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akinoameDecided to take a little break from the Ben 10 reviews before I do a few specials between seasons, so it's a W.I.T.C.H. episode today as your Christmas Eve gift.
With the birth records of every girl in Heatherfield from thirteen years ago (“Happy Birthday, Will”), Phobos plans to put his plan into action. His long-lost sister will have inherited powers she doesn’t know about, and her protectors will have kept her true identity from her—which makes her easy prey. As he pets a living gargoyle (sorry, guys, Weisman’s next season), he tells Cedric that in order to track her down, he must establish a human identity on Earth.
Meanwhile, Sheffield Insititute has a new history teacher, Professor Dean Collins, who is teaching kids who are WAAY below his PhD, if Uriah chewing the gum he found on the bottom of his shoe is any indication. Ew. Eager to begin teaching, Collins remarks on how impressed he is with the students’ enthusiasm for the school’s annual Community Service Day, since they always sign up extra early for it. So because they’re such wonderful, selfless, altruistic teenagers, he’s going to hold it early this year!
Good luck, buddy.
The truth is that the students are far from altruistic when they’re signing up for Community Service Day. They’re actually just trying to avoid the bad jobs. And Sheffield apparently has no regard for the students’ safety with some of these. Last year, Cornelia ended up scraping the monkey cage at the zoo, and she was traumatized by the damned dirty apes pulling her hairplease no comments about how monkeys aren’t apes; it was either this or a Ron Stoppable joke. Worse, Irma had to paint sewer ladders.
…Hold the phone. Let me get this straight: the school let a twelve-year-old paint ladders in a sewer?! Can you say “safety violation”? Let me list the potential hazards:
Danger of falling.
Danger of infection because of dooty water.
Danger of disease-ridden vermin.
And no supervision!
Sure enough, Irma was scared by a rat and fell into the dooty water. I swear, Sheffield is a lawsuit waiting to happen!
As if Will didn’t have enough to worry about with her school having no code of ethics about not trying to kill the kids, her mom is oddly distracted. Susan asks Will what she’d think if she started dating again, but Will offhandedly remarks that she should just avoid cooking for whomever she hooks up with. After dinner, Prof. Collins shows up, much to Will’s shock, but he’s the new head of the PTA and Susan joined up. And “Dean” brought the material for Susan so they could go over it together. While giving each other googly eyes. And laughing over everything. Um, I’m not sure if this is an ethics violation or not, but it’s still odd.
Elsewhere, Cornelia is going to bed early so she can get up in time to get the good jobs. Lillian barges in and says that Corny has to play with her, but Corny tells her no and not to ruin her sleep. An angry Lillian tells Cornelia that she’s mean, and then in the middle of the night, she goes and turns off her alarm clock. We’re supposed to feel for her in season two? Sure, my siblings have been bratty, but at their worst, they never pulled this kind of shit. They knew that would lead to Divine Wrath being rained down on them, usually from Mom or Dad. What a brat! So the next day at school, Taranee and Irma have managed to sign up to seal envelopes at City Hall, which has apparently been rebuilt after they trashed it last episode. Hay Lin and Will get to paint over graffiti in abandoned, sketchy parts of town with no supervision. Though it’s not like they’ve gotten the worst of Sheffield’s total hatred for children and their desire to kill them all. Some guy named Martin (who’s less scrawny than Martin Tubbs and has brown hair) has to scrub dumpsters. God, he’d be lucky to find Rita Repulsa in one. Sheffield’s doing a much better job of being the villain here. And with Corny late, she freaks the hell out while Lillian smugly eats her pancakes…which are apparently made of cardboard or something. Pancakes shouldn’t be that stiff and crunch. Ew. As she yells at her hellion little sister, Cornelia loses her pants. Yeah. Thirteen-year-old girl. Stay classy, guys. With nothing else left on the list, she’s stuck reading for the out-of-control kids at Lillian’s preschool. All of whom have behavioral issues, according to the teacher. And the teacher ditches her there.
That’s it! I’ve held in this rant far too long! This is a massive ethics violation! Does nobody in the Heatherfield School District have a professional code of conduct? The teacher can’t even manage to control her students, how the hell do you expect a teenager to?! Not to mention this is a huge liability issue! You’ve thrown a thirteen-year-old girl in the middle of a special-ed classroom with no supervision! I can speak from experience—you do not do that to anybody, ever, regardless of their age! Cornelia is not a trained teacher. She should not be left alone with a class, even discounting their behavioral issues! Seriously, if anything happens to either Cornelia or the kids, who’s liable? No surprise, Cornelia ends up tied up and painted on. I hope you sue the pants off that teacher, Corny.
Sorry. It was a little triggery for me. Anyway, Cornelia’s not the only one dealing with crap. Taranee and Irma get off easy, since they just have numb tongues from licking envelopes. Collins drops by to check on themgrumble, why not check on the kids who shouldn’t be left alone in special-ed classrooms or in sketchy parts of town. When he sees that they can’t even talk anymore, he points out that they should have used the sponges set out for them, much to their annoyance. But as Hay Lin and Will paint over graffiti at the old abandoned train station (and Will bitches to an oblivious Hay Lin about the UST between her mom and her teacher), they come across some strange writing. Will looks at it and suddenly becomes dizzy and passes out, the words glowing and shifting in her vision. An emergency meeting is called at the Silver Dragon, and either Hay Lin is stronger than she looks or Caleb’s second part-time job is to carry unconscious people home because they have Will lying down. Hay Lin managed to copy the writing down on her arm, and Caleb and Yan Lin confirm it’s a Meridianite language, but Caleb can’t read it. He does know who can, though, so they set out. When they return to the old abandoned train station, the writing on the wall isn’t there anymore, so Will finds them a portal in the train tunnel. The girls transform just before something starts to come through the portal. Immediately, the four with elements get ready with Water, Fire, Earth, and…Metal Bar! Really, Hay Lin? Though to be fair, I’d do the same. But it’s not an attacker; it’s only Blunk with a stash of dragon nostrils he’s trying to trade. The girls go through the portal and when Hay Lin realizes she no longer needs her metal bar, she tosses it through the portal behind her, hitting Blunk. It’s an extraneous scene, but it is kind of funny when it builds to Blunk getting hit. Schadenfreude: Making people glad that they’re not you.
Caleb takes them to a secret entrance in the middle of some…broken stuff, leading them into the Infinite City. They find a mystic waterfall, and Caleb drops to one knee before it, begging the “Ancient One” to help them. A very tall bald woman with tattoos on her face appears from the water (I’m assuming this is a projection, since she’s roughly Caleb-sized in later episodes). This is the Mage, and we are going to learn nothing about her this episode. We don’t even learn she’s called the Mage either. Hay Lin shows her the writing on her arm, which Mage explains is the writing of the Beasts. She translates the four or five symbols into two sentences: “You are still undetected. Begin your search for the girl.” So Phobos is using urban decay to communicate now. Looking at the state of Meridian, I’m not entirely surprised. The Mage warns that the Beast is in their town in human form, trying to get close to the Guardians. Except he’s not because we already know that Phobos is looking for a very specific girl who is not Will. Either the Mage isn’t as wise as she looks, or the writers have no sense of consistency—for episodes they themselves wrote. Next season, I’m just chalking this one up to “All According To Plan.”
Will suspects Collins, which for now is logical, given that he seems to be everywhere she wants to be, like Visa. Mage explains that if you touch a Beast with the Heart, it will show its true form. I have no memory if we ever see this power again. But back on Earth, Will goes through her rant on how it has to be Collins and she has to be the targetnever mind that Yan Lin explained in the second episode that Will was never Phobos’s target. She asks what would be a better way to get close to Earth girls than to pose as their teacher and hit on their moms? Hay Lin suggests a box of donuts. Really? Another donut joke? Is Homer Simpson one of the execs or something? But Caleb tries to apply real logic and asks how anyone from Meridian would know enough Earth history to be able to teach it, since Caleb himself is such a fish out of water. Unfortunately, Crazy Will Logic trumps Earth—er, Meridian logic, and all the girls are convinced that Collins is an evil guy trying to get close to Will’s mom and Community Service Day is some kind of nefarious plot. Girls, I’ve already explained this: Community Service Day is a nefarious plot, but set up by Sheffield’s evil, student-hating administration and school board. Ignoring Caleb’s pleas for a sane plan, they set out to spy on Collins. It culminates in them ambushing him outside the Vandoms’ apartment building. The girls attack while Caleb facepalms, and it’s honestly a miracle they didn’t kill the poor guy. The Heart fails to reveal his “true form”; it only zaps the guy. And why was he there? He had PTA materials for Will’s mom. A pissed off Caleb gloats that he was right. He has the right to gloat.
The girls push a barely conscious Collins home in a wheelbarrow, and Caleb bitches to him about the girls. A police car makes all six of them freak, and when they try to duck out of sight, they accidentally knock Collins into a neighbor’s swimming pool. And Caleb’s still bitching. They have to wheel him five miles uphill to home, and the girls are tired and want to transform. This leads to the best exchange in this episode—possibly in the season:
Caleb: Hey, you’re only supposed to transform for emergencies!
Irma: Well, what do you call pushing a wet, unconscious man up a hill in a wheelbarrow at midnight?
Caleb: Unnecessary, if you’d listened to me.
Caleb has some of the best lines, I swear. The girls transform anyway and fly Collins, but a flock of geese attacks them, and they drop him. Onto a trampoline. Which bounces him into a swimming pool. And then a pack of dogs gets to him. You know, somehow I doubt that this was what he expected when he got his PhD and decided to teach middle/high school kids history. After transforming back, the girls (Caleb presumably got bored with this shit and headed home) carry him into the apartment, where they find more evidence that Caleb Was Right. To keep Collins from suspecting anything, they tow his car, hide his papers in his desk, release his pet lizard, and make him think it was all a nightmare partially inspired by his lizard attacking him in the middle of the night. No wonder Caleb’s the genius in comparison. Will’s idea of tactics is a typical Disney tween-sitcom plot. The next day, Cornelia returns to the preschool, with Taranee and Irma towing envelopes. The kids will have to lick them, and no, they’re not allowed to use sponges. Susan is disgusted with Collins for ditching her last night and swears off dating. Plus, she’s too busy. There’s an emergency block meeting about some weirdo swimming in everybody’s pools.
Meanwhile, Cedric has fully established his identity as a bookseller, and his little shop of horrors is open for business.
This episode would be considered filler if not for introducing the character of Dean Collins, whose interest in Susan Vandom becomes a big point for Will’s character growth in the next season. Probably the major source of conflict in this episode is Will’s inability to cope with her mom dating again.
At this point, all we know about Will is that she has a single mom. We don’t learn anything about her father until late season two (and it ends up a little odd because of plot developments Weisman wanted to use but got nixed by Disney execs; more on that when the time comes). So we go in with no expectations of how Will should react when her mom decides she wants to date again. When Susan asks Will for her opinion, Will acts like she’s okay with it, offhandedly making a comment about her bad cooking. But when she’s suddenly faced with the reality, she doesn’t take it well. She’s pissed about the obvious UST between Susan and Dean—I’m going to use “Collins” when he’s acting in the role of their teacher and “Dean” for when he’s acting in the role of Susan’s potential boyfriend—and complains to Hay Lin about it. But Hay Lin doesn’t have a problem with it. She knows that Will’s mom is incredibly hot for someone who’s got to be in her forties or something. Sure, Hay Lin’s a ditz in this first season, but she has a point that Will refuses to see. Will sees her mom as a forty-something mother of one, not America’s most eligible bachelorette. She can’t see her ever making out with anyone—especially Dean Collins—in the old abandoned train station like a couple of teenagers. Her whole point about why it’s impossible for Collins to have interest in her mother is that she’s “old.” By the end, she finally admits that she’d be okay with her mom dating again—likely out of embarrassment for having zapped Dean for nothing. But as we’ll learn later, she still draws the line at Susan dating her teacher.
Will’s internal conflict leads to a bit of a conflict between her and Caleb regarding leadership styles. And it’s something that pretty much was coming anyway. Caleb is older than Will, fifteen/sixteen to thirteen (Caleb’s age is either retconned in season two, or two years pass; either way, I’m trying to keep track of the passage of time here. Right now, it looks like fall). He’s lived his entire life in a war-torn world, forced at a very young age to take charge. He has never really known what it’s like to be a kid (as indicated in “The Key”). He’s a teenager forced to be a man twice his age, and this has a major effect on his personality. He’s very focused and very critical because he’s used to dealing with adults, or other adults-in-kids’-bodies. Will and the other girls are very innocent—a change from the comics, where they all had a dark secret; I like this change because it really emphasizes how alien they are to Caleb, further exploring his personality as a main character. But Caleb also is just a teenager. When he gets annoyed with these younger, very innocent girls, he reacts like a kid. He gets sulky. He gets cocky. He gloats. He acts like he grew up in a safer world like Earth and he’s always had a childhood. But he didn’t, and this is what really does fuel that reaction. It’s not an act, like say, Ben Tennyson in the Ben 10 series. Caleb has a limit of how much he can act like an adult, simply out of cognitive development. Once he reaches that limit, he starts behaving like any other teenager would under the circumstances. And as we’ll see, he’s also changing thanks to the influence of the people he’s met on Earth, who teach him how to be a teenager again.
Will, of course, has lived all her life in relative peace and stability, and she’s never had to grow up nearly as fast as Caleb has. Where Caleb has to think with his head for everything or else the Rebellion will fail, Will has the luxury to think with her heart and make mistakes. This is a bit of a point of contention between them. Caleb knows exactly how high the stakes are here, and though Will knows them too, she doesn’t have the conditioning that he had. This is why she makes bad plans. Her ideas are based in some amount of logic—it would be a perfect chance to keep an eye on particular people or check out targets if you pose as a teacher in a local high school (it worked for Elsa and Tommy in Power Rangers Dino Thunder, and we’ll see it come up again for the Guardians later this season). But she ignores the fact that not every girl in the eighth grade would be taking that particular history class, or as Caleb points out, that someone who just got there from Meridian wouldn’t have enough knowledge of Earth history to teach a class on it. This is the whole reason why Caleb doesn’t start high school until next season; he’s barely got enough of Earth culture straight to be able to work as a waiter at the Silver Dragon.
But Will’s insistence on listening to her heart is what gives her the most trouble. She and Caleb are equally stubborn, and this makes it really tough on Caleb when they start spying on Collins. He buys glue, and Cornelia says it must be for his realistic human mask, at which point Caleb groans. When he heads to the pet store to buy live crickets, Irma says it has to be his dinner, and Caleb says that the guy probably has a pet lizard—which it turns out he does, much to Irma’s chagrin. Will, though, insists it explains why Dean could eat Susan’s cooking, ignoring the fact that he was probably too interested in her to insult her cooking. Meanwhile, Caleb starts to wonder why he’s even there if nobody’s listening to him. As he points out, none of them would be in the mess of trying to get Collins home safe and sound if they’d listened to him from the start. And when alien boy is the only one who has Earth logic down, that’s bad. Will’s bad plans will return especially in season two, but the logic behind them will be more sound—with one notable exception in “Q is for Quarry.”
This episode introduces the Infinite City, which becomes a base of sorts for the Rebellion later in the season—which makes it really bad that Caleb and the Guardians left the front door wide open. The builder is unknown, but it was constructed at least four thousand years ago. In that time, there’s been plenty of exploration, but nobody’s found an end to it in any direction—hence the name “Infinite.” It has deeper levels too, leading to the Mage’s waterfall, hidden by a trap door leading to stairs. Cornelia complains about the stairs for some reason, though. Honey, you can fly. No wonder Caleb bitches so much about the girls.
We also learn that when the Guardians transform, one of the reasons they don’t get recognized is that the light from the Heart of Kandrakar is blinding. Caleb has to shield his eyes when he’s around their transformation. Under the right conditions outside the Vandom home, all Dean sees is the symbols of the elements before a group of fairies beat the crap out of him. And is everybody in this city stupid or something? Because there’s an old lady at Collins’s apartment who seems totally oblivious to the fact that he’s clearly been beat up and is being carried home by a group of teenagers.
“A Service to the Community” was written by Andrew Nichols and Darrell Vickers. Cam Clarke played Prof. Dean Collins. The Mage was played by BJ Ward.
With the birth records of every girl in Heatherfield from thirteen years ago (“Happy Birthday, Will”), Phobos plans to put his plan into action. His long-lost sister will have inherited powers she doesn’t know about, and her protectors will have kept her true identity from her—which makes her easy prey. As he pets a living gargoyle (sorry, guys, Weisman’s next season), he tells Cedric that in order to track her down, he must establish a human identity on Earth.
Meanwhile, Sheffield Insititute has a new history teacher, Professor Dean Collins, who is teaching kids who are WAAY below his PhD, if Uriah chewing the gum he found on the bottom of his shoe is any indication. Ew. Eager to begin teaching, Collins remarks on how impressed he is with the students’ enthusiasm for the school’s annual Community Service Day, since they always sign up extra early for it. So because they’re such wonderful, selfless, altruistic teenagers, he’s going to hold it early this year!
Good luck, buddy.
The truth is that the students are far from altruistic when they’re signing up for Community Service Day. They’re actually just trying to avoid the bad jobs. And Sheffield apparently has no regard for the students’ safety with some of these. Last year, Cornelia ended up scraping the monkey cage at the zoo, and she was traumatized by the damned dirty apes pulling her hair
…Hold the phone. Let me get this straight: the school let a twelve-year-old paint ladders in a sewer?! Can you say “safety violation”? Let me list the potential hazards:
Danger of falling.
Danger of infection because of dooty water.
Danger of disease-ridden vermin.
And no supervision!
Sure enough, Irma was scared by a rat and fell into the dooty water. I swear, Sheffield is a lawsuit waiting to happen!
As if Will didn’t have enough to worry about with her school having no code of ethics about not trying to kill the kids, her mom is oddly distracted. Susan asks Will what she’d think if she started dating again, but Will offhandedly remarks that she should just avoid cooking for whomever she hooks up with. After dinner, Prof. Collins shows up, much to Will’s shock, but he’s the new head of the PTA and Susan joined up. And “Dean” brought the material for Susan so they could go over it together. While giving each other googly eyes. And laughing over everything. Um, I’m not sure if this is an ethics violation or not, but it’s still odd.
Elsewhere, Cornelia is going to bed early so she can get up in time to get the good jobs. Lillian barges in and says that Corny has to play with her, but Corny tells her no and not to ruin her sleep. An angry Lillian tells Cornelia that she’s mean, and then in the middle of the night, she goes and turns off her alarm clock. We’re supposed to feel for her in season two? Sure, my siblings have been bratty, but at their worst, they never pulled this kind of shit. They knew that would lead to Divine Wrath being rained down on them, usually from Mom or Dad. What a brat! So the next day at school, Taranee and Irma have managed to sign up to seal envelopes at City Hall, which has apparently been rebuilt after they trashed it last episode. Hay Lin and Will get to paint over graffiti in abandoned, sketchy parts of town with no supervision. Though it’s not like they’ve gotten the worst of Sheffield’s total hatred for children and their desire to kill them all. Some guy named Martin (who’s less scrawny than Martin Tubbs and has brown hair) has to scrub dumpsters. God, he’d be lucky to find Rita Repulsa in one. Sheffield’s doing a much better job of being the villain here. And with Corny late, she freaks the hell out while Lillian smugly eats her pancakes…which are apparently made of cardboard or something. Pancakes shouldn’t be that stiff and crunch. Ew. As she yells at her hellion little sister, Cornelia loses her pants. Yeah. Thirteen-year-old girl. Stay classy, guys. With nothing else left on the list, she’s stuck reading for the out-of-control kids at Lillian’s preschool. All of whom have behavioral issues, according to the teacher. And the teacher ditches her there.
That’s it! I’ve held in this rant far too long! This is a massive ethics violation! Does nobody in the Heatherfield School District have a professional code of conduct? The teacher can’t even manage to control her students, how the hell do you expect a teenager to?! Not to mention this is a huge liability issue! You’ve thrown a thirteen-year-old girl in the middle of a special-ed classroom with no supervision! I can speak from experience—you do not do that to anybody, ever, regardless of their age! Cornelia is not a trained teacher. She should not be left alone with a class, even discounting their behavioral issues! Seriously, if anything happens to either Cornelia or the kids, who’s liable? No surprise, Cornelia ends up tied up and painted on. I hope you sue the pants off that teacher, Corny.
Sorry. It was a little triggery for me. Anyway, Cornelia’s not the only one dealing with crap. Taranee and Irma get off easy, since they just have numb tongues from licking envelopes. Collins drops by to check on them
Caleb takes them to a secret entrance in the middle of some…broken stuff, leading them into the Infinite City. They find a mystic waterfall, and Caleb drops to one knee before it, begging the “Ancient One” to help them. A very tall bald woman with tattoos on her face appears from the water (I’m assuming this is a projection, since she’s roughly Caleb-sized in later episodes). This is the Mage, and we are going to learn nothing about her this episode. We don’t even learn she’s called the Mage either. Hay Lin shows her the writing on her arm, which Mage explains is the writing of the Beasts. She translates the four or five symbols into two sentences: “You are still undetected. Begin your search for the girl.” So Phobos is using urban decay to communicate now. Looking at the state of Meridian, I’m not entirely surprised. The Mage warns that the Beast is in their town in human form, trying to get close to the Guardians. Except he’s not because we already know that Phobos is looking for a very specific girl who is not Will. Either the Mage isn’t as wise as she looks, or the writers have no sense of consistency—for episodes they themselves wrote. Next season, I’m just chalking this one up to “All According To Plan.”
Will suspects Collins, which for now is logical, given that he seems to be everywhere she wants to be, like Visa. Mage explains that if you touch a Beast with the Heart, it will show its true form. I have no memory if we ever see this power again. But back on Earth, Will goes through her rant on how it has to be Collins and she has to be the target
The girls push a barely conscious Collins home in a wheelbarrow, and Caleb bitches to him about the girls. A police car makes all six of them freak, and when they try to duck out of sight, they accidentally knock Collins into a neighbor’s swimming pool. And Caleb’s still bitching. They have to wheel him five miles uphill to home, and the girls are tired and want to transform. This leads to the best exchange in this episode—possibly in the season:
Caleb: Hey, you’re only supposed to transform for emergencies!
Irma: Well, what do you call pushing a wet, unconscious man up a hill in a wheelbarrow at midnight?
Caleb: Unnecessary, if you’d listened to me.
Caleb has some of the best lines, I swear. The girls transform anyway and fly Collins, but a flock of geese attacks them, and they drop him. Onto a trampoline. Which bounces him into a swimming pool. And then a pack of dogs gets to him. You know, somehow I doubt that this was what he expected when he got his PhD and decided to teach middle/high school kids history. After transforming back, the girls (Caleb presumably got bored with this shit and headed home) carry him into the apartment, where they find more evidence that Caleb Was Right. To keep Collins from suspecting anything, they tow his car, hide his papers in his desk, release his pet lizard, and make him think it was all a nightmare partially inspired by his lizard attacking him in the middle of the night. No wonder Caleb’s the genius in comparison. Will’s idea of tactics is a typical Disney tween-sitcom plot. The next day, Cornelia returns to the preschool, with Taranee and Irma towing envelopes. The kids will have to lick them, and no, they’re not allowed to use sponges. Susan is disgusted with Collins for ditching her last night and swears off dating. Plus, she’s too busy. There’s an emergency block meeting about some weirdo swimming in everybody’s pools.
Meanwhile, Cedric has fully established his identity as a bookseller, and his little shop of horrors is open for business.
This episode would be considered filler if not for introducing the character of Dean Collins, whose interest in Susan Vandom becomes a big point for Will’s character growth in the next season. Probably the major source of conflict in this episode is Will’s inability to cope with her mom dating again.
At this point, all we know about Will is that she has a single mom. We don’t learn anything about her father until late season two (and it ends up a little odd because of plot developments Weisman wanted to use but got nixed by Disney execs; more on that when the time comes). So we go in with no expectations of how Will should react when her mom decides she wants to date again. When Susan asks Will for her opinion, Will acts like she’s okay with it, offhandedly making a comment about her bad cooking. But when she’s suddenly faced with the reality, she doesn’t take it well. She’s pissed about the obvious UST between Susan and Dean—I’m going to use “Collins” when he’s acting in the role of their teacher and “Dean” for when he’s acting in the role of Susan’s potential boyfriend—and complains to Hay Lin about it. But Hay Lin doesn’t have a problem with it. She knows that Will’s mom is incredibly hot for someone who’s got to be in her forties or something. Sure, Hay Lin’s a ditz in this first season, but she has a point that Will refuses to see. Will sees her mom as a forty-something mother of one, not America’s most eligible bachelorette. She can’t see her ever making out with anyone—especially Dean Collins—in the old abandoned train station like a couple of teenagers. Her whole point about why it’s impossible for Collins to have interest in her mother is that she’s “old.” By the end, she finally admits that she’d be okay with her mom dating again—likely out of embarrassment for having zapped Dean for nothing. But as we’ll learn later, she still draws the line at Susan dating her teacher.
Will’s internal conflict leads to a bit of a conflict between her and Caleb regarding leadership styles. And it’s something that pretty much was coming anyway. Caleb is older than Will, fifteen/sixteen to thirteen (Caleb’s age is either retconned in season two, or two years pass; either way, I’m trying to keep track of the passage of time here. Right now, it looks like fall). He’s lived his entire life in a war-torn world, forced at a very young age to take charge. He has never really known what it’s like to be a kid (as indicated in “The Key”). He’s a teenager forced to be a man twice his age, and this has a major effect on his personality. He’s very focused and very critical because he’s used to dealing with adults, or other adults-in-kids’-bodies. Will and the other girls are very innocent—a change from the comics, where they all had a dark secret; I like this change because it really emphasizes how alien they are to Caleb, further exploring his personality as a main character. But Caleb also is just a teenager. When he gets annoyed with these younger, very innocent girls, he reacts like a kid. He gets sulky. He gets cocky. He gloats. He acts like he grew up in a safer world like Earth and he’s always had a childhood. But he didn’t, and this is what really does fuel that reaction. It’s not an act, like say, Ben Tennyson in the Ben 10 series. Caleb has a limit of how much he can act like an adult, simply out of cognitive development. Once he reaches that limit, he starts behaving like any other teenager would under the circumstances. And as we’ll see, he’s also changing thanks to the influence of the people he’s met on Earth, who teach him how to be a teenager again.
Will, of course, has lived all her life in relative peace and stability, and she’s never had to grow up nearly as fast as Caleb has. Where Caleb has to think with his head for everything or else the Rebellion will fail, Will has the luxury to think with her heart and make mistakes. This is a bit of a point of contention between them. Caleb knows exactly how high the stakes are here, and though Will knows them too, she doesn’t have the conditioning that he had. This is why she makes bad plans. Her ideas are based in some amount of logic—it would be a perfect chance to keep an eye on particular people or check out targets if you pose as a teacher in a local high school (it worked for Elsa and Tommy in Power Rangers Dino Thunder, and we’ll see it come up again for the Guardians later this season). But she ignores the fact that not every girl in the eighth grade would be taking that particular history class, or as Caleb points out, that someone who just got there from Meridian wouldn’t have enough knowledge of Earth history to teach a class on it. This is the whole reason why Caleb doesn’t start high school until next season; he’s barely got enough of Earth culture straight to be able to work as a waiter at the Silver Dragon.
But Will’s insistence on listening to her heart is what gives her the most trouble. She and Caleb are equally stubborn, and this makes it really tough on Caleb when they start spying on Collins. He buys glue, and Cornelia says it must be for his realistic human mask, at which point Caleb groans. When he heads to the pet store to buy live crickets, Irma says it has to be his dinner, and Caleb says that the guy probably has a pet lizard—which it turns out he does, much to Irma’s chagrin. Will, though, insists it explains why Dean could eat Susan’s cooking, ignoring the fact that he was probably too interested in her to insult her cooking. Meanwhile, Caleb starts to wonder why he’s even there if nobody’s listening to him. As he points out, none of them would be in the mess of trying to get Collins home safe and sound if they’d listened to him from the start. And when alien boy is the only one who has Earth logic down, that’s bad. Will’s bad plans will return especially in season two, but the logic behind them will be more sound—with one notable exception in “Q is for Quarry.”
This episode introduces the Infinite City, which becomes a base of sorts for the Rebellion later in the season—which makes it really bad that Caleb and the Guardians left the front door wide open. The builder is unknown, but it was constructed at least four thousand years ago. In that time, there’s been plenty of exploration, but nobody’s found an end to it in any direction—hence the name “Infinite.” It has deeper levels too, leading to the Mage’s waterfall, hidden by a trap door leading to stairs. Cornelia complains about the stairs for some reason, though. Honey, you can fly. No wonder Caleb bitches so much about the girls.
We also learn that when the Guardians transform, one of the reasons they don’t get recognized is that the light from the Heart of Kandrakar is blinding. Caleb has to shield his eyes when he’s around their transformation. Under the right conditions outside the Vandom home, all Dean sees is the symbols of the elements before a group of fairies beat the crap out of him. And is everybody in this city stupid or something? Because there’s an old lady at Collins’s apartment who seems totally oblivious to the fact that he’s clearly been beat up and is being carried home by a group of teenagers.
“A Service to the Community” was written by Andrew Nichols and Darrell Vickers. Cam Clarke played Prof. Dean Collins. The Mage was played by BJ Ward.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-24 09:13 pm (UTC)I hadn't noticed that the transformation blinded people.
Will's Heart shows The Mage's true form in season two, although I don't think there was touching. The Mage would be a different case, because she's not a Beast. I think Beast refers to someone like Cedric, say Miranda.
What plot points were dropped because of the execs? I went through his website in June and read everything I could find related to W.i.t.c.h. The only thing I remember that might relate to Will's parentage is that the reason for her being chosen as a guardian would be explored along with Irma and Taranee in a later season.
I don't remember the girls having dark secrets in the comics.
As for the timeline, the whole series lasts a year and a half. I figure that Cornelia and Will are thirteen and twelve, and Will turns thirteen in her birthday episode. The others are twelve. Why? Because they are a year older in the comics, and I remember googling for comments on the show and finding people saying they were a year younger.
In the comics, Hay Lin and the other two are thirteen, while Hay Lin is said to be twelve in the episode with the fantasy movie and the tracker. In what I think was an early season two episode, Will has Taranee helping her with math and says something like, 'congratulations, you could be in the eighth grade.' This is before the summer vacation episodes. In late season two, Cornelia is fourteen. Season two lasts from spring to winter, and season one lasts from fall to winter.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-25 03:09 am (UTC)Yeah, it wasn't obvious, but it does make sense how not everyone notices them. Though the girls still are recognizable enough between forms that Caleb can mistake Guardian!Will as Will's older sister.
The plot point that Disney nixed was that Tony Vandom was going to be a louse like his counterpart in the comics. Disney said no, presumably because they felt awkward about villifying noncustodial parents. But it did make for some awkwardness in the script when you have Susan constantly suspicious of her ex-husband when he just turns out to be a fairly decent guy who's just getting married and springing that on his daughter suddenly.
The "dark secrets" were more along the lines of how their powers were more active before they got the Heart, and Will's telepathy made it hard for her to make friends in Fadden Hill. These weren't present in the cartoon, making it a lot easier on Will to have a more innocent view of the world than Caleb would.
I'm trying to keep track of the timeline as much as possible, without trying to worry too much about the comic setting or anything. The thing that really does throw me off is Caleb's age, since he's stated to be 15 in the first episode, but in season 2, he's 17. So I need to keep track of their vacations and everything to get a sense for the timeframe. Right now seems still somewhere in fall, given all the cold weather and how it just seems to get colder from there.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-25 04:54 am (UTC)I used the comics to help fill in gaps, but I still think you can infer solely from what the show says that Will is twelve and turns thirteen early in the season, and she is in the same class as Cornelia, and in a higher grade than Taranee in the spring in a season two episode. Elyon would be in the same grade, as she was always Cornelia's lab partner. Hay Lin is definitely stated to be twelve in I think was The Return of the Tracker, and Cornelia was fourteen in the episode where she babysits Lillian and discovers her powers. That was fairly late, right before the Halloween episodes. So she has a birthday during or before early fall.
Wasn't it Will who said Caleb was fifteen? I don't remember, and I don't remember in which episode he was seventeen either. When you get to it, and if he was fifteen, I'll know whether to fanwank that he turned sixteen early in the season offscreen or if it's just a continuity error.
Sadly, this is my only Caleb icon; I need room for more
Date: 2010-12-25 04:59 pm (UTC)Caleb himself tells Will his age in "It Begins and It Resumes":
"What are you rebelling against, diaper rash?"
"Hey, girly-girl, I'm fifteen!"
It's possible he hasn't been able to keep track of his age very well since his father's "death," but yeah. It's one of those situations where you don't want to de-age yourself. Most likely, it is a continuity error.
Caleb's age issue
Date: 2010-12-27 05:00 pm (UTC)Is it stated anywhere that a Meridian year is 365 days? Would it be possible that he was fifteen and had two Meridian birthdays by the next reference?
It also could be that while Meridian 'humans' may have a common ancestry to Earth humans, but environment has caused them to age differently, including shorter childhood and longer adult life. It may not be the same pace between males and females. On Earth girls tend to hit puberty first, on for Meridians it could be the guys who go first.
It's been forever since I've seen WITCH, so I don't know if the possibilty of time compression could've happened at some point where time flowed faster for Meridians than it did for the people on Earth.
Just giving some sci-fi potential excuses for age issue plot holes.
Re: Caleb's age issue
Date: 2010-12-27 07:59 pm (UTC)Basically it comes down to W.I.T.C.H. really having consistency issues in season one. They had a lot of good ideas, but they really didn't do such a great job organizing it all. And then when you hand it off to an organization freak like Greg Weisman (which I say with the utmost respect, since his meticulous organization results in awesome plots from minor details early on), it gets messier.
Caleb
Date: 2012-08-16 05:57 pm (UTC)Love your analysis of Caleb and him acting older than he is. Really, it was spot-on. I really like the character, and think you have a good handle on him.
I didn't really think Lillian was out of line. I think she learned her tactics from Cornelia. :) After Cornelia took her things without permission and threatened to shave her bear - so she's hardly the always-innocent sister. Besides, she gets her revenge by making the class do her community service. Also, FTR, I don't think it's a special-ed class. Too many kids, and we see nothing indicating that Lillian has problems later. I think it's just a teacher that lets the kids run wild an she says "behavior issues" to indicate they're a bunch of little hooligans. But I haven't listened to that bit of dialog in a while, so I could be wrong.
I completely agree on the lawsuit-waiting-to-happen. It's one of those times when I just remind myself it's a kids show and keep going.
The ages are a little weird. Been trying to figure them out (cartoon version only). As far as I can tell, the first season takes only one semester. The second season takes a full year. Summer break covering H, I, and J. If any of this is wrong, let me know - I'm really trying to get it straight in my own head.
So, Will is in eighth grade for the first season and the first half of the second season (her "you aren't even in eight grade" comment to Taranee). Cornelia and Eliyon seemed to be the same grade - they are definitely the same age as each other and they had biology with Will. It's odd that they'd be 12-turning-13 in eighth grade, but that is how it seems to play out. Taranee is a year younger (or at least a grade behind).
Cornelia was also referred to as 14 in "U is for Undivided."
IIRC, Nigel is called a freshman in "T is for Trauma." Not sure how old Matt is. Caleb was 15 at the what seemed to be the start of the first school year. The next school year started in K. So it's between August and November that Caleb is presumably 16 (17 years ago for Julian and Nerissa). So that actually works out to be a year and some change after he said he was 15. So would that work? Or am I misremembering something or have my math off?
Re: Caleb
Date: 2012-08-17 01:33 am (UTC)Oh, Cornelia's no angel either, believe me. But even if the class wasn't special ed and it was a matter of the kids' behavior being out of control that day, the teacher was absolutely wrong to leave a preteen/teenage girl all alone in that classroom, especially knowing there were problems.
I think I'm going to have to give up on doing the math for everybody's ages and figure out if it contradicts itself at any point. The reason why I started doing it was because Caleb was mentioned to be 15 at the start of the series, and he was 17 in the middle of season 2. Now I've been on such a long hiatus from the series for my other reviews that I honestly cannot remember.