I have to admit to always kind of thinking the Stoppables should’ve left Ron (Will Friedle) with someone in the US. Family, or the Possibles, or something. Disrupting his life the way they did doesn’t seem good for him socially or academically—though Ron’s academics are complicated enough to merit their own essay, honestly, and not something we’ll be getting into here. Still, if the job was so amazing that it couldn’t be passed up, they still should’ve considered doing something to improve the situation for their only child.

But no—Mrs. Stoppable (Andrea Martin) has gotten an amazing new job at the home office of her company, which means moving to Norway. Since Mr. Stoppable (Elliott Gould) is an actuary, he can work anywhere they place a dollar value on human life. So this means splitting up the Possible-Stoppable team. Kim (Christy Carlson Romano) is heartbroken. And not helped by the fact that three of her villains are teaming up. She goes to stop the Tempus Simia idol from being stolen and discovers that the people breaking into the museum are not just the expected Lord Monkey Fist (Tom Kane) but also Duff Killigan (Brian George), Dr. Drakken (John DiMaggio), and Shego (Nicole Sullivan).

Kim is taking Latin and is able to work out that the Tempus Simia is the Time Monkey, but just as she does, she gets a visit from Rufus 3000 (Michael Dorn), a genetically engineered naked mole rat from the future. He tells her that she must stop the Supreme One from taking over the world. This involves a lot of travel back and forth in time, eventually going into the future to take on the Supreme One there. There are definitely surprises in store for Kim.

The fact is, Shego’s laziness has always been apparent. It just feels like the whole “supervillain” thing is itself more work than it’s worth. Yeah, she spends a lot of her time sitting around while she’s working for Drakken, but still. She has to keep getting up and fighting Kim and so forth, and there’s got to be something easier. There’s an episode where we meet her heroic family, and I can definitely see choosing to rebel against them, but it still seems like so much more than you’d think she’d want to do.

Kim, conversely, is shown here to have always been pretty intense. She’s ganged up on in preschool in the bits we see, and she still manages to have the strength to fight back, and her first mission was more than she could’ve anticipated. I also like that the movie shows us both the rivalry with Bonnie (Kirsten Storms) and the friendship with Monique (Raven-Symoné), because it shows that girls can be real friends as well as fighting with one another. It’s why I liked when the series eventually added a male friend for Ron—friendship in various gender configurations.

I am left with a few other unanswered questions. Why doesn’t a certain former high school nemesis of Kim’s (voiced as an adult by Kelly Ripa) recognize them when they reach the future? Especially when the naked mole rats attack? How did Kim initially meet Wade (Tahj Mowry)? Are there any other golfing cyborgs? Who engineered the Rufuses? How quickly did the Supreme One manage all this? Is the Moon base just not seen as a serious threat?

This is also one of the places where Ron’s Mystical Monkey Powers might’ve come in handy, had the show not decided to basically ignore them most of the time. Ron may not be afraid of monkeys anymore at this point, but he has not truly accepted them, either. Of course, that’s in part so we can see the battle between a horde of naked mole rats and the ninja monkeys, and those are some of the greatest words I’ve ever typed.

I still love the show’s wit, too—preschool Ron (Harrison Fahn) reminds me a bit of a Peanuts character, honestly. Rufus 3000 solemnly informing them that he may already have polluted the time stream enough—and also he is baking cookies. The various bits where the villains call one another on their assorted weirdnesses. “And I hate meatcakes! No idea why I said that!” The frustration of time travel language and verb tense.

This is one of the times we get to see what Ron is capable of when he focuses, Mystic Monkey Powers or no, and I love those. No matter how often it happens—and it happens several times over the course of the series—everyone is taken by surprise every time. Even Kim, sadly. But really, when you take everything from someone (except his naked mole rat, but presumably only because there’s no easy way to do that), you’ve just created someone with nothing to lose. Any villain should know to fear that, especially one who plans to take over the world.

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