Justice League Unlimited S02E04 Review: The Expendables

Justice League Unlimited, Season 2, Episode 4: Task Force X

Man, this was the episode that got me to love Suicide Squad. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the live-action movie, but rewatching this episode really got me sad over how changed the Squad was from its base roots into, well, what's basically a superhero team made up of supervillains. See, in the movie, the Squad is just a bunch of supervillains drafted by Amanda Waller to become a deterrent against superheroes, as well as to do their dirty jobs... but instead of doing actually villainous things like assassination or, in this case, stealing a superweapon from the Justice League, all they did in the movie was, well, fight scarier bad guys, with a good chunk of them talking about loyalty and codes of honour. Of course, the movie had to deal with a lot of real-life problems including massive revisions to the script and the lack of a pre-established superhero presence and all that jazz, but let's not talk about the live action movie.

Let's talk about the Justice League Unlimited adaptation of the Suicide Squad, or as it's referred to here, Task Force X. Honestly I'm a bit sad that we didn't get a spin-off of Task Force X, but I guess that's a bit too tough to adapt for a children's show without giving the villains a serious dosage of adaptational heroism. This episode is easily one of the strongest episodes in the entirety of the DCAU, and following after the very excellent "Doomsday Sanction", it's a pretty impressive feat.

I've always been fascinated with episodes that highlight the villains of a story, showing what life looks on the other side of the morality line, and generally giving these down-beaten bad guys a chance to shine. A lot of DCAU episodes before have been very memorable because they starred villains, and here, it's the Suicide Squad that gets the spotlight as the episode centers around them being forcibly gang-pressed to do Cadmus's dirty work, to break into the Justice League Watchtower and steal a particular cargo. There's a definite heist movie vibe to it all, and breaking into the Watchtower, the base of the good guys, the setting of literally every episode in this series, is basically Mission Impossible. It's a bit hard who to root for because the earlier parts of the episode lets us spend so much time with the members of the Squad, that seeing them fight a bunch of B-lister Justice Leaguers who we barely know is just a very fun bit of 'who to root for?'

Also, I finally get to see Vigilante and Shining Knight actually team up and fight some bad guys! Yay!

Anyway, the episode has Deadshot as the de facto main character of the Squad, which is honestly what happens with most incarnations of Suicide Squad adaptations (not just the live-action movie, but also the version that popped up in Arrow, as well as the animated movie Assault on Arkham). As Deadshot is escorted to his execution, he is given the chance to swap out his death penalty with a five-year government service contract. It's too good a deal, and Deadshot asks what the catch is. Military colonel Rick Flagg shows up, telling Deadshot that, well, he's basically a pawn. His last meal has been laced with explosive nanites that will blow up his head at the slightest hint of insubordination, and Deadshot is brought to meet the other three members of their Suicide Squad Task Force X: Captain Boomerang, Plastique and Clock King.

While it might be more ideal to use more older villains to give this episode more of a 'now the bad guys are good!' vibe, the episode does keep a nice balance of having half the team be older characters -- Deadshot and Clock King might not be fully-developed three-dimensional characters before, but the audience is familiar with them. Especially Deadshot, who is a bit of a recurring enemy in Justice League. Captain Boomerang makes his personality as an abrasive Australian jackass clear from the get-go, Rick Flagg makes his no-nonsense military man stance also clear, and Plastique's kind of an everywoman, but at the same time there's a very well-done bit of flirting and sexual tension between her and Deadshot.

With Clock King acting as the big, emotionless planner in the background, telling the members of the Task Force where to go in exactly how many seconds, the four members on the field -- Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, Plastique and Rick Flagg -- disguise themselves as one of the many bridge bunnies and faceless engineers that work abroad the Watchtower that we've seen so many times before. There's instant repertoire between the cast. Deadshot flirts with Plastique, Deadshot is pissed off at Captain Boomerang's general unprofessional-ness, and Deadshot butts heads with Rick Flagg because, y'know, he's the holier-than-thou military dude.

Deadshot's clearly meant to appeal to the audience. He's a smooth talker, he's a smarmy ass who's not worried most of the time, he makes a bunch of hilarious double entrende jokes, and he's got these cool wrist gun-gauntlets, and he's just absolutely chill about everything. ("Always did wanna die for my country.") He mocks Colonel Flagg's name (I would, too), and he doesn't lose his cool even when he's trapped in an elevator ride with Green Lantern, even rubbing the poor space cop by intentionally asking for Hawkgirl's signature. Deadshot plays off his three co-stars very well as they take the ride up to the Watchtower and attempts to sabotage the power core in order to create a diversion to steal Ares' Annihilator armour, and it's just a thrill to watch.

Captain Boomerang doesn't disappoint either, getting a lot of the episode's best lines, with a particular moment of hilarity being him nearly blowing their cover by setting off the metal detector with freaking 75 cents. "75 cents is 75 cents! I'm supposed to throw away money?" It's not shown on-screen, but the simply exchange of dialogue between him and Plastique is hilarious. Plastique is fun, too, she just doesn't get quite as many memorable lines as Boomer or Deadshot. Flagg is... a huge asshole, and I still hate him, but I've always hated Rick Flagg wherever he shows up. So.

The visuals in this episode are pretty spectacular too, most impressively the little pan-around when the Squad enters the Watchtower. We generally get shots from high railings to see the people gathered in the huge bays of the Watchtower, but here we get to see it from the perspective of one of the little bridge bunnies, as we see how truly large the scope of the Watchtower is, and how out of their league Task Force X would be if they actually had to fight everyone present. Plastique's the only one among them with powers, and honestly, creating explosions isn't quite dangerous enough to even faze non-powered superheroes like Green Arrow or Batman, let alone if every single superhero there pays attention to the four of them.

There's a very cool, well-portrayed sense of infiltration as the Task Force makes its way through the Watchtower. From the elevator ride with Green Lantern, to Captain Atom suddenly barring their path -- and subsequently 'covering their escape' from the unstable reactor, to the actual confrontation with Vigilante, Shining Knight and Atom Smasher... the episode is pretty awesome. The fight didn't last all that long, but between Atom Smasher expanding into his gigantic size to fight the Annihilator (which is a serious, well-needed power boost for the Suicide Squad) to Deadshot, Vigilante, Shining Knight, Plastique and Captain Boomerang doing battle with their respective weapons, it's a very fun little action scene that made me so happy.

And as if all of the Suicide Squad goodness isn't awesome enough, the greatest moment of my personal fangasm was when the Squad runs towards the teleporter, apparently home free... and then who else to bar their way but the Martian Manhunter? "It's only one guy", the Squad claims, but J'onn unleashing the full extent of his powers, going from being the guy standing at the bridge and giving orders and being the shapeshifting powerhouse that he is is just amazing.

“Ask yourselves... is being in here with me what you truly desire?” That is maybe one of the most badass lines ever spoken in a superhero cartoon. J'onn absolutely outguns the Suicide Squad, and it's not even fair. J'onn is a super-strong alien that can phase through bullets, shapeshift into a giant martian dragon martian monstrosity (holy mother of fuck that is badass), and he literally takes down the entire team in less than a minute, phasing through bullets and explosions, shoving his hand through Deadshot, changing into a dragon to take Plastique out, and throws Captain Boomerang to take out Rick Flagg. Even when the Annihilator charges and rips J'onn into two pieces, he's merely incapacitated for a while, and eventually takes out the Annihilator. The only way the Squad manages to bypass J'onn was with the threat of killing the unconscious Atom Smasher.

J'onn J'onzz is easily one of my favourite, if not my favourite, DC comics character, and it is such a rarity seeing him used to his maximum potential here.

And a very well-told scene that exemplifies how Suicide Squad is a bunch of villains forced into heroism? Their loyalty is mostly nonexistent. As Plastique is about to join her retreating Squad-mates, she gets incapacitated by Captain Atom. Deadshot, despite the camaraderie built up among him and Plastique throughout the episode, uses this chance to shoot one of Plastique's bomb, allowing enough distraction for the rest of the Squad to escape with their prize. Plastique's fate is ambiguous, but considering she's nowhere as durable as J'onn or Captain Atom, and she's not the person being interrogated at the end of the episode, it's likely that she kicked the bucket at that scene.

No, it's a far cry from the movie adaptation, or the Arrow adaptation, or the direct-to-DVD cartoon, where it's Waller that blows up insubordinate Suicide Squad members. This time, it's Deadshot, charming rogue Deadshot, that shows that despite it all, he's still a villain, and he's got a mission to complete. It's a bit surprising that it's Deadshot that makes the treacherous shot and not Captain Boomerang, which makes him suddenly so much more complex as a character. While the Suicide Squad later is revealed to have to work for Cadmus and the government for five more years... the Justice League has their own morally ambiguous conversation.

J'onn J'onzz, who's been absolutely and gloriously scary this episode, notes how they lost against this group of infiltrators, and in a discussion with Green Lantern about what to do with the random support staff that betrayed them, J'onn actually suggests that they fucking wipe the guy's memory. It's the whole plotline of the comic book storyline 'Identity Crisis'. How valuable is the superhero community's secret that you go around wiping the memories and perverting the minds of other people who discovered it? This is a very far cry from the J'onn J'onzz of Justice League, where he wouldn't even dream about reading the minds of people who haven't allowed him in, showing just how jaded J'onn has became. The past three episodes portray this very well, showing how J'onn is willing to let Oberon die just to prevent Apokolips from becoming a threat, and later supporting the decision to Phantom Zone Doomsday. And while he is still undoubtedly heroic, without friends like Flash and Green Lantern to bring J'onn back to humanity, it's only a matter of time until J'onn devolves into his opposite counterpart in this episode, the Clock King -- someone who's truly emotionless, cares nothing for the rest of his team and is only obsessed with doing his job with utmost precision.

Justice League Suicide Squad Roll Call:

• Major Villains: Deadshot, Rick Flagg, Captain Boomerang, Clock King, Plastique, Amanda Waller, Tala
• Major Superhero Roles: Captain Atom, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Atom Smasher, Shining Knight, Vigilante
• Non-Speaking Cameos: Stargirl, Vibe, Gypsy

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Suicide Squad is a government-sanctioned team of supervillains forced to do the government's dirty work. Here they are referred to by their alternate codename in the comics because 'suicide' is not a word that's allowed to be spoken in a children's cartoon. Among the members featured here, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, Rick Flagg and Amanda Waller are all members of the Squad's 80's incarnation, while Clock King and Plastique would be members in future incarnations of the team.
• Deadshot: We've talked about Deadshot/Floyd Lawton before when he first appeared in the Justice League episode The Enemy Below. 
• Rick Flagg Jr: Richard Flagg Jr (sometimes Flag) in the comics serves mostly the same role as he does here, as the Suicide Squad's 'warden', so to speak. Son of Richard Flagg Sr, who was a member of a World War II iteration of the Suicide Squad (which did not feature supervillains). He's just a soldier that's not happy to be working with convicts. 
• Captain Boomerang, a.k.a. George "Digger" Harkness: Captain Boomerang is a classic Flash villain, a petty crook and a member of the Rogues, who does battle against the Flash with, you guessed it, boomerangs. Captain Boomerang's treachery and cowardice even among the Rogues is legendary, and he was indeed one of the more iconic members of the first iteration of the Suicide Squad, often butting heads with the more professional members of the squad. Captain Boomerang actually made a brief cameo in the Justice League episode 'Eclipsed' as a villain beaten by Flash in commercials.
• Clock King, a.k.a. Temple Fugate: Making a return from Batman: The Animated Series, Clock King is a master of efficiency, able to calculate and strategize everything to the second to outwit his opponents. Later in Batman: TAS he would gain a device that actually gave him time-manipulating powers, but that was seemingly destroyed. 
• Plastique, a.k.a. Bette Sans Souci: Plastique is an enemy of Firestorm and Captain Atom, who was engineered to be able to create explosions by touch. After her stint in the Suicide Squad, in the comics she eventually settled down and married Captain Atom. 
• In a rather hilarious detail, Deadshot smuggles his arm-cannons in Lightspeed Energy Bars, which was the brand of energy bars that Flash was promoting in the episode 'Eclipsed'.
• The Annihilator weapon first appeared in the episode 'Hawk and Dove'. Other objects in the League's secure vault includes Grodd's mind-control helmet, a Gorilla City hoverbike, Lex Luthor's battle suit, a bunch of Thanagarian weapons and Luthor's power disruptor used to take down the Justice Lords.... and quite randomly,Hellboy's right hand. 
• A small personal victory for myself, where finally, after three and a half seasons, J'onn J'onzz's moniker as the Martian Manhunter is finally spoken on-screen.
• Belle Reve Penitentiary is a fictional prison featured multiple times in DC comics, and is very much associated with the Suicide Squad, being used as one of the facilities Waller uses to impound Suicide Squad members.