Can I ask what tower prep is?
Oh man. Tower Prep was a 2010 live action Cartoon Network show. It did not get renewed after the first season. The plotting, writing, and acting are all massively, comically uneven, and I can’t in good conscience say that it’s objectively good, but it is genuinely one of my favorite found family stories. Like I said in the last post (reblogged from my main) it’s the first place that I encountered and fell in love with a bunch of my favorite tropes.
The plot, as best as I can remember it: Ian is a fifteen year old kid, who gets in trouble at school for fighting bullies. He always wins these fights because, somehow unknown to him, he’s slightly precognitive and he can predict his opponent’s moves. One day he falls asleep and wakes up in a dorm room at Tower Prep.
Tower Prep is a high school for teenagers with minor superpowers. All of them woke up there one day with no memory of leaving their homes. It’s clear fairly quickly that they’re all being experimented on to various extents. One of the key mysteries of the series is whether they were kidnapped or sent away by their guardians, and the question of whether their parents are complicit in the unethical experimentation gets pretty distressing at points, for a children’s show.
Ian is understandably freaked out, and tries to escape, a bunch of times. He meets three other kids who have been at the school for a while, and are plotting escape together. Gabe is a hypnotist, CJ is supernaturally good at reading body language, and Suki is a perfect vocal mimic. The show is hilariously bad at remembering what everyone’s powers are and the characters regularly forget to use them when they would be useful.
Some actually good and creepy worldbuilding elements: none of the teachers at the school have names, they’re referred to exclusively by the subject they teach, and it’s eventually strongly implied that they’re all ex students still held captive by the administration. The day to day operations of the school are managed by an AI, and it slowly becomes clear that she’s straining against the bounds of her programming to protect the students. The student body is intensely competitive about a sport called ‘buffer’ which is sort of football hockey with three teams on roller skates. A lot of the episodes in some way involve the elaborate system of urban legends that the student body tells about the school, and it’s a surprisingly interesting portrayal of a subculture based around being kidnapped for your superpowers and forced to pretend nothing is wrong. The consequences for misbehavior include both normal things and completely horrifying threats (in particular, permanent solitary confinement and implicitly brainwashing) and everyone, including eventually Ian, acts like this totally makes sense.
It’s one of the funniest things about the show, and also the most fridge horror-y, the sudden changes in tone. One episode, the four kids are huddled together in the attic comforting each other that surely their parents didn’t mean for them to be kidnapped and tortured for their superpowers (there’s no onscreen torture or even explicit discussion of it, but it’s definitely implied that kids are sometimes awake for medical procedures before their memories are wiped), then the next episode the premise is “CJ wants to throw a prom but the school rules are too restrictive :(” and you have to take a step back and say wait did you guys forget that you’re being held captive? And some of that is definitely just weird writing, but some of it is also intentional and it’s incredibly creepy and effective, because the kids have mostly adjusted well enough to pretend, under threat from the faculty, that everything is normal. But they’re all scared and confused and lots of the kids have some version of an escape plan, but some of those kids are banking on graduating first, which is risky because no one knows what happens when you graduate.
I did not mention the cult, the cyclops graveyard, the minor epidemic that almost wipes out the student body, the superpower enhancing drugs, the militia of students that patrols the woods, the other less official militia of students that patrols the woods pretending to be monsters, or the tunnels in the walls. The writing is sometimes genuinely bad. Ian, Suki, CJ and Gabe are a really compelling found family. I recommend that you watch the show.
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