals? Watch The Legend of Korra; it promises to be awesome.
The major plot of season two was a triune story featuring the history of the Forever Knights, the return of Vilgax (again), and the Esoterica’s search for their lost god, Dagon. This…is troublesome. The first two are fine, easy to swallow Ben 10 plots. But once you start mixing cults in, well…I put up a shitload of trigger warnings on my reviews for season two for a reason.
The Dagon arc is in some ways similar to the Ori arc of Stargate SG-1, the final two seasons of the series. You’ve got some changes to the status quo, like the departure of Richard Dean Anderson and the additions of Ben Browder and Claudia Black to the cast. You’ve got some wavering focus on the plot until it really kicks off again about halfway through, and oh yeah, the fact that it’s about a religion with some striking parallels to real-world faiths.
I’ve already discussed the lack of focus on the plot, so let’s start off with the status quo. Season two opened up with the revelation that offscreen, Ben and Julie had an argument and broke up. Or something. It was really unclear just what happened, but Julie said something and Ben took it to mean that it was over and yeah. Teenage wasteland. I actually wouldn’t have had as much of a problem as I did with the breakup if it hadn’t happened offscreen. From the sound of it, legitimate concerns were brought up, and we see quite a bit of what’s going on in their minds: How much time Ben is able to devote to Julie, how much attention Julie is demanding from Ben, mutual jealousy, both of them needing to focus on themselves for a little while. All in all, very realistic problems that they’ve had that would keep me from quoting Linkara’s rant about the Tommy/Kim breakup in Zeo. But the problem is that we don’t see what they argued about. We can only guess. And then on top of that, the assumption is made that Julie must have been right. That Ben is constantly wrong. I’ll get on the whole ONORE DICKEIDO thing going on with Ben later on, but it’s a major problem with him across all series. But what makes the problem worse is that this whole shift in the status quo doesn’t do anything. We only ever see one reference to Ben and Julie working on repairing their relationship, and that’s “Revenge of the Swarm.” Every time that we see Ben and Julie together again after that, they’re strained like Gwen and Kevin were at the beginning of their relationship. And I’ll get on Gwen and Julie (not like THAT!) later. All it really does is free Ben up for Eunice to kiss him. And she’s technically his cousin.
The next big problem is the fact that the Esotericas are a religious organization and Dagon is their god. Much like the followers of Origin in SG-1, you can find parallels in them to real-world religious organizations (fundamental Christianity for Origin, Scientology for the Esotericas), and this immediately gets problematic. You can a religious organization all you like. Go ahead and criticize it for its practices, for what it promotes, and what its priorities are. Criticize the Ori for lying to its followers and convincing them to destroy all nonbelievers in attempts to gain more power, just as you’d criticize the Catholic Church for its sex scandals and its apparent focus on protecting the priests rather than the abused children, or as you’d criticize Scientology for gag orders against people who leave the Church so they can’t speak out against it or for suing people for criticizing it. These are sins committed by the organizations, and they absolutely deserve to be condemned. But faith is not a sin. If you believe that the ultimate goal of humanity is to Ascend to a higher plane of existence and that those with higher levels of technology should share their blessings with those who lack it? I’m not going to judge your faith. If you believe that a god sent his son to live among humanity only to die to atone for their sins? I’m not going to judge you for that. If you believe that a giant alien squid brought advanced technology to Earth and left, promising to bring more technology to promote peace? I will hold off on pointing out that there are no large bodies of water floating around in space and that squid runs the risk of getting severely dehydrated. It’s what you do as a result of these beliefs that matters.
Can it be done well, this whole battle against the gods? Oh yes. Justice League’s “The Terror Beyond,” for example, features the League waging war against the ancient squid god of Hawkgirl’s ancestors. Part of the plot of Princess Mononoke. Xena and some incarnations of Wonder Woman. There are more, but I just happen to be terrible at pop culture references. You just have to take care with it. Don’t alienate your viewers. Don’t make them feel like having religion, especially a specific one, is wrong.
As for the characters, we’ll start off with Julie, since her characterization was a huge problem for me in season two. When we first met her in Alien Force, she was the Normal Girl. She was an average girl on the tennis team at school, good at some of the subjects that Ben was bad at, but Ben was attracted to her. She was pretty without being beautiful or exotically alien. She was smart without being a genius. She was athletic without being a superstar. She was brave without being reckless. She was supportive without being a doormat. She was perfectly imperfect—everything sane and grounded that Ben wanted.
And then Ultimate Alien rolled around. There was criticism galore of Julie, just like there is for every canon female love interest in every fandom ever: Mai in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Eri in Kamen Rider Ryuki, Dana in Batman Beyond, Kat in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers/Zeo/Turbo, Cam in Bones, Akiko in Kamen Rider W, Ginny in Harry Potter, and so on and so on. How do you address this? Most of the time, the writers don’t bother; they stick to the stories they wanted to tell. Others, like the duo behind Avatar and The Legend of Korra, troll the hell out of everybody. And some try to rectify the characters’ flaws, for better or worse.
I believe that Julie is the last case (though I will admit that the writers seem to know how to troll, especially when it came to Eunice). Were there problems with her character? Yes. I think she was portrayed a little too safely average in AF; it was hard to find something about her—other than Ship—that stood out. But it was nice having the Superhero’s Girlfriend in on the secret so he’d have some emotional support. He has a hell of a time when he can’t tell her what he’s doing and why he has to leave. Terry, Ren, I’m looking at you boys. At least you both fixed that, even if it took Terry a while.
But in UA, Julie began to adopt some exaggerated characteristics and began losing what made her who she’d been. She suddenly became a tennis star, competing internationally, even if her ranking wasn’t high. She became hypercompetitive, to the point that Ben couldn’t even win at miniature golf without it pissing her off. It became obvious that she was jealous of his ability and his fame, and it was sort-of addressed in (sigh) “The Flame Keepers’ Circle,” with her wanting to be able to use her (limited) fame to promote the use of alien technology to better human life. She was furious with Ben in the first season episode “Duped” for missing her first big tennis match, then disrupting it with his Id, Ego, and Superego’s antics. This turned into the Offscreen Breakup and some massively skewed priorities. Julie had once been supportive of Ben’s heroics, and in the very first episode of Ultimate Alien, promised that at least she still thought of him as a hero despite everything that had happened. Kind of hard to remember that when she flips out over him needing to fight a battle after beating her in a friendly game of mini-golf with all four of them (“Greetings From Techadon”), or when she’s pissed that he heard a police radio report of a suspected hostage situation that Ben has to run away from saying goodbye to her at the airport for (“The Perfect Girlfriend”).
The shifts in her personality seem very similar to Gwen. Her hypercompetive relationship with an oblivious Ben seems like Gwen’s childhood relationship with her cousin. She begins so sound like a perfectionist, which canon shows that Gwen is. So I seriously wonder if maybe this is an attempt to attract or please the fringe shippers, specifically Ben/Gwen, who argued that Julie was too bland or normal or otherwise not like Gwen.
And speaking of Gwen, she had an amazing run at the end of season one. During the Kevin arc, she really came into her own as a hero, standing up to not just her boyfriend, but to her superpowerful cousin as well and telling him to cut the crap (I’m paraphrasing here). She got her ass totally kicked by the both of them, but still kept on fighting, using herself as bait to lure Kevin in and telling Ben to take a hard look at what he was considering to do and convincing him to spare Kevin. We watched Kevin fall. We watched Ben teeter on the edge of darkness. And we watched Gwen rise into the light as the hero. I swear, I think I described Aqua at the end of Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep in that analysis there, and that’s saying something.
So season two started, and I was really hyped to see how Gwen was going to develop further. And…we really didn’t get anything new. In fact, we didn’t see anything of what had just happened. Gwen fell back into the same rut she was in during AF, contributing in battle fine, but her role being The Smart One. She still nagged Ben and Kevin, always seemed to know better. She was still a perfectionist. The amazing development shown at the end, where she really could have taken charge of the team in their darkest hour, was entirely forgotten.
Kevin also didn’t get much in the way of development in season two, but honestly? He didn’t need it. He’d gotten everything he needed in season one, and there is literally nothing more I can say on the matter without completely rehashing my Season 1 Summation.
However, unlike Gwen, Kevin didn’t regress in his character development. He was very obviously the voice of reason on the team, telling Gwen when she needed to take a break, yelling at Ben when he was putting them in danger, and everything. When he said that Ben was tempted by the power of the sword, his word carried more weight to me than Gwen’s, when she’s repeatedly shifting into Anodyte form. Kevin completely lost his sanity. He became a villain again. He did the one thing he swore he would never do, and he’d done it to save his friends. He was saved from it. No wonder he’s the voice of reason. At the same time, he’s still the snarky, adorable badass we all love. Give his boy his own show, please!
And finally, we come to Ben. Like with Gwen, there wasn’t a whole lot of follow-up on his development from season one. They kind of alluded to it in “The Ultimate Enemy,” with it being his turn to go through a whole “absolute power corrupts” bit, but it was really poorly built up and it was only the barest reference to Kevin going totally guano loco. Miss “I turn into an Anodyte anytime I want” trying to help him out wasn’t much help.
There were plenty of times where Ben was being a complete dumbass, but he wasn’t nearly as unbearably arrogant as in AF season three, so that’s something at least. This is one of the two major running threads of his characterization: There’s a lot of potential, but it’s not taken as far as it could be. You see him really tortured during the Aggregor arc and very nearly forgetting what it means to be a hero when Kevin becomes a villain, but it’s resolved neatly and I for one don’t get the sense that Ben is ever going to break his heroic vows or kill anyone. We see him struggling with his newfound fame in the first episode of the series, but there’s not enough in the plot to justify exposing his identity. The relationship drama with Julie could easily be handled with his heroics keeping them apart for too long (hello, Terry and Dana) rather than including random acts of jealousy. Hell, half the time after “Eye of the Beholder,” I couldn’t tell if Ben and Julie were still dating. Ben seemed to be interested when other girls expressed interest in him, and he and Julie were on such strained terms that it looked like a very messy divorce. Are they staying together for the kids (Kevin and Gwen)? The fame subplot only really brought in a couple of new characters to play around with. Jimmy Jones, who I personally love, was a great concept and really could have been a jumpstart idea into Omniverse: give a little kid who worships Ben some time to shine, and attract even more kids to the franchise. Or it could have backfired like Justin in Power Rangers: Turbo, who knows? The idea that Ben is a hero to millions, but especially to this ten-year-old boy? That’s a great plot to work with. What about when Ben seems less than heroic? What about when he’s struggling with his morality? What about when he has to bring him into battle—does he do like his grandpa and let the kid tag along, or does he try to protect him like we saw of Original Recipe 10-K in “Ken 10”? Then you’ve got Will Harangue, who could have been an interesting character if not for him totally getting away with everything in “Video Games.” Maybe somebody should be going around and telling everyone that Ben is a menace. Narutaki in Kamen Rider Decade is a fun character. Good portrayals of J. Jonah Jameson of Spider-Man, you love to hate. And let’s face it: We all love seeing what happens when Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart go head-to-head. Harangue could have been the person ensuring that Ben stayed a hero. Maybe it would have helped Ben stick to his ideals if he had someone second-guessing him. Like Superman had with Cadmus in Justice League Unlimited. But Harangue lost that opportunity when he unleashed a Spider Slayer/Omnidroid on Ben in “Video Games.” That’s where you officially cross into villain territory, but he got off without a mark on his reputation, simply by editing live footage of the battle to make it look like Ben was the aggressor. But I’ll get on that later. Harangue was dropped throughout most of season two, becoming mostly a bad memory, and that was pretty much the end of the whole importance of Ben’s fame.
This problem was endemic to the Murakami/McDuffie era as a whole, with the numerous dropped or delayed plotlines. The Forever Knights, for example, were supposed to be waging war against a planet of dragons. That never happened. They were also supposed to be racist against nonhumans, leading to an extermination campaign in “The Purge.” The arrival of St. George the Dragon-Slayer stopped that. Meaning that they killed Pierce for nothing. Or maybe since, you know, it was really unclear. And it’s not like anybody ever found out what happened to Pierce. This is a guy who was set up originally as a parallel to Ben, who was one of Max’s star students and the leader of the Helpers/Max Force through “Above and Beyond.” Ben respected him. And he (maybe) dies and is never addressed again. But that’s not even the worst of it. This series is called Ultimate Alien, and when are the ultimates ever important to the plot? The whole first season, the season when we should be getting used to the changes in the status quo and really selling these new toys, the plot revolves around five new aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy. We hear a justification in the first episode that Ben is a little afraid of the new ultimates, and we see his eyes glow mysteriously for a moment, but it’s never followed up on. We’re supposed to assume that the oneshot, second season episode “Ultimate Sacrifice” is the answer: that the ultimates are taking on a life of their own. But it’s not foreshadowed and we don’t have anything after that resolution. And then Azmuth gives him the new Omnitrix at the end, justifying that the Ultimatrix is a piece of shit and not as good as the Omnitrix and Ben deserves something better. That’s really sweet, Azmuth, but when did we ever see that the Ultimatrix was an inferior device? Nothing plotwise proved that it wasn’t even better than the Omnitrix at getting the job done. So there’s a shorter time limit on ultimate transformations. Big deal. In Kamen Rider Kuuga, Yusuke could only use his Rising forms for thirty seconds, and that meant he couldn’t transform for a good few hours afterward. Does this mean he dumped the device in favor of something more reliable that didn’t allow him access to his much-needed ultimate powers? No. He figured out how to work with that limitation and then how to overcome it. You want a reason to debut a new Omnitrix for the new series? Pick something different from constantly saying the Ultimatrix was inferior without showing any evidence that it wasn’t a damn good plot device. And if you’re going to introduce upgraded forms, do something more with them, especially if that’s the name of your series. No, I’m not still bitter at Kamen Rider 555 about Faiz Blaster Form. Not at all.
The other problem this series has is one I like to call ONORE DICKEIDO. Or you could call it the “Butch Hartman Trap” since it happens in beloved Hartman series The Fairly Oddparents and Danny Phantom. The idea is that it’s always the hero’s fault and he’s always going to get blamed for it. And that’s that.
To once again abuse the hell out of my Kamen Rider analogies, I’m going to go back to what I said about Will Harangue being similar to Narutaki of Decade. Narutaki’s role throughout the series was pretty much to entertain the audience by going through the parallel worlds and warning the Riders there that Tsukasa, the titular Kamen Rider Decade, was a destroyer of worlds and would bring them to ruin. So by the time Tsukasa and his group got there, everyone was out for his blood. They ended up having to spend most of their visit trying to prove to the native Riders that he was worth trusting, while he tried to help them with their problems—which were sometimes caused by Narutaki. How about that? And whenever anything went wrong, Narutaki was the first to blame Tsukasa, with a shout of “ONORE DICKEIDO!” (translation akin to “Curse you, Decade!” but really hammy). And so it happens with Ben and his relationship with Harangue, and well, with the guarded reactions of the entire adult population of Earth. Ben is the Destroyer of Property, the Prince of Collateral Damage, and the Lord of the Reckless. Nobody’s going to take his side, even when he’s trying to do good.
And this extends so far that it reaches the levels of Danny Phantom. In both it and Fairly Oddparents (which I am less familiar with), the hero is a young boy (Danny for the first, Timmy for the second) with a good heart whose reputation is systematically destroyed by everyone around him. He’s got a couple of people who care about him and trust him—for Danny, it’s Sam and Tucker; for Timmy, it’s Cosmo and Wanda; for Ben, it’s Gwen and Kevin—but even they will turn against him if the plot calls for it. Count how many times Gwen and Kevin took Julie’s side in an argument with Ben. Does anybody ever stand up for Ben? Not really.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Like Tsukasa, Danny, and Timmy, Ben has an ego that’s just asking for trouble. Season three of AF, for instance. But his ego isn’t that enormous to justify the way he’s constantly being ragged on. Is it his fault that hero time get in the way of relationship time? You can argue that he can leave it to the others, but when the battle usually ends because Ben pulls out an alien and kicks everyone’s ass? Kind of hard to make the argument that Gwen and Kevin can hold their own.
And this leads to this very odd contradiction that’s across all of the series. And yes, I’m preemptively including Omniverse in this. The story tries to emphasize the fact that Ben is the hero, not the aliens. That it’s his will, his spirit, his heart that save the day. In each series finale so far, we’ve seen it: Secret of the Omnitrix, “The Final Battle,” “The Ultimate Enemy.” This implies that Ben could leave behind the Omnitrix and still be able to do all of his heroics. Yet at the same time, we are constantly told that Ben is the only person worthy to bear the Omnitrix—Secret of the Omnitrix, “War of the Worlds,” “The Final Battle,” and “The Ultimate Enemy.” It’s a plot point regarding villains like Albedo, who was seriously underutilized before becoming a total joke of a character, and Vilgax, who has appeared so many times and gotten his ass kicked so many different ways that I don’t think he has the right to claim to be Ben’s Only Nemesis anymore. I’m not saying that the contradiction is bad, but it is baffling. The franchise edges too much on proving that only Ben is worthy to wear the Omnitrix. But it doesn’t do nearly as good a job proving that Ben could do the job even without it. We see glimpses of it, but it’s not enough to really sell the message. It only happens when Ben has it taken from him. It better proves that he should be the one to keep it.
But for all of my complaints and whining, I don’t think that Ultimate Alien or the Murakami/McDuffie era as a whole were bad or failures. As I said, season one of UA was amazing, really living up to the potential that Murakami and McDuffie saw for it. Season two had some great oneshot episodes, giving amazing insight into the future (“Ben 10,000 Returns”) and the past (“Moonstruck”). Kevin fully developed as a character, Gwen took a chance as the leader and trusted in her heart, and Ben was brought to the brink and back and is still learning on his journey to become a hero.
The final montage in Ben’s memories in “The Ultimate Enemy” really says it all. It is the most beautiful compilation of images across the two series, singling out his brightest and darkest moments. It shows how much he’s proven himself as a hero, how he’s always had his loved ones beside him, and how hard Murakami and McDuffie worked on the series and how much heart they put into it. It clearly indicates that McDuffie knew this would be the end of his run as story editor, though obviously, not in the way he left. It’s bittersweet, and if it were the last of Ben 10 altogether, it would have been a good ending.
But it’s not the end. It’s a new beginning. Time for new fans to join our heroes and to come to love the series just as much as we did. Time for new writers and artists to take the reins. Time for them to prove themselves.
So just as much as it’s a goodbye, it’s also a hello. An end and a beginning.
And in honor of that love that never dies, I’ll leave it to David Bowie and Queen now.
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure.
This is the end.
The end of an era. The end of Dwayne McDuffie and Glen Murakami’s run on Ben 10. When they began, the series had run a good two to three years under its creators, Man of Action, who wrote it as a bit of a homage to comic books, aimed at the 6-11 boys watching and making their parents buy toys. As the fans began to grow up and Man of Action moved on, McDuffie and Murakami took the reins, expanding the target audience a bit by including fan-favorite Kevin and trying to cement the series more in hard sci-fi. When fans reacted negatively, they reversed their decisions and reintroduced the mystical elements of the show, continuing the comic book traditions the series started with: retcon it to make it more realistic and re-retcon it when that backfires.
This formula brought them from Alien Force, the story of Ben growing up and maturing as a hero on his own, supported by his friends; to Ultimate Alien, Ben taking the lead as a public figure and having to make hard decisions about the enemies he’s facing and the friends he’s won. Which has now brought us to the end, as a seasoned yet new crew takes the reins for Ben 10: Omniverse, apparently attempting to bring the series once more to its roots.
And unfortunately, this is also the end of my interest in the series.
This has been a long time coming. Last year, in February, Dwayne McDuffie died from complications after emergency heart surgery. And it was then that I knew that I wouldn’t watch Omniverse if he didn’t work on it. Unlike probably a good portion of the fanbase, I didn’t grow up with comics, nor with much in the way of TV. I read a lot as a child, and the first superhero shows I saw were when I was nine years old, with Superfriends reruns and Batman: The Animated Series and the budding DCAU. From there, I was hooked, becoming more and more attracted to the mature storylines that the DCAU offered, while still loving fun stuff like Teen Titans during high school and college. McDuffie was the whole reason I even gave Alien Force a chance, because I’d loved Static Shock and his work on Justice League. When Ben 10 first aired, I was in my first year of college. It was this show about a ten-year-old kid and the aliens he could turn into, while he traveled the country over the summer with his grandfather and cousin. And I had no interest in it. I was eighteen and I had three younger siblings. I really had no desire to watch something centered around kids who’d drive me nuts. And drive me nuts Ben and Gwen did every time I tried to watch it. Sure, there were some episodes I thought were pretty strong, such as “Ken 10” and Secret of the Omnitrix, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.
And then Alien Force came along, and
shaungarin urged me to watch it again, as he has with Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, and Pretty Cure. Since he’s got a 3 for 3 success rating in getting me to watch stuff, I checked it out—but only because I saw that the crew was from my beloved Justice League Unlimited and Teen Titans.And you know something? I loved it. Even when it was bad, I loved it. I loved watching Ben grow and mature, and I liked seeing Gwen be a calming influence, a confidante for Ben and second-in-command as he had to learn how to make decisions on his own, and I loved watching Kevin go from villain to hero. It was exactly the kind of series that appealed to me. I even went back and started giving the original a chance, and while I still have to say it’s not my cup of tea, I can appreciate it a bit better.
Then Ultimate Alien rolled around, and I was even more hooked than before. The Aggregor storyline giving way to the Kevin storyline, with intense drama and major character development and consequences—it was the stuff of dreams. By this point, I’d finished watching some Kamen Rider series and Power Rangers RPM, and I loved the deep character analysis that this whole story arc was going into, just like I got out of my favorite toku.
But then something happened, and it’s what I call the “second story slump.” The second season or second story arc begins, and it really isn’t as strong, or it doesn’t know where it’s going. I heard about it happening in JLU as the Cadmus story arc completed and the Legion story arc began, and I saw it in AF with the Vilgax story arc. And it happened here. For a long time, season two of UA didn’t have a story arc. But I was okay with it because it produced a good amount of solid oneshots, like “Revenge of the Swarm” (at the time), “Ben 10,000 Returns,” and “Moonstruck.” But when the Dagon story arc kicked off, I found it lacking. And episodes came that absolutely infuriated me, including triggery material and copouts in characterization and story. The magic—or alien hard science, if you prefer—was gone. And since it was after McDuffie’s death, I couldn’t help but feel—especially since “Ben 10,000 Returns” was the only episode he’d written until that the end—that without him, Ben 10 was seriously lacking something special. And as rumors of reboots and unappealing character designs surfaced, I already knew that I couldn’t watch the sequel. Not with the Maestro gone.
Now, McDuffie would probably roll his eyes at this lament from a twenty-four-year-old who doesn’t read comics and hardly watches TV anymore and never grew up with this stuff. Or maybe he’d be touched, who knows? All I know is that the series no longer appealed to me, and my inevitable goodbye to Ultimate Alien was going to be a goodbye to Ben altogether (minus the forays in fanfiction and RP, of course, but that’s all going to be based in the past stuff).
So this endpoint analysis is probably going to be the hardest I’ll ever do, even more so than the three-part analysis I have to do for Kamen Rider Ryuki. It’s going to be messy and emotional, but I’ve been invested in this show for four years. I realize that it’s not as long as some of the rest of the fandom, but it’s hard to say goodbye, and it’s hard to sort through disillusionment and pain and find the love that never ends.
With those words said, let’s dive into the series itself.
Ultimate Alien started off on a high point, completely changing the game. In the finale of Alien Force, Ben gained the Ultimatrix, a specialized Omnitrix created by Albedo that could evolve his alien forms into their Ultimate forms, ala Digimon or Pokémon. On top of that, another major change occurred. For six years, Ben had been able to hide his heroics, maintaining a secret identity. But one ten-year-old boy was smart enough to put together all of the mysterious alien appearances and link them to a single symbol, finally linking that to Ben. The video he posted went viral on the internet, and Ben instantly became a celebrity. This all crashed into his first intergalactic incident, where an evil Osmosian like a future evil Kevin gone horribly, horribly right, abducted five powerful aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy and tried to use their powers to gain the Map of Infinity, which would lead him to the Forge of Creation, where he could absorb the powers of a baby Alien X and become a god. This season was wrought with intense drama and character development, as we explored what made a hero and how even those who fell from the light could still be saved from the darkness.
I’ve gone over how effing awesome season one was in my Season Summation. While he wasn’t well developed as a character separate to himself, Aggregor was a great dark reflection of both Kevin, and of Ben too. He was clearly based off of Kevin 11,000 from the original series what-if episode “Ken 10,” but when you get down to it, he was also a great character foil for Ben. He was the first villain who ever truly outwitted Ben, and he was much more well-versed in the art of war. Ben’s greatest strength until that point had not been his physical power, but his mind and heart. He was the man with a plan, the one who could come up with something that was just crazy enough to work, and his goodheartedness kept him from straying into the dark side.
But as DVD Verdict points out, there is a gimmick that is similar between Ben and Aggregor, and it’s the ability to take on the powers of other aliens. With the Ultimatrix, Ben can easily scan their DNA and become a copy of them. Aggregor uses his powers to absorb one-tenth of their powers, and seeks to take on their full powers, all in an attempt to gain the powers of a baby Celestialsapien—what does it matter if you can only get one-tenth of infinity? Ben uses his powers peacefully, never harming whomever he scans. Aggregor hurts those he absorbs, and when he becomes Ultimate Aggregor, we’re led to believe that he killed the Andromeda Five.
With this dark reflection set up, Ben’s character went into its darkest spiral. His temper was shorter, and he was clearly smarting after every defeat. Greg played him like a secondhand fiddle, and he fell for it every time. Meanwhile, Kevin was becoming wiser in the background, leading to his heroic sacrifice where he gave into the monster inside of him in order to save the universe. What had really propelled Ben’s descent into darkness was the fact that the “Ben Way,” the tao that he followed where he fought for peace, where he tried to make friends, and where he always saved the people, didn’t work against Aggregor. And now, his greatest success, the only one of his enemies that he managed to turn into a friend, had to absorb his powers and went mad, became his enemy once more. This led Ben to essentially say, “Fuck it,” to the whole thing and completely misinterpret Paradox’s message to him that he would do “what needs to be done” as “kill Kevin dead.” However, Ben never had it in him to kill anyone, and really, the end where Gwen guilt trips him into saving Kevin is just as much her calling his bluff. The Tao of Ben is that there’s always another way—this is what has defined him as a hero, and it is the entire basis of his fighting style. He doesn’t have to sink to the level of the bad guys. He doesn’t have to kill. He can remain a hero, pure and true.
And then came season two.
I don’t want to dump on season two, mostly because I think I’ve complained enough during the reviews themselves. Its first problem was following such a strong first season. How do you top the climax that is “Forge of Creation” and the wonderful resolution of “Absolute Power”? The team has proven their bond under the worst possible circumstances, and they’ve all come out stronger. We saw Kevin’s dark side, and we saw Gwen’s light, and we saw Ben edging closer and closer to the darkness. So clearly, you’ve got to do something epic, something that will test Ben’s mettle once more and really play with the possibility that Ben might give into his great power too, right?
Well, not exactly. The second problem with this season is that it started off without a clearly defined arc. The season started off with oneshot episodes, most of which were pretty good and accomplished a good amount of character development. But at the same time—they were oneshots! It took until episode seven to reveal what the main plot was, when even season three of Alien Force made it obvious from the first episode that Vilgax was the main threat that season. A consistent problem with Ben 10 is that it’s not very good at sticking to a single plot thread for very long; like its hero, it has a lack of focus on a specific goal. It runs around with apparent ADHD, starting up new subplots and forgetting about them for a season or more. “Enemy of My Frenemy” aired a year and four months after we left Charmcaster in Ledgerdomain at the end of “Where the Magic Happens”…thirty-one episodes later. We never did find out what happened to Aggregor after “Forge of Creation” until a throwaway line in “Night of the Living Nightmare,” and that was Albedo telling us anyway. Returning to the main plot is abrupt and confusing; the last six episodes before the last three episodes of season two apparently took place over the course of two weeks, with about half of them having to take place over the course of multiple days. It was a shock returning to the Forever Knights plot and discovering that in the time it took for Ben to defeat six of his enemies, they hadn’t gotten a damn thing done.
And the third problem is the buildup and payoff. I’m going to say it again: The Forever Knights are not interesting villains for Ben 10. They are a gimmick, and that gimmick doesn’t mesh well with the story of a boy with a watch that can transform him into different aliens. You want normal people using innovative technology to stand toe-to-toe with superpowered individuals? Watch The Legend of Korra; it promises to be awesome.
The major plot of season two was a triune story featuring the history of the Forever Knights, the return of Vilgax (again), and the Esoterica’s search for their lost god, Dagon. This…is troublesome. The first two are fine, easy to swallow Ben 10 plots. But once you start mixing cults in, well…I put up a shitload of trigger warnings on my reviews for season two for a reason.
The Dagon arc is in some ways similar to the Ori arc of Stargate SG-1, the final two seasons of the series. You’ve got some changes to the status quo, like the departure of Richard Dean Anderson and the additions of Ben Browder and Claudia Black to the cast. You’ve got some wavering focus on the plot until it really kicks off again about halfway through, and oh yeah, the fact that it’s about a religion with some striking parallels to real-world faiths.
I’ve already discussed the lack of focus on the plot, so let’s start off with the status quo. Season two opened up with the revelation that offscreen, Ben and Julie had an argument and broke up. Or something. It was really unclear just what happened, but Julie said something and Ben took it to mean that it was over and yeah. Teenage wasteland. I actually wouldn’t have had as much of a problem as I did with the breakup if it hadn’t happened offscreen. From the sound of it, legitimate concerns were brought up, and we see quite a bit of what’s going on in their minds: How much time Ben is able to devote to Julie, how much attention Julie is demanding from Ben, mutual jealousy, both of them needing to focus on themselves for a little while. All in all, very realistic problems that they’ve had that would keep me from quoting Linkara’s rant about the Tommy/Kim breakup in Zeo. But the problem is that we don’t see what they argued about. We can only guess. And then on top of that, the assumption is made that Julie must have been right. That Ben is constantly wrong. I’ll get on the whole ONORE DICKEIDO thing going on with Ben later on, but it’s a major problem with him across all series. But what makes the problem worse is that this whole shift in the status quo doesn’t do anything. We only ever see one reference to Ben and Julie working on repairing their relationship, and that’s “Revenge of the Swarm.” Every time that we see Ben and Julie together again after that, they’re strained like Gwen and Kevin were at the beginning of their relationship. And I’ll get on Gwen and Julie (not like THAT!) later. All it really does is free Ben up for Eunice to kiss him. And she’s technically his cousin.
The next big problem is the fact that the Esotericas are a religious organization and Dagon is their god. Much like the followers of Origin in SG-1, you can find parallels in them to real-world religious organizations (fundamental Christianity for Origin, Scientology for the Esotericas), and this immediately gets problematic. You can a religious organization all you like. Go ahead and criticize it for its practices, for what it promotes, and what its priorities are. Criticize the Ori for lying to its followers and convincing them to destroy all nonbelievers in attempts to gain more power, just as you’d criticize the Catholic Church for its sex scandals and its apparent focus on protecting the priests rather than the abused children, or as you’d criticize Scientology for gag orders against people who leave the Church so they can’t speak out against it or for suing people for criticizing it. These are sins committed by the organizations, and they absolutely deserve to be condemned. But faith is not a sin. If you believe that the ultimate goal of humanity is to Ascend to a higher plane of existence and that those with higher levels of technology should share their blessings with those who lack it? I’m not going to judge your faith. If you believe that a god sent his son to live among humanity only to die to atone for their sins? I’m not going to judge you for that. If you believe that a giant alien squid brought advanced technology to Earth and left, promising to bring more technology to promote peace? I will hold off on pointing out that there are no large bodies of water floating around in space and that squid runs the risk of getting severely dehydrated. It’s what you do as a result of these beliefs that matters.
Can it be done well, this whole battle against the gods? Oh yes. Justice League’s “The Terror Beyond,” for example, features the League waging war against the ancient squid god of Hawkgirl’s ancestors. Part of the plot of Princess Mononoke. Xena and some incarnations of Wonder Woman. There are more, but I just happen to be terrible at pop culture references. You just have to take care with it. Don’t alienate your viewers. Don’t make them feel like having religion, especially a specific one, is wrong.
As for the characters, we’ll start off with Julie, since her characterization was a huge problem for me in season two. When we first met her in Alien Force, she was the Normal Girl. She was an average girl on the tennis team at school, good at some of the subjects that Ben was bad at, but Ben was attracted to her. She was pretty without being beautiful or exotically alien. She was smart without being a genius. She was athletic without being a superstar. She was brave without being reckless. She was supportive without being a doormat. She was perfectly imperfect—everything sane and grounded that Ben wanted.
And then Ultimate Alien rolled around. There was criticism galore of Julie, just like there is for every canon female love interest in every fandom ever: Mai in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Eri in Kamen Rider Ryuki, Dana in Batman Beyond, Kat in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers/Zeo/Turbo, Cam in Bones, Akiko in Kamen Rider W, Ginny in Harry Potter, and so on and so on. How do you address this? Most of the time, the writers don’t bother; they stick to the stories they wanted to tell. Others, like the duo behind Avatar and The Legend of Korra, troll the hell out of everybody. And some try to rectify the characters’ flaws, for better or worse.
I believe that Julie is the last case (though I will admit that the writers seem to know how to troll, especially when it came to Eunice). Were there problems with her character? Yes. I think she was portrayed a little too safely average in AF; it was hard to find something about her—other than Ship—that stood out. But it was nice having the Superhero’s Girlfriend in on the secret so he’d have some emotional support. He has a hell of a time when he can’t tell her what he’s doing and why he has to leave. Terry, Ren, I’m looking at you boys. At least you both fixed that, even if it took Terry a while.
But in UA, Julie began to adopt some exaggerated characteristics and began losing what made her who she’d been. She suddenly became a tennis star, competing internationally, even if her ranking wasn’t high. She became hypercompetitive, to the point that Ben couldn’t even win at miniature golf without it pissing her off. It became obvious that she was jealous of his ability and his fame, and it was sort-of addressed in (sigh) “The Flame Keepers’ Circle,” with her wanting to be able to use her (limited) fame to promote the use of alien technology to better human life. She was furious with Ben in the first season episode “Duped” for missing her first big tennis match, then disrupting it with his Id, Ego, and Superego’s antics. This turned into the Offscreen Breakup and some massively skewed priorities. Julie had once been supportive of Ben’s heroics, and in the very first episode of Ultimate Alien, promised that at least she still thought of him as a hero despite everything that had happened. Kind of hard to remember that when she flips out over him needing to fight a battle after beating her in a friendly game of mini-golf with all four of them (“Greetings From Techadon”), or when she’s pissed that he heard a police radio report of a suspected hostage situation that Ben has to run away from saying goodbye to her at the airport for (“The Perfect Girlfriend”).
The shifts in her personality seem very similar to Gwen. Her hypercompetive relationship with an oblivious Ben seems like Gwen’s childhood relationship with her cousin. She begins so sound like a perfectionist, which canon shows that Gwen is. So I seriously wonder if maybe this is an attempt to attract or please the fringe shippers, specifically Ben/Gwen, who argued that Julie was too bland or normal or otherwise not like Gwen.
And speaking of Gwen, she had an amazing run at the end of season one. During the Kevin arc, she really came into her own as a hero, standing up to not just her boyfriend, but to her superpowerful cousin as well and telling him to cut the crap (I’m paraphrasing here). She got her ass totally kicked by the both of them, but still kept on fighting, using herself as bait to lure Kevin in and telling Ben to take a hard look at what he was considering to do and convincing him to spare Kevin. We watched Kevin fall. We watched Ben teeter on the edge of darkness. And we watched Gwen rise into the light as the hero. I swear, I think I described Aqua at the end of Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep in that analysis there, and that’s saying something.
So season two started, and I was really hyped to see how Gwen was going to develop further. And…we really didn’t get anything new. In fact, we didn’t see anything of what had just happened. Gwen fell back into the same rut she was in during AF, contributing in battle fine, but her role being The Smart One. She still nagged Ben and Kevin, always seemed to know better. She was still a perfectionist. The amazing development shown at the end, where she really could have taken charge of the team in their darkest hour, was entirely forgotten.
Kevin also didn’t get much in the way of development in season two, but honestly? He didn’t need it. He’d gotten everything he needed in season one, and there is literally nothing more I can say on the matter without completely rehashing my Season 1 Summation.
However, unlike Gwen, Kevin didn’t regress in his character development. He was very obviously the voice of reason on the team, telling Gwen when she needed to take a break, yelling at Ben when he was putting them in danger, and everything. When he said that Ben was tempted by the power of the sword, his word carried more weight to me than Gwen’s, when she’s repeatedly shifting into Anodyte form. Kevin completely lost his sanity. He became a villain again. He did the one thing he swore he would never do, and he’d done it to save his friends. He was saved from it. No wonder he’s the voice of reason. At the same time, he’s still the snarky, adorable badass we all love. Give his boy his own show, please!
And finally, we come to Ben. Like with Gwen, there wasn’t a whole lot of follow-up on his development from season one. They kind of alluded to it in “The Ultimate Enemy,” with it being his turn to go through a whole “absolute power corrupts” bit, but it was really poorly built up and it was only the barest reference to Kevin going totally guano loco. Miss “I turn into an Anodyte anytime I want” trying to help him out wasn’t much help.
There were plenty of times where Ben was being a complete dumbass, but he wasn’t nearly as unbearably arrogant as in AF season three, so that’s something at least. This is one of the two major running threads of his characterization: There’s a lot of potential, but it’s not taken as far as it could be. You see him really tortured during the Aggregor arc and very nearly forgetting what it means to be a hero when Kevin becomes a villain, but it’s resolved neatly and I for one don’t get the sense that Ben is ever going to break his heroic vows or kill anyone. We see him struggling with his newfound fame in the first episode of the series, but there’s not enough in the plot to justify exposing his identity. The relationship drama with Julie could easily be handled with his heroics keeping them apart for too long (hello, Terry and Dana) rather than including random acts of jealousy. Hell, half the time after “Eye of the Beholder,” I couldn’t tell if Ben and Julie were still dating. Ben seemed to be interested when other girls expressed interest in him, and he and Julie were on such strained terms that it looked like a very messy divorce. Are they staying together for the kids (Kevin and Gwen)? The fame subplot only really brought in a couple of new characters to play around with. Jimmy Jones, who I personally love, was a great concept and really could have been a jumpstart idea into Omniverse: give a little kid who worships Ben some time to shine, and attract even more kids to the franchise. Or it could have backfired like Justin in Power Rangers: Turbo, who knows? The idea that Ben is a hero to millions, but especially to this ten-year-old boy? That’s a great plot to work with. What about when Ben seems less than heroic? What about when he’s struggling with his morality? What about when he has to bring him into battle—does he do like his grandpa and let the kid tag along, or does he try to protect him like we saw of Original Recipe 10-K in “Ken 10”? Then you’ve got Will Harangue, who could have been an interesting character if not for him totally getting away with everything in “Video Games.” Maybe somebody should be going around and telling everyone that Ben is a menace. Narutaki in Kamen Rider Decade is a fun character. Good portrayals of J. Jonah Jameson of Spider-Man, you love to hate. And let’s face it: We all love seeing what happens when Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart go head-to-head. Harangue could have been the person ensuring that Ben stayed a hero. Maybe it would have helped Ben stick to his ideals if he had someone second-guessing him. Like Superman had with Cadmus in Justice League Unlimited. But Harangue lost that opportunity when he unleashed a Spider Slayer/Omnidroid on Ben in “Video Games.” That’s where you officially cross into villain territory, but he got off without a mark on his reputation, simply by editing live footage of the battle to make it look like Ben was the aggressor. But I’ll get on that later. Harangue was dropped throughout most of season two, becoming mostly a bad memory, and that was pretty much the end of the whole importance of Ben’s fame.
This problem was endemic to the Murakami/McDuffie era as a whole, with the numerous dropped or delayed plotlines. The Forever Knights, for example, were supposed to be waging war against a planet of dragons. That never happened. They were also supposed to be racist against nonhumans, leading to an extermination campaign in “The Purge.” The arrival of St. George the Dragon-Slayer stopped that. Meaning that they killed Pierce for nothing. Or maybe since, you know, it was really unclear. And it’s not like anybody ever found out what happened to Pierce. This is a guy who was set up originally as a parallel to Ben, who was one of Max’s star students and the leader of the Helpers/Max Force through “Above and Beyond.” Ben respected him. And he (maybe) dies and is never addressed again. But that’s not even the worst of it. This series is called Ultimate Alien, and when are the ultimates ever important to the plot? The whole first season, the season when we should be getting used to the changes in the status quo and really selling these new toys, the plot revolves around five new aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy. We hear a justification in the first episode that Ben is a little afraid of the new ultimates, and we see his eyes glow mysteriously for a moment, but it’s never followed up on. We’re supposed to assume that the oneshot, second season episode “Ultimate Sacrifice” is the answer: that the ultimates are taking on a life of their own. But it’s not foreshadowed and we don’t have anything after that resolution. And then Azmuth gives him the new Omnitrix at the end, justifying that the Ultimatrix is a piece of shit and not as good as the Omnitrix and Ben deserves something better. That’s really sweet, Azmuth, but when did we ever see that the Ultimatrix was an inferior device? Nothing plotwise proved that it wasn’t even better than the Omnitrix at getting the job done. So there’s a shorter time limit on ultimate transformations. Big deal. In Kamen Rider Kuuga, Yusuke could only use his Rising forms for thirty seconds, and that meant he couldn’t transform for a good few hours afterward. Does this mean he dumped the device in favor of something more reliable that didn’t allow him access to his much-needed ultimate powers? No. He figured out how to work with that limitation and then how to overcome it. You want a reason to debut a new Omnitrix for the new series? Pick something different from constantly saying the Ultimatrix was inferior without showing any evidence that it wasn’t a damn good plot device. And if you’re going to introduce upgraded forms, do something more with them, especially if that’s the name of your series. No, I’m not still bitter at Kamen Rider 555 about Faiz Blaster Form. Not at all.
The other problem this series has is one I like to call ONORE DICKEIDO. Or you could call it the “Butch Hartman Trap” since it happens in beloved Hartman series The Fairly Oddparents and Danny Phantom. The idea is that it’s always the hero’s fault and he’s always going to get blamed for it. And that’s that.
To once again abuse the hell out of my Kamen Rider analogies, I’m going to go back to what I said about Will Harangue being similar to Narutaki of Decade. Narutaki’s role throughout the series was pretty much to entertain the audience by going through the parallel worlds and warning the Riders there that Tsukasa, the titular Kamen Rider Decade, was a destroyer of worlds and would bring them to ruin. So by the time Tsukasa and his group got there, everyone was out for his blood. They ended up having to spend most of their visit trying to prove to the native Riders that he was worth trusting, while he tried to help them with their problems—which were sometimes caused by Narutaki. How about that? And whenever anything went wrong, Narutaki was the first to blame Tsukasa, with a shout of “ONORE DICKEIDO!” (translation akin to “Curse you, Decade!” but really hammy). And so it happens with Ben and his relationship with Harangue, and well, with the guarded reactions of the entire adult population of Earth. Ben is the Destroyer of Property, the Prince of Collateral Damage, and the Lord of the Reckless. Nobody’s going to take his side, even when he’s trying to do good.
And this extends so far that it reaches the levels of Danny Phantom. In both it and Fairly Oddparents (which I am less familiar with), the hero is a young boy (Danny for the first, Timmy for the second) with a good heart whose reputation is systematically destroyed by everyone around him. He’s got a couple of people who care about him and trust him—for Danny, it’s Sam and Tucker; for Timmy, it’s Cosmo and Wanda; for Ben, it’s Gwen and Kevin—but even they will turn against him if the plot calls for it. Count how many times Gwen and Kevin took Julie’s side in an argument with Ben. Does anybody ever stand up for Ben? Not really.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Like Tsukasa, Danny, and Timmy, Ben has an ego that’s just asking for trouble. Season three of AF, for instance. But his ego isn’t that enormous to justify the way he’s constantly being ragged on. Is it his fault that hero time get in the way of relationship time? You can argue that he can leave it to the others, but when the battle usually ends because Ben pulls out an alien and kicks everyone’s ass? Kind of hard to make the argument that Gwen and Kevin can hold their own.
And this leads to this very odd contradiction that’s across all of the series. And yes, I’m preemptively including Omniverse in this. The story tries to emphasize the fact that Ben is the hero, not the aliens. That it’s his will, his spirit, his heart that save the day. In each series finale so far, we’ve seen it: Secret of the Omnitrix, “The Final Battle,” “The Ultimate Enemy.” This implies that Ben could leave behind the Omnitrix and still be able to do all of his heroics. Yet at the same time, we are constantly told that Ben is the only person worthy to bear the Omnitrix—Secret of the Omnitrix, “War of the Worlds,” “The Final Battle,” and “The Ultimate Enemy.” It’s a plot point regarding villains like Albedo, who was seriously underutilized before becoming a total joke of a character, and Vilgax, who has appeared so many times and gotten his ass kicked so many different ways that I don’t think he has the right to claim to be Ben’s Only Nemesis anymore. I’m not saying that the contradiction is bad, but it is baffling. The franchise edges too much on proving that only Ben is worthy to wear the Omnitrix. But it doesn’t do nearly as good a job proving that Ben could do the job even without it. We see glimpses of it, but it’s not enough to really sell the message. It only happens when Ben has it taken from him. It better proves that he should be the one to keep it.
But for all of my complaints and whining, I don’t think that Ultimate Alien or the Murakami/McDuffie era as a whole were bad or failures. As I said, season one of UA was amazing, really living up to the potential that Murakami and McDuffie saw for it. Season two had some great oneshot episodes, giving amazing insight into the future (“Ben 10,000 Returns”) and the past (“Moonstruck”). Kevin fully developed as a character, Gwen took a chance as the leader and trusted in her heart, and Ben was brought to the brink and back and is still learning on his journey to become a hero.
The final montage in Ben’s memories in “The Ultimate Enemy” really says it all. It is the most beautiful compilation of images across the two series, singling out his brightest and darkest moments. It shows how much he’s proven himself as a hero, how he’s always had his loved ones beside him, and how hard Murakami and McDuffie worked on the series and how much heart they put into it. It clearly indicates that McDuffie knew this would be the end of his run as story editor, though obviously, not in the way he left. It’s bittersweet, and if it were the last of Ben 10 altogether, it would have been a good ending.
But it’s not the end. It’s a new beginning. Time for new fans to join our heroes and to come to love the series just as much as we did. Time for new writers and artists to take the reins. Time for them to prove themselves.
So just as much as it’s a goodbye, it’s also a hello. An end and a beginning.
And in honor of that love that never dies, I’ll leave it to David Bowie and Queen now.
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-17 02:50 pm (UTC)So now that I'm out of love of this series, my love for the new Young Justice series continue to grow and my interest in W.i.t.c.h. and Digimon Frontier still stays the same, although the one for W.i.t.c.h. comic is declining due to several recent badly written issues. :P If they keep this up, I might have to say good bye to it along with Ultimate Aliens.
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Date: 2012-04-17 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-19 02:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-19 05:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-19 07:58 pm (UTC)Hope is not good either. She's figuring out who she is. But she is definitely not evil.")
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Date: 2012-04-20 01:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-20 01:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-20 02:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-20 02:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-20 02:54 pm (UTC)Kapaychan
Date: 2012-07-08 03:35 am (UTC)As somebody who wades around in the mess of the comic book universe, I have to admit that it's not as great as people make it out to be. It's a mess that just keeps getting worse as they fiddle around, reboot it and wave a bunch of gimmicks in audience faces. This is the true concern for following the comic book route with this show - it feels like that. Truly good writing doesn't bend over sideways, or twist into pretzels to make everyone happy because no one will nor is it about not listening at all. I think if they just stuck with a solid plot idea and just keep on telling it and change only little things, this actually makes for a much cleaner storytelling. Big issue in the second season with it's inability to focus on its arc because they probably inherently know it wasn't that good. I hated what they did with Julie almost as much as my hatred for Ben being villainized all 2nd season. I remember my sister saying that the reason why they made Julie a jackass was because no one in this fandom can relate with anyone who isn't a jackass. There's probably that plus the fact that they were trying to Gwenify her. That's the best theory I've ever heard for it. And your explanation and the way you vented on the Onore Dikeido of this season already expresses everything I want to say about it.
The news that Murakami isn't a part of the new series has actually put my position of supporting Omniverse in jeopardy. I don't know if I can watch it without him. I don't know what to think about it anymore.
If nothing else, I'm so glad you were a part of the fandom for the previous two series and I absolutely enjoyed all the essays you wrote and the discussions we had. This was a wonderful endpoint analysis. Thanks for the great read!
Re: Kapaychan
Date: 2012-07-08 04:42 am (UTC)It's July now, and I still can't articulate how I feel on all of this. How my favorite characters mostly all progressed into this mess. How the story just fell apart at the seams. And then the sense going around that the best thing to do is to scrap everything and go back to Ben 10 original in terms of style and substance.
I guess what I've been trying to get at is that I got into Alien Force because it was a series that appeared to be growing with its fandom and its star. It was slightly darker than the original and significantly more mature. It focused on friendship and family. It made Ben into a leader, while the first series focused on him as a hero. That was the first two seasons. After slipping in season three, Ultimate Alien got back on track by having Ben as THE hero--the one who everyone now was looking to to save the universe. All of the planet, all of the galaxy, all of the universe was looking at him. And I loved watching him struggle, watching him slowly rise under that weight. So going back to basics feels like a massive step backwards in terms of development of story and character.
Devlin and Ken refuse to let me walk away from their side of the fandom, and I still have "Derailed" and its lovely, cracky Den-O elements to play with. But honestly, I just want to play with my Kamen Riders instead now. Even when they screw up a season, it's not the entire franchise that feels destroyed in the wake of it.
Re: Kapaychan
Date: 2012-07-08 08:02 am (UTC)I think when you've been watching or following something for ages it really makes the break off from it more complex and harder. I don't know if I'm going to go through that with the new series and I very well hope not, but this might be another case of my second Naruto.
My sis and I are still discussing why the producers and the big wigs thought a return to the original was going to win people over. I think it just created even more divisions and forging an even smaller audience willing to stay. Hopefully it gets new audiences without falling into the trap of Continuity Lockout? Because even though they're trying to relive the original, they're actually going to keep this as continuation of the previous series. My mind boggles at the kind of people they actually want watching it. It's starting to creepily remind me of the comic book industry. Them and their reboots and redesigns and their gimmicks but no improvement in storytelling.
That's actually what I was desperately hoping for. That they'd actually make it more about a much greater exploration of his nuance as a hero. The name Omniverse could be about ideas on how to be a hero when the complications of interdimensional/interuniversal travel comes into play. Would be a different ball game just being the hero of one Universe. But I doubt they'd be interested in anything emotional or psychological when he's breaking off previous strong ties with his long running team to team up with (the hell?) himself and some new guy. The idea of that seems to focus on hijinks rather than making his leadership more solid. It baffles to no end.
That's great though! XD I do hope you'd keep on going with Devlin and Ken muses and the Derailed stuff because it's too awesome to do without. I guess with Kamen Rider they don't do stupid gimmicks so they're more reliable than this series? I dunno lol. XD
Re: Kapaychan
Date: 2012-07-08 04:07 pm (UTC)I hate saying it, because it makes it sound like there's a One True Way of doing things, but I really prefer the Kamen Rider/Super Sentai/Power Rangers approach to a franchise. Since the '80s, Kamen Rider's been doing it, and Power Rangers started in '99 while it's pretty much been the way Super Sentai has always operated: Each season is a new team entirely. You have a whole new gimmick. Right now, Kamen Rider Fourze is a celebration of space and youth, Power Rangers Samurai is samurai, and Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters is Power Rangers, oddly enough. If you don't like these series, there's always a completely different one you can get into. Fourze too goofy for you? Watch one of the older series, geared toward an older audience, or go back to W or OOO which were slightly more mature while still being light enough for the kiddies. Power Rangers Samurai sucks? There's always RPM. Go-Busters not doing it for you? There's 35 other seasons for you to enjoy.
Choose which gimmick you want: card-based superpowers (all three franchises, once Power Rangers Megaforce airs), evil computer viruses (Power Rangers and now Super Sentai), magic coins (all three), vampires (Kamen Rider), time travel (all three), space (Kamen Rider and Power Rangers). Choose how serious you want it. Do you want a really serious, often dark, show? Kamen Rider Ryuki or Faiz, Choujuu Sentai Liveman. Do you want a really silly one? Kamen Rider Den-O or Fourze, Gekisou Sentai Carranger. You want more of a balance? Well, any Power Rangers really, but particularly RPM, Kamen Rider W or OOO, and probably most Super Sentai too. Do you want a good starting point? Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Ninja Storm, Dino Thunder, or RPM, Kamen Rider W or OOO and probably Kabuto too, and damn near any Super Sentai really. Want an anniversary? Power Rangers in Space and Megaforce, Kamen Rider Decade and the Let's Go Kamen Riders and Megamax movies, Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger and the Super Hero Wars movie. If you don't like something, you can skip it, and you're not getting lost when you come back. Okay, well, watching Kamen Rider Decade when you really only know a handful of the seasons it's a tribute to will get you lost, but that's different.
These three franchises all want particular audiences--they want new kids, so they'll change things up and try to bring them in. And god help Power Rangers, they at least try. But they also know that they've got a long history of fans, some of whom have grown into parents themselves, so their shows also appeal to the moms and dads. And again, Power Rangers at least tries.
Re: Kapaychan
Date: 2012-07-08 04:07 pm (UTC)Ben is never locked into a specific age. Originally he was, but they made him grow. And once you do that, there's no turning back. So what they do instead is mentally regress him, send him back in time to meet his younger self, things like that. You can't build a franchise on trying to keep everything in the past, where it was safe. You have to take chances and grow and evolve. And the first seasons of AF and UA did just that, but the fear always took over and they regressed (do you hear me, Samurai?). You've got a lot more room to do that when you've reached 20 or so years and you want to go back to old days. Ben 10 isn't even 10 yet. It's 6. The original Kamen Rider had reached a hiatus by that point, but what had it done? It had produced five strong series featuring seven Kamen Riders (eight if you count Tackle, and I do, so there) in total. After three or four years off the air, they tried a reboot and that didn't even stick. The new series? 2006 was Kabuto, a fight against aliens disguised as humans. Super Sentai? If you use Goranger as the starting point, then you have Taiyou Sentai Sun Vulcan, a sequel to the previous season where a three man (and yes, I do mean man) team against remnants of the previous bad guys. Using Battle Fever J, the 6 year point is Changeman, where the Earth itself grants the power to the military heroes who decided to protect it. Power Rangers? Was exploring the Lost Galaxy, having put a close to the story arc it had been running since the original. New stories, new gimmicks. Ben 10 is stale in comparison.