By: Mark Julian
This week's episode saw the young superheroes go toe-to-toe with the Injustice League, which was composed of Count Vertigo, Joker, Poison Ivy, Ultra-Humanite, Atomic Skull, Wotan, and a very de-powered Black Adam. I mean seriously, Black Adam alone should be able to take out the entire Young Justice (YJ) team by himself. While I thoroughly enjoyed this episode, that was one thing that nagged at my subconscious the entire episode.
Moving on, the Justice League (JLA) goes up against giant plant monsters that are a combination of tech, magic, and science thanks to the combined efforts of Ivy, Wotan, Joker (eh?), and Ultra-Humanite. Batman sends Aqualad's team to stop the Injustice League while the big guns of the JLA stop the plants, which are attacking major cities worldwide. At first, I thought this was backwards as I felt Young Justice was definitely being handed the more dangerous mission of the two but I thought about the nature of the attack and realized that YJ simply didn't have the numbers to deal with such a widespread and numerous threat. An aspect of this episode that I really enjoyed was the cool JLA cameos from heroes such as Guy Gardner, Hawkman, Icon (cool nod to Dwayne McDuffie),Plastic Man, Blue Devil, and tons more. Honestly, seeing so many heroes in action was the coolest aspect of this episode.
Back to the plot; while we are treating to all these cool cameos as the JLA takes on the various plant monsters around the world, YJ does battle with the Injustice League. The team fights admirably but inevitably lose forcing Aqualad to resort to "Plan-B" which is Spoiler:putting on the helmet of Fate. Thanks to that timely assist, the momentum changes and our heroes hold their own until the JLA turns up which prompts the villains to immediately surrender.
Now lets rewind to earlier in the episode, when Batman is assigning this mission. When the team departs, Captain Marvel begins to leave with YJ but Batman stops him and makes a statement which leads me to believe that he knows that the Injustice League isn't the secret villain society that's really behind recent antagonistic actions. Whether I'm reading too much into this or Batman really is the detective we all think he is will have to be revealed in future episodes. Of course the big Revelation in this episode was that we finally saw exactly who "The Light" really is. You can view them in the screencap below.
In case you're lost, that's Vandal Savage, Queen Bee, Ocean Master, Ra's al Ghul, The Brain, Klarion the Witch Boy, and Lex Luthor. The highlight in this episode, voice-acting wise was Khary Payton as Aqualad and Jesse McCartney as Robin. Kaldur'ahm showcases more and more of his leadership skills in every episode however, each episode also subtly shows Robin performing better than any of the other team members. This harkens to the fact that as they've said in previous episodes, he's the most experienced out of all the other YJ members. One thing I definitely did not enjoy was the portrayal of the Joker in this episode. He did grow on me as the episode progressed but that was merely a shift from dreadful to just bad. After legendary performances from Mark Hamil and a good one from John DiMaggio in Batman: Under the Red Hood, Brent Spiner (Data from Star Trek)really needed to bring something unique and frenetic to the character and it just wasn't there. Overall though, I have to give the episode:
8.5/10
Enjoy some of the screencaps below of the many, many cameos.
Other notable cameos: Hawkgirl, John Stewart, Martian Manhunter, Green Arrow, Red Arrow, Rocket, Icon, Black Adam, Superman
Young Justice is an American animated television series created by Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti for Cartoon Network. Despite its title, it is not an adaptation of Todd Dezago and Todd Nauck's Young Justice comic series, but rather an adaptation of the entire DC Universe with a focus on young superheroes. The series follows the lives of teenaged heroes and sidekicks who are members of a fictional covert operation team called Young Justice. The team is essentially a young counterpart to the celebrity-level famous adult team, the Justice League. The main setting is the fictional universe of Earth-16, during a time period in which superheroes are a relatively recent phenomenon. The series debuted on January 7, 2011 with a two week reairing of the first two episodes, which originally aired as an hour long special on November 26, 2010. Young Justice premiered on September 9, 2011 on Teletoon, in Canada.
Young Justice resumed airing new episodes September 16 at 6:30 PM Eastern on Cartoon Network after a 6 month hiatus.
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