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Secret Worlds

CWs: some spoilers for The Secret World of Alex Mack, a 30-year-old TV show; caveat legens

So I just finished a complete rewatch of The Secret World of Alex Mack (1994-97). Like a lot of people my age, I remember watching it when it first aired on Nickelodeon. I was 10 at the time it started, and remember loving it immediately. The story follows the life of Alex Mack, a "normal" middle-schooler who, as she's walking home one day, is nearly run over by a truck carrying a toxic chemical, GC-161, and a barrel of the chemical spills all over her. She flees the scene, heads home, and finds that she now has secret powers, including telekinesis, the ability to zap things with electricity, and also, she can change into a pool of liquid if desired. She tells her older sister Annie, and eventually her best friend Ray, but doesn't tell her parents. Most of the episodes involve running from the agents of the chemical plant, which effectively runs the town of Paradise Valley. Alex's fear is that if she tells her parents, they'll sell her out to the plant, and the plant will run experiments on her. (It's already running experiments on others, we find out, so she would be yet another victim, unfortunately).

Alex's dad works at the chemical plant, and her mom works there for the first season or so doing PR, but eventually does other things, and even goes back to school to study sociology. Alex's sister Annie is interning at the chemical plant, and so has a lot of opportunity to study GC-161 alongside her father. So all that ends up being very interesting. Alex and Annie try to figure out as much as they can about this bizarre chemical, while also tracking Alex's health to make sure she's OK. All the while, she's dealing with the ups and downs of middle school, puberty, friendships, homework; all the normal stressors in life on top of having these strange powers.

Danielle Atron is by far the main villain of the series. She runs the chemical plant, and once she finds out that a kid was involved in the accident, she sends her head of security, Vince, to do reconnaissance. Vince ropes in Dave, the driver of the truck involved in the accident, to help him in this search (ostensibly as "penance" for the accident). Dave is a bumbling, childlike man, who doesn't really know what is going on most of the time. I found myself wondering throughout most of the series if he were autistic, but I don't know. He starts off as not very likable, but eventually shows that he has a "heart of gold," honestly. He explains it pretty well himself: he thought Vince and Danielle were trying to help the kid involved in the accident, but once he finds out that they want to experiment on the kid, he's completely out, and working against them whenever he can. We see a bit of his home life; he lives in a RV/mobile home, and sends whatever money he can to his elderly parents, at least one of whom is in poor health. So he's overall a pretty good guy who got dealt a bad hand, and is working for the wrong people. At the same time, since he's working as a janitor most of the time, alongside his driving duties, and most people don't think much of him, he's able to get into nearly anywhere in the plant and be privy to conversations others couldn't.

Vince is a cartoon villain. He looks like a bargain-bin Ed Harris and keeps coming up with wacky schemes to find the kid involved in the accident. Most of them come off like Wile E. Coyote, straight-up ACME scchemes, such as a huge GC-161 detector disguised as a security system in a new video store that opens in town. Later on, he even pays a young woman to pretend to be a high-schooler and become friends with Alex and her friends, and try to expose Alex and her powers. It is some very weird stuff. He even hides in the Macks' attic after he almost gets caught snooping around their house. Eventually Danielle realizes he's ridiculous and fires him, even though he comes back with various attempts to keep up the search.

I really liked the friendship between Alex and Ray. They've been best friends since they were very young, and it shows in the writing and the acting. They're neighbors (he lives somewhere down the street from her), and they have a very believable friendship, with ups and downs and fights and everything one would normally expect in a friendship. But he's pretty much always got her back, and the feeling is mutual. At the end of the series, he gets trapped and she ends up coming back to save him. I wouldn't have it any other way. He goes from thinking the powers are "cool!" at first to realizing how difficult it makes her life at times, and mostly just tries to help her keep her secret and stay safe.

Alex is also good friends with two other girls, Nicole and Robyn. They are also quirky and fun and the friendships seem believable. Once the show moves to high school at the end of season 3 and all of season 4, Nicole disappears (I guess she got other friends? Happens), but Robyn sticks around. Another friend joins the group earlier on, Louis Driscoll. He's a redhead and just kind of a class clown goofball. I didn't really like him at first, since he was grating and annoying. He gets a massive crush on Annie (same here, I had a huge crush on her as a kid!), she rejects him because she's already seeing someone and isn't into him, and then he backs off. He turned out pretty much fine though, and over time he becomes just one of the revolving friend group. Hilariously, there's one episode with his dad, who is played by Tom Virtue, who plays the dad in Even Stevens. Louis reminds me a lot of Louis Stevens (Shia LaBeouf) from Even Stevens, so that's a fun connection.

There are a few recurring friends and enemies. Kelly Phillips is the cool popular girl who can't stand Alex, and also thinks something is extremely odd about her. Hannah Mercury is the cool popular girl everyone has a crush on. Ray dates her for an episode and ultimately completely rejects him. She is mostly OK but not great. Annie dates a guy named Bryce for a while, but she's way more into him than he is into her, and they break up. Alex likes this guy named Scott, who is Kelly's boyfriend. He's pretty vapid and boring and Alex just seems to like him for being a pretty face. I was glad to see him drop out of the show since that particular crush was really boring.

The show sometimes dips into the super weird, even paranormal. There's a Halloween episode where Alex, Ray, and Louis end up going to a house everyone thinks is haunted. Alex is sucked into the house by an unseen force, and after some scary scenes, finds out that an old woman lives there. She is a ghost and enjoys scaring some people at least, but is very nice to Alex and tells her to come back and visit whenever she likes. Just before the episode ends, we find out she is likely Danielle Atron's grandmother. She said that she is very disappointed in her granddaughter, and we see "Atron" on the mailbox outside the house. That story is never revisited, but it's interesting because it adds to the feeling of history throughout the whole show. Families have been there for a long time. A character who shows up near the end of the series, Hunter, comes back to Paradise Valley because he wants to figure out what happened to his father. His father used to work for the plant and studied GC-161, and he eventually tells Alex that his dad was "disappeared" by Danielle and the plant. So he's back for vengeance and closure. He and Alex end up dating, and he's the third person to find out her secret, and is surprisingly understanding. Louis is the fourth person, completely by accident, and Louis actually folds under "torture" and tells the plant that Alex is the kid they're looking for (Nice move, Driscoll...). It also completely pays off to look at things in the background of scenes; you will find some weird stuff!

I was thinking about this a bunch last night after I watched the finale. It is a really good show. It can be formulaic (The Plant is looking for the kid! Middle school sucks! High school sucks! Parents don't understand!), but it's simultaneously a thriller and a slice-of-life sort of show. We get to watch kids being kids, and friends enjoying friendships. The Mack family really love each other and it shows, even if Alex can be a moody teenager. Alex & Annie's sisterly relationship is a delight as well. Even though they are sometimes furious and frustrated at one another, at the end of the day, everything is OK and they ove each other. There's an interesting resonance between something Annie says and the end of the series. Annie and Alex are watching a movie at some point and Annie mentions something about how the good guys always win in the end. And that's how the show ends. Just when you think the bad guy is going to win -- Danielle is about to get a billion dollars wired to her, and fly off in a helicopter -- Alex and her parents, who were captured and detained by the plant, and Ray, get out of the plant just before the explosives planted inside blow up! And Hunter runs after Danielle and tackles her, and the helicopter about to pick her up flies away. The ersatz FBI drives up in cars and jeeps to arrest her. And Hunter gets his revenge. And Alex and her family and friends are OK. The good guys win, and it doesn't feel cheap or silly or anything. It is completely on brand for the show.

It was a real rollercoaster. As I mentioned, I watched the show as much as I could when it was on, but I never did so systematically like now. Lately I've been watching 3-4 episodes a night, since they're 24min episodes. And it's been delightful to actually watch the whole thing. I really enjoyed it. I think, with very few exceptions, it's aged incredibly well. For '90s Nickelodeon, it does a lot of things right. Ray and Nicole are Black, but neither the show, nor the characters, ever, to my knowledge, treat them differently. And TV can be very racist at any time, so that is refreshing. There's a character that one episode focuses on, Nathan, aka "The Creeper," who everyone thinks is kind of a weirdo. But the show goes out of its way to say that hey, maybe you should try to get to know the guy, give him a chance. He very much reads as autistic, as he mostly keeps to himself and is very socially awkward. In that episode, the class is asked to make a video bio on themselves. Nathan secretly does his bio on Alex, and takes some very unflattering video clips of her, and embarrasses her and himself in front of the whole class when the movie is screened. But then Louis, who has been procrastinating on his own video, does the same thing and focuses on Nathan. He catches Nathan playing the piano beautifully, and takes some other footage, and his voiceover says "hey, give the guy a chance, he might have a lot more going on if you just talk to him!" It's sort of a saccharine feel-good thing, but it's also very typical of the show. Nathan shows up near the very end of the series again, and he's in some sort of junior ROTC army cosplay nonsense (yuck). So that's not fun. But in general, the show does a lot of things very right, which is again, surprising for a '90s show.

I'm really interested to see the Nick Knacks episode on this show. I'm about halfway through that particular series of YT videos, and very much enjoying the deep dive into everything Nickelodeon. I've learned about a ton of shows I'd never even heard of, so that's fun. Alex Mack is firmly in the Nickelodeon pantheon for a lot of people, though, and is still very well-loved, for good reason. I'm glad I rewatched it properly and I would encourage you to do so as well! Thanks for reading, friends <3