"Gumball?"
While Ben, Gwen and Kevin are investigating Los Soledad for alien disturbances, they encounter a creature that ages what it touches rapidly, as well as a man who defies space and time. He has long forgotten his original name, but now goes by a new one: Paradox.- Abandoned Area: Los Soledad used to be a military base, but now it's all abandoned.
- Affectionate Parody: The episode starts with a teaser that resembles a B-movie from the 50s, black and white and all.
- Ambiguous Situation: Played for Laughs. Kevin gets a copy of his car from a certain date, with a note stating that it shouldn't bump into anything made from the same year. Kevin thinks it's all a joke...maybe.
- Apocalypse How: Paradox brings the team to a future where they failed to stop the creature. It has moved all across the Earth and aged everything, reducing the planet to rubble.
- Bored with Insanity: After getting sucked in by the time vortex, Paradox went mad due to eternal isolation, but after a couple of thousand years, he got bored by it, so he decided to go sane again. His understanding of the space time continuum grants him the power to time travel.
- Clockwork Prediction: Paradox does this a lot throughout the episode due to him having experienced everything already.
- Foreshadowing:
- Paradox mentions at least one occasion where he and Ben work together to save the entire universe.
- Ben notes that when the creature first appeared, it had run toward a telephone booth and then to a nearby building, as if it was looking for anyone it could find. Ben realizes that sounds less like the actions of an entity of mass destruction and more like a Fish out of Temporal Water.
- Grandfather Paradox: Paradox advises against stopping the experiment that created the creature since it also gave him his time travel. He's eventually convinced to bring them back to the day of the experiment anyway, but the team averts this by saving the man who would become the creature after Paradox falls into the time vortex.
- I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: When Kevin demands that Paradox fixes his car after the monster ages it, Paradox responds “I’m a doctor, not an auto body!”
- Jerkass Has a Point: After hearing Paradox's backstory and what led to the Bad Future, Kevin has no problem summarizing everything in three words: It's his fault.
- Made of Explodium: After repairing Kevin's car with time travel, Paradox leaves a note warning him of this.
Word of God says he was joking.Kevin, try to keep in mind that if this car comes into contact with anything else from 1976, it will explode like anti-matter. Enjoy! -Paradox. - Name Amnesia: Due to spending who knows how long outside of time, Paradox has long forgotten his actual name.
- No-Sell: Paradox is the only one who can (relatively) safely touch the creature. It still induces Rapid Aging, but since Paradox is The Ageless, it doesn't visibly affect him, though he still comments that he can feel the years rapidly passing by.
- Once More, with Clarity: The beginning of the episode show's Paradox's time experiment, which seems to have gone wrong because of a miscalculation he made, followed shortly by the shadow of a gigantic creature that seemed to have come through the machine. Towards the end of the episode when Ben and the others travel back in time to prevent the time creature's origin, it turns out the experiment went haywire because Paradox's assistant accidentally knocked against one of the control panels, and the giant shadow was actually Humongosaur who was saving Paradox's assistant from being pulled into the event horizon.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Paradox is just how he calls himself. His actual name is long forgotten.
- Rapid Aging: The creature can rapidly age everything it touches, which also includes Kevin, though Paradox fixes him.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Once the group realizes what the creature really is — Paradox's old lab assistant — they go back in time to move him out of the accident that would've changed him.
- Shout-Out: The episode features a lot of Doctor Who references, with Paradox more or less being an expy of him.I walk in eternity.
- Time-Travel Tense Trouble: Paradox has this problem; more specifically, it's the fact that he seems to mix up events that haven't happened yet with events that have.Paradox: [to Ben] You're much smarter now than when I first met you later.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Paradox's old lab assistant who ended up causing the time travel experiment to go wrong. It's zigzagged in that while it worked out for the best in that Paradox was flung into an event horizon, the assistant ended up causing himself to be flung forward into time as a mutated time-creature that could age and corrode the planet.
- Was Once a Man: When the team travels back in time in the moment of the accident, Ben realizes that the creature was also human and that it is actually Paradox's old lab assistant.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: In-Universe with Paradox's old lab assistant, who was unaware that he had mutated into a creature that caused everything he touched to rapidly age and risked decaying the entire planet in 100 years.
