Justice League S01E08-09 Review: Jokers and Luthors

Justice League, Season 1, Episodes 8-9: Injustice For All

The way the episodes were aired, Injustice For All wasn't exactly episodes 8-9. In fact, it was aired as the 18th and 19th episodes of the season, five stories after where it was initially intended to be broadcasted... for whatever reason. Some people say that it's supposed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the first episode of Batman: the Animated Series. Some say that it's supposed to coincide with the release of a video game. Or something. At the very least, Injustice for All should take place before the Fury two-parter (episodes 14-15 in the original airing order) because that two-parter referenced some of the events that took place here. Since I'm the one making the reviews, I get to decide what the order of the episodes are going to be. Yay!

Anyway, previous episodes -- and indeed, every single episode for the length of the first season other than the aforementioned Fury -- would only star one or two villains, or an army of faceless non-threatening mooks. Injustice for All fixes that by basically being Superfriends done in a more mature tone, basically the Justice League taken to its logical conclusion. What if the bad guys teamed up as well? This was easily my favourite episode as a kid from the first season of the Justice League, and honestly, can you blame me? We've got the full Justice League team -- the first time since the pilot this happened, one of the three stories in season one where the entire team participated fully. The scripting was fantastic, jumping from crisp, well-choreographed action scenes to fun comedic moments to slightly more serious matters. And it's not just the Joker's inclusion -- Batman: TAS's version of Joker that is that perfect blend of a clown and a psychopath, voiced by the legendary Mark Hamill, injects quality and comedy into every scene he's in. Like, literally. But he's not just the only well-written character here. From Batman effortlessly manipulating the likes of Grundy and Cheetah to basically fuck up while guarding him, to Solomon Grundy's simpleminded brutish antics, to Ultra-Humanite clearly in it only for the money and being overly exasperated with Luthor's hammy VENGEANCE, to Luthor just being such an awesome villain with all the best lines and having to double and triple the Injustice Gang's pay...

And let's not get to the action scenes. The League's power set is all too familiar to us by this point, but bring in a bunch of newcomers with their own set of awesome superpowers. Yes, they are pretty basic -- Cheetah is a cat girl, Copperhead is a snake man, Shade can create shadows, Star Sapphire is basically a pink Green Lantern, Ultra-Humanite and Solomon Grundy are physical powerhouses... but still, it is awesome to see all these powers lobbed around. First we see a brief demonstration of the Injustice Gang's various powers as they turn on each other pretty quickly, before they lure the League towards them. I absolutely love how the good guys and bad guys trade fighting partners so effortlessly. One moment Cheetah and Copperhead are ganging up on Batman, and then Flash shows up to knock one of them away, Wonder Woman ties up Cheetah, Batman heads off to take down Luthor, the lynchpin... it's fluid and organic and awesome.

There's a definite sense of them being less competent than the League, with the Injustice Gang only giving the League a good fight when half of them (Superman, Batman, Green Lantern) are present and when the backup team of Hawkgirl, Flash and Wonder Woman shows up it ended up being a near-rout. And it's awesome that this doesn't even cheapen the power factor of some of the villains, because the show makes it clear (without pointing it out too obviously) that the League watching each other's back and being more coordinated than the Injustice Gang is what causes them to succeed much better.

Joker's arrival on the second half of the story actually serves to highlight Luthor's doomed failure. Luthor and the Ultra-Humanite are undoubtedly intelligent individuals, but Luthor basically relies on throwing money around to gain the other supervillains' respect... and when he's borderline insane and shouting abuses and being condescending all the time, well, these aren't his employees, they can walk out any time. The Joker also demonstrates that Luthor, well... he underestimates Batman so much despite the two of them being the most similar among the large cast -- normal men who can do battle with godlike superhumans by simple virtue of intellect and resources. And it actually helps to answer the question as to what Batman brings to the table of the Justice League beyond paying for all the Javelins they blow up every other week... he knows how to play the mind-games. Getting Grundy and Humanite to fight each other, sympathizing with Cheetah and setting her up as the false traitor, offering more money to Ultra-Humanite, making sure Luthor values him too much and keep him as a living prisoner and not hand him to the Joker...

Also, from a meta-standpoint, this is absolutely awesome simply because it brings back two of the most important villains from Superman: The Animated Series and Batman: The Animated Series, Lex Luthor and the Joker respectively. And Joker's back in a style that is more in-line with his Batman: the Animated Series character model, restoring the lips and the expressive eyes after those disappeared in the New Batman Adventures visual revamp. This episode actually helps to put a small tie on the Lex Luthor plot that ran throughout Superman: TAS, because if I remember the show correctly, the last time we saw Luthor was him squirming away from being brought to justice with political manipulations, before Darkseid takes center stage as the main series villain. The slightly extended prologue sequence with Superman finally managing to expose Luthor's crimes -- by getting J'onn to pose as Superman and get Luthor to monologue -- is a classic 'make use of the villain's hubris' moment, and there's just something ironically poetic that Lex Luthor is so prepared in his attempts to take down Superman that the thing that finally foiled him was the fact that the kryptonite gave him, well, cancer, basically.

We then continue to have Luthor as our POV character as he's at the lowest he's ever been in life. He lost to Superman, he's dying from kryptonite poisoning, he's in jail... and none of his money can buy him the treatment. The only thing left is revenge, and Luthor sheds the persona of modern-age business suit untouchable businessman Luthor and embraces being a straight-up bad guy in a suit of armour.

Perhaps it would be more impactful if the group of villains that Luthor gathered had featured one or two familiar faces -- one of the Batman/Flash/Green Lantern villains that has been featured in the earlier TV series would've had a bigger impact, but honestly the way the Injustice Gang was introduced was quite smooth and sleek, and each character has their own power set and a rough two-dimensional personality laid to us in that opening scene. What follows, is, well, the Injustice Gang being beaten up by the Justice League and forced to escape, Batman tracking down the Gang only to be blindsided by the Joker literally deciding to drop in at the last minute, then a half-episode of the Injustice Gang falling apart both due to Luthor's own horrible personality and Batman's subtle machinations... and eventually fall apart when the Justice League assaults them and defeats them in combat, including an engineered double-cross courtesy of the Ultra-Humanite.

For some criticism, well, the episode was a bit too... Batman and Luthor-centric. The Injustice Gang get the best lines and most of the character development, whereas the rest of the League is kind of sidelined. They have lines and a lot of action scenes, but not much development. Which is fine, to be honest, because both Luthor and Batman are important characters themselves to carry the two-parter on their own. And boy, their interactions with each other, and their respective interactions with the Joker... Michael Keaton, Mark Hamill and Clancy Brown just deliver their lines with such gusto that it's no wonder their depictions of Batman, Joker and Lex Luthor have been so entrenched within my psyche as the definitive versions.

That's not to say that the other Leaguers didn't have great moments, mind you. J'onn earnestly trying to console Batman for being a valuable member of the team and that he didn't have to prove himself by pushing himself so hard is a very kind gesture -- which, of course, considering Batman was kind of met with cold ice. Superman also got a nice, hilarious moment where he absolutely fails to put the fear of god onto Copperhead and wondering just how Batman does it... which highlights both Superman's own status as a symbol of hope and justice, and the difference between the two's fighting styles. Oh, and I guess Superman's moments with Luthor -- cutting off his 'you'll never get me' rant in the hospital when he wakes up, and genuinely sounding like he's filled with concern and pity for his old nemesis, asking if there's anything he can do... yeah, boy scout, you keep being super-nice.

Oh, and Hawkgirl continues to elude the censors by making a premature ejaculation joke about how Flash, the fastest man alive, can't get himself a date.

So yeah, not a perfect series of episodes... but damn if it isn't entertaining.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• This episode is the first to feature non-Superman, non-Batman characters from a previous series, namely Lex Luthor and the Joker. Luthor's last appearance in Superman: the Animated Series had him still as a legitimate businessman albeit trying to discredit Superman during the whole Apokolis invasion. The Joker, meanwhile, was chronologically last seen in the Batman: the Animated Series episode 'Mad Love' which saw him tumble into an ambiguous death in a train smokestack... of which he has survived many other 'deaths' before. Notably, Luthor and Joker are the first supporting (non-Batman, non-Superman) characters from the two original series to appear in Justice League, as all throughout the series there's a definite embargo on the sidekick characters, which is why scenes that take place in, say, Metropolis never showed Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen, and scenes that take place in the Batcave do not feature ever-faithful Alfred.
• Luthor mentions Stavros as one of the people he bribed during his motive rant to the J'onn-Superman, who is a minor character from the Batman: the Animated Series episode 'Fires to Olympus' as a government worker that's secretly also working with crime boss Maxie Zeus.
• Lex Luthor in the comics actually also suffered from kryptonite poisoning, which in the comics caused him to undergo a brain-switch into a new, healthy body, which he introduces to the world as Alexander Luthor Jr, a man without the criminal record of his father. It's a nice reversal in the TAS-verse, where kryptonite poisoning instead caused Luthor to shed his businessman persona and go full-out criminal.
• Within the TAS-verse itself, kryptonite poisoning has been alluded ever since "World's Finest", the Batman/Superman crossover movie, where it was mentioned that the previous owners of the kryptonite dragon statue died of radiation poisoning. Luthor's exasperation with the Joker is a reference to their ill-fated team-up during said movie.
• Speaking of Lex Luthor, his purple-and-green suit that he dons while leading the Injustice Gang harkens to his look during the Superfriends cartoon, while his green powered armour harkens to the classic powered armour he uses in many Golden and Silver Age stories. 
• The Injustice Gang is the name of a group of powerful super-villains that is formed to be the 'mirror match' for the Justice League, and its members have rotated in and out numerous times. Each member of the Injustice Gang is the traditional villain of one of the members of the Justice League... though poor Hawkgirl and J'onn don't get any representation from their rogues' gallery. Lex Luthor and Ultra-Humanite are Superman villains, Joker and Copperhead are Batman villains, Solomon Grundy started off as a Green Lantern villain that eventually became way more associated with Batman, Star Sapphire is a Green Lantern villain, Cheetah is a Wonder Woman villain and Shade is a Flash villain.  
• This episode marks the first appearance in the TAS-verse for all the villains that aren't Luthor and the Joker. Quick backgrounds for them, because I so love talking about DC characters.
• Ultra-Humanite: Ultra-Humanite has the distinction of being one of the first, if not the very first, supervillains introduced in DC comics, serving as Superman's nemesis before the conception of Lex Luthor. Ultra-Humanite's origin is briefly alluded -- he is a mad scientist who is paralyzed, and ended up transferring his brain into that of an albino gorilla, giving him monstrous strength in addition to intellect. Ultra-Humanite's love for the classical music, and his more scholarly way of speaking, was original to this cartoon -- because, well, the poor dude was actually kind of phased out of the comics after Luthor was introduced, so much that he sat out several decades' worth of comics. 
• Cheetah: One of Wonder Woman's more iconic villains, there has been several different criminals, with three major bearers of the mantle. This Cheetah, who is transformed into a half-human, half-cheetah hybrid due to a gene splicing experiment as told in the episode, seem to be loosely based on Barbara Minerva, the post-Crisis incarnation of the Cheetah, whose transformation into a half-cheetah hybrid was caused by a magical curse by an African fertility goddess.
• Star Sapphire: (Sapphires are blue, not pink/purple, damn it!) Ahem. The Star Sapphire is a classic enemy of the second Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. Star Sapphire's real identity is Hal Jordan's love interest, Carol Ferris, whose mind was taken over by an alien sapphire given to her by an alien race called the Zamorans. The Sapphire had its own mind (or corrupted Carol's, depending on the writer), and many other successors to the Star Sapphire mantle would rise after Carol was freed from the sapphire. and later stories would expand the Star Sapphires to be one of the various Green Lantern counterparts on the different sides of the colour/emotion spectrum. Star Sapphire's powers are basically similar to Green Lantern's, just pink. While Star Sapphire's origin and identity is never outright stated in the show, the producers intended this to be the Carol Ferris version, who indeed is the most iconic version of the character.
• Solomon Grundy: The quintessential 'brute' villain for DC comics, Solomon Grundy is, well, previously Cyrus Gold in life. Killed during the 1920's in a cursed swamp near what would become Gotham City, the entity known as Solomon Grundy will continue to be reborn from the swamp whenever it is killed, and while it wandered the world it is a very powerful, if simple-minded, brute. Solomon Grundy was initially an enemy of the Golden Age Green Lantern, Alan Scott, before being transplanted into Batman's Rogues' Gallery. 
• The Shade: The Shade, a.k.a. Richard Swift, began his comic-book life as a simple gimmick villain that can manipulate shadows with a cane. He fought both the first and second Flashes, but during the 90's he received a drastic revamp that turned him into a much cooler character with a very rich backstory, reimagining him as someone with magical capabilities and immortality (or longevity) that was born in the 1800's and is involved in the backstories of several DC superheroes, acting as both reluctant supporting character and as an outright antagonist. It'll take a very, very long time to talk about Shade's comic-book story, but suffice to say few C-list villains have such a complex and developed story as Shade does. 
• Copperhead: Known only as 'John Doe', the villain known as Copperhead is... well, just a Batman enemy that committed crime in a snake-suit costume. A deal with the devil Neron later empowered Copperhead and turned him into someone with snake powers. This show's incarnation of the character is based more on the classic, pre-devil-power-upgrade version of the character, but Copperhead himself does have a pretty visible snake tongue multiple times.
• During the final battle, Hawkgirl crashes into statues of the Wonder Twins, the much-derided 'kiddie sidekick' created for the Superfriends cartoon.
• Cheetah was actually slated to die in this episode, albeit gotten rid of off-screen when Solomon Grundy drags her away after her 'treachery' was exposed, but thanks to an animation error that placed her among the criminals arrested near the end of the episode, Cheetah was considered 'spared' and will live on to appear in future episodes. 
• Luthor's "et tu, Humanite" line is a reference to Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. Joker's "you're desth-picable!" line mirrors Looney Tunes' Daffy Duck's catchphrase. Joker's jokes about Bat-Car-Keys and Bat-Breath-Mints is likely a playful nod to the 60's Adam West Batman TV series, that added the Bat- prefix to absolutely every single equipment that Batman uses.