Justice League Unlimited S03E02 Review: Reincarnated Egyptian Alien Stalker

Justice League Unlimited, Season 3, Episode 2: Shadow of the Hawk

So one of the more contentious decisions that people argued was the usage of the relatively minor character Hawkgirl, who in the source material was a bland sidekick at best and a cliched love interest at worst. Hawkman was the source character. Well, four seasons later, and DCAU's Shayera Hol and her journey through betrayal, soul-searching and redemption has definitely made her mark as one of the most rounded-out characters in all of DC lore from what's essentially a gender-flipped Hawkman.


Of course, by using the 'alien cop' backstory, we did cut off a lot of the rather convoluted lore about reincarnation, Egyptian pharaohs and star-crossed lovers that was intrinsic to Hawkman's backstory. Those of you more familiar with the relatively recent live-action Legends of Tomorrow would be more familiar to the more classic 'reincarnation Egyptian lovers' backstory, but to me, Hawkgirl will always be a badass alien cop first and this convoluted reincarnation soup second. Still, was there a way to believably introduce a more traditional Hawkman into the setting, especially with Hro Talak kind of standing in as an evil version of the space-cop-Hawkman?

Well, this episode manages to do that, in a very, very believable way, which honestly makes me dislike Legends of Tomorrow's handling of their version of Hawkgirl a lot more now after watching this episode. But that's a discussion for another day.

See, one of my favourite parts of this episode is that how women tends to be stereotypically cast as the one who's so love-blind about destiny and soulmates. It's as much an ingrained trope in the Western culture as tropes of a brave knight in shining armour saving the princess from her evil oppressors. This episode introduces Hawkman, who brings with him a huge baggage of being Shayera's reincarnated lover, but instead of being a woman who is pursuing true love and destiny, Shayera, as the central emotional lead in all this, is rebelling against these romantic ideals. She refuses to let herself be defined by her relationship to a man, especially one who literally pops up and claims to be her true love reincarnated, when literally two or three days ago she doesn't even know this 'Carter Hall' bloke even existed.

The fact that Carter Hall is portrayed both sympathetically -- he's clearly a nice, if slightly over-enthusiastic dude -- but at the same time showing creepy stalker tendencies that should cause any but the most romantically-desperate of women to think twice is a great move, as well. Hawkman is brought in without really impacting or defining the already well-defined version of Shayera in the DCAU, and while Shayera doesn't deny the slight bit of attraction she feels towards Carter (hell, she apparently even sleeps with him based on context clues!) -- especially before learning of the weird-ass reincarnation thing -- she's also not willing to accept the whole 'we are destined to be together!' shtick. Carter, on the other hand, wants something more than sex -- emotional commitment. And in a very well-written buckling of traditional romantic dynamics, that is exactly what Shayera doesn't need or want right now, especially not with, what to her is a glorified one-night stand.

Quite hilariously, a nice detail that Batman discovered is that Carter Hall was banned from JLA internet forums for flaming Shayera haters.

Throw John Stewart, Shayera's past lover, into all this -- and John's own conflict about having moved on from Shayera and being in a relationship with Vixen, yet at the same time troubled with his own visions of 'destiny' that he saw his and Shayera's son, Warhawk, in the future... and John can't deny lingering affections for Shayera, if his reaction to seeing Shayera in a pretty dress is anything to go by. But John isn't a douche, and he's not just going to drop the good thing he has going on with Vixen just because of going into a possible future one time... and besides, what if Shayera doesn't want to hook back up? John is feeling all sorts of protectiveness and jealousy towards his old girlfriend and it's all confusing to the poor man.

The episode doesn't really give any definite conclusion, and it's fine -- emotional relationship shakeups take time, and I for one am glad that even if Shayera ends up being paired with Carter in the end (she doesn't) it's not done in one episode randomly.

The rest of the episode has Carter, Shayera and Batman go into an Egyptian tomb. Batman plays the cynical brother to Shayera throughout the entire episode, being the devil on her shoulder that reminds her to keep her head on straight and not to be confused with all this nonsense about reincarnation and all that jazz. Batman's been shadowing Shayera throughout her journey in investigating this Carter Hall fellow, out of sight and trusting Shayera to handle herself, but ready to show up and punch Carter should he turn out to be, well, a supervillain.

There are a lot of great explanations as to why Carter's doing what he's doing. One is that, well, the reincarnation story is true. The other, that Shayera and Batman leans towards, is that the Thanagarian Absorbacon that the ancient Thanagarian pharaohs Chay-Ara and Katar, malfunctioned and imprinted Katar Hal's memories into Carter Hall's mind. The idea that the original pharaohs that were reincarnated were Thanagarians in the first place was actually a very inspired move on the DCAU team's part -- I always thought it was absolutely weird for a pair of Egyptian rulers to randomly reincarnate as winged aliens half a galaxy away.

One thing that didn't really work out that well for me is Shadow Thief, who's... just kind of there. Yes, he gets a fair bit more to him later on in a follow-up episode, but the Thief's still a bit bland as far as villains go. The action scenes -- in the gorgeous interior of the pyramid, as well as the JLA fighting the Extremists earlier in the episode, is just amazing.

Still, it was a very masterful episode, dealing very well with the messiness of human emotion and the convoluted Hawkgirl/Hawkman backstory without feeling like a stupid 'because destiny says so' the way Legends of Tomorrow did. It opens the way for John/Shayera or Carter/Shayera to happen organically, and it's easily one of the better-written episodes of the season. It's an episode that I actually missed as a kid, so it was a huge, huge treat to watch this for the first time.

Justice League Roll Call:

• Speaking Superheroes: Batman, Hawkgirl, Hawkman, Green Lantern
• Non-Speaking Superheroes: Vixen, Elongated Man, Superman
• Speaking Superillains: Shadow Thief, Dreamslayer
• Non-Speaking Supervillains: Lord Havok, Gorgon, Tracer, Khunds, The Adversary, Giganta

DC Easter Egg Corner:

• Hawkman, a.k.a. Carter Hall, a.k.a. Katar Hol... has had... a very... convoluted backstory, to put it kindly. He (and his lover, Shayera Hol/Shiera Hall) is a reincarnated Egyptian pharaoh that stumbled upon Thanagarian metal that allowed him to fly, or he's a space cop that came to Earth. The post-Crisis stories tried to merge both origin stories, adding more and more layers that convoluted Hawkman and Hawkwoman's story even more. The DCAU version of Hawkgirl tends to lean towards the Silver Age origin story, being a simple space cop, but the Hawkman here leans towards the Golden Age origin story, albeit with the twist that the original Khufu and Chay-Ara were Thanagarians that were deitified by the ancient Egyptians.
• Shayera being unaware of all this, and being suddenly approached by a Hawkman that insists that they were reincarnated lovers and that Shayera's memories just haven't returned, is very similar to the post-Crisis version of Hawkgirl, Kendra Saunders, from the 90's JSA comics.
• Hawkman's original name, Joseph Gardner, is possibly a reference to Gardner Fox and Joseph "Joe" Kubert, who were the writers that co-created Hawkman. 
• The Shadow Thief is a classic Hawkman enemy. While here his origin story is yet to be revealed, in the comics, Shadow Thief is Carl Sands, a thief who was granted the power to turn into a shadow by an interdimensional alien.
• The Extremists, here consisting of Tracer, Dreamslayer, Lord Havok and Gorgon, are a team of supervillains that, in the comics, battled Justice League Europe. They hail from the interdimensional world of Angor, which was destroyed due to a nuclear holocaust. The four that appeared here are based on the original team of Extremists. In a bit of a meta-joke, the Extremists are thinly-veiled expies of Marvel comics villains, and in their original debut, the Justice League was assisted by the Champions of Angor, themselves thinly-veiled homages to Marvel superheroes. 
• Lord Havok, the robot dude, is a homage to Doctor Doom.
• Dreamslayer, the caped wizard with a head of fire, is based on Dormammu.
• Gorgon, the fat blob with tentacles, is based on Doctor Octopus.
• Tracer, the feral-looking man, is based on Sabertooth.
• The villains seen in the montage of photographs that show that Carter Hall has been stalking Shayera are, of course, all featuring actual DC villains. In addition to Giganta, we have:
• Adversary, the dude with the black-orange costume, is a minor Superman enemy.
• Khunds, which is a race of warlike aliens that tend to battle the Legion of Super-Heroes.
• In a nice bit of continuity, Korschian Oysters are mentioned as Shayera's favourite food, which was what Hro Talak brought for Shayera in 'Starcrossed'.