Emma Gilbert

Emma Gilbert is one of the main characters who became a mermaid in H2O: Just Add Water. Along with Cleo and Rikki, Emma discovered her powers after her trip to Mako Island. She is portrayed by actress Claire Holt.

Background
When Emma was only six-months-old, she had been introduced into the world of swimming by her father, Neil Gilbert. Since then, Emma dedicated most of her free time training and competing for her swim team, and had won countless trophies for it. Unfortunately, due to protecting her secret, she quit the team. Out of all three girls, Emma grew up in a more stable environment as her father is a business man in sales and financial development. Her mother, Lisa Gilbert, was once a junior lifeguard and currently collects crystal figurines. Because her father’s job allows him to affiliate with Harrison Bennett's business and investments, Emma and her brother, Elliot Gilbert, grew up along-side with Zane Bennett, Harrison’s son, since she was three years old. Despite their childhood companionship, Emma and Zane grew weary of each other as they grew older. Because their parents are still close friends, the two of them continued to be friendly towards the other on some occasions.

Despite growing up in a more wealthier lifestyle than her friends, Emma lacks the personality of a snob. Unlike her popular classmate, Miriam Kent, Emma and her brother were taught to be respectful and truthful to one another. Used to her perfect family lifestyle, Emma admits feeling guilty whenever she had to lie to her brother or her parents. Unlike her friend, Cleo Sertori, Emma shares a close relationship with her younger sibling, Elliot, and at often times she would try to comfort and reassure him whenever he’s unhappy. Although several times, they still got on each other nerves and argue.

Sometime during her childhood, Emma met Cleo and the two of them became close friends ever since to the point where Emma is aware of Cleo's bad singing. Because of her yearly intense training for her competitive swimming team, Emma had only attended Cleo’s first few childhood birthday parties, last being her sixth. After years of friendship, she wasn’t aware that Cleo’s birthday parties had remained the same childish party, courtesy of Cleo's father.

Personality
Emma has a confident and responsible, if somewhat controlling, personality. She tends to worry if things get out of control. She is very organized. Living in a perfect family lifestyle, she developed a need to be a perfectionist. She enjoys being the most organized of the girls and can’t help but encourage others to do the same. As well as being a driven individual, Emma once dedicated her free time in training for her regional swimming competition. Although she resigned after turning into a mermaid because it precludes her from swimming, Emma retains a bit of her driven personality.

She does seem to be more empathic than her friend, Rikki Chadwick when it comes to understanding other people’s feelings and daily problems. She tends to express many concerns for her friends and would even go out of her way to try and do the impossible for them, even trying her best to restore Louise Chatham’s decaying boat. Although Emma is often the most conscientious and considerate of the three girls, at times she can be pedantic and controlling, once even suggesting that she considers chewing a prescribed number of times before swallowing as a normal practice.

Emma also displays a responsible trait where she tends to wake up early for work before café opens and stays late after closing as we found out in the episode "Cleo vs. Charlotte". Being the responsible one, she constantly reminds her brother and friends to do their work and is often paranoid when things aren’t organized. This tends to drive those around her insane at times when she stressed about it too often.

Often times, she doesn’t listen to what other people say and assumes the situation for the worse. When push comes to shove, she would often show-off and proves to others that she can be more or just as skilled as they are in certain events. In "Riding For a Fall", she attempts to show off her newfound knowledge about riding horses to Ash, but her plan only backfired. In "Emma Rebel", she attempts to become a rebellious girl, just like Rikki, to show that she can be fun to be around. She fails to do this when she decides to have a party while her parents are away. Once the party gets out of hand with the help of Rikki she gets it to stop and admits this isn't the way for her. But in the same episode she shows true honesty when she confesses about the party to her parents who assumed Rikki had thrown while they were away for the weekend. Her ideas for organization and control sometimes brings her into conflict with Rikki, who is Emma's polar opposite.

Often times, Emma would disagree and argue with Rikki, who is her polar opposite. While in contrast to Rikki’s rebellious and care-free personality, Emma is controlling and organized. Because of their opposite personalities and different ideals, Emma and Rikki often argue and have various conflicts, leaving Cleo stuck in the middle of their fight. Aside from her girly personality, Emma is shy and emotional. Also, another trait for Emma is bossy. While arguing with Rikki, she bosses her around but no knowing that it sometimes hurts her feelings.

Emma is not as tough and thick-skinned as she puts on; in her own words, "I may seem tough, but I'm easily hurt."

Appearance
Emma is a very pretty teenage girl, and has golden hair and blue eyes. Her hair is extremely long, reaching along her waist. Her skin is quite fair and smooth. She usually lets her hair down, but as the series progresses, she begins to tie it up. As a mermaid, her hair is let down and she has an orange-scaled tail with a matching top. After the storm, Emma went to another island during a special full moon, where her tail and top changed to a turquoise color.

Her casual clothes have a lot of blue and white tank tops, based on her powers on turning water to ice. So this basically means her favorite colors are blue and white.

She also wears a locket identical to Rikki, Bella, Andrea, Natalie, and Cleo's, only with a white stone, to represent the water's freezing ability.

Becoming a Mermaid
One day, Cleo was helping Emma train for her regional swimming competition by timing her. While Cleo later left for home, Emma continued to train some more. Later on during her walk home, Emma ran into Cleo again but this time she was riding in Zane’s zodiac boat with the new girl, Rikki. Cleo and Rikki invited her for a ride with Rikki suggesting that they go out into the ocean for some fun and Emma expressing her concern. With the carefree Rikki steering the boat out into the sea and miles offshore, the girls soon found out that they are now out of fuel in the middle of the ocean. With little choice, the three girls paddled their way to the closest land they could find: Mako Island.

Once ashore the deserted island, Emma and her friends pondered on how they should call for help. Being the most prepared one in the group, Emma brought out her cell phone but only to find that it couldn’t get a signal. Emma suggested that they should head inland towards a higher altitude in hopes of getting a signal for a call. As they ventured in deeper into the jungle-infested island, the three girls soon came across a clearing where a river stream turns into a waterfall over several boulders. While Emma and Rikki were able to jump over to the small waterfall, Cleo became hesitant and without a warning, fell into a hole. The other two followed her and continued to pursue a way out of the underground cave.

Several hours later, the three of them ended up at the end of the tunnel and found the moon cave with a pool at the bottom of the island’s dormant volcano. Emma realizes that the Moon Pool is connected to the ocean and may be their only way out, dove in to find out. Confirming her find, she and Rikki convinced the hesitant Cleo to escape with them. When all three of them entered the pool, the full moon became aligned with the moon pool, causing it to bubble and glow a mystic blue glow and emitting small orbs of magical light particles into the air. Oblivious to what was happening to them, the girls ventured out into open sea where they were rescued by the local water-police.

Around twelve hours later, Emma went to the ocean for a morning swim. After ten seconds in the ocean water, Emma was shocked to feel that she no long has human legs but instead, she sprouted a mermaid tail. She later confirms that she wasn’t the only one who became a mermaid as the same thing had happened to Cleo and Rikki.

Mermaid Powers
Emma possesses the ability to transform into a mermaid ten seconds after physical contact of water. She turns back into a human several minutes after climbing out of the the water and once her body is completely dry, she turns back into a human along with the clothes she was wearing before she transformed. As a mermaid, Emma has the ability to swim at super speed of 600km/h, hold their breath for more than fifteen minutes, and possibly dive at a depth lower than any ordinary human being.

Hydro-Cryokinesis
Emma is the second mermaid to discover her individual powers over water: the ability to freeze water. Her ability can cause things to become brittle enough for her to break, such as an electronic lock. She can freeze an entire person and put them into stasis lock or render them immobile by freezing only their wet suits. With Cleo’s power, Emma can create ice sculptures or ice-orbs, but it would eventually melt or shatter. At first, it implies that she could only freeze things with water over it. But several times in season one, Emma was able to freeze, cool, and lock objects with her powers without the aids of water. This could imply that she can freeze the small water molecules around those dry objects. With this power, Emma can freeze water and all other liquids to freezing temperatures literally to absolute zero.

Cryokinesis
In the second season premiere, a special full moon along with a rare planetary alignment greatly strengthens and increases her powers to much more powerful levels. Emma’s new mermaid power is Cryokinesis, the power to create, generate, manipulate and control ice, snow, sleet and hail at will and also control clouds. It allows her to freeze any object without water, even freezing an entire room. When in combination with Cleo and Rikki's advanced powers, she can create unusually strong electric storms and levitate a person. It is shown that she can explode ice, too, in the episode when they were practicing their powers in the moon pool with the balloon penguin. With this power, Emma also can create, control and manipulate ice, snow and hail at will.

Ash Dove
Her love interest is Ash, a horse riding instructor and and the new supervisor of JuiceNet Cafe. Emma has often been encouraged by her friends Rikki an. Cleo to reveal her mermaid secret to Ash because he lacks the determination to find out her mermaid secret.

At first, Emma despised Ash and thought he was an arrogant person when she met him as the instructor to her younger brother Elliot. But when she accidentally poisoned his horse, Rebel, Emma felt terrible, and used her power to create snow in order to cure the horse. Surprised that she stayed with the sick horse overnight, Ash expressed his thanks to her.

Later on when Ash was chosen to be the new supervisor of the Juice Net Cafe, Emma hated him more than she already did because she felt that he had stolen the job position that was meant for her. Failing to get the other employees to strike against him, Emma felt more hatred for Ash. Emma witnessed helpless as she watched Ash introduced new schedules for the staff, new uniforms (which included a silly hat), took her own hard-worked juice recipe off of the menu, changed the ice-room storing system, and even created basketball games for the customers. When Emma saw how much fun everyone was having, she decided to swallow her pride and work with him instead of against him, only to be shocked to find out that Ash had fired her because he thought she broke the new storing system.Later, Ash discovered that she was innocent and it was Amber who didn't follow his new orders because too many changes came too fast. Ash appeared at her front door steps, begging her to come back, which she didn't want to at first. He offered to slow down his ideas of changes for the restaurant, admitted that she was right, and offered to put back her home-made juice recipe on the menu to which then, did she agreed to return to work there. Later on, they went on a few several dates. At one point, Ash almost forced Emma into the water because he believed that she's aqua-phobic and that he wanted to help her get over her fears. Luckily, she convinced him to stop just in time, but was in danger of having her secrets revealed again near the end of the second season. As the pressure of her secrets pressed on her relationship with Ash, he demanded to know what she was hiding, but she refused despite having Charlotte using her magical powers against her, almost revealing her secret in front of him. Emma decided to reveal to Ash that she is a mermaid. Ash was okay with it and they continued their relationship.

Trivia

 * Before becoming a mermaid, Emma was a professional swimmer.
 * Emma likes dolphins.
 * Emma is richer than Cleo and Rikki, and in the same social class of Miriam and Zane.
 * Emma is very sensitive.
 * Just like her friend, Cleo, Emma is very good at science.