Hey look, it's Dr. Doom's little-known gay cousin!
Meanwhile - or presumably the next morning, I guess, since it looked like night in Cardboard City - Drew and Laurie strike up a conversation about keeping their superhero identities secret. In the coffee house. Which is full of people. While a man sits reading a book literally one foot behind Drew. Seems a bit counterproductive to me, but hey, I've never been a secret superhero, so what do I know?
Anyway, Laurie is studying for an upcoming French test, which she complains is going to be very hard, and Drew convinces her to order a coffee, which she promptly leaves to go get, being a waitress here and all. I only mention these mundane details because they're the setup for some time trickery. You see, as soon as Laurie looks back down at her textbook, Drew is standing next to her with her cup of coffee, which she warns is piping hot. Despite Laurie's surprise at the speedy service, Drew doesn't seem to notice anything strange - until Laurie sips her coffee and realizes it's already cold. Meanwhile, Gordon, who has been sitting on the other side of the room, approaches Drew with a donut (that is obviously plastic) and complains it's stale, even though Drew insists it was just baked that morning.
Gordon reveals to Laurie he's here for his weekly appointment to talk with his mother (they both have "very busy schedules," partially because she's the mayor), who promptly walks in and orders herself a cappuccino. But as soon as she sits down, she stands back up and says she has to leave but really enjoyed their time together. Gordon checks the time and sees it's apparently an hour later than he thought, then turns only to see Swinton suddenly sitting next to him even though he hadn't been in the coffee house at all before. Swinton sees Laurie studying and asks her a question in French, which she doesn't understand. But as soon as he repeats the question in English, she responds in perfect French and is amazed at how well her studies are suddenly going.
Things don't get REALLY weird, though, until Swinton gets up to go to the bathroom - then turns around and sees himself, still sitting down where he just was, saying he needs to go to the bathroom. The two Swintons encounter each other on the stairs to the restrooms and, regrettably, the universe doesn't implode. Instead, they react with vague confusion and Swinton #1 returns to his seat to point out his double to the others. Gordon's immediate assumption is that Swinton has cloned himself as a science project, but Swinton correctly guesses something is wrong with time itself - which the teens confirm by checking their watches and realizing they all have vastly different times (except for Drew, who wears a broken watch because she likes how it looks).
The two Swintons realize this is going to be really awkward once they get to the urinals.
I'm sorry to spend so much time on this sequence of events, but the fact is that, to my amazement, it's actually a pretty entertaining scene; easily the best thing in the show so far. It's a fun concept and it's actually interesting to see it play out. Now let's see how long it takes for this episode to go off the rails.
To get to the bottom of things, Swinton asks for a sundial so he can measure the distance between solar time and clock time. Conveniently, Drew has one in her backyard by her pool house, so they relocate there. As the teens sit around discussing the situation, Drew's aunt suddenly walks into frame tugging along an artificial Christmas tree on wheels, asking the kids to help decorate it. This strikes them as odd since, as far as they know, it's the middle of May. Drew's aunt goes off to get the lights for the tree and the teens finally pull their heads out of their asses and realize that Gorganus must be up to something. And all without consulting a sundial, which we never actually see.
Just as our heroes realize the flagrantly obvious, their tattoos begin to flash. A Power Portal appears next to them, but because of the time fluctuations, it disappears before they have the chance to go through. In his lair, Nimbar freaks out about how the Sorcerer is making time go haywire, while wondering why the teens don't answer his summons, proving he is incapable of putting two and two together. Back at the pool house - with a now fully-decorated Christmas tree - Swinton reasons that only one of them will be able to jump through the portal next time it opens. Worse, he also alleges that they're aging at an accelerated rate. Gordon points out that Swinton is the youngest of the group, and volunteers him to be the one to go through the portal as he'll have the longest time to fight. Swinton agrees, and says he'll send a portal for the others the day after tomorrow, which he figures should be pretty soon at this point.
The portal opens again, and Swinton gets through. He and Nimbar discuss how time is speeding up like crazy and going out of order, and Swinton advises Nimbar to open a portal, leave it open as long as he can, and hope for the best. Because dramatic tension is apparently overrated, the very next scene is the portal reopening at the pool house and all three of the others getting through immediately.
Personally, I don't think I'd be in much of a rush to get to the giant snot-pile's space cave.
Upon arrival, the teens realize they're extremely tired, and Nimbar points out that the time shenanigans are not only aging them, but also causing them to suffer from sleep deprivation. When Nimbar reveals their enemy is the Sorcerer, the teens again react as if they've fought him before in some nonexistent earlier episode. They're also worried because "he's trouble" and they may not be able to defeat him in their weakened state. Except when they step on the Transo-Discs and transform into Galactic Sentinels, they become instantly refreshed and ready to fight. Again, so much for dramatic tension.
The Sentinels and the Sorcerer engage in a poorly-choreographed battle, in which the Sorcerer literally throws some fake snowflakes into the air, prompting Gordon to declare that it's now winter. Then, with a wave of his wand, the Sorcerer turns up the studio lights, and Laurie surmises it's summer! Up on Moleculon, Gorganus and Lechner watch and are assured of their victory, with Gorganus stating all the time warping is (somehow) going to scare the Sentinels to death.
The heroes summon their weapons and blast the monster, but he teleports behind them in a puff of purple mist and vaporizes their arsenal. They immediately re-summon the weapons and fire more lasers, but we don't even see whether they make contact or miss. The editing throughout the whole fight has been horrible, with one shot of the Sorcerer taunting the teens repeated ad nauseum to pad things out, but the worst offense is yet to come.
The Sentinels combine into Knightron and fire some lasers at him from their sword, but he pulls the same teleportation trick again and reappears behind them. After a very brief moment of Knightron swinging Megacalibur at the villain, this entire sequence is completely repeated with no changes whatsoever. They literally play the same portion of the fight twice, back-to-back, which is a truly incredible display of laziness. If it's supposed to be some sort of time loop caused by the Sorcerer's powers, the show does nothing to actually imply that.
Apparently as sick of this fight as I am, the Sentinels decide to "trap him in the Megacalibur's energy beam." In practice, this means they fire their sword's laser into the sky, which causes a spotlight to shine on the Sorcerer from above and apparently keep him in place. Then they finish him off with a few more laser blasts, causing him to teleport away entirely.
The Sorcerer will never make it to Broadway if he can't get over his stage fright.
Back up on Moleculon, where the Sorcerer has apparently retreated to, Gorganus scolds his warrior for failing him and calls him unworthy, zapping him with his finger-laser and returning him to his dry ice summoning pedestal. So like, they're supposed to be mercenaries, right? Do they actually do jobs for anyone else, or is Gorganus literally turning them into figurines and trapping them in an ice box until he needs them? Somehow I get the feeling the show is never going to bother answering this question.
Upon the teens' return to Nimbar's lair, Swinton notes that they were apparently gone for a whole year. Yet again, the show immediately resolves a problem it's just introduced when Nimbar assures them that defeating the Sorcerer somehow made everything on Earth just go back to normal. On the next episode they might as well just defeat the monster before Gorganus sends it down.
Back at the coffee house an indeterminate amount of time later, Laurie laments that they couldn't have come back from the fight after her French test, but politely refuses when Drew jokingly suggests she ask the Sorcerer for some help with that. Gordon's there waiting for another session of "quality time" with his mother, and Swinton is also there because this show only has a handful of sets so he doesn't really have anywhere better to be. Drew notes that her watch has suddenly started working, and asks the others for the time so she can set it, but they all have different times. The episode ends with each of them wondering whether the Sorcerer's spell is really still in effect, which is either a really lame unresolved cliffhanger or a really lame gag. Your choice.
The teens pictured doing a great job of not hanging out together to protect their identities, as always.
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Okay, so this was a BIG step up from the last two episodes, if not in terms of actual production competence then at least in terms of enjoyability. Which is to say I didn't feel like smashing my computer monitor the whole time it was playing. The time-warp jokes were at least interesting enough to keep my attention, even though the script is pretty inconsistent on whether time is looping, jumping around, or just speeding up. The characters were more tolerable than they were in "The Note," and the monster fight, while still terrible, at least had a few laughable moments. And hey, no Dwayne. That's worth at least one consolation point on my nonexistent scoring system!
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