Sorry to be so late on this review. I was getting snacks during the first commercial break of this episode last night, and spilled grape juice all over the stairs. I had to clean that up, and missed the rest of the episode.

PLAY BY PLAY

Argit, the weird, conniving little Porcupine/Rat/Weasel alien boy thing that occasionally runs scams with Kevin, is now running a protection racket: If the Forever Knights will give him $100,000/month, he’ll see to it that their castles don’t fall down. They refuse to pay, and, of course the castles do fall.

I'm having trouble concentrating tonight, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, a cartoon that no one but me remembers, keeps flooding through my head for some reason. In light of this, I took a lot of notes while watching the show. Normally I don't do this, normally I just trust my memory and my amazing powers of seeing stuff that probably isn't there, which might be subtext and clues, or it might just not be there.

Much as I like Ben 10 - and I do - the continuity of the show has always been problematic. Some of that is the unavoidable result of time compression in the show. The original series ran from December of 2005 to May of 2008, yet it took place entirely within the space of 90 days, one summer. The sequel series ran from April of ‘08 to March of this year (2010 for all of you folks reading this in the future. How are those flying cars and starships working out for ya’ up there?), and was set over the course of one school year.

Here we are two episodes into the new series, and they’ve already got a really long way towards addressing and overcoming my reservations about the previous series, “Ben 10: Alien Force.” This new show is brighter, fuller, generally funnier. While it still feels like our characters are operating in a big vacant world where there’s usually only three or four people, there are at least other people walking by in the background.