Now that season 3 is on its way it’s the best time to rewatch the show, preferably on the DC Universe streaming service if you’re in America as that helps support the show directly and hopefully get us more than just season 3. This Re(af)Watch series is not quite a review, more of an opinion piece about each episode as I rewatch them. Covering all 46 episodes of the show’s first 2 seasons, and maybe more. Continuing on with season 2 episode 5 Beneath
Written by: Brandon Vietti
Directed by: Doug Murphy
Episode synopsis: A squad consisting of Batgirl, Miss Martian, Wonder Girl, and Bumblebee, infiltrate Bialya to search for more clues to who planted the bomb that killed the Kroloteans, and instead finding something more troubling. The Light are abducting runaway teens for some sinister purpose for their new Partner. Meanwhile one of Jaime’s friends goes missing and he goes to investigate, finding an abusive step-father.
This is the prerequisite “girl team-up” cartoon episode. It’s a fun one, if a little more compact than team-ups in other shows due to the space needed for the B-plot, but it’s still enjoyable. Young Justice was certainly refreshing compared to other superhero cartoons in that they had a boatload of female characters and used them quite often. Generally superhero cartoons are “boys action cartoons” and don’t generally have a lot of prominent female characters because of that. It has been said that executives don’t think “boys want to watch girl characters” or that the cartoon will be considered a “girls cartoon and boys won’t watch the show” if it has female leads rather than male leads. And of course they rarely make toys of the girl characters so the executives would rather push toy characters than non-toy ones. So we get things like The Batman’s final season has an all-male Justice League and the one female cast member, Batgirl who was prominent in season 3, appeared in only a couple of the episodes of the final season. But more generally you will see a “boys action cartoon” with a main cast of three or more characters and only one of them will be a girl (two if you’re lucky). There are exceptions, but there’s a reason why this is known as having a “token girl character.”
Young Justice is one of these exceptions because it has so many women in it, and it’s not just the quantity but the quality of all of them. They each feel like their own individual character and none of them are in stereotypical roles like “the girlfriend” or “the rival who gets the girlfriend jealous” just to name two. In season 1 the girls could have just been “the girlfriend” because they all have romantic interests, but they each get their own storyline separate from any of their romantic interests. Season 2 is no different and while the timeskip has shaken things up a bit, and Zatanna and Rocket have been promoted to Justice League status and Artemis has retired, the women never feel like they’ve taken a back-seat to the men.
This is more Wonder Girl’s episode than the other three, she’s the newbie of the group still dealing with her own enthusiastic nature and insecurities. One thing this episode did incredibly well was that Cassie’s inexperience and over-enthusiasm didn’t endanger the mission, she didn’t screw-up horribly and doom the mission, which is something lots of other shows have done before. They let her be inexperienced without needing her to constantly mess things up. She makes a mistake once, and that’s Devastation spotting her shadow when she flew overhead, but that felt like a easy mistake to make on her part rather than the episode hammering home that she’s inexperienced. The episode re-enforces that by calling back to the early days of season 1 where the Team certainly had their own fair share of screw-ups. She also only makes that one mistake, and it’s after making several correct on-the-fly decisions that saved the Team. So she comes out of this episode looking pretty good.
There is one question I have about this mission, specifically that Nightwing says he’s sending an all-woman squad because Queen Bee can’t control them. So does that mean all four of them are straight? We know from last season that Queen Bee “can control most men and some women” and in the tie-in comic we see her controlling a woman, so did Nightwing ask their sexual preferences or is that just listed on the Justice League databases? What if they are in the closet or haven’t figured things out yet? Also does Queen Bee have to know the sexuality of the person before she controls them or maybe she just tries it on everyone she meets and hope she gets lucky. We don’t get them bumping into Queen Bee this episode so we don’t know. That would probably be one of the worst ways to find out you’re queer, being mind-controlled by a supervillain dictator.
Jaime’s B plot was a lot more down to Earth than the A plot, no supervillains and just some straight drama. Searching for his runaway friend, Tye Longshadow, fearing that Maurice, Tye’s mother’s boyfriend, has done something to him because Maurice is an abusive bastard. The show doesn’t dance around it, even if it doesn’t show the abuse on screen it’s very upfront about it. Maurice has been physically abusive towards both Tye and his mom, Shelly, and Tye has decided to get out of there for his own safety. They even have Shelly do the, sadly all too common, thing of excusing his actions, and even saying “he has good days, too.” There’s also subtle evidence of Tye’s abuse when we see him as he’s got a plaster (or band-aid for you Americans) on his face, telling the tale of his last encounter with Maurice that made him a runaway.
Credit to the show for not trying to justify Maurice’s abuse, he does it because he’s a bastard and we don’t need to see any other side of this. He’s not a supervillain, he doesn’t have magical powers, and he’s not abusing Tye and his mom to get some magical artefact macguffin from them. He’s just a man, a regular evil man, because those exist and they are both real and scary.
He’s also making physical pirated DVDs and video games in 2016, which I’m sure must happen somewhere, but still feels a bit odd. Do people still make money off of physical piracy nowadays? Word of God says he was “arrested and fired” after Jaime reported him to the police, and let’s hope he was sent to prison for a good while or else he’d certainly take this all out on Shelly. If only someone in that family would gain superpowers and would stop Maurice next time he abused someone. If only.
On a lighter note, character redesign time. This time another character that has appeared before, but she was in prison at the time so we didn’t get a look at her full outfit, Devastation. Another one that I wasn’t familiar with when I first watched the show. She is a Wonder Woman villain created in 1999, and it seems like she was one of those villains meant to be the mirror of the hero. Made by the god Cronus using the same clay that brought Wonder Woman to life (in her pre-New 52 origin before someone had the absurd idea that what Wonder Woman really needed was a father and daddy issues), Cronus made Devastation so he could stop Wonder Woman from getting in the way of him trying to kill Zeus.
I like the redesign a lot, they’ve beefed her up and gave her a muscular build, something that doesn’t happen a lot with female characters so it’s nice to see some variety in body types here. Canonically at the end of season 1 she is 1 year old, so she wasn’t made that long before the series started. Remember season 1 ran from July to January 1st, so it only covered half a year, and she was in prison the first time we saw her back in episode 11 Terrors. She was made, fought Wonder Woman, and then was put in Belle Reve Penitentiary all before that point. We also know she hasn’t fought Cassie before so we can guess she hasn’t clashed with Wonder Woman since Cassie became her sidekick. Who knows, maybe she’s a full time Light agent. If Cronus isn’t around, been dealt with by Zeus or some such, then that would make her a free agent. Assuming her comic origin is the same or similar to her Young Justice origin. Not that I imagine any of this will come up at all, it’s fun to speculate sometimes.
This episode covered a lot of heavy subject matters along with some more lighter action fare. The story of the abducted runaways will be one of the ongoing plots of the season, with the mystery of what The Light and their new Partner plan to use them for. Abductions are the big thing for the season, given it even started out with Kroloteans abducting people. Though the Kroloteans had a different approach, abduct and replace so no one would be any the wiser, while this time The Light has just gone for taking people no one’s going to miss or will be chalked up as just another runaway teen. We will find out more in future episodes.
Little things I liked: The villains just really bounce off each other, it’s just fun to see their banter and makes them entertaining to watch without having to make them fight amongst each other like other shows have done. Icicle Jr still hasn’t gotten over Miss Martian not being into him, it’s been 5 years let it go already. Devastation flirting with Psimon was fun. Seeing proper tiny air-vents and Batgirl squeezing through them added a funny bit of realism to the mission, Batman certainly couldn’t get through there. Showing Wonder Girl as being really strong ripping off those giant thick hanger bay doors, even if she’s not strong enough to lift a massive cargo plane. Jaime has a flip phone in the canon year of 2016, I just wanted to point that out.
Quote of the episode:
“Queen Bee isn’t the only woman who can mess with a man’s mind.” Batgirl
Quote that takes on a new meaning after watching the series:
“You search for answers, but the answers you seek will find you. Only then you will make peace with the one inside you.” Holling Longshadow
Though that entire scene was intentionally obvious foreshadowing.
Then there’s this shot:
