Young Justice S02E09 – Review

By: Jon Weisman (story)

The Story: The team’s HQ may not be a Mt. St. Helen, but it sure blows up like one.

The Review: During the show’s first season, I complained frequently about how the characters didn’t seem like “real” teens, whatever that means in a world of superheroes.  As much as I appreciated that they never rushed into anything without looking first, I sometimes longed for a little more spontaneity and humor from them.  After all, what teenager doesn’t like doing something completely random and laughing a bit stupidly about it afterward?

So among the many improvements this season’s brought, I like most how much more often you laugh during an episode now.  The addition of purely comedy-driven characters, like Beast Boy, Blue Beetle, and especially Impulse has something to do with that, I imagine.  Kid Flash kind of served this function in season one, but his counterpart from the future really relishes his role as team jester.  Bart’s happy-go-lucky attitude is infection, and has the potential to draw the others into fun outings they’d never have taken with the first-gen YJers.

Young Justice S02E05 – Review

By: Brandon Vietti (story)

The Story: Who says girl groups are dead?

The Review: Obviously, the biggest difference between this and last season is the team’s roster, which has grown a little bigger and a lot more colorful.  The writers have so far kept the focus on the returning characters, though they’ve wisely given the newbies substantial parts to play, getting us used to their presence.  Now seems the right time to get to know the rookies better, as they do represent the future of the team—unless we get another time jump in season three.

Of all the new members, Blue Beetle is a natural to break out.  His versatile power set, bizarre origin story, and racial and urban appeal make for a potent combination, and thanks to a cult-favorite ongoing and a Smallville appearance, he’s perhaps more familiar to us nowadays than you might expect.  But I’d say the biggest factor in his favor is he gives the show access to a whole realm of stories it’s only just now exploring: the socially relevant.

Young Justice Episode 11 – Review

By: Greg Weisman (writer)

The Story: Superboy and Miss Martian skip school to go to prison and discover little difference.

The Review: At some point in every superhero series, for better or worse, you’ve got to have a villain breakout.  If you’re going to gather a bunch of vicious sociopaths with meta-abilities into one room, it doesn’t really matter what precautions you take; sooner or later, all that toxic chemistry will blow up in your face—which sounds like a disaster on the surface, but it makes for good reading sometimes, doesn’t it?

You often see heroes reacting to these annual breakouts after the fact, once everyone has already gotten loose and swarming all over the place.  Young Justice tackles the problem from a more proactive angle, with Batman, ever the master of prep-time, planning to defeat the villains’ escape plans before they can execute.  To that end, he sends in Miss Martian and Superboy to impersonate the newly incarcerated Terror Twins and foil the villains from the inside.

It’s a solid plan, but once our heroes actually get inside Belle Reve (which everyone takes pains to pronounce with proper French intonations: “Reve” as in “rev” as in “bev” as in “beverage”), they really have nothing much to do except kill time until the villains launch their plans.  It’d make sense to fill this watch-and-wait period with your standard prison drama—the new fish learning the ropes the hard way—but aside from a minor tussle, we don’t get much of that.

What we do get is a lot of daddy issues, which seems in vogue for male characters nowadays.  Superboy has good reason to resent his “dad’s” distance, and to parallel that with Icicle, Jr.’s issues with the senior Icicle is a clever ploy on Weisman’s part.  But that relationship never ventures beyond the usual “son can’t live up to father’s expectations” bit, and although Connor shows a couple moments of sympathy, he gains and learns nothing from the experience.