by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

The DCOM Pantheon #7: The Thirteenth Year (dir. Duwayne Dunham, May 15, 1999)

Puberty. It happens to the best of us sometimes. And no matter how secure you are in yourself, it's always hard to tell exactly where you went wrong and how you let such a terrible thing happen. The Thirteenth Year is, like so many DCOMs, about a young person in the throes of a harsh pubin'.

We open on a mermaid swimming around a pier with her baby (who has feet) when a stereotypical hillbilly fisherman starts chasing her, thinking she's a marlin or some other big catch. The mermaid drops her baby in another boat and manages to evade the fisherman, but the boat drives away, baby and all. Thirteen years later, that baby has grown up to be Cody, a kid who helps his family run their rinky dink tour company and competes in swim meets. The people who discovered him on the boat have raised him as their own. They've told him he's adopted, but not that he's a merm. The fisherman, meanwhile, has devolved into a nutcase. Since he saw that mermaid, Big John has told everybody about his encounter, and now the entire town thinks he's crazy.

You know Cody's cool because he's got a girlfriend, Sam, and a swim team rival, Sean, and you know Sean's cool because his science teacher says they're going to study marine biology and Cody goes "I love marine biology... not!" Sean openly hits on Sam and definitely grows up to be a Jeremy Piven-type in the alternate universe where The Thirteenth Year is filmed like Michael Apted's Up documentaries.

In a cruel twist of middle school fate, Cody's lab partner is Jess, a Total Nerdzilla. Will the jock learn something from the dork? Yes. It would be toxic for a kids movie to have a jock continue beating up on a nerd after each character should have learned lessons from the other, but I would kind of love a film where the dickhead stays a dickhead and Disney short-circuits, making a quirky mermaid story in an amoral Todd Solondz world. I can dream. We can dream. I'm dragging you down here with me.

Jess is a mini-Jerry Lewis who can't swim but loves studying tide pools and fish. I dunno, Jess, maybe take a month or two to learn how to stay afloat so you can continue to do the one thing you care about in the world.

Around the time he's paired with Jess, Cody starts growing up/becoming a mermaid. He's been extremely thirsty, he has dreams of breathing underwater and his hands are sticky, which feels like an unintentionally sexual joke about puberty. He quickly develops a scaly, phosphorescent sheen on his hands and shocks Sam when the two kiss for the first time. Electricity is a mermaid thing now.

As happens with us all, Cody's early teenhood awkwardness gets in the way of his relationships. On his 13th birthday, Sam gets Cody a framed photo of herself, the sort of gesture that pops up in sitcoms but would be psychotic in real life. She wants to get closer to Cody, Cody wants to get closer to her, but he's so busy hiding his fish bod from Sam that he keeps pushing her away. Orphans like Cody are a big coming-of-age trope (in Can of Worms, the protagonist wasn't an orphan, but was convinced he had to be). It's an easy way of literalizing the outsider feeling so many kids have. Cody has loving parents who adopted him, but he has to grow up knowing the people he's biologically related to abandoned him on a boat. Combine that with his freaky powers and Cody's double-alienated, like Harry Potter or Superman. Writers love shortcuts and they'll saddle a kid with as many outsider signifiers as possible if they think you'll relate to a character more quickly.

Jess, sensing his lab partner has some serious shit going on, offers to tutor Cody in marine biology if Cody will teach him how to swim. The two spend more time together and a friendship forms, but the movie reveals Jess' dad is none other than Big John, the fisherman coot from the opening scene. As Jess teaches Cody about his body, the fuse is lit, and it's clear Big John is going to find the truth about mermaids before the credits roll.

But we've got more pressing concerns! Cody's transforming more and more rapidly! He goes to his parents and tells them that the more he's in water, the closer he gets to becoming a mermaid. "Next time I go into the pool, I might turn into a fish!" he cries, and Dave Coulier, summoning as much gravitas as he's able, puts his foot down, declaring "You. are. a. man." No son of Dave Coulier is going to sing "Under Da Sea" with any god damned musical fish. This is where the puberty metaphor falls apart, though. My body didn't change because I did the things I liked, I just slowly realized the things I liked were in no way serving the person I wanted to become. People don't resist exposure to new things as their bodies age, they just mature and think differently as a result. Regardless, Cody's becoming more fishy the longer he's in water. His conflict is now whether he'll compete in the big high school swim meet even though he knows it'll turn him into Jabberjaw.

He doesn't. He stays home. And then he sneaks out and competes, wins and is caught. Big John sees the fins and knows what's up. Other people aren't as bright. Sean, for example, is convinced Cody's swimming dominance can be chalked up to steroids. Cody could end all the speculation in two seconds if he was just willing to admit he's an abomination what spits in the face of god. Instead, he quietly lets Sean think he's roided out.

The guy who matters, though, now wants to kill his son's only friend. As Cody starts to explain his secrets to Sam, Big John drives up in his fishing boat and kidnaps quasi-mermaid Cody. Jess frees man-fish, choosing a classmate over his dad's reputation, sanity and basic contentment. Dad could have gotten back in the town's good graces, could be seen as something more than a lunatic blathering about mythological creatures, but Jess says no. In the scuffle, Jess falls in the water and drowns-- great job on those swimming lessons, Cody!-- but is brought back to life by Cody's electric powers, which turn his arms into defibrillators.

Cody's mom returns and he decides to live with her. Mermaids always wear shells and coral as jewelry, which makes sense because I usually mat my hair down with mud and grass when going out. We all decorate ourselves with the rocks we find on the ground. Anyway, Cody swims away for an undetermined period of time, promising to come back after he's lived among the merms for a while. It's fine, he's 13, he doesn't need an education. Go swim, for sure.

An as-yet-unheard theme song plays over the end credits and it is, I shit you not, the worst piece of music I've heard in years.

Before they were big: One of the fishermen who teases Big John is played by Joel McKinnon Miller, who plays Norm Scully on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Sam is played by Courtnee Draper, who has maintained a long career, especially in voice acting, and starred in the great DCOM Stepsister From Planet Weird. Big John himself is Brent Briscoe, who showed up in a bunch of Billy Bob Thornton movies and had an appearance on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and acted in David Lynch projects (this is another Duwayne Dunham joint) and will appear in the DCOM Twitches when we get to 2005. He died in 2017. RIP, Brent. You did a great job here. I mean that.

Well after they were big: Cody's dad is played by Dave Coulier, post-Full House and America's Funniest People.

What I had remembered from childhood: The basic premise and the shot of Cody drinking gallons out of the school's water fountain. Watching these, a scene, line or action will feel familiar and I'll know instantly it was in the Disney Channel's promos.

The year is 1999: Cody says being popular "feels like I'm the king of the world," and another kid says "You know he died at the end of that movie, right?" At Cody's birthday, his mom makes a "dairy-free tofu cake," which feels like one of those late 90s things where everybody was making fun of health food and new age medicine and whatnot. Jess says nerds don't have friends, they have hobbies, and that some nerds love Star Trek. The 90s, when there were multiple Star Trek series on TV and in theaters, seems like the last time a kid could say that. Star Trek has been an adult thing for a while now. There's a (maybe dead) movie continuity and there are some Paramount+ shows, but Star Trek has nowhere near the kind of universality it did when I was a kid and The Next Generation, Voyager and Deep Space 9 were on UPN every night. Now, kids love Beyblades and going to raves in angel wings and Dr. Seuss hats. It's just a different world.

Wouldn't fly today!: They keep things pretty clean here, thank gosh!

The _____ was in your heart the whole time: decision to throw your dad and his mental health under the bus

Ultimate Ranking:

1. Brink!

2. Halloweentown

3. Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century

4. Under Wraps

5. Can of Worms

6. You Lucky Dog

7. The Thirteenth Year

Ultimate Ranking Notes: Not bad, but a little boring. This could have been an episode of So Weird and saved us all from that fucking song.

Next Time: Smart House, which may be the best DCOM ever