Do you remember love? “Moonstruck”
It’s cleaning day on the Rustbucket RV when Ben decides to go Four-Arms to clear out more boxes, getting stuck in the doorframe. Kevin kicks his ass out, which makes Ben drop all of the boxes, spilling their contents all over the floor. Gwen finds a bracelet among the spilled stuff, but Max won’t give it to her because it had belonged to their Verdona. He promises it’s a long story, but the kids eagerly gather around the picnic table for How I Met Your Grandmother. So sue me if I wanted a more romantic tagline than this one.
It all started when Max was about seventeen or eighteen, when he was a rookie (Second) Lieutenant in Air Force Tactical Command. Given his rank, I’m assuming he was eighteen, though to be honest, I don’t have much knowledge about how the officer training program, whether for the 1960s or today. In any case, in what is obviously a shout-out to Hal Jordan, Max was flying F-104 in a training exercise when he came across a strange dark cloud hiding a vortex, out of which flies an alien ship. No, that’s not a screencap from the episode, that’s just the first thing I thought of when I saw it. The UFO fires, shooting down Max’s wingmen, but he hotdogs after it, managing to hit it with a missile. Unfortunately, his sheer awesomeness is too much for his jet to handle, and it falls apart on him. When he manages to crash-land it into a burning wreck at base, the Colonel gives him a dressing down for flying beyond the speed capabilities of the F-104. Having had it with Max’s attitude, he’s ready to give him the boot, but a Major General (judging by the two stars on his shoulders) stops him.
The General questions Max, who unflinchingly sticks to his story, even though the other pilots never saw the UFO. But it turns out that the General believes him. Because President John F. Kennedy (whose picture is on the wall in a very good likeness) has promised that America would go to the moon “before this decade is out.” Assuming that this takes place in the same year as his 1961 speech before Congress or his 1962 speech to Rice University, and going with the assumption that Max is eighteen, this would put Ultimate Alien in 2009 or 2010 (because he turns sixty in the summer of Ben 10, then add six years). Cut me some slack; I’m a history buff, and I’ve been obsessed over the Space Race since fifth grade. These guys totally did their research for this episode, and I love every minute of it. But Ultimate Alien diverges from history as we know it because Kennedy took the Space Race up a notch not because of the Soviets but because of the aliens. Alien activity on Earth was becoming more and more frequent, and Kennedy wanted to be sure that when we met the aliens, we’d be on a more even footing. And despite-or rather, because of-Max’s cockiness, stubbornness, and general mix of badass with attitude, the General knew this was exactly what America needed in an astronaut. He transfers Max to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to begin his training on Monday.
Totally thrilled with the fact that he’s going to be an astronaut (and who can blame him?), Max heads to a “diner” (read: bar) to celebrate, but there’s barely anyone there. And no hot chicks. There’s a funny moment when the waitress/bartender says that the chili there sucks, and he orders a double, proving that he’s always eaten weird stuff. But just when he’s depressed that he gets to boldly go where no one’s gone before without any of the fringe benefits, a hot redheaded woman with a strange silver bracelet sits next to him and introduces herself as Verdona. Being Max, he immediately starts flirting, and Verdona reciprocates. So Max pulls the single best pickup line ever out of the bag: I’m going to be an astronaut, and I’m going to be the first man on the moon. Verdona says she’d love to come along, but Max warns her that the capsule is pretty small. That doesn’t bother her, though, and she promises that she’s small.
…Wow. This really is not a kids’ show moment here. Yes, Verdona just suggested that. And the look on Max’s face clearly says, “I’m getting laid tonight!” This explains so much.
She presses two fingers against his temple and then warns him that they have to go. Failing to think with that head, he fails to catch on, especially when she insists that she’s been trying to find him. At that point, a Terminator walks into the bar, badly disguised as a human. It confronts Verdona, but Max picks a fight with it to save her, shrugging off getting thrown into a table and a pool table, then smashing it with a cue and throwing it into a juke box. Because he’s Max Tennyson and that’s how he rolls. The illusion fails on the Terminator, revealing its robotic form, but despite this, Max still insists he can take it, though Verdona manages to convince him to run. As they get into Max’s red racer, the Terminator hijacks the Sheriff’s car, taking chase.
Max demands answers, but Verdona’s reluctant to give them. Bringing the car to a halt, he convinces her that he’s not going to run for his life if she doesn’t tell him everything now, so she admits that she’s an alien and the Terminator-actually a sentient robot called a Synthroid-is after her. Unsurprisingly, Max takes it well. In fact, the only thing he doesn’t take well is the damage his precious, self-built car takes during the chase. Huh, this sounds familiar. There’s an overturned semi up ahead, but Max isn’t about to let a little thing like a completely blocked road stop him, and he guns it. The Synthroid fires, blowing up the truck, and Max drives through the flames perfectly safe. Again, because he’s Max. They reach an old abandoned gas station to find it old and abandoned (and unlike Static and Gear’s future base, it doesn’t have a high-tech lair underneath it). Verdona reveals that the bracelet she’s wearing has locked her into human form, neutralizing all of her powers except for telepathy. She also reveals that she’d been in a prisoner in the UFO Max had shot down, and during the dogfight, she read his mind. Because of this, she believes that he can help her. I wonder if there’s a touch of destiny in that, but I honestly can’t be sure. A car approaches, and they quickly hide, and Max realizes that the bracelet has a tracking device and has to come off now. He takes Verdona to a copper smelting factory and tries to cut off the bracelet with a pair of shears, but he fails. As the Synthroid attacks, he gets an idea, but he needs Verdona’s help to pull it off, so he asks if she trusts him. Don’t even pretend you’re not singing A Whole New World.
Verdona lures the Synthroid to a non-OSHA compliant, free-standing walkway stupidly positioned directly over a vat of molten copper. Max then leaps onto it, cutting off the Synthroid’s arm with the sheers, then cutting the chain of the walkway and dropping to the floor, breaking his knee in the fall, but still enjoying the sight of the Synthroid falling into the molten copper. Huh, does this mean Max is John Connor? It would explain a lot about his badass level. But unlike the original Terminator, the Synthroid isn’t destroyed. He hurls his arm at the limping Max, knocking him out, and kidnapping Verdona. When Max recovers, he totally ignores his broken knee and gets in his car and races after them, trying to figure out where the ship was crashed. To do so, he hacks into Verdona’s telepathic connection with him and sees into her mind to find her. If that’s not the Power of Love, I don’t know what is! He arrives to find Verdona tied up and the Synthroid repairing its ship, so he takes a crowbar and smashes the Synthroid with it. Sure, the Synthroid only manages to disarm him and beat him up before regenerating, but it was still cool. Max demands answers and learns that the Synthroids want to use Verdona as a battery, since she’s an energy being. Her powers would keep their people alive for a few years before they managed to completely drain her to death. Because what’s one life if it saves many? Max instead argues that any life is precious and worth protecting, and there is no way in hell the Synthroid is taking Verdona. …Let me come back to this moment. Anyway, his impassioned speech proves to Verdona just how much he loves her, which is good considering she’s fallen for him too. But the Synthroid basically says, “Fuck that shit,” (I’m paraphrasing here) and threatens to kill Max, just like his people killed their creators. I knew they were Terminators. But before he can, Magister Labrid arrives! …You know, the guy who got killed in the two-part first episode of Alien Force? That guy? Well, yeah. Not a whole lot to celebrate since he’s useless here and gets his ass kicked immediately. Goddamnit, the only thing you did right was get yourself killed saving Kevin!
With the Plumber down for the count and Verdona taken inside, Max sees the abandoned badge and blaster and takes the blaster (maybe the badge too, but who knows?) and charges inside. Verdona is placed in a stasis chamber, and Max levels the blaster at the Synthroid, who points out that his armor is too strong for blasters. But Verdona broadcasts info about the ship’s power sphere into Max’s mind, so he shoots that instead. The sphere goes critical, causing the ship’s power to fail. Verdona is released, the lovebirds flirt, and they still have time to escape as the energy obliterates the Synthroid. And as they run for their lives, Max even manages to haul Labrid’s ass out of the range of the ensuing explosion. With the ship destroyed, the bracelet falls off Verdona, allowing her to take on her true Anodyte form. And Max still thinks she’s hot. She asks him to join her in space, but he turns her down, citing that even though he loves her, he’s got so much he still wants to do. She tries to offer it to him, but he argues that it’s not the same. No one but him can make his wishes come true. Verdona kisses him and promises that they’ll meet again.
Back in the present, Max explains to the kids that he did go into the astronaut program immediately after that, but the reason he never went to the moon (as left ambiguous in the original series) was because Labrid returned and recruited him. Ben asks Max for the story of how he and Verdona met again, but Max promises a rain check, since he doesn’t want to wake Kevin. Annoyed, Ben punches his best friend awake. As the kids go back inside, Max holds the bracelet and looks up to the stars, telling Verdona goodnight, wherever she is now.
I have been waiting for this episode since even before it had been hinted about on McDuffie’s Twitter. We seriously need a whole series about Max’s life before Ben 10, but I’m willing to settle for this episode-at least for now.
Back in the Alien Force episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Verdona revealed that when Max was young, he wasn’t too different from Kevin. And it shows. Especially the car thing. As a young man, he was a brash, ace pilot in the Air Force. His test scores and training records were amazing, but he had that infamous Tennyson stubborn streak. He constantly argued with his superiors when he thought they were wrong, racking up citation after citation for insubordination. Not too different from Ben, actually, given “Basic Training”-he doesn’t necessarily respect the chain of command unless he respects the commander giving him orders. But in addition to that, he had a long record of brawls and generally having a lousy attitude. In short, he was New Kirk from Star Trek 2009. And yet, the General thought this meant he was perfect astronaut material.
I have kind of a running gag about Max being perfect for Torchwood, given how he had alien girlfriends and everything. But it seems to be a little justified, along with my Kirk comparison, when he meets Verdona. Here is a woman he knows nothing about, learns she’s an alien, and progresses from wanting to have sex with her from the start to falling deeply in love with her. When Verdona reveals her true form, she’s even worried that it repulses Max, but he still loves her anyway. The Power of Love theme from season one carries over here, when we see just what he’s willing to do to save her. He puts his life in danger over and over and he even manages to hack into her powers to find her. Nothing in the universe is going to keep him from finding her, which makes it really depressing when you know that they apparently broke up before the grandkids were born, and he hasn’t seen her in possibly decades. Hell, he still keeps her bracelet and seems to be waiting for her, but she’s never come back to him. Guys, this is how you handle breakup aftermath.
But in the middle of the Power of Love theme is this subtle theme of desire I’ve picked up over time. If season one of Ultimate Alien asked “Who are you?” and forced Ben, Gwen, and Kevin to prove themselves as heroes who choose life and love, then season two asks, “What do you want?” It’s obvious with Ben being brought closer to the breaking point with his fame and his relationship with Julie. Episodes like “Viktor: The Spoils” and “Revenge of the Swarm” showed the dark side of desire, when it becomes greed. Prince Gila and King Zarian were willing to sacrifice innocent people in their desire for power, and the Hive Queen manipulated Elena into attacking anyone who would stand in the way of what she wanted. But unlike, say, a Yasuko Kobayashi Kamen Rider series, desire is portrayed as a good thing, not just something that can twist people into darkness. It’s the want for something that keeps the heroes going. Ben’s desire to have Julie back propelled him to rebuild bridges with her in “Eye of the Beholder” and confront and fight Elena in “Revenge of the Swarm.” It’s the desire for truth that leads Jimmy to consider the possibility that his hero might have turned to the dark side and become a hero himself in “The Big Story.” Kevin’s desire to keep his badge is what Gwen blackmails Ben with in “Basic Training,” and Gwen’s desire to help gives her trouble in “Creature From Beyond” and “It’s Not Easy Being Gwen.” Hell, even the resolution in “Absolute Power” was also a matter of desire: Gwen’s desire to save Kevin trumping Ben’s reluctant acceptance of what he thought he needed to do-not what he wanted to do.
And it’s Max’s desires that get in the way of his relationship with Verdona, but for a good reason. He wants to become an astronaut. He wants to go to the moon. He wants so much, and it’s what drives him. Verdona offers it to him: she can take him into space, no problem. The moon? Just a pitstop on the way to the stars. But he insists that he has to be the one to make his dreams come true. No one can do it for him. What he wants, he must accomplish with his own hands. It’s not greed; it’s the ultimate virtue of humanity.
But another moment that feels depressing in retrospect comes when Max tells off the Synthroid for failing to understand the true value of life. He argues that it’s wrong to sacrifice one life to save many because that one life is just as valuable and worth protecting. It’s idealistic and heroic, everything that we see he passes on to Ben and Gwen. But it’s also something he appears to have grown out of. In “Absolute Power,” he told Gwen off for trying to save the life of the person she loved, even if his death would save countless others. He said it was “unprofessional” for her to put her personal feelings ahead of the lives of others. And when he talked to Ben, he admitted that he agreed with his decision and wanted to be sure he’d made it on a mature level, not because he felt betrayed. So it adds a lot more heaviness to those discussions, especially the one with Ben. Because now we know he wasn’t asking his grandson why he was sacrificing his idealism and everything that made him a hero in order to do the right thing, but he was really asking his younger self-just embodied in Ben. Implicitly, everything that happened to Ben that arc is exactly what happened to Max, only Ben managed to be resilient enough not to completely betray his principles of idealism the way Max had.
Finally, because I know someone’s going to mention it eventually, the younger Max’s design is changed from when we saw a ten-year-old version of him in “Don’t Drink the Water” back in the original series. The only time we ever saw Max young, he had red hair. Here, he has brown hair, and the redheaded Tennysons get those genes from Verdona (and Ben apparently gets his fashion sense from her, given the white dress with a black line she was wearing). I’m going to say this now: it’s not important. This is a single detail that easily would have been forgotten, if you weren’t particularly nitpicky about details in the original series. It’s not a big deal at all that Max’s hair color changes between three series and four years (since that episode premiered in 2007). But I know someone, somewhere, is going to wank about it, so there you go.
“Moonstruck” was written by Len Uhley. Young Max was played by Jason Marsden, and Jeff Bennett reprised his role as Magister Labrid.
It all started when Max was about seventeen or eighteen, when he was a rookie (Second) Lieutenant in Air Force Tactical Command. Given his rank, I’m assuming he was eighteen, though to be honest, I don’t have much knowledge about how the officer training program, whether for the 1960s or today. In any case, in what is obviously a shout-out to Hal Jordan, Max was flying F-104 in a training exercise when he came across a strange dark cloud hiding a vortex, out of which flies an alien ship. No, that’s not a screencap from the episode, that’s just the first thing I thought of when I saw it. The UFO fires, shooting down Max’s wingmen, but he hotdogs after it, managing to hit it with a missile. Unfortunately, his sheer awesomeness is too much for his jet to handle, and it falls apart on him. When he manages to crash-land it into a burning wreck at base, the Colonel gives him a dressing down for flying beyond the speed capabilities of the F-104. Having had it with Max’s attitude, he’s ready to give him the boot, but a Major General (judging by the two stars on his shoulders) stops him.
The General questions Max, who unflinchingly sticks to his story, even though the other pilots never saw the UFO. But it turns out that the General believes him. Because President John F. Kennedy (whose picture is on the wall in a very good likeness) has promised that America would go to the moon “before this decade is out.” Assuming that this takes place in the same year as his 1961 speech before Congress or his 1962 speech to Rice University, and going with the assumption that Max is eighteen, this would put Ultimate Alien in 2009 or 2010 (because he turns sixty in the summer of Ben 10, then add six years). Cut me some slack; I’m a history buff, and I’ve been obsessed over the Space Race since fifth grade. These guys totally did their research for this episode, and I love every minute of it. But Ultimate Alien diverges from history as we know it because Kennedy took the Space Race up a notch not because of the Soviets but because of the aliens. Alien activity on Earth was becoming more and more frequent, and Kennedy wanted to be sure that when we met the aliens, we’d be on a more even footing. And despite-or rather, because of-Max’s cockiness, stubbornness, and general mix of badass with attitude, the General knew this was exactly what America needed in an astronaut. He transfers Max to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to begin his training on Monday.
Totally thrilled with the fact that he’s going to be an astronaut (and who can blame him?), Max heads to a “diner” (read: bar) to celebrate, but there’s barely anyone there. And no hot chicks. There’s a funny moment when the waitress/bartender says that the chili there sucks, and he orders a double, proving that he’s always eaten weird stuff. But just when he’s depressed that he gets to boldly go where no one’s gone before without any of the fringe benefits, a hot redheaded woman with a strange silver bracelet sits next to him and introduces herself as Verdona. Being Max, he immediately starts flirting, and Verdona reciprocates. So Max pulls the single best pickup line ever out of the bag: I’m going to be an astronaut, and I’m going to be the first man on the moon. Verdona says she’d love to come along, but Max warns her that the capsule is pretty small. That doesn’t bother her, though, and she promises that she’s small.
…Wow. This really is not a kids’ show moment here. Yes, Verdona just suggested that. And the look on Max’s face clearly says, “I’m getting laid tonight!” This explains so much.
She presses two fingers against his temple and then warns him that they have to go. Failing to think with that head, he fails to catch on, especially when she insists that she’s been trying to find him. At that point, a Terminator walks into the bar, badly disguised as a human. It confronts Verdona, but Max picks a fight with it to save her, shrugging off getting thrown into a table and a pool table, then smashing it with a cue and throwing it into a juke box. Because he’s Max Tennyson and that’s how he rolls. The illusion fails on the Terminator, revealing its robotic form, but despite this, Max still insists he can take it, though Verdona manages to convince him to run. As they get into Max’s red racer, the Terminator hijacks the Sheriff’s car, taking chase.
Max demands answers, but Verdona’s reluctant to give them. Bringing the car to a halt, he convinces her that he’s not going to run for his life if she doesn’t tell him everything now, so she admits that she’s an alien and the Terminator-actually a sentient robot called a Synthroid-is after her. Unsurprisingly, Max takes it well. In fact, the only thing he doesn’t take well is the damage his precious, self-built car takes during the chase. Huh, this sounds familiar. There’s an overturned semi up ahead, but Max isn’t about to let a little thing like a completely blocked road stop him, and he guns it. The Synthroid fires, blowing up the truck, and Max drives through the flames perfectly safe. Again, because he’s Max. They reach an old abandoned gas station to find it old and abandoned (and unlike Static and Gear’s future base, it doesn’t have a high-tech lair underneath it). Verdona reveals that the bracelet she’s wearing has locked her into human form, neutralizing all of her powers except for telepathy. She also reveals that she’d been in a prisoner in the UFO Max had shot down, and during the dogfight, she read his mind. Because of this, she believes that he can help her. I wonder if there’s a touch of destiny in that, but I honestly can’t be sure. A car approaches, and they quickly hide, and Max realizes that the bracelet has a tracking device and has to come off now. He takes Verdona to a copper smelting factory and tries to cut off the bracelet with a pair of shears, but he fails. As the Synthroid attacks, he gets an idea, but he needs Verdona’s help to pull it off, so he asks if she trusts him. Don’t even pretend you’re not singing A Whole New World.
Verdona lures the Synthroid to a non-OSHA compliant, free-standing walkway stupidly positioned directly over a vat of molten copper. Max then leaps onto it, cutting off the Synthroid’s arm with the sheers, then cutting the chain of the walkway and dropping to the floor, breaking his knee in the fall, but still enjoying the sight of the Synthroid falling into the molten copper. Huh, does this mean Max is John Connor? It would explain a lot about his badass level. But unlike the original Terminator, the Synthroid isn’t destroyed. He hurls his arm at the limping Max, knocking him out, and kidnapping Verdona. When Max recovers, he totally ignores his broken knee and gets in his car and races after them, trying to figure out where the ship was crashed. To do so, he hacks into Verdona’s telepathic connection with him and sees into her mind to find her. If that’s not the Power of Love, I don’t know what is! He arrives to find Verdona tied up and the Synthroid repairing its ship, so he takes a crowbar and smashes the Synthroid with it. Sure, the Synthroid only manages to disarm him and beat him up before regenerating, but it was still cool. Max demands answers and learns that the Synthroids want to use Verdona as a battery, since she’s an energy being. Her powers would keep their people alive for a few years before they managed to completely drain her to death. Because what’s one life if it saves many? Max instead argues that any life is precious and worth protecting, and there is no way in hell the Synthroid is taking Verdona. …Let me come back to this moment. Anyway, his impassioned speech proves to Verdona just how much he loves her, which is good considering she’s fallen for him too. But the Synthroid basically says, “Fuck that shit,” (I’m paraphrasing here) and threatens to kill Max, just like his people killed their creators. I knew they were Terminators. But before he can, Magister Labrid arrives! …You know, the guy who got killed in the two-part first episode of Alien Force? That guy? Well, yeah. Not a whole lot to celebrate since he’s useless here and gets his ass kicked immediately. Goddamnit, the only thing you did right was get yourself killed saving Kevin!
With the Plumber down for the count and Verdona taken inside, Max sees the abandoned badge and blaster and takes the blaster (maybe the badge too, but who knows?) and charges inside. Verdona is placed in a stasis chamber, and Max levels the blaster at the Synthroid, who points out that his armor is too strong for blasters. But Verdona broadcasts info about the ship’s power sphere into Max’s mind, so he shoots that instead. The sphere goes critical, causing the ship’s power to fail. Verdona is released, the lovebirds flirt, and they still have time to escape as the energy obliterates the Synthroid. And as they run for their lives, Max even manages to haul Labrid’s ass out of the range of the ensuing explosion. With the ship destroyed, the bracelet falls off Verdona, allowing her to take on her true Anodyte form. And Max still thinks she’s hot. She asks him to join her in space, but he turns her down, citing that even though he loves her, he’s got so much he still wants to do. She tries to offer it to him, but he argues that it’s not the same. No one but him can make his wishes come true. Verdona kisses him and promises that they’ll meet again.
Back in the present, Max explains to the kids that he did go into the astronaut program immediately after that, but the reason he never went to the moon (as left ambiguous in the original series) was because Labrid returned and recruited him. Ben asks Max for the story of how he and Verdona met again, but Max promises a rain check, since he doesn’t want to wake Kevin. Annoyed, Ben punches his best friend awake. As the kids go back inside, Max holds the bracelet and looks up to the stars, telling Verdona goodnight, wherever she is now.
I have been waiting for this episode since even before it had been hinted about on McDuffie’s Twitter. We seriously need a whole series about Max’s life before Ben 10, but I’m willing to settle for this episode-at least for now.
Back in the Alien Force episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Verdona revealed that when Max was young, he wasn’t too different from Kevin. And it shows. Especially the car thing. As a young man, he was a brash, ace pilot in the Air Force. His test scores and training records were amazing, but he had that infamous Tennyson stubborn streak. He constantly argued with his superiors when he thought they were wrong, racking up citation after citation for insubordination. Not too different from Ben, actually, given “Basic Training”-he doesn’t necessarily respect the chain of command unless he respects the commander giving him orders. But in addition to that, he had a long record of brawls and generally having a lousy attitude. In short, he was New Kirk from Star Trek 2009. And yet, the General thought this meant he was perfect astronaut material.
I have kind of a running gag about Max being perfect for Torchwood, given how he had alien girlfriends and everything. But it seems to be a little justified, along with my Kirk comparison, when he meets Verdona. Here is a woman he knows nothing about, learns she’s an alien, and progresses from wanting to have sex with her from the start to falling deeply in love with her. When Verdona reveals her true form, she’s even worried that it repulses Max, but he still loves her anyway. The Power of Love theme from season one carries over here, when we see just what he’s willing to do to save her. He puts his life in danger over and over and he even manages to hack into her powers to find her. Nothing in the universe is going to keep him from finding her, which makes it really depressing when you know that they apparently broke up before the grandkids were born, and he hasn’t seen her in possibly decades. Hell, he still keeps her bracelet and seems to be waiting for her, but she’s never come back to him. Guys, this is how you handle breakup aftermath.
But in the middle of the Power of Love theme is this subtle theme of desire I’ve picked up over time. If season one of Ultimate Alien asked “Who are you?” and forced Ben, Gwen, and Kevin to prove themselves as heroes who choose life and love, then season two asks, “What do you want?” It’s obvious with Ben being brought closer to the breaking point with his fame and his relationship with Julie. Episodes like “Viktor: The Spoils” and “Revenge of the Swarm” showed the dark side of desire, when it becomes greed. Prince Gila and King Zarian were willing to sacrifice innocent people in their desire for power, and the Hive Queen manipulated Elena into attacking anyone who would stand in the way of what she wanted. But unlike, say, a Yasuko Kobayashi Kamen Rider series, desire is portrayed as a good thing, not just something that can twist people into darkness. It’s the want for something that keeps the heroes going. Ben’s desire to have Julie back propelled him to rebuild bridges with her in “Eye of the Beholder” and confront and fight Elena in “Revenge of the Swarm.” It’s the desire for truth that leads Jimmy to consider the possibility that his hero might have turned to the dark side and become a hero himself in “The Big Story.” Kevin’s desire to keep his badge is what Gwen blackmails Ben with in “Basic Training,” and Gwen’s desire to help gives her trouble in “Creature From Beyond” and “It’s Not Easy Being Gwen.” Hell, even the resolution in “Absolute Power” was also a matter of desire: Gwen’s desire to save Kevin trumping Ben’s reluctant acceptance of what he thought he needed to do-not what he wanted to do.
And it’s Max’s desires that get in the way of his relationship with Verdona, but for a good reason. He wants to become an astronaut. He wants to go to the moon. He wants so much, and it’s what drives him. Verdona offers it to him: she can take him into space, no problem. The moon? Just a pitstop on the way to the stars. But he insists that he has to be the one to make his dreams come true. No one can do it for him. What he wants, he must accomplish with his own hands. It’s not greed; it’s the ultimate virtue of humanity.
But another moment that feels depressing in retrospect comes when Max tells off the Synthroid for failing to understand the true value of life. He argues that it’s wrong to sacrifice one life to save many because that one life is just as valuable and worth protecting. It’s idealistic and heroic, everything that we see he passes on to Ben and Gwen. But it’s also something he appears to have grown out of. In “Absolute Power,” he told Gwen off for trying to save the life of the person she loved, even if his death would save countless others. He said it was “unprofessional” for her to put her personal feelings ahead of the lives of others. And when he talked to Ben, he admitted that he agreed with his decision and wanted to be sure he’d made it on a mature level, not because he felt betrayed. So it adds a lot more heaviness to those discussions, especially the one with Ben. Because now we know he wasn’t asking his grandson why he was sacrificing his idealism and everything that made him a hero in order to do the right thing, but he was really asking his younger self-just embodied in Ben. Implicitly, everything that happened to Ben that arc is exactly what happened to Max, only Ben managed to be resilient enough not to completely betray his principles of idealism the way Max had.
Finally, because I know someone’s going to mention it eventually, the younger Max’s design is changed from when we saw a ten-year-old version of him in “Don’t Drink the Water” back in the original series. The only time we ever saw Max young, he had red hair. Here, he has brown hair, and the redheaded Tennysons get those genes from Verdona (and Ben apparently gets his fashion sense from her, given the white dress with a black line she was wearing). I’m going to say this now: it’s not important. This is a single detail that easily would have been forgotten, if you weren’t particularly nitpicky about details in the original series. It’s not a big deal at all that Max’s hair color changes between three series and four years (since that episode premiered in 2007). But I know someone, somewhere, is going to wank about it, so there you go.
“Moonstruck” was written by Len Uhley. Young Max was played by Jason Marsden, and Jeff Bennett reprised his role as Magister Labrid.