Arrow S02E19 – Review

By: Greg Berlanti, Geoff Johns, Andrew Kreisberg, Keto Shimizu (story)

The Story: Isabel may have had a point when she said Ollie would drag his company into ruin.

The Review: Not unlike the most recent episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Arrow had some fairly momentous developments last time around, but left almost no time for anyone to really process them. That task is left up to this episode, the entirety of which is less about taking action and more about responding to actions already taken. It’s a quieter episode than we’re used to, but perhaps a necessary one to allow the characters to inspect the damage that’s been dealt to each of them.

For Thea, this means a thorough examination of herself, to see how much of her identity has been eroded by the dual whammies of Roy leaving and discovering her true parentage. When you consider that around this time last year, Thea had nothing going for her character other than a cliché of a teen romance with Roy, it’s quite remarkable to see her running one of the strongest character arcs of the season. Her entire outburst to Ollie as to how devastating Slade’s revelation has been to her is genuine and effective throughout, starting from her correction that he isn’t her brother, but her half-brother.

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.