There’s this brief moment here that I think deserves a little nod, when Aladdin and the Genie pointedly shove the Sultan out of the way.

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And this is his reaction: 

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Let’s talk about this for a minute. 

This is a character who is the central part of at least a fewepisodes that were built up to show that Aladdin and his friends shouldn’t infantilize him as much as they do because he may be an old man, but he is not completely useless or incapable of handling himself. 

His reaction here is completely justified. He knows that he made a mistake in his youth and his daughter is about to pay for it. He doesn’t know what Arbitus will do to her, and if the head canon mentioned before holds true? This is a reminder to him that he can’t be a hero. He tried to do something heroic for his bride and wound up making a contract with a monster, and he can’t be a hero now because nobody believes he can be one. 

And guess what? In about five minutes he’s going to pretty much fade into the background because while this is his fucking story it’s going to be handed off to Aladdin to finish. 

One of the best one-offs, yes. But it still has its problems. 

The intruder approaches. Spoiler: The “most precious treasure” is Jasmine.

I like this little bit here: 

The plant (and by extension Arbitus) tucks Jasmine into bed and brushes her hair out of her face while she sleeps. Potentially creepy but done with the same sort of air as would be done by a parent. 

Because Arbitus chose the Sultan’s child, rightly identifying her as what he treasured most. (Leave alone that Jasmine is her own person and not the Sultan’s to give away.) He chose the Sultan’s child and he treats her with the level of care he knows the Sultan would afford her. Because unlike the Sultan, he’s not going to walk into the man’s palace and start breaking his shit. 

And then everybody realizes at the same time that Arbitus probably doesn’t care about gold. 

So everybody assumes the treasure he’s coming for is something from the treasury and the audience pretends to go along with it.

And I get way too much joy out of taking screencaps of Aladdin making silly faces. 

They resolve to guard the treasury and…why do they all need to be dressed like the palace guards? 

We learn a few things about the Sultan when he was young.

Every now and again we get glimpses of the Sultan’s brilliance, showing him as more than the often naive and childish old man portrayed in much of the movie and throughout the series. This episode takes place just after the Sultan’s marriage to his wife – likely when he was still a prince and not a Sultan at all. (And God, I wish they had revealed his actual name.) 

So this intro scene, while presenting our antagonist, Arbitus (voiced by Ron Perlman, if you can believe it), also shows us the sort of prince that the Sultan was in his youth. 

First things first: we see him out exploring – just for the Hell of it apparently. Just after getting married. Perhaps he was looking specifically for this place because the Sultan, however innocent you see him, has always displayed a fascination toward magic. Anyway, I don’t think he’s the Sultan yet, and given that this flashback  takes place twenty years before the series and his hair has gone completely white in the meantime, I want to place him in his thirties in this scene. At the earliest. 

That may seem kind of advanced in age for him NOT to be the Sultan yet. Given his general naivete about things, the fear of conflict he shows in this flashback suggests to me that he might not be the eldest or only child of the royal family and was likely very sheltered. The baby of the family, even. My money is on him having an older sibling, and he never personally expected to take the throne, but then there was an unfortunate death in the family sometime after this point. 

I didn’t view this as necessarily cowardly. I think he’s afraid but I also think the Sultan is and always has been the sort of person who hesitates to do harm to anyone and he just happened to do something thoughtless and ignorant in this one instance. 

But let’s rewind a little so we can get to that. He discovers a castle made of plants in the desert: 

This would indeed be a considerable wonder to anyone dwelling in a desert climate. I hesitate to assume the Sultan was just ignorant enough to think this place didn’t belong to anybody and just wandered right in. 

Even if that’s totally what it looks like. 

I like to think he might have come looking for this place. But I’ll get to that in a second. 

He explores the wonders of the garden, including living musical instruments, apparently. 

And then he decides he wants this flower. He picks it, incurring the wrath of the Garden’s protector. Meet Arbitus, who in the wikipedia page is described as a “sorcerer” but my money here is on “Earth Elemental” since he appears to be quite literally made of the earth and flora, himself.

He refers to the flower as his “masterpiece” because the garden is basically a giant art installation. He creates living art. The Sultan begs him to spare his life, explaining that he only wanted to bring a flower to his new bride. He promises that his greatest treasure will belong to him if he lets him go. Arbitus promises he will come for said treasure in twenty summers. 

So several things: I think the Sultan wanted to prove himself worthy to his bride and went somewhere that was rumored to be dangerous to bring her something special. That’s the sort of thing heroes do, right? And what is more heroic than a prince? 

Also this is probably why Jasmine is named after a flower. And why the gardens in the palace are so expansive and well-cared for. 

I really want to know more about his life before Jasmine was born, so I’ll just have to go with the ideas until something better comes along. 

Production Code Episode 46 – Garden of Evil

And with this I’d like to kick off a semi-regular event on the blog known as One-Off Wednesday. Once things are less hectic and my job stops kicking my ass I intend to do a few episodes per week, but on Wednesdays I’d like to focus specifically on episodes of Aladdin that feature a character that only appears once. 

And this is, by far, one of the best one-off episodes in the series. 

I for one, greatly enjoy your sassy commentary on the Aladdin series. While it’s a good show, there are things that are problematic with it story wise, so it’s great someone finally pointing these things out.

I’m glad you’ve enjoyed them! And when I point these things out I’m definitely not aiming to turn people off to watching what’s probably a nostalgic show for them. We should recognize these things in programming and let them expand our understanding of them and our culture (and how it’s changed – twenty years later I doubt the same writers would make the same choices). 

Quick Update

I’m experiencing serious problems with my computer and have to do a system restore, so I haven’t been able to get hold of more episodes.

When things are well again I will be returning with the requested episode, “Garden of Evil." 

Conclusion: Fasir throws the main characters a bone

Fasir decides that he’s going to use magic we weren’t even certain he had to heal the tree and give Aladdin and Jasmine their cure. 

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But the part of this episode that always stuck with me was the end as he looked on at the heroes celebrating their victory. 

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“You once left me, Mirage, to pursue your malevolent path, but one day, love will triumph over your evil heart and bring you back to me." 

I always wished they’d develop on this more in the series but it never happened. It made me wonder what kind of power Fasir had – its limitations and where it comes from, and like I discussed in our last episode: what kind of life did Mirage lead before she became Evil Incarnate? 

People have wondered if Fasir is her polar opposite – if she is Evil Incarnate, perhaps he is Good Incarnate. 

I don’t think he is, because as I discussed in "The Prophet Motive,” I’m pretty sure that entire adventure was orchestrated so that Aladdin would kill his brother. 

But now let’s look back at Mirage’s motivations throughout this episode. 

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She wanted to prove that love is weakness. More specifically, she wanted to make Aladdin stop loving Jasmine, and I said this was telling about her own past, most likely. 

Her tactic for getting Aladdin to stop loving Jasmine involved turning Jasmine into a monster and thereby making it impossible for them to be together. She wanted Jasmine to lose hope that she could be anything but a monster, and she wanted Aladdin to stop loving her once she was no longer the woman he fell in love with. 

This leads me to think that she thinks she’s become a monster, and has no idea why Fasir hasn’t stopped loving her. In some ways I’m not sure she believes he still loves her, because of this. 

And that’s pretty damn profound for a Disney series. 

Want more episodes? See the Episode Masterlist.
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So on that note, the loss of hope and the power of love.

So they find the tree. Mirage is baffled that they got this far, but I don’t know why she expected them to die if her goal was to make Aladdin stop loving Jasmine. Maybe she expected him to break up with her over the poison barbs. 

So she cheats at her own game and kills the tree and all its fruit, so that the cure is out of Jasmine’s hands forever. 

Jasmine completely gives up. 

And of course Mirage comes to gloat. She also dismembers the Genie with a gesture and says the fundamental difference between him and Aladdin is that Aladdin’s filled with blood. This is interesting, but totally not what we’re talking about right now. 

Jasmine resolves that she can’t let Aladdin stay with her (even though he insists he still loves her) because she could kill him. When he won’t leave she tries to scare him off.

And I genuinely felt for him here because I have literally never seen him look so hurt in his life. 

Genie seems convinced they’re going to try to take Jasmine back to Agrabah anyway, but Aladdin stops him and tells his friends to leave without him. 

Much to Mirage’s surprise, he uses the last of the lotion so that Jasmine doesn’t have to be alone forever. This still makes me tear up a bit. 

Mirage tantrums and poofs out. 

Just, this whole scene. The only criticism I have is that they appear to have struggled just a little too much with Aladdin’s proportions so he almost always looks a little odd. But this blew me away when i was little and one of the better demonstrations of love in any Disney series. Seeing deformed or supernaturally monstrous characters loved in spite of appearances is nothing new with Disney animation. Having a beautiful character choose to join them is another thing entirely. 

I applaud you, episode. Much applause.