#phantom meta

You could tell they got cancelled. It had a very strong, "Oh shit this is it we better go big before we go home!!" feel to it. They fell into the pit that has swallowed so many shows before them: in order for this to be this biggest, most epic thing yet, we have to make them save the whole world. Which isn't true. There are other, BETTER ways to raise the stakes than "This will kill as many people as possible." We're not built to handle thinking about numbers that big. I could tell you I killed a million people or a billion people and that is an EXTRAORDINARY difference, but it almost doesn't seem like it because the extent to which your brain determines the difference at that point basically amounts to "Yup, that's a lot of zeros." So... I get really tired of people thinking that trying to destroy or take over the world is the only way to get as big and epic as possible. Just having a character save the world is kind of boring, in a very weird way. We can't conceptualize the extent of what they're doing so we lack the emotional response necessary to make the story exciting, and it’s a cliche we’ve seen a hundred times before. Besides, when has a character ever NOT saved the world? No story is going to end with, "And then the giant meteor crashed into the planet and they all died." So, you know they're going to succeed. That's why making smaller, personal struggles are so important to the emotional impact of the story. Frodo and Sam save Middle Earth - but Frodo can never truly return home. Luke manages to turn away from the Dark Side and redeem his father, but his father doesn't survive. I would have been so much more interested to see a final showdown that centralized Danny, Vlad, and Valerie - hero, villain, and shapeshifter, to borrow Christopher Volger's term - rather than what we got.

PLOT HOLES

 I have four major bones to pick with this episode.

1. I hate that taking Danny's powers and giving them back is as easy as it was. If I woke up and realized I was half ghost trying to undo it would be the first thing I would do, especially if my parents HUNTED GHOSTS FOR A LIVING. Besides, if it's as easy as walking into the portal and turning it on, Jack Fenton should have accidentally given himself ghost power like 300 times over. It should be an anomaly, something particular and strange that can't be easily replicated. I wasn't crazy about this in Memory Blank, but I let it slide because overall that was a good episode. In this one, though, it was so central and I just. Ugh.

2. Vlad's "taking over the world" shtick. Okay, first of all, I call bullshit complete and total bullshit on the idea that EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD would agree to ANYTHING, apparently in a matter of days no less. Second, "I want five billion dollars and to rule the world." That... That is what a five year old makes his supervillain action figures say. It's so juvenile, and it's very, dare I say, cartoony? Now, of course, it is a cartoon, I get that, but Vlad was for all of the series up to that point a really well-written villain. Yes, he's over the top and absurd, but in an amusing way that fit into his world. And everything he did, he did because he was LONELY. He wanted Danny, or he wanted a clone of Danny, he wanted Maddie, because he wanted companionship. Even when he was being grasping and power hungry he never wanted power for the sake of power itself. He wasn’t content with just being the mayor: he wanted to be LOVED. He wanted his people to ADORE him, to WANT him to be mayor. So it makes no sense for him to reveal himself as an evil ghost and out of nowhere go "SUDDENLY I'M RIDICULOUSLY POWER HUNGRY AND WANT TO RULE THE WHOLE WORLD EVEN THOUGH ANYONE WITH A BRAIN CAN SEE THAT WON’T WORK." It's juvenile, it's stupid, and it's just a cheap way for them to turn on the doomsday machine.

3. Those stupid Masters Blasters. Talk. About. A Plot. Device. Where do I even start? First let's just acknowledge that they just DISAPPEARED like halfway through the episode because they'd served their purpose of getting rid of Danny Phantom and then proving to be corrupt because they charged money for ghost hunting, and obviously the show didn't know what to do with them after that so they just dropped them. But also, there was absolutely NO reason for them to be as good at ghost fighting as they were?? And this show did the thing that I hate, I hate, I hate so much, where they suddenly handed Danny the Incompetent Buffoon ball and he lost all of the skill and intelligence he had been gaining over the course of the series so that the other characters could appear good in comparaison and drive him towards making a stupid decision. And what makes it a hundred times worse is that there is SUCH an obvious solution – so obvious that I kept waiting for them to reveal that was what was actually going on. Why not have Vlad stage the attacks? Think about it: Vlad brings in these three ghost hunters that are, in fact, good ghost hunters – they have to be able to hold their own in the event of a real attack after all – but they're still at a disadvantage to Danny Phantom because they have to rely on technology and don't have all of his powers. So how do you make them look good? Actually, it's incredibly simple: kidnap a few ghosts that you know about, so you know all their strengths and weaknesses, and strategically release them in places where the Masters Blasters have the advantage and an audience. At the same time, have one of Vlad's doubles there, to serve two purposes: one, as backup in case the fight starts to go south against the Masters Blasters, and two, to INTERFERE WITH DANNY PHANTOM. Because they're no reason why Danny should suddenly lose all his skill and get his suit blasted off – unless an enemy he wasn't watching for is attacking him from behind. This fixes almost every plot hole with these characters, and all you have to do to communicate this is show Vlad in the background releasing ghosts for the Masters Blasters to fight and invisibly disintegrating Danny's pants, probably less than a minute of extra animation. But even before that – Who ARE these guys? Where the hell did they come from? Why is Valerie not one of them? As far as Vlad knows she was still his pawn. Sure she rebelled against him over Danni but there's no reason for him to turn her against him further. I guess you can argue there's a big time gap where he finds these people and trains them, but their existence is just so RANDOM.

4. Loose ends, loose ends everywhere! Why did Valerie get about three seconds of screen time? Why was Vlad more or less just left up in space? Like I said above, what happened to the Master Blasters? Why make the reveal to his parents so rushed? None of these is a huuuuuuuge problem by itself – except maybe Vlad, that was pretty weak – but there were so many of them.

“We Could Have Had It All (Rolling in the Ghost Zone)"

Perhaps part of the reason that I was so disappointed with this episode/movie was that I got really excited after watching the penultimate episode, the one with Danni and Valerie. I thought they were using that to set up the final, as a prequel episode – specifically, the cliffhanger bit where Valerie discovered that Vlad was Plasmius and zoomed off before he caught her. From what I’ve seen, they already knew they were getting cancelled at that point, but if that’s true then they really fucked up in terms of dramatic structuring. They had an episode of buildup and a huge dramatic reveal, and then immediately rendered the whole thing entirely pointless by Plasmius's voluntary reveal to the world and Valerie's almost total absence from the final episode (boooooo).

Here's what I would have killed for: Like I said earlier, centralize the episode around the conflict of Danny, Vlad, and Valerie. Make it all about Danny and Vlad's nemesis battle with Valerie caught in the middle. That's what the series was building up to, and I'm convinced that if we'd had more episodes that's where it would have gone. I'm not going to write out an entire episode plot, but there are a few things I really wish would have happened:

--Pick up with Valerie's struggle in response to the revelation that Vlad is Plasmius. She's also only JUST learned in the prequel that "half-ghosts" like Danny, Danni, and Vlad exist, and she doesn't know about Danny yet. Make this a difficult revelation to deal with: are they ghosts, the thing she hunts, or humans, the thing she protects? Make her seek out Danny Phantom, or perhaps Danny Fenton, or maybe both, for advice. Maybe he toys with the idea of revealing his secret. Maybe he does reveal it.

--Involve his parents and Jazz more. This is the finale, they should play a part. An emotional one, not just a plot device What if Valerie went to them asking about people with ghost powers? If – and I'm not sure they should – his parents discover Danny's ghost powers, make it a BIG DEAL. The biggest deal possible. I know they accepted it in the circus episode before they got their memories wiped, but that was when they had nothing to do but sit and think about it for a couple days and Jazz to steer them in the right direction. What if they didn't have that? What if they discovered it in the heat of a battle?

--If we still want to take Danny's powers away, maybe his parents were responsible for it. Maybe they discover his identity and invent a machine that sucks the ghost powers out of him. He could still avoid it until he eventually decides to use it voluntarily.

--If we take Danny's ghost powers, make getting them back a BIG DEAL. It should be the focus of at least an entire act, not something that happens by accident.

--We’re making an alliance with the ghosts? With all of Danny’s enemies? SHOW IT. Don’t cut away for the sake of suspense. I want to see these ghosts be convinced, want to see them MAKE THE DECISION to help Danny 

--For the love of God, give Vlad something better to do, a better motive, a better goal. I don't know necessarily what it should be but there are a million other better goals than taking over the world. Maybe he's the reason his parents find out about him, maybe whatever uneasy peace they achieve for most of the time is broken irreparably, possibly because of Valerie turning against Vlad, and Vlad reveals Danny's secret to his parents in order to enlist their help hunting him down.