Young Justice S02E05 Review: Girls Night Out

Young Justice: Invasion, Episode 5: Beneath

Again, it's an episode that's mostly split between two storylines. In the main action story, Nightwing sends an all-girl squad to go to Bialya, a location we've visited multiple times in the first season. While Nightwing justifies the all-female squad by noting that they're immune to Queen Bee's pheromones, Batgirl makes a hilarious crack about how Nightwing would never have to justify an all-male squad., causing the team leader to get intensely flustered and sign off. That was actually funny. The Bialyan storyline has a distinct focus on one of our newer members, Wonder Girl, but also has a great tie-in to the Blue Beetle storyline. Or rather, Jaime Reyes's story, because his spotlight screentime in this episode is devoted to his civilian life as he tries to figure out his friend's disappearance -- the audience ends up realizing that Tye Longshadow's disappearance is actually tied to the strange human trafficking ring that the Light agents are doing, which, in turn, is also tied to the mysterious "Partner".

By and by, while it is somewhat tempting to dismiss all of these "oh, it's connected to the enigmatic Partner" end-of-episode revelations as being similar to the "it's all connected to the Light!" bits from season one, I felt that Invasion's approach and seeding out the various plotlines connected to the Partner from the frame-job with the League, the Black Manta alliance, and now the human trafficking, are all handled a lot better with more immediate follow-up in subsequent episodes.

Let's talk about the superhero side of things first, because sometimes I forget that the animation quality of Young Justice can easily rival some of the better DC animated movies. The fight scenes aren't that many, but the huge four-on-five battle we get between Alpha Squad and the "Fearsome Five" is pretty awesome, with lots of great moments especially when Mammoth and Devastation tries to stop a runaway plane. As always, though, the focus of the episode is on characterization.

Wonder Girl is energetic and bubbly, building up on the brief scenes that we've seen her in the previous four episodes. She's also arguably the strongest member of the four ladies, but in this stealth mission it's to her detriment as Miss Martian sidelines Wonder Girl. While no one outright says it, it's heavily implied that Wonder Girl is very new to this whole superhero business. Devastation doesn't recognize her. Both Miss Martian and Batgirl are very professional, and Bumblebee is extremely confident, and all of the three end up being a neat contrast to Wonder Girl's "oh crap, what do I do?" mentality when she spies Psimon and his minions arrive. There's a neat continuity nod, too, when Nightwing and M'gann establish earlier that Psimon is still comatose... only to find out that, of course, comic book rules still exist even with Young Justice's higher body count.

Wonder Girl's huge character moment (which I felt could've been expanded a bit more) is that it is her screw-up that ends up alerting the villains to the superheroes' presence, but it doesn't last that long as M'gann quickly gives her a pep talk about how all missions always have a touch of unpredictability to them.

We get a fun bit of cat and mouse as the superheroes and supervillains try to get ahead of each other, and we also learn quickly that the villains are actually kidnapping children and placing them in stasis pods for some reason. Batgirl gets captured briefly and thrown into one of these pods, but of course the others rescue her, beat down Psimon and his goons, and then save the plane full of kidnapped children. It's an exciting superhero team-up scene for sure, with lots of neat one-liners from a lot of the characters present. It's also worth noting that despite the obvious rivalry between M'gann and Psimon, M'gann doesn't actually lobotomize Psimon at all, showing that she hasn't quite gone full-on moral-less Vigilante mode just yet. Or maybe she just doesn't want to lobotomize people around her younger charges.

Of course, the villains actually have a second batch of kids to present to their 'Partner', this batch with Tye Longshadow among them. Oops!

Speaking of Tye Longshadow, he's sort of the focus of Jaime Reyes' story in this episode. And unlike previous episodes, since Jaime's scenes are 100% seen from his point of view, in this episode we actually hear the Scarab talk a lot more. "Eliminate him!" The Scarab screams at every single opportunity, whether it's dealing with Tye's slightly-dementic grandfather, or dealing with a locked shed, or dealing with Tye's abusive stepfather, the Scarab's answer is invariably high-ordinance giant cannons, and it's gloriously fun as the Scarab acts as this overzealous guardian angel.

If it's not already clear that the Blue Beetle's going to be the huge focus among the new faces of this season, this episode certainly seals the deal. When Jaime's buddy Tye Longshadow calls him about leaving town and subsequently disappears when he gets kidnapped by mysterious parties, Jaime ends up going onto an investigation storyline as he goes around and talks to Tye's mother and her boyfriend Maurice. Tye has clearly butted heads with Maurice a lot of times before, and the episode gives an eerily realistic portrayal of a meek, subservient spouse in Tye's mom who keeps trying to justify that Maurice "has his good days" and clearly afraid to do anything to upset her boyfriend.

Yes, Jaime's story ends up leading nowhere as all the talk from Tye's grandfather Holling about how Maurice is jealous and wants to be tribe chief ends up being a red herring. The worst that Maurice does isn't beating up or killing his girlfriend's son, but merely pirating DVD's and video games. Jaime ends the episode no closer to finding where Tye Lonsghadow has disappeared beyond crossing off a suspect, but the episode's focus is more to put Jaime Reyes in a more prominent light and give him some solo story time. We also learn that the Scarab has way, way more capabilities than just cannons, wings and staple-guns. We see that it can transform into a lockpick and it can scan for people telling the truth. There's a lot of neat buildup in this episode, but I don't think any of them is more important than the Jaime Reyes stuff considering how big of a player he'll eventually become in this season.

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Blue Beetle, Nightwing, Miss Martian, Batgirl, Wonder Girl, Bumblebee, 
• Villains: Mammoth, Devastation, Shimmer, Icicle Jr, Psimon, Queen Bee
• Civilians: Tye Longshadow, Shelly Longshadow, Maurice, Holling Longshadow, Asami Koizumi, Eduardo Dorado Jr, Virgil Hawkins

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Tye Longshadow borrows his name from Longshadow, a character created for the Justice League Unlimited cartoon (Tye also shares JLU's Longshadow's voice actor), which in turn is based on the Apache Chief, one of the 'ethnic' characters in Hanna-Barbera's Challenge of the Super-Friends. His background is completely original to Young Justice, though. 
• The five villains that feature here seem to be a nod to the Fearsome Five, a group of five villains that menaced the Teen Titans and assorted characters. While the membership of the Five tends to rotate (and neither Icicle nor Devastation have ever been in any version of the group) Psimon, Shimmer and Mammoth are three of the most consistent members of the Five. 
• Devastation makes a lot of references to how she fought Wonder Woman, which, of course, alludes to how she's traditionally a Wonder Woman villain.