Young Justice Episode 18 – Review

By: Peter David (writer)

The Story: Will Artemis and Zatanna come to “Harm”?  It’s a “Secret.”  Yeah, I went there.

The Review: Unlike the Teen Titans, which brought kids together to learn the value of friendship and heroism, David’s interpretation of the adolescent vigilante on the original Young Justice comics emphasized their most irritating qualities: distractible, selfish, temperamental, petty, and recklessly impulsive (and not just Impulse either).  But he also wrote with great credibility about their capacity for idealism, cleverness, grief, and compassion.

So it’s not surprising he brings a similar mixture of playfulness and darkness to his guest episode.  Sadly, he can’t deliver the quite same tone he did on the original comics.  For one thing, he works with completely different characters than the ones he wrote back in the day, even though they share some of the same names and origins.  Take Superboy; David’s version was a hopeless swinger with a fade haircut; ours is a sullen loner with a major chip on his shoulder.

But our clone has shed some of his angst lately, and David takes advantage of that to bring back a little of his mischievous side, featuring a return of Superboy and Miss Martian’s Happy Harbor High classmates at the same time.  As Marvin goes for the “greatest prank ever” at a Halloween dance, the joke turns on him when Connor retaliates with a trick of his own.  His brings a surprising amount of enthusiasm to the ploy, even getting M’gann and Wally on the joke too.

All this is really a fun side dish to the main course of Artemis and Zatanna hitting the town.  A fun idea, and in the early parts of the episode you do get a kick out of seeing the potent combo of Zee’s magic and Artemis’ martial artistry.  But once they run into Harm, a villain David created in the old YJ days, the episode essentially becomes a “Will the girls survive the sadist?” routine.

This would be entertaining in itself, except Harm is a painfully flat character, a case that was true back when he originally debuted.  He seems, in the tradition of Cathy, innately and incurably evil.  The episode even introduces him as such, since he can wield the sword of Beowulf, which only accepts the pure of heart—“It never said ‘pure good.’”  Like anyone who skews toward the extremes of the moral spectrum, Harm is just predictable.