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akinoameIn a Null Void prison, a convict is released from solitary and into the mines. Deciding he needs to beat up the new kid on the cellblock, he heads over despite the warnings of a fellow prisoner, Quince. What he doesn’t count on, though, is that the new guy is Kevin, who promptly kicks his ass. Robot guards are about to haul Kevin off to solitary, but Quince sticks up for him, insisting that the other guy, Trukk, must have stepped on his own pick and somehow thrown himself into the wall. You know, like the single best America’s Funniest Home Video ever. So the robots decide to buy it and haul Trukk off to the infirmary, while Quince wonders just where he’s seen the new guy before.
Back on Earth, Ben and Gwen have found that in the week since “Forge of Creation,” Kevin’s settling old scores—no matter how big or small. He landed a guy in traction for not paying him back $8 from five years ago, and though Gwen insists that Kevin’s not well, Ben insists that Kevin needs to pay for what he’s done, not taking this new betrayal well at all. Searching for any clue to where he is, they head to his house—and on a sidenote, where is his mom? We know Kevin had mostly forgiven her, but did he just leave her alone? Or did Ben and Gwen move her for her own safety? Anyway, Kevin’s room is messy as hell and Gwen can’t find anything to give her an idea where he went. But Ben sees an apparently recent carving on Kevin’s desk and recognizes the emblem as the previously unseen insignia of Incarcecon (at least, I don’t think we saw it in Secret of the Omnitrix), telling Gwen they’ve got to head off.
Back in Incarcecon, Quince finally realizes where he remembers Kevin from—he’d been in that same prison six years ago. Kevin denies everything, but Quince promises not to tell anyone who he is, admitting it’s a shame that after everything he went through in his escape that he only ended up back. But Kevin insists that he’s back on purpose—he wants revenge. Elsewhere in the prison, Warden Morg, an obvious douche (I mean really, are you going to trust a guy whose name is a homophone for “morgue” and isn’t part of the Addams Family?), prepares for an unexpected prisoner transport…only to wind up with two Plumbers teleported in, warning him that someone has come to the prison to try to kill him. Morg wants them out of his prison, but Ben and Gwen cheerfully point out that the teleporter is only one-way, and they’ll have to wait for the next supply ship to come tomorrow to take them home. Pissed, the Warden has a guard escort them to a room for the night, ignoring Ben’s warning that someone is out to kill him.
As the Tennysons try to find their way out of their cell to meddle in the Warden’s business, Quince and Kevin discuss the past. When he’d first come to Incarcecon, an influential prisoner named Kwarrel decided to take him under his wing and taught him to control his anger and his powers. A la The Great Escape, he’d been building an escape tunnel underneath the prison in secret, and he decided to take Kevin with him. Unfortunately, there was a guard, Morg, who hated Kwarrel. He ambushed Kwarrel and Kevin in the secret tunnel and threatened to kill them, but Kwarrel tackled him and told Kevin to run. Unable to do much more than that, the kid followed orders, only to hear a blaster shot ring out behind him. Kevin blames himself for his perceived cowardice, and he hates that while his friend is dead, the murderer is still alive. He turned the escape tunnel into a mine, using the prisoners as cheap labor to mine these odd blue gems, but whatever they are, he wants them secret. He replaced all the guards with robots, leaving himself as the only living being on staff.
Meanwhile, the Tennysons escape the cell with the help of Goop and start investigating the mine, but Morg ambushes them. He walks off, telling his guards to kill them, already writing his cover story that the cousins had been attacked by the prisoners. Unfortunately for him, Humongousaur and Gwen are more than happy to smash some bots, but in the battle, some of the crystals are pulverized into dust, and Humongousaur inhales it. He ends up on a bad LSD trip, with visual and auditory hallucinations that eventually coalesce into a hallucination of Gwen as a fire-tossing alien. Freaked, he goes on a rampage, demanding to know where Gwen is, but when she realizes that he can’t hear her, she slaps him sober.
Excuse me for a moment as I point this out: Humongousaur. Drug trip. Gwen. Slaps. Him. Sober. She should seriously be a memetic badass.
Pained by the attack that somehow purged the drug from his system, Ben transforms back and he and Gwen realize that this is why Morg has robots on staff—he’s using Incarcecon as a front for his drug ring for the “dream dust.” And yes, Gwen uses the words “drug trafficking.” A subtle anti-drug message in a children’s television show, and focusing on the trafficking part to boot. Who’d have thought? Kevin’s more or less come to the same conclusion about the stuff, and he goes looking for Morg, even though Quince tries to talk him out of it, insisting that if he killed Morg, it would undo everything Kwarrel did for him. Kevin finds his friend’s murderer and threatens him with an overdose, then beating him to death with his own arms. But before he can go “Vendetta” on the guy’s ass, Morg activates the prisoners’ shock collars, which sends a lethal blast of energy to every single one of the prisoners. Ben and Gwen recognize that it’s sonicky, and Echo Echo counteracts the frequency, shattering the collars. Don’t ask; it’s sonic. Freed from their leashes, the prisoners attack the guards while Gwen and Ben catch up to Kevin and try to stop him. Gwen fails to talk him down, and Ben decides to go Armadrillo and tackle Kevin when he goes after Morg. Pissed that Ben attacked him, Kevin hits back, throwing him into the wall and causing a partial mine collapse. Morg manages to escape to the elevator, but Kevin’s already inside. Morg offers him anything, but Kevin says that all he wants is the one thing no one can ever give him—Kwarrel back. He throws Morg into the elevator and breaks the cable, sending it plummeting into the lowest part of the mine, where Ben and Gwen have conveniently found themselves. Seeing that Morg’s about to be killed, Gwen uses magic wind to break the fall, and the two arrest him. When they arrive on the surface, the prison is in chaos. Prisoners are breaking down the walls and escaping, thanks to everything the team has managed to do in battle. Kevin’s escaped, thinking he’s succeeded in avenging Kwarrel’s death. Quince, however, decides he’s going to stay, knowing he still has to serve his sentence. But overall, Ben’s not too worried about the mass break-out, since all the prisoners are still in a pocket dimensiongalaxy hellhole. What he’s more worried about is Kevin. He tells Gwen that they’re past the point where they can help Kevin, insisting they need to “put him down,” affirming the decision he came to at the end of “Forge of Creation.” The only thing he’s going to be able to do now is to kill his best friend.
More of Kevin’s past is revealed, and this time, it covers how he escaped the Null Void…well, at least how he escaped the Null Void prison he’d been in. And it also tells a lot about how he managed to change back into a human and got a change in personality too.
When he first arrived in Incarcecon, he started fights with other prisoners all the time. He didn’t like anyone at all. But a prisoner named Kwarrel realized that he was only acting out; he was angry, and he needed to learn to control that anger. He came up to Kevin, kicked his ass, and told him that when he was ready to try to control himself, he could come to him for help. Kwarrel had apparently been kind of a dad among the prisoners—he was influential and rational, willing to help out—everything Kevin needed right then. Eventually, Kevin asked for help, and Kwarrel began coaching him on how to control his temper, and by extension, his powers. As it turns out, there’s apparently an emotional feedback loop inherent in the transformation—absorbing bio-energy makes you crazy and turns you into a monster. But you can’t change back until you manage to stop acting crazy. Lose control of yourself, lose control of your powers (/cough called it /pimp). Once he’d managed to get control over his emotions, Kevin was able to shift back into human form, shedding a lot of the rest like a snake shedding its skin. Once he was human again, he was able to learn how to safely use his Osmosian powers, mastering the art of absorbing matter. Kwarrel really became a surrogate father to him in his time of need, and when the time came to escape, the guy didn’t even hesitate to ask his foster son to come with him. He managed to get the others to stage a diversion, presumably by going out and saying, ”Forget about controlling my anger; let’s riot!”. In the chaos, he led Kevin through the escape tunnel into what would eventually become the drug mine. But Morg caught them, immediately planning on using lethal force. Against a kid. Yep, douche. Not taking that shit, Kwarrel attacked him, making him drop the blaster right at Kevin’s feet. And Kevin was honestly scared shitless at this point. He had no idea what to do, and when Kwarrel told him to go on alone, he said he couldn’t. Kwarrel told him not to argue, and Kevin did what any eleven-year-old who’s scared for his life would do under those circumstances—listen to the adult and run, never looking back. But to this day, he blames himself, forever haunted by the sound of the gunshot that killed Kwarrel, wondering if he could have saved him. Kwarrel was one of the few people who cared about Kevin after his dad died, and a surrogate father when he needed one the most. And he went out pretty much the same way Devin did. Kevin never forgets the reason behind this rampage. It’s not blind hatred this time; just as in “Vendetta,” it’s a very personal stake. And given that Kevin’s emotions bound up in this mutation are self-loathing, it makes sense that even in the throes of insanity, he’s acting logically about this. He hates himself for running and failing to save his second father. He may think he hates Ben and Gwen right now, but that’s nothing compared to how much he hates himself.
Thanks to a flashback, we get to see eleven-year-old Kevin in human form again. Like little Ben in “Forge of Creation,” he’s got a slight redesign, though in my opinion, it’s less jarring than ten-year-old Ben sometimes being a direct Mini-Me of sixteen-year-old Ben. But it’s also a more drastic difference. He goes from this to this. Gone are the baggy eyes and the paleness and extreme skinniness. Instead, he looks physically healthy—which makes sense, given he’s actually got someone watching out for him now. Before, he was out there on the streets, fighting for his meals (to badly paraphrase “Baba O’Riley”). Now, he’s got someone making sure that he takes care of himself—that he sleeps and eats well and gets him working out. On a symbolic level, the improvement in Kevin’s physical state reflects the improvement in his mental state. He looks healthier, and he is healthier—psychologically speaking. His anger is under control, and though he still has a red-hot temper, he doesn’t lash out nearly as badly as he used to. And I like this new design because of that. It’s a very physical reminder that he’s grown up.
And for some inexplicable reason, I have the urge to hug him and squeeze him into itty-bitty pieces.
*slaps self*
Sorry. Hopefully, that’ll never happen again.
Incarcecon was first seen in the original series movie/episode Secret of the Omnitrix. Referred to as “the Prison Planet,” it was a space station—and oddly not a planet at all—floating somewhere in the middle of space, accessible only by a Supergate. This time, it’s in the Null Void and sitting on an asteroid. And still not a planet, but at least they don’t try to call it one this time. Continuity-wise, this doesn’t make much sense, even discounting the design change. Kevin was in Incarcecon at around the same time Ben and Gwen were looking for Azmuth and ended up finding Myaxx. You’d think that even in such a big area, they’d have heard the other was there. I mean, come on. It’s Ben and Kevin as kids. They’d have wanted another chance to try to kill each other. This is made all the stranger by the fact that we know there’s a supermax prison in the Null Void from “Vendetta,” and Ragnarok had been there ever since he killed Devin. So…what? Was Ragnarok seriously in the same jail as the son of his vic? Really? I’ve read a supposition that there’s actually a series of prisons called “Incarcecon,” and I’ve got to admit that makes more sense. Never mind the fact that the Plumbers use the Null Void as a supermax prison anyway and still treat Incarcecon as the place where they put the worst of the worst in Secret of the Omnitrix. Still, some things stay the same—while this incarnation of Incarcecon has guards even six years ago (as opposed to the stupidly uncontrolled nature of the original), they still have the dumb idea that the Plumbers should have no oversight. In fact, that’s the rule. Plumbers, the galactic police agency, are off-limits to the prison. Why?! This is so incredibly stupid! And you wonder why Morg’s able to get away with this shit until a couple of meddling kidsbut no dog catch him! I apologize, but everything about this place just offends my sense of “WTF, man?!”
“…Nor Iron Bars a Cage” was written by Len Wein. CN makes it nigh impossible to read the credits, but I recognized Kevin Michael Richardson as Quince. The remaining credits will have to wait until I can get a better view of them or I get the DVDs.
Update as of 9/3/11: Warden Morgg (yes, I misspelled it in the review; what else is new?) was played by Xander Berkeley. The DVD credits list Kevin Michael Richardson as Kwarrel and Fred Tatasciore as Quince, but given that Richardson's voice is very hard to mistake, it's clearly the other way around: Tatasciore is Kwarrel and Richardson is Quince.
Back on Earth, Ben and Gwen have found that in the week since “Forge of Creation,” Kevin’s settling old scores—no matter how big or small. He landed a guy in traction for not paying him back $8 from five years ago, and though Gwen insists that Kevin’s not well, Ben insists that Kevin needs to pay for what he’s done, not taking this new betrayal well at all. Searching for any clue to where he is, they head to his house—and on a sidenote, where is his mom? We know Kevin had mostly forgiven her, but did he just leave her alone? Or did Ben and Gwen move her for her own safety? Anyway, Kevin’s room is messy as hell and Gwen can’t find anything to give her an idea where he went. But Ben sees an apparently recent carving on Kevin’s desk and recognizes the emblem as the previously unseen insignia of Incarcecon (at least, I don’t think we saw it in Secret of the Omnitrix), telling Gwen they’ve got to head off.
Back in Incarcecon, Quince finally realizes where he remembers Kevin from—he’d been in that same prison six years ago. Kevin denies everything, but Quince promises not to tell anyone who he is, admitting it’s a shame that after everything he went through in his escape that he only ended up back. But Kevin insists that he’s back on purpose—he wants revenge. Elsewhere in the prison, Warden Morg, an obvious douche (I mean really, are you going to trust a guy whose name is a homophone for “morgue” and isn’t part of the Addams Family?), prepares for an unexpected prisoner transport…only to wind up with two Plumbers teleported in, warning him that someone has come to the prison to try to kill him. Morg wants them out of his prison, but Ben and Gwen cheerfully point out that the teleporter is only one-way, and they’ll have to wait for the next supply ship to come tomorrow to take them home. Pissed, the Warden has a guard escort them to a room for the night, ignoring Ben’s warning that someone is out to kill him.
As the Tennysons try to find their way out of their cell to meddle in the Warden’s business, Quince and Kevin discuss the past. When he’d first come to Incarcecon, an influential prisoner named Kwarrel decided to take him under his wing and taught him to control his anger and his powers. A la The Great Escape, he’d been building an escape tunnel underneath the prison in secret, and he decided to take Kevin with him. Unfortunately, there was a guard, Morg, who hated Kwarrel. He ambushed Kwarrel and Kevin in the secret tunnel and threatened to kill them, but Kwarrel tackled him and told Kevin to run. Unable to do much more than that, the kid followed orders, only to hear a blaster shot ring out behind him. Kevin blames himself for his perceived cowardice, and he hates that while his friend is dead, the murderer is still alive. He turned the escape tunnel into a mine, using the prisoners as cheap labor to mine these odd blue gems, but whatever they are, he wants them secret. He replaced all the guards with robots, leaving himself as the only living being on staff.
Meanwhile, the Tennysons escape the cell with the help of Goop and start investigating the mine, but Morg ambushes them. He walks off, telling his guards to kill them, already writing his cover story that the cousins had been attacked by the prisoners. Unfortunately for him, Humongousaur and Gwen are more than happy to smash some bots, but in the battle, some of the crystals are pulverized into dust, and Humongousaur inhales it. He ends up on a bad LSD trip, with visual and auditory hallucinations that eventually coalesce into a hallucination of Gwen as a fire-tossing alien. Freaked, he goes on a rampage, demanding to know where Gwen is, but when she realizes that he can’t hear her, she slaps him sober.
Excuse me for a moment as I point this out: Humongousaur. Drug trip. Gwen. Slaps. Him. Sober. She should seriously be a memetic badass.
Pained by the attack that somehow purged the drug from his system, Ben transforms back and he and Gwen realize that this is why Morg has robots on staff—he’s using Incarcecon as a front for his drug ring for the “dream dust.” And yes, Gwen uses the words “drug trafficking.” A subtle anti-drug message in a children’s television show, and focusing on the trafficking part to boot. Who’d have thought? Kevin’s more or less come to the same conclusion about the stuff, and he goes looking for Morg, even though Quince tries to talk him out of it, insisting that if he killed Morg, it would undo everything Kwarrel did for him. Kevin finds his friend’s murderer and threatens him with an overdose, then beating him to death with his own arms. But before he can go “Vendetta” on the guy’s ass, Morg activates the prisoners’ shock collars, which sends a lethal blast of energy to every single one of the prisoners. Ben and Gwen recognize that it’s sonicky, and Echo Echo counteracts the frequency, shattering the collars. Don’t ask; it’s sonic. Freed from their leashes, the prisoners attack the guards while Gwen and Ben catch up to Kevin and try to stop him. Gwen fails to talk him down, and Ben decides to go Armadrillo and tackle Kevin when he goes after Morg. Pissed that Ben attacked him, Kevin hits back, throwing him into the wall and causing a partial mine collapse. Morg manages to escape to the elevator, but Kevin’s already inside. Morg offers him anything, but Kevin says that all he wants is the one thing no one can ever give him—Kwarrel back. He throws Morg into the elevator and breaks the cable, sending it plummeting into the lowest part of the mine, where Ben and Gwen have conveniently found themselves. Seeing that Morg’s about to be killed, Gwen uses magic wind to break the fall, and the two arrest him. When they arrive on the surface, the prison is in chaos. Prisoners are breaking down the walls and escaping, thanks to everything the team has managed to do in battle. Kevin’s escaped, thinking he’s succeeded in avenging Kwarrel’s death. Quince, however, decides he’s going to stay, knowing he still has to serve his sentence. But overall, Ben’s not too worried about the mass break-out, since all the prisoners are still in a pocket dimension
More of Kevin’s past is revealed, and this time, it covers how he escaped the Null Void…well, at least how he escaped the Null Void prison he’d been in. And it also tells a lot about how he managed to change back into a human and got a change in personality too.
When he first arrived in Incarcecon, he started fights with other prisoners all the time. He didn’t like anyone at all. But a prisoner named Kwarrel realized that he was only acting out; he was angry, and he needed to learn to control that anger. He came up to Kevin, kicked his ass, and told him that when he was ready to try to control himself, he could come to him for help. Kwarrel had apparently been kind of a dad among the prisoners—he was influential and rational, willing to help out—everything Kevin needed right then. Eventually, Kevin asked for help, and Kwarrel began coaching him on how to control his temper, and by extension, his powers. As it turns out, there’s apparently an emotional feedback loop inherent in the transformation—absorbing bio-energy makes you crazy and turns you into a monster. But you can’t change back until you manage to stop acting crazy. Lose control of yourself, lose control of your powers (/cough called it /pimp). Once he’d managed to get control over his emotions, Kevin was able to shift back into human form, shedding a lot of the rest like a snake shedding its skin. Once he was human again, he was able to learn how to safely use his Osmosian powers, mastering the art of absorbing matter. Kwarrel really became a surrogate father to him in his time of need, and when the time came to escape, the guy didn’t even hesitate to ask his foster son to come with him. He managed to get the others to stage a diversion, presumably by going out and saying, ”Forget about controlling my anger; let’s riot!”. In the chaos, he led Kevin through the escape tunnel into what would eventually become the drug mine. But Morg caught them, immediately planning on using lethal force. Against a kid. Yep, douche. Not taking that shit, Kwarrel attacked him, making him drop the blaster right at Kevin’s feet. And Kevin was honestly scared shitless at this point. He had no idea what to do, and when Kwarrel told him to go on alone, he said he couldn’t. Kwarrel told him not to argue, and Kevin did what any eleven-year-old who’s scared for his life would do under those circumstances—listen to the adult and run, never looking back. But to this day, he blames himself, forever haunted by the sound of the gunshot that killed Kwarrel, wondering if he could have saved him. Kwarrel was one of the few people who cared about Kevin after his dad died, and a surrogate father when he needed one the most. And he went out pretty much the same way Devin did. Kevin never forgets the reason behind this rampage. It’s not blind hatred this time; just as in “Vendetta,” it’s a very personal stake. And given that Kevin’s emotions bound up in this mutation are self-loathing, it makes sense that even in the throes of insanity, he’s acting logically about this. He hates himself for running and failing to save his second father. He may think he hates Ben and Gwen right now, but that’s nothing compared to how much he hates himself.
Thanks to a flashback, we get to see eleven-year-old Kevin in human form again. Like little Ben in “Forge of Creation,” he’s got a slight redesign, though in my opinion, it’s less jarring than ten-year-old Ben sometimes being a direct Mini-Me of sixteen-year-old Ben. But it’s also a more drastic difference. He goes from this to this. Gone are the baggy eyes and the paleness and extreme skinniness. Instead, he looks physically healthy—which makes sense, given he’s actually got someone watching out for him now. Before, he was out there on the streets, fighting for his meals (to badly paraphrase “Baba O’Riley”). Now, he’s got someone making sure that he takes care of himself—that he sleeps and eats well and gets him working out. On a symbolic level, the improvement in Kevin’s physical state reflects the improvement in his mental state. He looks healthier, and he is healthier—psychologically speaking. His anger is under control, and though he still has a red-hot temper, he doesn’t lash out nearly as badly as he used to. And I like this new design because of that. It’s a very physical reminder that he’s grown up.
And for some inexplicable reason, I have the urge to hug him and squeeze him into itty-bitty pieces.
*slaps self*
Sorry. Hopefully, that’ll never happen again.
Incarcecon was first seen in the original series movie/episode Secret of the Omnitrix. Referred to as “the Prison Planet,” it was a space station—and oddly not a planet at all—floating somewhere in the middle of space, accessible only by a Supergate. This time, it’s in the Null Void and sitting on an asteroid. And still not a planet, but at least they don’t try to call it one this time. Continuity-wise, this doesn’t make much sense, even discounting the design change. Kevin was in Incarcecon at around the same time Ben and Gwen were looking for Azmuth and ended up finding Myaxx. You’d think that even in such a big area, they’d have heard the other was there. I mean, come on. It’s Ben and Kevin as kids. They’d have wanted another chance to try to kill each other. This is made all the stranger by the fact that we know there’s a supermax prison in the Null Void from “Vendetta,” and Ragnarok had been there ever since he killed Devin. So…what? Was Ragnarok seriously in the same jail as the son of his vic? Really? I’ve read a supposition that there’s actually a series of prisons called “Incarcecon,” and I’ve got to admit that makes more sense. Never mind the fact that the Plumbers use the Null Void as a supermax prison anyway and still treat Incarcecon as the place where they put the worst of the worst in Secret of the Omnitrix. Still, some things stay the same—while this incarnation of Incarcecon has guards even six years ago (as opposed to the stupidly uncontrolled nature of the original), they still have the dumb idea that the Plumbers should have no oversight. In fact, that’s the rule. Plumbers, the galactic police agency, are off-limits to the prison. Why?! This is so incredibly stupid! And you wonder why Morg’s able to get away with this shit until a couple of meddling kids
“…Nor Iron Bars a Cage” was written by Len Wein. CN makes it nigh impossible to read the credits, but I recognized Kevin Michael Richardson as Quince. The remaining credits will have to wait until I can get a better view of them or I get the DVDs.
Update as of 9/3/11: Warden Morgg (yes, I misspelled it in the review; what else is new?) was played by Xander Berkeley. The DVD credits list Kevin Michael Richardson as Kwarrel and Fred Tatasciore as Quince, but given that Richardson's voice is very hard to mistake, it's clearly the other way around: Tatasciore is Kwarrel and Richardson is Quince.