Justice League Unlimited, Season 3, Episode 9: Grudge Match
It is so, so welcome to have Question, Black Canary and Huntress back in an episode again. Also, Hawkgirl and Vixen. This is an episode filled with relative callbacks to previous episodes, both relationship wise (the rivalry between Hawkgirl and Vixen, Question and Huntress's relationship, Canary and Huntress's old rivalry) and setting wise (Roulette returns!), one that once more demonstrates that you can make a story about girl power without going into ham-fisted strawman feminist rants. Live action Supergirl, take note. For the superhero genre, the depiction of female characters have been... a long and hard road. Sure, it's been a lot better now, in no small part thanks to the internet having a trigger-finger at going batshit angry at any depiction of women that's stereotypical, but perhaps that's a necessary evil. And even then, it's not quite enough -- the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a decade-old juggernaut, but even their big-name female character, Black Widow, still isn't good enough to get a movie for herself, and Captain Marvel keeps getting pushed back and back even more.
But looking back on the however many decades have passed since superheroes were introduced to children via old comics with simplistic dialogue, to this cartoon released in 2004, and now, as of the time that I'm writing this review, it's 2017 and the first real good female superhero movie has finally graced the silver screen. It's a long and hard path to get there, where back then your typical women are the likes of Lois Lane and Julie Madison alternate between being eye candy, love interests, damsels in distresses... and on their worst, like poor Katma Tui or Kyle's girlfriend, they get killed off to have our male heroes punch the air and declare grief-fueled vengeance. Even Wonder Woman, a rarity among the male-filled superheroes of that time, was reduced to a secretary in the early pages of the Justice Society, and had the embarrassingly sexist weakness of losing all her powers if bound by a man. Yes, things eventually got out of that peahen and strong female characters began to rise up and define themselves, but it's still an uphill battle.
Which is where Justice League shined. Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl are amazing characters, Shayera Hol in particular having one of the most solid story arcs throughout the five season run of the show. But they're not content with just having their two primary female leads be strong characters, and when the cast expansion happened in Unlimited, female characters both old and new get a chance to shine. Supergirl, Huntress, Black Canary, Galatea... the show isn't afraid of putting them in important roles. Important action roles, at that. And I cannot believe how amazing the portrayal of women are in an episode that has scantily-clothed women fight in a cage fight tournament, which sounds like someone's weird fetish fantasy. Yes, there's a degree of fanservice in all this, but that doesn't take away from the fact that all the women involved are powerful warriors in their own right who just happen to be wearing slightly more revealing clothing.
But it definitely delivers. Yes, some of the women are dressed in questionable scantily clad costumes, but the fights are still amazingly crafted and animated, with the great concept that Roulette has mind-controlled some of our female heroes, and the different battle styles that a brawler like Black Canary has, or the more feral, primal animal-based Vixen, or the walking juggernaut that is Wonder Woman, is amazingly done. Mind you, the setup to get there is a bit suspect. If Roulette, and by extension, the Legion of Doom, has fucking Wonder Woman under her control, you'd think that they would do something more productive other than forcing them to fight in a cage fight to earn money from the betting viewers. And if it's money you want you really could be doing something more productive with that, surely?
But after we get past that bit of ridiculousness (and Luthor mocks Grodd for 'turn men into apes' plan?), Roulette sets it up in a rather neat way. We know the Legion has been asking for cuts from their members, and we know that Luthor's main goal is to revive his buddy Brainiac, so Roulette and Tala getting angry at each other gives Roulette an idea -- all-female fight!
This leads to Huntress, who's now independent since her estrangement from the league last season, seeing Black Canary struggling to fight a couple of random pickpockets, and after a brief discussion with the Question, Huntress decides to go off an investigate on her own, finding Canary participating in a cage fight against another female Leaguer, Fire. Which leads to the first of many awesome superhero fighting scenes. It helps, mind you, that Fire's abilities is just so damn well-animated despite it just being her shooting green fire.
Huntress asks Canary what the meaning of this is, and I love how clever the show quickly acknowledges that Huntress doesn't just angrily beat Canary up without questioning her. Is this a sting operation? Is she being blackmailed? Turns out mind-control is the name of the game, and while Huntress manages to break Canary out of her thrall, Roulette's right-hand-man, Sonar, shows up to whack them and incorporate the two into Roulette's latest match.
Again, there's the question as to why Roulette doesn't try to mind-control the two, but I guess Luthor gave her only so many mind-control chips? They fight, as Huntress and Black Canary have to tag-team against Vixen and Shayera. Again, the show does very well at portraying the different fighting styles. Obviously Vixen and Shayera use their powers to their advantage, with Vixen jumping around like an angry animal, while Shayera uses her 'flying charging mace-to-the-face' fighting style. But even Canary and Huntress, the two 'normal' people in the episode, are once more contrasted. Huntress's fighting style is less acrobatic, far more judo and aikido-esque as she makes use of her opponent's faster momentum to whack them around. Canary is far more violent, charging in and using high kicks to barrage her opponents.
And as much as I question the long-term validity of this Metabrawl model as something Roulette is doing to get money, god damn if it isn't really entertaining. And then the score and Roulette's hammy announcement picks up and Wonder Woman is unleashed upon the four other leaguers, and just like Evil Flash last episode, Evil Wonder Woman is a walking force of nature. The 'we are soooo fucked' face on the faces of Canary and her friends is amazing to behold, and she just absolutely destroys everything in her path. Good thing she can be shut down by shutting off the same mind-control device, or Hawkgirl's probably dead in that fight.
Canary and Huntress end up being the ones that take down Roulette and Sonar, and it's amazing to see that Roulette can pull off a pretty cool action scene on her own. Sonar, that loser, ends up losing in a scream-to-scream fight against Black Canary. The villains are down, and that final scene where Canary and Huntress decide to have one last match is as awesomely shown as that first Green Arrow vs Flash crossover -- two powerful characters we've grown and love, who's just mucking around with each other and sparring just for the hell of it.
Add that to the amazing scripting in the episode, and it's easily one that's very fun to watch once you get over the ridiculousness of Roulette's master plan. And the Question might have only shown up for like two minutes, but he makes the most of it. Between his absolutely shitty attempts at phone sex ("What are you wearing?" "Blue overcoat. Fedora." "You really stink at this." -beat- "Orange... socks?") and the sheer ridiculousness that they snuck in a phone sex joke into a cartoon, to Question suddenly interrupting Huntress's introdump about Canary with the hilarious line of "Ah ha! 32 flavours, as I suspected!" because Baskin Robins is totally part of some giant conspiracy, to Shayera's deadpan lines when she's freed of the mind control, to the pants-shittingly hilarious lines that everyone has when Wonder Woman enters the field, the episode's just so fun and action-packed that I can overlook its shortcomings.
Justice League Roll Call:
- Speaking Superheroes: Black Canary, Huntress, Question, Fire, Vixen, Hawkgirl, Wonder Woman
- Non-Speaking Superheroes: NIGHTWING!
- Speaking Supervillains: Roulette, Lex Luthor, Tala, Brainiac, Sonar
- Non-Speaking Supervillains: Shatterfist, Hellhound
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- The events of "Double Date", where the Question and Huntress fought Black Canary and Green Arrow, as well as Huntress's expulsion from the League in that episode, are brought up by various characters in this episode. Shayera and Vixen also take note of their brief passive-aggressive quarrel in "Hunter's Moon" and how they have gotten along since then. Black Canary also notes of how she last tangled with Roulette's underground arena in "The Cat and the Canary".
- The team-up of Black Canary and Huntress is an allusion to their role in the then-running Birds of Prey series, a team of female superheroes that primarily stars Huntress, Black Canary and Oracle (a.k.a. Barbara Gordon/the first Batgirl).
- Nightwing! The city that Huntress and Canary investigates is explicitly called Bludhaven, which, in the comics, is where Nightwing operated out of in his solo miniseries after he quit the Teen Titans. In the DCAU canon, Nightwing showed up after the ambiguous timeskip between Batman: the Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures and the show keeps it relatively ambiguous what Nightwing has been doing, although hints at a superheroing career outside of Gotham City. As always, the Batman Embargo has kept all Batman-related characters other than Batman himself from appearing in Justice League Unlimited, so it's a neat bit for them to sneak Nightwing in, mullet and all.
- Sonar, a.k.a. Bito Wladon, is seriously one of the more pathetic villains I've seen in DC comics lore. He's nominally a Green Lantern enemy, and he waves around a magic tuning fork that absorbs and unleashes sound waves, whose big motivation for his crimes is to make his small country of Modora be famous in the media. He would later have his technology stolen by a second villain called Sonar who wears a skintight orange-and-blue outfit under a lab coat.
- The two pathetic fighters in Roulette's first brawl are Hellhound & Shatterfist. Hellhound is a Catwoman antagonist, who trained under the same martial arts master as Selina did and adopted the Hellhound mantle as a silly 'dog-beats-cat' metaphor. We briefly saw Shatterfist before in "Clash" as a member of the Cadre, a supervillain team that Batman and Superman didn't even care enough to acknowledge properly as they discuss Captain Marvel while beating them up.
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