CaT Reviews: When Everything Changed!

This is the second episode of CaT Reviews!, this time reviewing the Horizons episode When Everything Changed..., as requested by Yoponot.

Story
The story begins with a street brawl, introducing us to a core concept of the series; humans have suddenly begun developing strange powers, though not with enough regularity that everyone really believes that it's happening.

We then cut to the next day at a high school, where we meet one of our main protagonists, and the person this episode will be following, Ryan Felton. At lunch, one of his peers is talking about the street brawl seen in the beginning of the episode, having been in the crowd watching it. The discussion turns to the topic of superpowers, which Ryan ignores.

As he goes to class, his thoughts reveal that he severely doubts the existence of superpowers, and laments that so many people believe in them. He also thinks about how 'the weak are always eaten by the strong', and that he 'pities those who try and live in this corrupt world of ours.'

...While taking notes about Roasted Chicken with Asiago Polenta.

Whether this is a clever metaphor of humans eating chicken representing his statement, or simply an indication that Roasted Chicken with Asiago Polenta is actually connected to edginess and human suffering, I cannot say. (Though I suspect the latter. Never trusted those birds.)



Uh, anyways:

We cut to later, seeing Ryan at home as his mother gets back from work. He's made chicken for dinner-



MOVING ON:

He's made chicken for dinner, and we get some exposition that Ryan's father ran off when he was little, forcing his mother to work extra hard to support the both of them. We get a flashback to Ryan in elementary school where he's being bullied for being a momma's boy and getting good grades. One girl almost decides to help him, but leaves instead. I'd say something about kids being unrealistically mean, but really, this is kinda tame compared to real life. Not a problem with the episode, more of a problem with humanity in general.

We then cut to the middle of the night, where two robbers make some loud noises that wake Ryan up. They run off before he can find them, but as he investigates, he finds his mother dead, covered in stab wounds and stuck under a cabinet. Why the intruders felt that what appears to have been an over-the-top knife combo move with a furniture-slam finisher was necessary to kill a middle-aged woman is not explained, but it does seem to have done the job.

Ryan checks her pulse, finding that it's gone, and decides to remove the cabinet and move her over by the phone, which is NOT something you want to do in real life with an injured person, even if you're 99% sure that they're dead. If they weren't dead before, all that screwing around with their injuries will probably do them in.

That fact that he may have actually killed his mom with that boneheaded move aside, he calls the police. They arrive and interview him, prompting a flashback where we see that he actually caught sight of the robbers while they were in the house, but fainted after seeing one of them shoot ice from their mouth.

After the police leaves, he goes back into the house, trying to convince himself that it was all a dream. As he goes back to his room, however, he finds it covered in ice and pretty much flips out, yelling about how 'it was my fault' and 'I could have stopped them!', which, yeah, no, you couldn't have. These people can perform knife-furniture super moves and shoot ice beams. You'd've been screwed either way, kid.

As he yells, his hands start glowing with an orange light and eventually burst into flames, setting his room on fire and collapsing the bathroom's ceiling...somehow. He then tried to put himself out, to no avail, and thinks about how he's 'just like those freaks' now.

A day later, he goes to McDonalds and orders a burger from The Awesome Jack, then sits down and uses the internet to begin his search for revenge, proving once and for all that Ronald McDonald is the spirit of vengeance.



We see him go through a couple middle-men until he finds the perps, at which point we see that he's gone more or less friggin' insane. He easily overpowers them and is about to kill one of them, but is stopped by the arrival of Shane Emerald, the other main protagonist of the series, who apparently has edginess-sensing abilities. Shane then uses his actual power of controlling diamonds to subdue Ryan, after which the episode ends.

Characters
There's not much to say about the characters, as only the main one is featured very heavily in the episode. For what it's worth, the writing for the side characters that are there is pretty good, feeling very natural.

The main character is written well for the most part, but at times, his angst steps over into ridiculousness, and his purported intelligence can be somewhat lacking. I'll have to see how his character is handled in the future to make more judgements here, but the writing for him in this episode is passable.

Writing
The writing is overall pretty good, being descriptive and detailed, but not boring. The plot is somewhat cliche, especially since dead moms are a dime a dozen in fiction, but it works fine for a starting point. The pacing is solid, and while the main character's angst feels pretty forced at times, the dark tone is handled pretty well overall.

The grammar is probably the weakest part of the episode, and although it's fine in the spelling department, the sentence structure can feel very off at times. Not enough to break the episode, but it can get distracting.

Conclusions
When Everything Changed... is a well-written, nicely paced, and very informative start to the series. It gives us the needed information for the setup without any of the exposition feeling forced, and while it's not without its problems, it makes for a very good first episode.

And so, my final rating for this episode is a Great Beginnings,  7.5/10 .