EPISODE REVIEW: Ben 10 Alien Force: “Above and Beyond” (Season 3, Episode 17)

Grrr. Is there anything worse than an episode where the audience is deliberately misled into thinking there’s real peril going on, only to find out that it’s all just a training exercise? Really, it’s just the worst bait-and-switch available.

I’m all in favor of all kinds of misdirection for the audience: keep ‘em guessing, play with the format, set things up as a mystery, have the story told by an unreliable witness, whatever, I love all those variations on form, but the whole “It was all just an exercise” really is just the worst kind of slap in the face to the viewers. Worse even than the “It was all just a dream” episode, or “Cosmic Reset Button” stories in which time travel prevents the whole episode from ever having taken place, things to back to the way they were before, and we end up blowing anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours (“Year of Hell”) on a story of no consequence whatsoever. They’re worse, even, than Holodeck episodes, which are just the laziest, sloppiest, “Why bother-est” storytelling imaginable.

(Full disclosure: I used to believe the Reset Button stories were the worst ones imaginable, but the Stargate Franchise has done like a dozen of ‘em in the last 324 episodes, and they’ve all been pretty clever and good.)

This pains me. It really does, because “Alien Force” has been a consistently above-average show with solid writing and three well-developed central characters. Though there have been a few clunker episodes in this and the prequel series (Which was on the whole far more uneven than “Alien Force” is), they’ve never made such a massive misstep as this. Obviously, because I really like the show, because I’m a huge screaming fan of Dwayne McDuffie, and because I’ve enjoyed everything they’ve done up ’til now, I will ultimately forgive this bad story, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a *Really* bad story.

All my kids and I watch the show together when new episodes come on. It’s a family ritual. We all look forward to it, and have since the original show was on. My middle child actually yelled “Oh, come on!” at the screen when the big twist was revealed. The oldest said, “You know, I saw that coming, but I hoped I was wrong,” and the youngest just said “Stinks” and left the room looking rather glum.

The plot, such as it is: The “Plumbers Helpers” (Manny, Pierce, Helen, and Alan, who I think has a different voice this time out) get an emergency call from Max in Space Station Delta, saying Ben’s wigged out and is attacking him. As Gwen and Kevin are “On the other side of the galaxy on a mission” (Cue wah-wah guitar), the Helpers head up to the station, find a message from Max, immediately disregard it, and get whomped on for the next 17 minutes or so. Then they decide Max’s advice was good after all and defeat Ben. In the process, the station is crippled and will crash on “The City of London.” (A line which seem oddly almost expositional. It’s delivered in such a manner that it could have easily gone on say something like “We’re going to crash into the city of London, capital of the United