2019
09.07
Black Lightning’s back

After years and years of begging for at least one Greg Weisman show to get a third season, the control brains gifted fans with a third season of Young Justice. One with higher stakes, with gore and sex you couldn’t get from a Cartoon Network airing. Seemingly cut plot points are rescued from cancellation hell, and you finally got to see what Darkseid was going to do after that cliffhanger from ages back. I could almost call it miraculous, if Young Justice were a good show. Compared to his work on Gargoyles and Spectacular, YJ has always been the Weisman show with the most stumbles for me. So many subplots that were never fully executed, so many characters shoved into the background while less interesting people were given screentime. And as soon as those issues were fixed and the series became watchable and even entertaining, boom, time skip happens, a new cast is thrown onto the already existing cast, and we’re back to step one where we repeat and exacerbate the problems from the previous season. And Outsiders is no exception.

In this season, while the Outsiders as a team show up, the word was used more as a theme. The central seven main characters given the spotlight this season all come from outside backgrounds. Brion and Tara Markov are an exile and a kidnapped victim from their home country. Halo and Forager are refugees from their home worlds. Cyborg is a young man whose normal school life was snatched away from him by cybernetics and occasional mind possession. Beast Boy left heroics for an acting career, then came back. And Black Lightning quit the Justice League. Not a clean thematic connection between our cast, but there’s something to it. The previous heroes have gone through too many missions and heartaches to be a young Justice League anymore, and the show gives new perspectives for some viewers who didn’t grow up with the last two seasons. The problem is complicated yet simple at the same time. I just don’t care about most of the cast.

This is something that was thrown around since the show’s first season. Is it worth keeping up with a character’s arc if they’re unlikable for most of their run? Kon and M’Gann were unbearable to watch back then, but fans insisted they were interesting enough characters that any lack of sympathy would be fixed sooner or later. But it’s season three now, and while they became less annoying this year, they still weren’t interesting. And this new cast isn’t interesting either. Brion spends much of the first half of the season yelling and moping about his sister. Halo spent more time dying than getting a personality. And Forager was just annoying. It’s okay to make an unlikable lead, but not if you make a dull lead. Whenever someone defends a work by saying characters are allowed to be unlikable, they always seem to be defending bad examples of that archetype like the lead character from YIIK. And that’s not to say any characters from this season were that bad, but none of them connect.

Take Brion for example. As I said, he’s not a character who makes the most of his screentime. While his angst is understandable given the circumstances, murdered parents and his kingdom taken away from him, it’s still hard to feel sympathy for him, let alone patience. He does defrost as the show goes on, and becomes a hero on occasion, but because of YJ’s large cast, his development is often sidelined for another character. And by the time he’s allowed to have lines, any good will he’s gained has long since faded away. When his season arc wraps up, and he eventually splits from the team, it’s hard to see the betrayal as heartbreaking as the show wants me to think because there’s so little to Brion beyond his mood swings, his dull romance with Halo, or his often cold relationship with his sister because the show can rarely afford his voice actor and Tara’s to talk to each other. And because of outside elements, he’s not even in full control of himself most of the time. He’s just a chesspiece moving from point A to point B.

Then there’s Violet, a character who takes up more screentime than she should but does little with the scenes she’s given. Her character as a concept is interesting. The corpse of a refugee woman, given new life through New God technology and transformed into an alien walking in human skin. But then she’s never given her own moments to shine. She’s just the character who dies just to show off her healing factor for most of her run, then the writers made her kiss Harper Row for some reason. She’s not so much a character as she is a walking plot device without any sense of real agency. And maybe that’s the point because she started out as a Mother Box, but it doesn’t make for a character I want to see for the entirety of the season. Then the show decides the only better than two dull characters is to make both dull characters date. There’s a very Anakin/Padme sense to their relationship. Brion and Violet have little in common besides being on the same superhero team. Maybe the writers wanted to go for an upper-class/lower-class contrast, with Brion coming from a royal background and the body Violet inhabits previously living life as a refugee servant. But it’s not a moving relationship that gives either character more layers or background. In fact, the romance should have been eliminated in favor of other characters getting screentime.

I think that’s something Justice League Unlimited succeeded in that Young Justice continually falters on. Finding the right characters to spend time on while the previous main characters are on patrol or doing something else. When JLU needed superheroes to focus on instead of the core seven, they picked the Question, Huntress, and Green Arrow, and these characters really stood out by giving a nice contrast to the established Justice League we already knew, challenging their ideals while enforcing a code of honor of their own. Plus, Huntress and Question’s relationship was actually fun to watch. Whereas YJ always seems to pick the wrong cards in their deck. Blue Beetle was a chore to watch in season two, yet he took the majority of the runtime. Same thing with the Outsiders this season. This incarnation of Cyborg is my least favorite. He’s so loud, and his daddy issues envelop any other traits of his. Didn’t help that when the first half of this season ended, Doom Patrol premiered and gave me a Cyborg who was far more interesting and likable while still having troubles with his father like the YJ version. Execution’s obviously a major factor. Maybe if better hands were dealing with Geo-Force and Halo, they would have been much better characters with an endearing and engrossing love story. But that’s the thing. It’s a sea of maybes and what ifs when viewing this show. What if they focused more on the original team? Maybe they could have given Tim Drake some episodes? What could have happened if they loosely adapted a different DC comic than the Outsiders?

As the season went on, the series appeared to be more interested in creating its own version of Teen Titans than the Outsiders. Despite never saying the words outright, Beast Boy and Cyborg become more prominent characters, they’re part of a team who live in a giant tower, and Deathstroke ascends from a lieutenant into a main villain. It’s almost as if the writers grew bored with the Outsiders aspect, and wanted to focus on an entirely different group of teen superheroes even before the season ended. I can only assume, but characters who were Outsiders in the comics like Katana and Metamorpho cameoed early on in the season, indicating there was something in store for them. But then it didn’t. And this iteration of the Outsiders has more Titans, with Geo-Force being the only member to be an Outsider in the comics. For one reason or another, the writers forget to add Halo and instead left her in the old Young Justice team even though it’s mostly a remnant with few active members at this point.

This isn’t a new problem with the show. Invasion previously played with the idea of introducing a modern incarnation of the Hanna-Barbera Superfriends with Static in place of Black Vulcan, but only half of them stay on board once the third season starts, and Static gets little beyond a partnership with Black Lightning that’s only shown through silent background scenes. Young Justice has no clear focus. If you watched that season two cliffhanger all those years ago with Darkseid, you might have thought that would be the big plot, but instead you get a loose adaptation of Judas Contract and the largest presence of any of Darkseid’s forces is Granny Goodness showing up. So much yet so little occurs in the series because there are a hundred plots, and they’re all in line waiting. And that could work. Plenty of HBO shows are nothing but swarms of plotlines struggling to enter a narrow door. But Young Justice leaves the fat in. Fat that makes Jackie Aprile Jr and Ziggy Sobotka look like welcome figures. They leave in fluff scenes that would have been acceptable and even entertaining in a show with little going on, but become aggravating because they’re in the way of dozens of other plot threads I would rather watch. Yeah, that one Scooby-Doo tribute was cute, but was that really needed when you still have other storylines that have yet to be touched on in multiple episodes? Will it take a whole season for them to do anything with Beast Boy confronting Queen Bee over his mother’s death? Or Damian Wayne existing thanks to something that happened between time skips. I feel like I’m always playing a waiting game while watching this show. I’m waiting for this plot thread I’m interested in to get remembered while the show continues to focus on things I couldn’t care less about like M’Gann’s guidance counselor gig or Violet and Forager going to school. When you’re a series that takes its time producing episodes, Outsiders was first announced three years ago and I assume the next season will come out three years from now, you have to do everything you can to refine your product as much as possible. You can’t afford slow pacing when your series is already slow to come out. Or else you get a dawdling ride that spends so much time on detours that you completely forget the main goal in mind, like Samurai Jack’s final season.

Because as much as the series like to spend time on other characters, the final showdown will ultimately boil down to Dick Grayson’s team versus Vandal Savage’s Light. Maybe Greg Weisman will take a page from Grant Morrison’s Batman run and let Dick inherit the cowl, and he leads his incarnation of the League to fight Vandal’s forces. Or potentially he’ll do something subversive and kill off either character before they can have their go at a final chess game. But that’s the problem. I’m waiting to see if anything will happen. An entire season goes by, yet neither side has advanced far enough to reach that path. While Vandal’s spotlight episode this season was actually pretty good, it still felt like a gem in the rough compared to how underdeveloped the main villains are in Outsiders. Deathstroke does little beyond playing Terra’s string, Lex is only around to be an allegory for a certain political figure, Granny Goodness is portrayed with a refreshing Professor Umbridge vibe before becoming yet another generic mustache twirling villain, and the rest are just there. One of Greg Weisman’s strengths as a writer is turning villains into people with their own desires, weaknesses, loves, and hates. But that’s sorely lacking for most of this season. Here, they’re just evil villains hatching evil plans within evil plans. Even their ultimate plan to turn Earth into a galactic empire rings hollow. Yeah, it sounds like a goal that could benefit humanity and makes the Light seem less evil and more ambitious, but I don’t buy it. Making humanity a greater empire seldom gives the common man a better life. Otherwise, trickle-down economics would actually work. You think Amazon employees get more money whenever Jeff Bezos adds another billion to his bank account? Emperors who speak of altruism and good faith always rest on the skulls of peasants. I’ve seen people cheer on Vandal because they think his conquering games are fun, but I can only imagine it being entertaining if he were as prominent in the series as Reinhard von Lohengramm was in Legend of Galactic Heroes, instead of an antagonist who spends much time in the shadows. And I have to repeat myself, but you’re just waiting for something to happen between his forces and Dick’s like there’s a Cold War going on. Because it’s not like the League will ever kill a villain.

Whether superheroes should kill their villains is one of the biggest questions when going through long-running comics. Obviously, the real reason Batman never kill the Joker is because the Joker’s popular, and popularity is immortality in DC/Marvel superhero comics. Plenty of writers over the years grapple with that problem because the Joker’s a mass murderer and one more day of life with him means countless deaths in Gotham. Some like Tim Burton avoid the issue outright and let Batman murder his villains. Others like Timm and Nolan present an alternative situation where Batman won’t directly kill the Joker, but they won’t go out of their way to save them or let a proxy character murder them such as Terry in Return of the Joker. Other writers argue the reason Batman shouldn’t kill the Joker is because beyond all his darkness, he still believes in the best of people, and there’s genuinely a part of him that knows the Joker can do better. And then you have the pragmatic approach that Batman won’t kill because it would violate his privileges as a vigilante, and the cops would have to arrest him. But whatever the case, that “not killing” rule applies heavily in Young Justice, almost frustratingly so. There’s no John Constantine or Tommy Monaghan around to play wild card among the heroes. Almost every superhero is strictly anti-killing no matter what, and when Brion kills in the finale, it’s viewed as unforgivable by all of his teammates despite the circumstances. Killing is bad no matter what. Lying to your friends is bad no matter what. And I’m left wondering what’s the endgame in Dick’s mind. Does he just hope to imprison the entire Light in the Phantom Zone or some secret prison when this is all done? When you’re one superhero who refuses to kill, that’s understandable. But when you’re leading a huge team in a secret war with another massive force, and you absolutely expect zero fatalities, it’s harder to swallow. It’s such a simple dichotomy even though the series now aims at a TV-14 demographic than a TV Y7. Yeah, it’s the same approach the Marvel Netflix shows did with Matt Murdock and Luke Cage. But it was also a little annoying there. Sure, Matt. Let Bullseye live. Let the sociopath who needs decades of therapy to even pretend to be a human being but quickly devolves into an insane murderer once he gets unhinged live. But the difference there was I really liked Daredevil, and understood Matt’s reasons for not killing even if I didn’t agree, while Young Justice is frustrating. Not good enough to like, but too fascinating to drop.

Even with all of its flaws, Young Justice is still the most interesting superhero cartoon series in the last few years. It’s fascinating to see the show illustrate or foul-up its themes and ideas. Despite this article’s length, I think I’ve only scratched the almost intimidatingly large surface of this show, for better and for worse. And that’s especially prevalent this season where they dealt with heavy topics like human trafficking and domestic abuse. There’s a whole episode dedicated to Harper Row’s abusive dad, and it even ends with a hotline for domestic violence. The Outsiders as a brand isn’t new to the topic of social issues. A 2004 arc in the comics featured the team partnering up with John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted to stop a child trafficking ring. And like a fictional superhero team crossing over with a real life human being to discuss modern day slavery, it all feels kinda weird instead of empowering when implemented in the show. The heart’s in the right place, for sure, but it never fits when a fantastical universe where even young adults have reality warping powers deal with political issues plaguing the youth in real life. Like in Harry Potter when he became the victim of a huge disinformation campaign, and nobody bothered to use Truth Serum on him to dispel any lies. It’s hard to discuss or portray a troubling issue in a superhero universe for that reason. Because the comic book universes aren’t our universe. And whenever a superhero universe like the DCU or Earth-616 tries to mirror our universe, it almost always feels awkward no matter how well-executed. And in Young Justice, painting metahuman trafficking as a serious issue only makes the heroes look like idiots because they rarely use superheroes known for mind-reading or teleportation to get the job done. M’Gann’s a mind reader and a shapeshifter, the best skills any recon agent could have. But she’s mostly stuck doing guidance counselor work instead of utilizing her skills on the field.

It’s similar to the Oracle problem DC had until the New 52, where Barbara Gordon was still in her wheelchair even though medical science was so advanced in the DC universe that disembodied brains could regain the ability to walk. Oracle’s story in comics such as Birds of Prey was meant to be a good message to readers regarding wheelchair users, but made no sense in-universe despite attempts to explain it. And eventually, DC let Barbara walk again despite controversy over the change. That’s the problem with discussing real life problems in an unrealistic universe. Do you want to teach audiences something they could use in their daily lives at the cost of limiting the potential strangeness in your worldbuilding? Because DC isn’t hard sci-fi or hard fantasy. It’s outlandishly weird when viewed under the right light. Batman can be off unwiring a bomb while Mogo the Green Lantern watches over a solar system, as Destiny of the Endless writes it all in his book. Even though I admire Young Justice for being a show about the entire DC universe, the show just doesn’t seem to understand the realm it portrays.

P.S. Can we get less mind control plots in season 4? We’ve gotten so many last season with Cyborg getting his mind compromised, or Halo getting brainwashed, or Brion getting mind controlled. Not to mention the Justice League getting brainwashed yet again. And the Anti-Life Equation. It’s overdone. Between the mind control and the endless plans, characters are given so little actions of their own free will. And it becomes irritatingly repetitive.

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