Jazz’s character development has been smooth and consistent from the start: nosy, bossy, overprotective, too soon grown-up and too little wise. But she has fiercely protected her brother’s secret, even though (in her own passive-aggressive way) she would rather wait for him to tell her rather than let it slip that she already knows. She has been dropping hints, carefully looking the other way and covering his tracks for a long time. But now her steadfast devotion to her brother and his secret life has come to a crisis: she believes he is unstable and dangerous, and for the first half of the episode, we are invited to believe the same.

And that’s where the genius of this episode comes in. For the first half we are limited to Jazz’s point-of-view; we only see what she sees. That, combined with her frequent voice-overs, helps us just begin to edge over to the precipice of believing that maybe… just maybe… Danny has lost his mind—that he’s cracked under the pressure, becoming a hazard to his family and his friends. The fact that he has begun to doubt himself doesn’t help. That said, I wish the animators hadn’t been quite so heavy-handed in depicting Danny in full-on panic mode, especially in the submersible scene when Danny is terrified at the sight of his former adversary (and a parrot). It’s a bit of a stretch, but I can almost believe that his panic and subsequent nervous breakdowns are actually point-of-view errors on Jazz’s part; she is remembering these events as the RV hurtles through the desert and has exaggerated Danny’s odd behavior in her memory.

The lengths that Jazz will go to in her mission to protect Danny from himself, and the lengths that Danny must go to in his mission to escape her eagle-eyed attention, make for much of the humor, cleverness and tension in this episode, building up to the delightful “Thank you for shopping at Fenton Mart” scene in the desert. Improbable as it may seem, helping Jazz rediscover her inner child is a perfectly logical solution to the problem and I’m glad Danny thought of it. It was also nice to see Jazz and Phantom face-to-face again, as they were at the end of My Brother’s Keeper, with Jazz displaying a fair measure of friendly recognition to her oblivious brother.

I find Youngblood a bit disturbing. In Pirate Radio he was depicted as a bratty child who simply wants to play pirate while taking advantage of despised adults; here, he reveals that only children can see him. I have to think this is significant. Why does he allow children to see him, but not adults? It occurs to me that he may not be a child at all, but something akin to a predator; his usual MO might be to show himself to children while remaining invisible to their parents, wanting to “play” with them in some manner that would be enjoyable for him but quite unpleasant for the kids. (The parrot just likes to watch.)

By: Bluemoonalto

Rating: None given

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