Paradox

Paradox is the twelfth episode of the first season of Ben 10: Alien Force, and the twelfth episode overall.
==Synopsis==
A time experiment in the 1950's rips a bizarre monster from the past that threatens the future of Ben's time. It's a race against time as Ben, Gwen and Kevin team up with Paradox, a time-traveling hero, to face off against the unstoppable creature.
==Plot==
===1952===
A man and his assistant are trying a time experiment using a large round portal containing quartz crystal, as officials of the US Army watch. Unfortunately, the experiment fails, causing the man to be sucked up into the portal, while an unseen creature, whose shadow is only visible, is heard growling.
===Present===
Ben, Gwen and Kevin visit Los Soledad after hearing of a disturbance. All they can determine at first is that some volatile experiments were conducted, which explains the cinderblock walls that haven't been touched in about 50 years. However, to everyone's surprise, they see vaguely man-sized holes in the wall. The gang heads inside and see that the place is a wreck with bizarre ash trails everywhere and fossilized animal skeletons, such as a bird and a lizard. Just as the gang question the possibility of DNAlien activity, they quickly get their answer when a strange energy creature arrives, and Ben turns into Chromastone to fight it.
The creature gets away and Chromastone transforms back into Ben. The team enter a lab (which is where the time experiment took place) and find the remains of the portal with materials partially sucked up in the machine. A mysterious man appears, and Ben turns into Swampfire. The man offers Swampfire a gumball. He then disappears and reappears outside. The trio follow him, but before they can question him, the creature reappears and the gang realize that all the trails and the skeletons it leaves behind are age, which means it somehow has the power to dangerously accelerate time on whatever it comes in contact with. Kevin tries to fight it, which the man tries to warn is a bad idea. The idea is confirmed as catastrophically bad, because just by punching it, somehow ages him exponentially. The unknown man flees to draw the creature away and the Ben and Gwen turn Kevin over, revealing him to be a decrepit old man.
Kevin is now reduced to a real-life crotchety old man, so Ben has to take the helm of Kevin's car to try and find help. The creature appears again and chases them. Ben's rudimentary driving skills (as a result of being taught by Max) get them out of the creature's path, but not before it touches Kevin's car with its "hand" and ages it to a rusted wreck. They just barely manage to escape the creature and meet the strange man again, who changes Kevin back to his proper age. However, he says regressing a car is beyond his ability. Ben asks the man who he is and Gwen decides that for simplicity's sake, they call him "Professor Paradox", as he has forgotten his real name after all this time. He explains his entire backstory, starting with how Los Soledad was built back in the 50s for the soul purpose of his science experiment.
He built a real working time machine with the quartz crystals plentiful in this desert and some unexpected miscalculation got him sucked into the portal and into the event horizon. He was trapped in the space-time continuum for 100,000 years or more, having to not age, sleep, or eat, just exist. He became insane but got bored with that and decided to learn. He now has encyclopedic understanding of the space-time continuum, enabling him to travel anywhere and when he wants (within reason) without the need for any "time machine." Since then, he's spent at least a dozen timelines crisscrossing along the shortcuts protecting the timeline and making the world a better place.
Paradox's current concern is the creature they've encountered. He explains with a chalkboard that the creature is different from the thousands of foes he's dealt with over the millennia because it's an extra-dimensional foe that came into their plane of reality at the exact moment when his experiment went awry. Gwen points out that this creature couldn't have been around for 50 years, as they would've known about it. Paradox explains that his experiment flung this creature from his past to their present when it came into existence. His job now is to put the kibosh on it before it wreaks havoc on the future. Ben and the team ask why the creature needs to be stopped if it's only attacking an abandoned military base.
Paradox then brings them to the Moon in their distant future, which for some reason gains a breathable atmosphere. He proposes the hypothetical question of what Earth would look like in 200 years if that Trans-Dimensional Creature was allowed to continue its spree of fast-forwarding destruction. He answers Gwen's question by showing them Earth reduced to a dark and brown dusty lifeless baron rock, not unlike the Moon in the present. If Paradox should fail at stopping that thing, this is the best possible version of the future that will transpire. 
 
They then spot another Paradox - the parallel doppelganger of this very timeline who had failed to prevent this catastrophe. The future Paradox urges his temporal counterpart not to repeat his mistakes and sends them back to the present with time running out. 
Gwen suggests that they simply go back and prevent the time experiment from happening. Paradox says they can't do that because it would also prevent him from becoming a time traveler who has helped the universe hundreds of times. He almost mentions one adventure that he and Ben had in saving the universe. They then spot the creature, so Ben transforms into Jetray and shoots the creature, but the neuro shocks have no effect. Paradox throws some gumballs in the creature's path and momentarily immobilizes it due to the fact that gum doesn't particularly age.
Paradox grapples with the creature. Though he exists outside of time, he says he can still feel the eons passing. Ben suddenly thinks of something and tells Paradox to take them back to the time of the accident. While Paradox holds off the creature, Ben, Gwen and Kevin head for the lab, where the experiment is about to be carried out. Ben tells Gwen and Kevin that that whatever the creature was, it wasn't acting like some unfathomable creature on a rampage, but all the things anybody in their right mind would be doing if they were lost in an abandoned military base. They then notice Paradox's assistant backing up out of fright and he accidentally ruptures one of the control panels, which is revealed to be exactly the unexpected complication Paradox mentioned that caused the accident in the first place. When Paradox is sucked in, they see the assistant is soon to follow. That's when they realize the full extent of the situation, as well as the true identity of the time creature.
As the experiment begins to fail like before, Ben transforms into Humungousaur (who turns out to be the unseen creature from the beginning of the episode) to keep from getting dragged into the portal and he saves the assistant. Gwen ends the disaster once and for all by firing at the portal, making it crumble and collapse into itself. Upon altering the timestream, the creature gains the upper hand against Paradox when it instantly reverts back into his assistant, Hugo, not only revealing that his bumbling mutated him into an inter-dimensional being as he was sucked into the time portal, but also that this entire adventure was a causal loop that he was the focal point of. Paradox takes the team back to the present, where he admits that he never expected such a plot twist, much less for the team to be this resourceful so "early". When Gwen asks what happened to Hugo, that's when he shows up, simply stating that he lived a good life. He greets Paradox for the first time in 50 years (100,000 years in Paradox's case) and apologizes about the experiment. Paradox understands and offers Hugo a chance to time travel, before they walk into a portal together to explore a behind-the-scenes look at eternity, leaving Ben, Gwen and Kevin seemingly stranded.
Kevin sarcastically thanks Paradox for leaving the three of them stranded out in the middle of nowhere and Ben says that with their mission complete and the car destroyed, they now have a long walk home. However, once they peer around a corner, they see Kevin's car not only fully restored, but in factory condition from 30 years ago. Eccstatic to have a literal brand-new car, Kevin withholds all the things he was going to say about Paradox and Ben finds a note on the windshield he left behind saying: "Kevin, try to keep in mind that if this car comes into contact with anything else from 1976, it will explode like anti-matter. Enjoy! -Paradox." Ben, Gwen and Kevin then drive back home, with Kevin querying if the note was a joke.
==Noteworthy Events==
===Major Events===
*The team meets Professor Paradox for the first time.
*Time in Los Soledad is altered so that Hugo is saved from becoming the Trans-Dimensional Creature and lives a better life.
*Kevin's car is completely aged and rusted but is later de-aged by Paradox and is factory new again.
====Character Debuts====
*Professor Paradox
*Hugo
*General Groff
*Professor Paradox (Paradox's Failure Timeline)
===Minor Events===
*It is revealed that Kevin used to drag race with some unnamed people at Los Soledad, leaving behind a message "KEVIN RULES!".
==Characters==
===Main Characters===
*Ben Tennyson
*Gwen Tennyson
*Kevin Levin
*Professor Paradox (first appearance)
===Antagonists===
*Trans-Dimensional Creature (first appearance)
===Other Characters===
*General Groff (first appearance)
*Professor Paradox (Paradox's Failure Timeline; first appearance)
==Aliens Used==
*Humungousaur
*Chromastone
*Swampfire
*Jetray
==Quotes==
==Naming and Translations==
==Cast==
==Allusions==
*Professor Paradox's line "I walk in eternity" is a direct reference to the Fourth Doctor from Doctor Who, who is often quoted for saying the same thing.
**Additionally, Paradox offering Swampfire a gumball is also a reference to the Fourth Doctor. Although most Doctors thereafter have done similar things, the Fourth Doctor often offered people jelly babies from a small paper bag.
==Errors==
*Chromastone has black lips.
*Swampfire's hologram faces away from Ben.
*In several shots, Swampfire is more muscular than usual.
*Ben says that Max taught him how to drive, but in the previous episode, he said he didn't know how to drive.
*In one shot, the outline around the side mirror of Kevin's car is missing.
*When the team is on the Moon, one Paradox has a black shirt.
*﻿When Humungousaur stops Hugo from being pulled into the vortex, he grabs his leg. In the next shot, he is seen holding him by the lab coat, and in the shot after that he is holding his leg again.
*Humungousaur stops Hugo from getting sucked in, but moments later, the Hugo outside the building reverts to human, which means that there would be two Hugos in the same timeline.
PX (84).png|Black lips
PX (115).png|Hologram error
PX (128).png|Swampfire error
PX (145).png|Swampfire error
PX (234).png|Missing outline
PX (375).png|Shirt error
PX (487).png|Humungousaur grabs Hugo by the leg
PX (488).png|Humungousaur grabs Hugo by the lab coat
PX (489).png|Humungousaur grabs Hugo by the leg again
==Trivia==
*Paradox hints that he has worked with the future Ben before, and he states that Ben decided to transform into Swampfire then too.
*Paradox mentions that he and Ben once teamed up to save the entire universe.
*As revealed in the Paradox and Plumbers' Helpers story book, which took material from the script of the episode, Professor Paradox's time travel experiment was originally supposed to be on November 12, 1955, which is a reference to the movie Back to the Future.
**However, it would later be revealed in Unearthed that Paradox's experiment took place in 1952.
*As of this episode, Jetray's voice is deeper.
*Kevin's car exploding in case it came with contact with anything from the year 1976 was merely a joke from Paradox.
*Kevin did not grow horns when he got aged up by the Trans-Dimensional Creature because the crew had not thought of the horns yet. However, Dwayne McDuffie stated that they did come up with a reason.
*Jim Krieg wrote this episode at Dwayne's request. Dwayne called Jim and told him "I know you're a big Who fan, do you want to write a Doctor Who pastiche?" Jim immediately said yes, hung up the phone, and looked up the word "pastiche".
==References==
===Crew Statements===
====T.J. Collins====
====Barry Hutchison====
====Dwayne McDuffie====
====Jim Krieg====
===Cartoon Network===
===Merchandise===
====Story Books====
ru:Доктор Парадокс
es:Paradoja
it:L'Esperimento
pl:Paradox (odcinek)
pt-br:Paradoxo (Episódio)
ro:Paradox (episod)
Category:Episodes
Category:Ben 10: Alien Force Episodes
Category:Ben 10: Alien Force Season 1 Episodes
Category:Episodes Directed by Butch Lukic
Category:Episodes Aired Out of Production Order
Category:Featured Articles
Category:Episodes with Flashbacks