Young Justice S01E09 Review: Mind-Blown

Young Justice, Season 1, Episode 9: Bereft

Well, this episode. It neatly picks up on last episode's foreshadowing of something going on in the Bialyan Desert, but throws us straight into a 'huh? What happened?' bit as M'gann wakes up next to Superboy in the desert, and they have both regressed and lost their memories. It's a memory loss episode as the Team has to learn how to work together all over again, with their egos and memories restored to how they were a couple of months ago, which means Superboy is reduced to a screaming tool and Artemis has no idea why she's in this weird superhero costume.

It's an interesting concept, but one that's not handled that well. On paper the episode is a pretty neat standalone storyline, of course, but I think this is the first Young Justice episode that I didn't really like that much. Objectively it's a decent episode that tells a neat, fresh story, but I don't feel like the positioning of this episode relatively early in the series worked that well, especially when some of our characters like M'gann and Artemis are relative ciphers, and the trio of Robin and Kid Flash already being buddies kind of makes the whole 'work together with strangers that are actually your friends' bit redundant, as does M'gann immediately remembering fragments of them being a team and trying to get everyone on her side, and quickly solving things with her telepathic powers. (Aqualad sits the episode out, being unconscious for most of it). It's also a miracle how Kid Flash and Artemis survived Superboy's rampage without any broken bones for no real reason.

It's a bit weird that the main villain of the episode, Psimon, ends up just wiping out the Team's memories instead of mind-controlling them or killing them outright, and it's honestly very oddly handled overall. The action sccenes are decent enough, but the whole concept of the memory loss storyline is rather slipshod in execution in my opinion.

One of the things that is intriguing in this episode is the mention of the Light having a 'partner' with access to a Boom Tube, but that's a cliffhanger that won't be explored until way, way later down the line. More relevantly is Artemis's angry reaction that this is probably another test from her father (what father drops his own teenage daughter in a random desert, and changes her clothes into a belly-revealing costume?) which Wally tries to probe into, but we don't get much from it. Artemis's backstory is definitely interesting, but the vague hints on this front doesn't really add that much to the episode.

There is, of course, a brief progression of M'gann and Superboy's romance, and the introduction of the enigmatic sphere, and M'gann shows that she's an insanely powerful telepath that beats down Psimon in a telepathic battle, but otherwise it's pretty much a filler episode. I suppose M'gann is supposed to be the main character? We don't really learn that much in terms of new things about her, and Psimon is a pretty dry villain and no amount of 'Psimon says' catchphrase can make him that interesting... though the psychic storm action scenes are pretty cool.

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Miss Martian, Superboy, Robin, Batman, Kid Flash, Artemis, Aqualad
• Villains: Psimon, Queen Bee, the Light's council

DC Easter Eggs Corner: 

• Psimon, a.k.a. dr Simon Jones, is a scientist who worked on extradimensional travel when he accidentally opened a portal to hell, and was transformed by the demon Trigon into a powerful psychic with his iconic visible-brain appearance. Psimon is most closely associated with being one of the most powerful member of the Fearsome Five, a group of villains who fought the Teen Titans, before deposing Dr. Light and acting as the leader of the group. 
• Queen Bee is the name of various supervillains in DC comics, with most versions being various kinds of aliens that command a swarm of robotic or alien bees. This one is based on the second Queen Bee, the human dictator of the nation of Bialya who clashed several times with the Justice League Europe and Justice League International. This Queen Bee's real name is never named. 
• Bialya is a fictional country in the Middle East, being a country involved in Captain Atom and Justice League International stories. The first Blue Beetle, Dan Garrett, also discovered the scarab that gave him his powers in Bialya as well.