The Secret Return of Alex Mack/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Characters from The Secret Return of Alex Mack include:

Alex Mack, AKA Terawatt

Alex
Terawatt in mid-transformation
Source: The Secret World of Alex Mack

Once just a kid who got weird powers thanks to a chemical spill, Alex Mack was inspired by the women she met during the events of The League of Extraordinary Women. Their encouragement and advice -- plus a battle in which she defeated a dragon singlehandedly -- gave her the confidence to return home and become her Earth's first very public superhero.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Action Girl
  • And a Diet Coke: Subverted. Alex needs all the calories she can consume, but despite this she drinks Diet Coke because she likes the taste.
  • Badass
  • Beware the Nice Ones: What the SRI in general think of Alex -- a sweet, innocent kid who you'd think would run home crying if you were mean to her, but who is actually an unstoppable force of nature -- and who doesn't quite realize just how impressive she is.
  • Big Eater: A side effect of her powers.
  • Big Stupid Doodoo Head: "Jerkhead" seems to be about the worst thing Alex is capable of calling someone -- with one notable exception. See Gosh Dang It to Heck below.
  • Book Dumb: At least at the start of the story. As she takes her studies more and more seriously, this trope withers and dies.
  • Buffy-Speak:
  • The Cape: Is the Archetype of this trope for her Earth.
  • Captain Ersatz: Is her Earth's counterpart to Superman.
  • Clark Kenting: Alex makes an extensive effort to visually differentiate herself from Terawatt.
  • Determinator/Plucky Girl: No matter how tired, scared, hungry or hurt she is, she just does not stop doing what is right and necessary.
  • Flight
  • Genre Savvy: She doesn't start out this way, but rapidly gets there after teaming up with the SRI.
  • Good Is Not Soft: She won't kill, but her opponents go down and stay down -- usually in little bloody heaps.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck: While other characters can and do swear colorfully, Alex continues to use only terms suitable to her original audience on Nickelodeon -- with one notable exception.
  • Hide Your Pregnancy: Two In-Universe examples are mentioned in the epilogue: the times Alex got pregnant, the SRI gave out the cover story that Terawatt had gone on an extended mission that took her away from Earth for several months.
  • Impossible Hourglass Figure: Built into Alex's Terawatt uniform as part of the disguise.
  • Impossibly Cool Clothes: Alex's Terawatt uniform is designed in such a manner that the only way it can be put it on is if you can turn into a liquid form and flow into it.
  • Intrepid Reporter: Alex settles on this as a career, and makes a good start on it during the course of the story.
  • Mind Over Matter
  • Most Common Superpower: Deliberately invoked in the design of the Terawatt costume, which dramatically exaggerates Alex's naturally slender and modestly-endowed figure in order to make a visible difference in their appearances.
  • Mundane Utility: Alex figures out how to charge rechargeable batteries with her lightning, and uses this to keep her cameras, cell phones and other gadgets going at all times. She also uses her TK to clean the house, do dishes, and to pick locks, as well as stabilize her camera when taking photographs.
  • Narrative Profanity Filter: Alex does this to her own recollections of other people's speech, usually in the form of "X said bleepity-bleep, and they didn't actually say 'bleep'."
  • Older Than They Look: Terawatt in the final epilogue, when we learn that Alex's powers apparently include arrested aging, and that 71 years later she still appears to be in her mid-twenties.
  • One-Woman Army: Terawatt, more because of her Determinator qualities than because of sheer power.
  • Properly Paranoid: Alex picks up this trait after spending time with the SRI, whose members are this professionally.
  • Secret Identity: Well, Terawatt, obviously. But in addition to Terawatt, Alex has several other identities, including Lt. Annie Farrell, Jack's quietly competent hacker/adjutant, and a teenaged version of Annie Farrell.
  • Shrouded in Myth: Outside of the SRI, her team and her family, almost no one really knows the limits of Terawatt's powers.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Alex, continuously, without ever really noticing, even when others point it out.
  • Trademark Favorite Drink: Alex prefers Diet Coke to almost anything. Given the absolutely huge amount of food she has to eat to fuel her powers, almost everyone in the know about her finds this both amusing and ironic.
  • Utility Belt: Alex gets one as a gift to add to her Terawatt costume after her first couple ops with the SRI, mainly to hold energy bars, but also a couple of useful toys.
  • Weak but Skilled: She's far from the strongest TK in the world -- Carrie White and Samantha Carter both exceed her by at least an order of magnitude or two, for example -- but she essentially grew up with TK, and accordingly has far finer and more instinctive control of it than practically anyone else.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Terawatt needs food badly. Even when not using using her powers Alex burns, as she puts it, "stupid amounts of calories". And using them? Makes her absolutely starving in almost no time flat.
  • Younger Than She Looks: Alex as Terawatt; she's deliberately designed both the uniform and the persona to give the impression that Terawatt's in her middle twenties.


Willow Rosenberg, aka "Acid Burn"

AKA 5al1x680
Source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Willow Rosenberg met Alex Mack on what had looked like the worst day of her life -- ousted from the successful software company she had built from nothing after a takeover by Oracle, sitting on the side of the road with the contents of her office. Then Alex and her mother swooped out of nowhere, rescued her, revealed Alex's Big Secret -- and recruited her. She's not looked back since. And when the government got interested in Terawatt, she found the love of her life in Jack O'Neill.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Arbitrarily-Large Bank Account: Willow is a Silicon Valley billionaire. Even before Oracle ousted her from her company, Willow had more money than she could ever use up in a lifetime. When she rebounded and rebuilt her firm, she just kept earning more. The fact that she has rather modest tastes and needs just means she has more money to use on computer equipment -- and for supplying Terawatt with useful support.
  • Bi the Way
  • Captain Ersatz: Thanks to one incident toward the end involving metal bracers, Willow seems to partake of at least a bit of Wonder Woman.
  • Does Not Know Her Own Strength: While she's nowhere near "super" strong, her Orphan genes make her strong enough that as a child she accidentally damaged her father's knee with an over-enthusiastic greeting.
  • Granola Girl: Is a kosher vegetarian, has a solar cell array on her house, grows her own vegetables, and is conscientious about being green and socially-aware.
  • Hackette
  • Hollywood Hacking: Aided by the fact that just about every website in the world uses something made by her company -- and she knows all the backdoors in all her products -- Willow can get into just about any system that's connected to the Net.
  • May-December Romance: With Jack O'Neill.
  • Playful Hacker
  • Secret Identity: As "Acid Burn".
  • Shout-Out: She took the handle "Acid Burn" from the character played by Angelina Jolie in Hackers.
  • Super Strength
  • Super Intelligence
  • Trademark Favorite Food: Well, it's unclear if it's actually her favorite, but Willow grows massive amounts of zucchini in her garden and makes all manner of zucchini dishes which she shares with the Macks -- most notably her chocolate zucchini cake, which even zucchini-haters love.
  • The Woobie: As a child, Willow was bullied, lost her only two friends -- one was killed, the other moved away -- and found herself estranged from her parents for no reason she could understand. When we meet her at the beginning of the story she still bears the scars of her childhood, with well-hidden insecurity among other symptoms. (Becoming Acid Burn and finding Jack helps her recover and grow -- and gave her the confidence to face down her childhood tormentor when they met unexpectedly.)
  • Yiddish as a Second Language: Willow, adopted and raised by Ashkenazi Jews, drops the occasional word or two of Yiddish into her speech.

Charlene Victoria "Shar" Mack/Charlene Roberta "Charlie" McGee, AKA "Pyre"

Source: Firestarter by Stephen King

The result of probably-illegal biochemical testing by a rogue agency, Charlie McGee is an adorable 8-year-old WMD with a whole raft of Psychic Powers, foremost among which is pyrokinesis. Alex finds her among the literal ashes of the agency, alone in the world after their murder of her father, and (with the approval of her parents) adopts her into the Mack family. Although their cover story makes them cousins, Alex's feelings for Charlie -- now "Shar" -- are more maternal than anything else.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:


Friends and Family

Ray Alvarado

Source: The Secret World of Alex Mack

Former Black Best Friend, now boyfriend, to Alex Mack.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Discard and Draw: After being exposed to GC-161, Ray does several rounds of this with geec and its antidote to settle on a "powerset" that does almost nothing but let him jump a little higher.
  • Victorious Childhood Friend: In introducing him to Shar, Alex mentions how they met at a young age. They're dating throughout the course of the story. And the epilogues make it clear that they got married.

Louis Driscoll

Source: The Secret World of Alex Mack

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Born Unlucky: Louis seems to suffer from this, even when his girlfriend Marsha's accidental TK use is taken into account.

George Mack

Source: The Secret World of Alex Mack

Alex's father, a biochemist of no small skill.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Barbara Mack

Source: The Secret World of Alex Mack

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Annie Mack

Source: The Secret World of Alex Mack

Alex's older sister, who helped her get through her first few years with powers, and still consults for her on biochemical matters, along with their father.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

The SRI

Colonel Jack O'Neill

Source: Stargate SG-1

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Capt. Riley Finn

Source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Privately called "Mister Iowa" by Alex the first time she met him, Riley Finn just exudes Midwest cornfed hominess. He really does come from Iowa -- or at least was raised there by parents Jon and Marti. He's actually a Breslynn Orphan -- more than that, he's an Orphan-plus, thanks to exposure to a biochemical while on SRI business, giving him a healing factor not far short of Wolverine.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Badass
  • Captain Ersatz/Expy: Is the Teraverse's counterpart to Clark Kent (but not Superman -- that's Terawatt).
  • Healing Factor: Riley's already-impressive healing rate, due to his Orphan physiology, gets supercharged in the wake of exposure to some biochemicals during an operation.

Jo Lupo

Source: Eureka

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Hanna Heller, AKA "Action Girl"

Hanna Heller
Action Girl
Source: Hanna

Raised to be a human weapon in the northern tundra of Scandinavia, Hanna Heller is an exquisitely deadly teen-aged girl who has absolutely no concept of fear. Literally -- the ability to feel fear was removed from her genes by the person who genetically engineered her. She was the first person Terawatt recruited for her super team.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Action Girl: It's her codename, even.
  • American Accents: Hanna is or becomes a master of them, and uses them to disguise her origins.
  • Attack! Attack! Attack!: This attitude is genetically programmed into her, and it takes her considerable effort and training to learn how to hold back.
  • Badass
  • Blood Knight
  • Buffy-Speak: Hanna eventually develops a kind of neo-"Valley Girl" manner of speaking -- partly from Willow, partly from Alex, and partly from other sources -- when she's not on-duty and is "just being a teenaged girl". Subverted in that it's more a deliberate choice made in order to better fit in with her contemporaries than a natural evolution of her manner of speaking.
  • Disability Immunity: Hanna's genetically-engineered inability to feel or even understand fear allows her to simply ignore at least one mental attack during the course of the story.
  • Grappling Hook Pistol: She gets two, courtesy of the Batman. And she loves them.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: Hanna is half-human and half... not.
  • Mundane Utility: Hanna uses her Super Senses to make sure her boyfriend is keeping up on his personal hygiene.
  • The Nose Knows
  • Pop Culture Isolation: Initially. Jack and his son Charlie among others work assiduously to change this. As her isolation from any human culture at all is rectified, Hanna begins to become a Pop-Cultured Badass.
  • Secret Identity: As "Action Girl".
  • Spock Speak
  • Super Senses
  • Super Soldier: Hanna was genetically engineered to be one.
  • Super Toughness

Grover Dunn, AKA "Klar"

Grover Dunn, pre-invisibility.
Source: The Invisible Kid

A teenaged prodigy in biochemistry, Grover discovered a formula for temporary invisibility, and used it for all manner of teenaged hijinks -- until he discovered too late that over-exposure to the compound he'd created resulted in permanent invisibility. Recruited for the SRI in the wake of an investigation of a murder committed by several other students from his high school who were also permanently turned invisible.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Andrew Clement, AKA "Ultraman"

Source: My Secret Identity

A young Canadian meta who worked mostly incognito until the SRI deduced his existence from reports of mysterious doings in the Toronto area. He first worked with the SRI and Terawatt during the Carrie White incident.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:


Samantha Carter

Source: Stargate SG-1

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Allies

Bruce Paine, AKA "Batman", AKA "The New York Bat"

Source: DC Comics

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Azure Crush (formerly Joellen "Jo" Baker)

Source: The Secret World of Alex Mack

A bully who targeted Alex Mack throughout middle and high school, Jo Baker made the mistake of violating a restraining order and trespassing at the high school from which she'd been expelled in order to attack Alex. Later, while in jail, she was approached by Danielle Atron, who recruited her to go after the Macks and gave her a dose of a mutagen. The mutagen turned fat, ugly Jo into the tall, svelte, beautiful -- and completely blue -- Azure Crush, and gave her super strength and invulnerability.

Although she initially served as Atron's mook, a chance meeting with some fanboys showed Azure Crush -- "Az" for short -- that she had more options than just being a supervillain. She drove with them to Los Angeles, took up the publisher of a men's magazine on his offer of millions for a pictorial, and settled down to a life of wealth and fame. After meeting several times with, and eventually fighting at the side of, Terawatt, she realized that she could be a hero as well. To this end she has gotten training in hand-to-hand fighting from the Batman, and made herself available to the SRI.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Yuki Sato, AKA "Tsurara"

Caption
Source:

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Eliza Thornberry, AKA "Shaman"

Artist's rendering. And not a very good artist at that.
Source: The Wild Thornberrys

Younger daughter of famous naturalist and documentarian Nigel Thornberry, Eliza gained the power to speak to animals when she consumed an unknown biochemical mix she was told was a magic potion by the African shaman who gave it to her. For years she kept her ability secret, convinced it would disappear if anyone learned of it. She's since learned that it's not a magical ability, and it didn't vanish when others knew. She's not a formal member of the SRI, but is willing to help out, as she did on the final assault against the Collective's tepui base.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Action Girl
  • Beautiful All Along: She gets her braces off, her braids brushed out, and sports contacts instead of her glasses after hooking up with the SRI.
  • Free-Range Children: Upon hearing about Eliza's lifestyle, Willow Rosenberg muses that the elder Thornberrys make her usually-absent parents look like micromanagers.
  • Good Is Not Soft: For an early teen, Shaman can be just as brutal as the Batman when directing her animal armies.
  • Heart Is an Awesome Power: Shaman's ability to speak to animals. At first glance it may not seem all that impressive, but either she's very persuasive, or it has some degree of Command to it, because she can get animals to fight for her -- like when she shows up for the final battle with an animal army numbering in the hundreds. Batgirl thinks she's the scariest person around.
  • Secret Identity
  • Speaks Fluent Animal

Kiran Singh, AKA "Ayananta" AKA "Solstice"

Caption
Source:

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

The Collective and Other Enemies

Danielle Atron

Source: The Secret World of Alex Mack

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive She is so overwhelmed by her own greed and arrogance that she pretty much fails to be an effective Big Bad -- all the flaws and inanities she displays in The Secret World of Alex Mack are here, and in some cases magnified by her circumstances and her decisions.
  • Discard and Draw: Uses multiple iterations of GC-161 and its antidote to make herself an (alleged) equal to Terawatt.
  • Heel Face Turn: "Dani" Atron, the "Jekyll" side of a Jekyll and Hyde Enemy Without split Atron underwent thanks to a "GC"-class chemical Alex doused her with during their final confrontation.

Dr. Maggie Walsh

Source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"Wacky Maggie", as Jack O'Neill is known to call her, is a real-world Mad Scientist who will not let little things like laws, morals or ethics get in the way of her investigations and creations. Thanks to Alex's information from Buffy's world in The League of Extraordinary Women, the SRI is able to confirm that the version of Walsh native to Alex's Earth is dangerous and denies her a place on their team. This just sends her directly into the arms of her true compatriots -- the Collective -- but not before she leaves behind a wake of creatures and monsters that Terawatt and the SRI must face down and destroy.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Howard Locke

Caption
Source:

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Claire Tobias

Caption
Source:

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Others

Victor Cready

Caption

A description of the character goes here.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
  • Blessed with Suck: Victor Cready's Human Torch powers do not confer resistance to fire beyond not actually being consumed by his own flame; he is in constant pain from being burned.
  • Discard and Draw: Eventually uses multiple doses of GC-161 and its antidote to find a powerset that does not leave him in constant agony.
  • Heel Face Turn: Initially hated his powers and actively defied Danielle Atron to give himself up, so that he could get the GC-161 antidote.
  • Secret Public Identity

Buffy Summers

Source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Former champion ice skater, reality show star, and Breslynn Orphan. For much of her adult life she kept up a facade of cheerful airheadedness, but after the Breslynn emails and a visit from Terawatt, she tried actively withdrawing from the world in the hopes she could just pretend her way to a simpler, happier life. But when the Collective targeted her, she revealed that she was just as clever and deadly as her counterpart in a world of vampires and demons...

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
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