akinoame | Where’s Richard Dean Anderson when you need him?: “Undercover”

The episode opens with Kevin messing around with a ~~mini-Stargate~~ transporter pod/teleporter pad (name shift in this episode from “Alone Together.” For simplicity’s sake and the prerequisite shout-out, I’m just going to call it “the gate”) in the garage. Ben, however, has a bad feeling about this since he’s seen this movie and he doesn’t want a “Banana-Fly” attacking him. You can start a bet on what’s going to explode first: the banana, the gate, or Kevin’s friends exploding at him. Sure enough, it works momentarily before the banana explodes and the gate overloads, and it’s only thanks to Swampfire’s ability to not get burned as he picks up the pod and throws it outside that they don’t get blown up. Everyone’s okay, but the gate is severely damaged. Fortunately, Kevin knows someone who can help fix it: Ben and Gwen’s old friend Cooper.

After Ben’s slip that Cooper had a massive crush on Gwen leads to plenty of teasing in her direction, they arrive at Cooper’s house to find his lab trashed and him missing. A video reveals that he was seized by DNAliens. Gwen tracks him down…to Los Soledad.

At first glance, everything looks exactly the way they left it: a couple of holes in the wall and no sign of anything suspicious. Ben walks over to check it out and passes through some kind of holographic forcefield, and he tells the others to follow. Inside the base, it’s snowing from three weather machines, and the DNAliens are hard at work building some kind of arch that basically looks like—and there’s no way of getting around this—a larger-scale Stargate (or alternatively, Phobos’s “Great Ring” from the final two episodes of W.I.T.C.H. season 2). They finally find Cooper, who’s been forced to build the cloaking field, among other tech. Getting him out of the building is easy enough, and Cooper gushes over Gwen. Getting across the base? Not so much. An attempt to use a small-scale cloaking field fails miserably when it gives out right in front of a horde of DNAliens, and they’re all captured. However, Ben has a plan, thanks to an accidental discovery of the properties of the metal varsidium and DNAliens’ sense of hearing. They trick the DNAliens into opening the door before barging out, facing their guards with a trinity attack: Gwen strikes Kevin, who’s absorbed the varsidium, and Echo Echo acts as an amplifier, sending a good-scale attack of that particular frequency against the DNAliens, who are completely helpless against it.

They manage to fight their way over to the cloaking field and the ~~Stargate~~ arch. Cooper heads over to dismantle it, but contact with the tech gives him a vision: just what the DNAliens are (scenes from “Max Out”) and what the Highbreed are planning. After a vision of a wormhole and tons of ships passing through the arch, it ominously ends with the Earth blowing up. Cooper then dismantles the cloaking equipment and Gwen destroys it, and the quartet hightail it out of there. Though they don’t know exactly what’s going on there, they know that one day, they’re going to have to go back and deal with it. Ben asks Cooper if he’ll join the team, and he agrees while giving Gwen googly eyes. Ben and Kevin grin, and Gwen simply answers, “Don’t even.”

After getting a report from a truck driver about mysterious buildings at Los Soledad, the sheriff looks over the construction crew’s permits. Everything seems to be in order, and the foreman suggests that the heat might have been getting to the trucker. Once both the humans have left, the Highbreed and the DNAliens remove their ID masks, and the Highbreed orders the DNAliens to get back to work, for the “time of cleansing” is drawing near.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen much of the original Ben 10, so my analysis of Cooper will be rather weak, since I can’t cross-compare. A powerful technomancer, Cooper is a genius who prefers to stay in his basement lab and tinker with inventions, when he’s not roleplaying on the local equivalent of World of Warcraft or any other MMORPG. This sets him completely apart from the Alien Force, best seen when they’re first racing across Los Soledad; used to the danger and running, Ben, Kevin, and Gwen are having no problem, but Cooper is running out of breath fast. Also, when they drive off, Cooper is looking behind them and is surprised to see that no one’s chasing them, but the others point out that the DNAliens don’t see them as a threat to their secrecy, as there’s no one they can tell about this. He also has a very noticeable crush on Gwen, which gives her no end of grief as the guys (especially Kevin) tease her about it.

This episode features a very fun team attack that basically exists just to abuse Kevin. The DNAliens are weak against sonic attacks, or at the very least, against the particular frequency emitted by varsidium. In fact, a couple of DNAliens even vomit onscreen from the noise as they all collapse. The attack works like a gong attached to an amplifier: Gwen hits Kevin with an energy blast, and since Kevin is holding Echo Echo, he’s able to transmit the frequency louder and across a wider range. This mostly exists to let Gwen take her frustrations out on Kevin, as he ends up completely unable to walk and begging them to stop using this plan. When he asks her if she had to hit him that hard, she smirks and says, “I did. I really did.” And this is why you shouldn’t pick on your girlfriend when she’s able to shoot energy blasts at you. ‘Cause she will.

“Undercover” was written by Adam Beechan. Cooper was played by Corey Padnos.