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akinoameFirst off, I didn't tape this episode, so I couldn't get the writer or actor credits. According to TV.com, Len Uhley wrote this episode, and the credits so far are Adam Wylie (Brainiac 5 from Legion of Superheroes, appropriately enough for a Ben analogue) as Pierce and Khary Payton (Cyborg from Teen Titans) as Manny/Fourarms (that one I recognized easily enough at least). Helen/XLR8 has not been listed in TV.com's credits yet.
This is the first episode of Alien Force to be shown from the eyes of the "villains," in this case, misguided Knights Templar fighting for revenge. Three half-alien hybrids have spent a few years fighting and "destroying" aliens with tech their leader, Pierce, just managed to figure out. However, last summer, Pierce started to worry that they were doing it all wrong when he saw one of the aliens they busted flash a Plumber's badge. He wasn't able to do anything more about it because sometime later, he was killed (or at least it's heavily implied--can't actually say it on a kids' show, but you know he's deader than Grandpa Max [for whom the jury is still out in some places]). The episode takes place apparently shortly after Pierce's death, where his sister Helen and her "HE IS NOT MY BOYFRIEND!" Manny are carrying on without him, taking out the DNAliens and any other aliens they happen to come across. Then one day, their scanner picks up three new apparent aliens right where they had finished taking care of a DNAlien. They head back and Manny is all for blasting them immediately, while Helen insists they wait. Her idea pays off, and they later manage to capture one of them to lure the others into their trap. But there's a problem: Those three "aliens" are Team 10.
Once again, Alien Force proves that alien puberty sucks ("Everybody Talks About the Weather," "All That Glitters," "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"). Manny, Helen, and Pierce before his death believed that they were humans who had been "contaminated" by some kind of alien plot--having no idea that one of their parents were Plumbers. Ben and his team were lucky to understand just what they were, thanks to Grandpa Max and to Kevin's alien street smarts. They had the experience to know just what they were doing and what a Null Void projector is--that it wasn't destroying the aliens they fought. Pierce had to figure out every bit of their tech on his own, where Ben and Gwen had Grandpa Max teaching them from their summer vacation at ten just what everything was and how to use it, and Kevin figured things out at some point presumably after escaping the Null Void. Kevin's experience also gave them the lesson that human/alien hybrids are a lot more common than you'd think ("Everybody Talks About the Weather"), and Grandma Verdona appeared to explain to Gwen (and Ben by proxy) just where their alien blood came from ("What Are Little Girls Made Of?"). Pierce, Helen, and Manny didn't have that luck, and it's just the first example of how their team is Team 10 through a broken mirror.
Manny and Kevin are the most obvious analogues--hotheaded tanks who don't think about what they're getting into. The fact that they're voiced by Cyborg and Beastboy from Teen Titans respectively gives another dimension of similarity to their brawl and arguments. Manny's plans come down to "shoot first, ask questions never," taking out the aliens immediately rather than looking for a smarter way to deal with them--or considering that they could have screwed up big time and captured the wrong guys. Kevin is savvier than Manny when it comes to aliens and their tech, but you can't deny his single-mindedness when it comes to a fight, evident from his first reappearance in "Ben 10 Returns." Immediately after Manny and Helen decide to go into the Null Void to rescue all of the innocent aliens they captured, Kevin accepts her apology but still writes off their team as doomed to failure and decides to steal some of their equipment. It's a simple moment that reminds the audience that Kevin is still cynical with loose morals, and maybe the darker version of Manny rather than the other way around.
Helen is Gwen in a world where Ben was killed. Just as Gwen was devastated and worried about Ken's kidnapping in "Max Out," Helen is still grieving for her brother's death. Helen has UST with Manny, but it's overshadowed by the loss. She constantly tries to carry on the mission just as Pierce would have, and every time Manny tries to insist that his methods of dealing with the aliens are just how Pierce would have wanted it, she hates him for using him as a weapon against her. But she is also the Gwen of now, trying to keep her "friend/teammate/not a boyfriend" from going off and getting his head blown off because he doesn't think things through. It's a lot subtler a comparison than the ridiculously obvious Manny/Kevin similarities, but it's still blatant enough, particularly when Helen yells at Gwen to keep her boyfriend in line, and midrant arguing for the same thing, Gwen breaks off with the "He is not my boyfriend!"
And finally, the subtlest comparison of all: Pierce and Ben. And it's only remotely subtle because Pierce is dead. From the little we see of Pierce, he's either midway through transformation to his Kineceleran form, or he's as human as you can get with that DNA, only his body has some alterations to it. Likewise, Ben is a Squib--alien grandmother, cousin with Anodite powers, uncle with indicated psychic ability, while he and the rest of the family are as normal as they come. Well, barring the whole transforming into aliens bit, but even that requires the watch. Pierce was the levelheaded leader, just as Ben is in the new series, and he was the only one capable of considering the problem of "What if we're wrong?" He's also the sane one--Helen says that he was always breaking up her fights with Manny, and he would often butt heads with Manny over leadership issues. If that doesn't sound like Ben, I don't know what does. While the episode actually concentrates more on the deceased Pierce than on Ben, we see Ben acting far more brotherly to Gwen than he's ever acted in the new series thusfar--getting scared when she's about to be dropped to her death by Helen, trying to comfort her on the bus about Kevin, then insisting "I didn't say anything" when she takes his words out of context and goes on her "He is not my boyfriend!" spiel.
It's also no coincidence that Ben is the one taken out of battle. Just as he's about to morph, pieces of the building above them break off, hitting him in the head and knocking him out. Gwen has to pull him aside and keep a force field up while trying to wake him. It's not the first time Ben's been injured in battle, but it happens to be the first time we see some lasting effects--he wakes up dazed, barely able to concentrate on anything, and while he's trying to figure out which alien to use, he staggers through the battlefield, nearly getting killed by a fallen beam and finally thrown into the Null Void. It could have had a downer ending there, but Ben's transformation to Swampfire wakes him up enough to pull himself out. Then, proving that he's the Pierce analogue, he shows off his technical pacifism again ("The Gauntlet," "Paradox," the end of "Be-Knighted") and simply takes Manny's fire (as weapon fire goes right through him, and he can regenerate to boot) before blasting fire at him to disarm him. He's the one who explains to Manny and Helen that they're attacking the wrong people and that they're Plumbers' kids just like them, and Helen trusts him with Pierce's journal, asking him if any of the aliens they've captured are good ones (Pyronite, Ectonurite, Piscciss Volann, Galvanic Mechomorph, Vulpimancer--in short, all of Ben's original aliens save for the already accounted for Kineceleran and Tetramand, a Galvan, and a Petrosapien [as Tetrax is probably the last of his kind anyway]). Ben also has hopes for their team, pointing out to Kevin that on paper, Team 10 looks pretty sorry too. And just as Kevin's and Manny's voice actors were teammates and best friends in Teen Titans, Yuri Lowenthal (Superman/Superman X) and Adam Wylie (Brainiac 5) were teammates from Legion of Superheroes. While I didn't see the series so I can't testify whether or not they were friends on the level Beastboy and Cyborg were, Brainiac did idolize Supes.
It's debatable whether the main ship in this episode was Kevin/Gwen or Manny/Helen. Manny and Helen's relationship was full of fighting and UST, but with the occasional awkward moment where Manny tried to be tender and failed miserably. In the meantime, we're seeing more of Gwen worrying about Kevin, in a reversal of situations from "All That Glitters." It's played a lot better than in that episode, and as the series goes on, it is starting to grow on me, but it has a long way to go still. I was much more accepting of the Manny/Helen simply because they're oneshot characters and thus, I expected them not to have a build-up to their relationship--it happened a while ago, offscreen. I also have hope for them as a couple, now that they know what they are and they understand enough about Pierce's reservations that they can begin to move on.
This episode appears to confirm Kevin's status as an alien hybrid. It's never stated just how Manny and Helen's scanner works, but it seems logical to assume it ignores human DNA and picks up only the alien--thus picking up hybrids through their alien sides. Alternatively, it may just pick up on hybrid DNA, like the DNAliens, which would explain why Plumbers' kids were often taken as well. It picked up on Ben and Gwen's Anodite DNA, but it also picked up Kevin's--whatever it may be.
Kevin also showed a new ability with his power--being able to transfer his armor to someone else. When rescuing the truck driver from the explosion, he absorbed the properties of the asphault to both himself and the driver, covering them both with armor strong enough to survive the fire. He also can absorb the composite properties of different ones, such as the change in his pocket, creating mottled zinc and copper armor around his hand long enough to break through the forcefield and destroy its generator.
And while Ben did get hurt from that blow to the head, he once again proves he's a man of steel himself. He was out of it when he was trying to morph, but the moment the energy snares caught his wrists, he was alert and trying to reach the Omnitrix, remaining well enough to escape in Swampfire's form and explain everything to Manny and Helen. At this point, I'm ready to handwave this consistent inconsistency with his injuries (he was also knocked out badly in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" but by the time Gwen arrived, he was back on his feet and ready to fight) on his alien heritage.
Finally, Cartoon Network is holding back "X Equals Ben Plus 2" until sometime next month--hopefully, only for another week. It looks like they're going to do some kind of build-up to celebrate the debut of Alien X, so hopefully they won't drop the ball as badly as Nick did with their Avatar build-up.
Edit: TV.com credits Juliet Landau (Tala from JLU, Natalie and Anodite form Verdona in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?") as Helen.
This is the first episode of Alien Force to be shown from the eyes of the "villains," in this case, misguided Knights Templar fighting for revenge. Three half-alien hybrids have spent a few years fighting and "destroying" aliens with tech their leader, Pierce, just managed to figure out. However, last summer, Pierce started to worry that they were doing it all wrong when he saw one of the aliens they busted flash a Plumber's badge. He wasn't able to do anything more about it because sometime later, he was killed (or at least it's heavily implied--can't actually say it on a kids' show, but you know he's deader than Grandpa Max [for whom the jury is still out in some places]). The episode takes place apparently shortly after Pierce's death, where his sister Helen and her "HE IS NOT MY BOYFRIEND!" Manny are carrying on without him, taking out the DNAliens and any other aliens they happen to come across. Then one day, their scanner picks up three new apparent aliens right where they had finished taking care of a DNAlien. They head back and Manny is all for blasting them immediately, while Helen insists they wait. Her idea pays off, and they later manage to capture one of them to lure the others into their trap. But there's a problem: Those three "aliens" are Team 10.
Once again, Alien Force proves that alien puberty sucks ("Everybody Talks About the Weather," "All That Glitters," "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"). Manny, Helen, and Pierce before his death believed that they were humans who had been "contaminated" by some kind of alien plot--having no idea that one of their parents were Plumbers. Ben and his team were lucky to understand just what they were, thanks to Grandpa Max and to Kevin's alien street smarts. They had the experience to know just what they were doing and what a Null Void projector is--that it wasn't destroying the aliens they fought. Pierce had to figure out every bit of their tech on his own, where Ben and Gwen had Grandpa Max teaching them from their summer vacation at ten just what everything was and how to use it, and Kevin figured things out at some point presumably after escaping the Null Void. Kevin's experience also gave them the lesson that human/alien hybrids are a lot more common than you'd think ("Everybody Talks About the Weather"), and Grandma Verdona appeared to explain to Gwen (and Ben by proxy) just where their alien blood came from ("What Are Little Girls Made Of?"). Pierce, Helen, and Manny didn't have that luck, and it's just the first example of how their team is Team 10 through a broken mirror.
Manny and Kevin are the most obvious analogues--hotheaded tanks who don't think about what they're getting into. The fact that they're voiced by Cyborg and Beastboy from Teen Titans respectively gives another dimension of similarity to their brawl and arguments. Manny's plans come down to "shoot first, ask questions never," taking out the aliens immediately rather than looking for a smarter way to deal with them--or considering that they could have screwed up big time and captured the wrong guys. Kevin is savvier than Manny when it comes to aliens and their tech, but you can't deny his single-mindedness when it comes to a fight, evident from his first reappearance in "Ben 10 Returns." Immediately after Manny and Helen decide to go into the Null Void to rescue all of the innocent aliens they captured, Kevin accepts her apology but still writes off their team as doomed to failure and decides to steal some of their equipment. It's a simple moment that reminds the audience that Kevin is still cynical with loose morals, and maybe the darker version of Manny rather than the other way around.
Helen is Gwen in a world where Ben was killed. Just as Gwen was devastated and worried about Ken's kidnapping in "Max Out," Helen is still grieving for her brother's death. Helen has UST with Manny, but it's overshadowed by the loss. She constantly tries to carry on the mission just as Pierce would have, and every time Manny tries to insist that his methods of dealing with the aliens are just how Pierce would have wanted it, she hates him for using him as a weapon against her. But she is also the Gwen of now, trying to keep her "friend/teammate/not a boyfriend" from going off and getting his head blown off because he doesn't think things through. It's a lot subtler a comparison than the ridiculously obvious Manny/Kevin similarities, but it's still blatant enough, particularly when Helen yells at Gwen to keep her boyfriend in line, and midrant arguing for the same thing, Gwen breaks off with the "He is not my boyfriend!"
And finally, the subtlest comparison of all: Pierce and Ben. And it's only remotely subtle because Pierce is dead. From the little we see of Pierce, he's either midway through transformation to his Kineceleran form, or he's as human as you can get with that DNA, only his body has some alterations to it. Likewise, Ben is a Squib--alien grandmother, cousin with Anodite powers, uncle with indicated psychic ability, while he and the rest of the family are as normal as they come. Well, barring the whole transforming into aliens bit, but even that requires the watch. Pierce was the levelheaded leader, just as Ben is in the new series, and he was the only one capable of considering the problem of "What if we're wrong?" He's also the sane one--Helen says that he was always breaking up her fights with Manny, and he would often butt heads with Manny over leadership issues. If that doesn't sound like Ben, I don't know what does. While the episode actually concentrates more on the deceased Pierce than on Ben, we see Ben acting far more brotherly to Gwen than he's ever acted in the new series thusfar--getting scared when she's about to be dropped to her death by Helen, trying to comfort her on the bus about Kevin, then insisting "I didn't say anything" when she takes his words out of context and goes on her "He is not my boyfriend!" spiel.
It's also no coincidence that Ben is the one taken out of battle. Just as he's about to morph, pieces of the building above them break off, hitting him in the head and knocking him out. Gwen has to pull him aside and keep a force field up while trying to wake him. It's not the first time Ben's been injured in battle, but it happens to be the first time we see some lasting effects--he wakes up dazed, barely able to concentrate on anything, and while he's trying to figure out which alien to use, he staggers through the battlefield, nearly getting killed by a fallen beam and finally thrown into the Null Void. It could have had a downer ending there, but Ben's transformation to Swampfire wakes him up enough to pull himself out. Then, proving that he's the Pierce analogue, he shows off his technical pacifism again ("The Gauntlet," "Paradox," the end of "Be-Knighted") and simply takes Manny's fire (as weapon fire goes right through him, and he can regenerate to boot) before blasting fire at him to disarm him. He's the one who explains to Manny and Helen that they're attacking the wrong people and that they're Plumbers' kids just like them, and Helen trusts him with Pierce's journal, asking him if any of the aliens they've captured are good ones (Pyronite, Ectonurite, Piscciss Volann, Galvanic Mechomorph, Vulpimancer--in short, all of Ben's original aliens save for the already accounted for Kineceleran and Tetramand, a Galvan, and a Petrosapien [as Tetrax is probably the last of his kind anyway]). Ben also has hopes for their team, pointing out to Kevin that on paper, Team 10 looks pretty sorry too. And just as Kevin's and Manny's voice actors were teammates and best friends in Teen Titans, Yuri Lowenthal (Superman/Superman X) and Adam Wylie (Brainiac 5) were teammates from Legion of Superheroes. While I didn't see the series so I can't testify whether or not they were friends on the level Beastboy and Cyborg were, Brainiac did idolize Supes.
It's debatable whether the main ship in this episode was Kevin/Gwen or Manny/Helen. Manny and Helen's relationship was full of fighting and UST, but with the occasional awkward moment where Manny tried to be tender and failed miserably. In the meantime, we're seeing more of Gwen worrying about Kevin, in a reversal of situations from "All That Glitters." It's played a lot better than in that episode, and as the series goes on, it is starting to grow on me, but it has a long way to go still. I was much more accepting of the Manny/Helen simply because they're oneshot characters and thus, I expected them not to have a build-up to their relationship--it happened a while ago, offscreen. I also have hope for them as a couple, now that they know what they are and they understand enough about Pierce's reservations that they can begin to move on.
This episode appears to confirm Kevin's status as an alien hybrid. It's never stated just how Manny and Helen's scanner works, but it seems logical to assume it ignores human DNA and picks up only the alien--thus picking up hybrids through their alien sides. Alternatively, it may just pick up on hybrid DNA, like the DNAliens, which would explain why Plumbers' kids were often taken as well. It picked up on Ben and Gwen's Anodite DNA, but it also picked up Kevin's--whatever it may be.
Kevin also showed a new ability with his power--being able to transfer his armor to someone else. When rescuing the truck driver from the explosion, he absorbed the properties of the asphault to both himself and the driver, covering them both with armor strong enough to survive the fire. He also can absorb the composite properties of different ones, such as the change in his pocket, creating mottled zinc and copper armor around his hand long enough to break through the forcefield and destroy its generator.
And while Ben did get hurt from that blow to the head, he once again proves he's a man of steel himself. He was out of it when he was trying to morph, but the moment the energy snares caught his wrists, he was alert and trying to reach the Omnitrix, remaining well enough to escape in Swampfire's form and explain everything to Manny and Helen. At this point, I'm ready to handwave this consistent inconsistency with his injuries (he was also knocked out badly in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" but by the time Gwen arrived, he was back on his feet and ready to fight) on his alien heritage.
Finally, Cartoon Network is holding back "X Equals Ben Plus 2" until sometime next month--hopefully, only for another week. It looks like they're going to do some kind of build-up to celebrate the debut of Alien X, so hopefully they won't drop the ball as badly as Nick did with their Avatar build-up.
Edit: TV.com credits Juliet Landau (Tala from JLU, Natalie and Anodite form Verdona in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?") as Helen.
