Young Justice S02E09 Review: Who's Playing Who

Young Justice, Season 2, Episode 9: Darkest

We continue with the whole Aqualad-as-a-double-agent storyline, and it's definitely interesting to see how poorly thought-out Team Nightwing's plan ends up being regarding sending Aqualad and now Artemis into the bad guys' fold without telling the others. Apparently, the Light still requires Aqualad to prove his true allegiance, although Black Manta himself is already pretty confident in his son's loyalties. Of course, the Light is right to be suspicious, because we do know that Aqualad is lying, although it does end up feeling a bit like overblown paranoia. We are reminded of the stakes and sacrifices made, with Lagoon Boy still being held captive and apparently about to be sent to the Light's ever-mysterious alien Partner. Lagoon Boy have some choice words to tell Aqualad, but poor La'gann is just stuck in that pod for the time being. We do finally get to see the Partner in semi-full-view, though, because La'gann actually gets shipped to them and two members of the Partner's race discuss with subtitled clicking alien noises about whether the Meta-Gene is involved in the mutations of the Atlantaneans.

Speaking of Lagoon Boy, the brief scene that we saw him disoriented also shows Tye Longshadow, a bunch of other kids... and Shimmer? It's not really mentioned, but apparently some time after "Beneath" the Light just decided to hand over one of their operatives to the aliens for experimentation? Is it because they didn't meet their quota when the Team in "Beneath" rescued the kids? Poor Shimmer.

The Light decides to send Aqualad and his brand-new minion Tigress (really Artemis holding the magical glamour charm), and the show smartly uses a couple of characters that we're reasonably familiar with. The Terror Twins and the always-welcome Icicle. Icicle gets some hilarious bits as they fly around on the Manta-flyer, and the mission this time? To straight-up blow up Mount Justice and the rest of the Team.

Meanwhile, Impulse continues to be friendly with Blue Beetle and tries to stick around him as much as he can, even if that involves popping next to the Reyes' household in the middle of the night (much to the Scarab's anger). We, the audience, know that Impulse is likely doing this to try to prevent some huge apocalypse, and with more and more signs of the Scarab's volatile nature, it seems more and more likely that Blue Beetle's going to be the harbinger of doom. But even without that context, Impulse and Blue Beetle's friendship is definitely well-done and neatly fleshed out over the course of the past couple of episodes. And we do get a brief scene of the two of them just hanging out and showing off their powers... and get ambushed by Team Kaldur'ahm. And while the two of them do put up a good fight, the show actually shows off just how dangerously close the good guys come to killing each other. Blue Beetle's Scarab's constant demands for evisceration is far more chilling when it's Artemis that's on the line and not Douchebag Stepfather Man; whereas we've seen that Kaldur'ahm and his co-conspirators are very much willing to allow other members to be captured like Lagoon Boy.

And when Impulse and Blue Beetle returns to Mt. Justice with a pilfered alien doodad pickpocketed from Aqualad, Nightwing identifies it as a tracker that Kaldur'ahm is tracking them with. Which disables the base's security. And it's a chilling series of events as Kaldur'ahm and his villainous cronies began to attack the Team members on their own home. Beating up Beast Boy when he's watching the Hello Megan TV show in the safety of his room, shackling a tame Wolf with an inhibitor collar, having the Terror Twins and Icicle beat up Superboy in the grotto... we get a pretty awesome series of fight scenes, too, again involving Impulse and Blue Beetle, but this time Nightwing helps to fight. And one by one Impulse and Nightwing are taken out by sheer numbers (and unpreparedness in Impulse's case), and Blue Beetle is forced to stand down. Ultimately, while Blue Beetle attacks Kaldur'ahm and the seeming detonator to a bomb he's planted in the base appears to be a dud, Kaldur'ahm reveals that he actually has a proper detonator and straight-up blows the base straight to hell, while absconding with Impulse, Beast Boy and Blue Beetle as additional captives.

Oh, and apparently if Nightwing was just a wee bit slower with his escape, he, Superboy, Wolf and the Sphere would've probably died in the explosion. Mal Duncan shows up to rescue the gang after his little side-story (which we'll cover later), but even then the Sphere sinks into the bottom of the ocean to heal after rescuing to the ocean. Again, while no one has died yet (Artemis's fake death notwithstanding), it's pretty damning of Kaldur'ahm to everyone involved.

And while we, the audience, know that Kaldur'ahm is a double agent, the events of this episode pretty much seals the deal that he's extremely committed to the role. The destruction of Mt. Justice might just be the destruction of the base, but the slow pan as each sub-location gets torn apart and ripped straight to hell is pretty damn somber and shocking. There's a reason why attacking the sanctity of a superhero's base is a trope -- it's pretty damn effective at ramping up the stakes. Only this time around the villain invading the superhero's lair isn't a Lex Luthor or a Joker. It's Kaldur'ahm, one of our heroes, in deep cover. And how much of this 'cover' is worth all the collateral damage and stress that the other heroes got? As Nightwing's near-sinking shows in this episode, the Team's leader is barely in control.

The show actually has Wally come in and tell Nightwing to his face how much he's royally fucked up. Nightwing has put a lot of faith in Kaldur'ahm being their double agent, but you can't blame Wally for being ballistic -- it's his girlfriend that's risking her neck hanging out right next to Kaldur'ahm, and if he should actually go evil, there's no telling if Artemis would actually be stabbed through the heart for real. As Wally points out, all of the tragedies that Kaldur'ahm used to justify his turn to evil (to both the audience and the Light, mind you) are definitely real and huge stress-causers. Kaldur'ahm truly did lose Tula, and truly did find that Black Manta is his father. And even with the knowledge that Kaldur'ahm is acting as a double-agent, he did allow and cause the kidnapping of now three members of the Team. And he blew up the base. Nightwing tries to justify this by saying that Kaldur'ahm handed him a tracker to find Lagoon Boy during the scuffle, but at the same time, just how much are they willing to trust Kaldur'ahm after apparently going so much further? Wally posits the theory that Kaldur'ahm might just be a triple agent, which, well, seems to be a pretty dumb writing move if it's the case, but the perceptions of the characters in-universe would definitely be completely different. After all, season one's climax did avoid a whole lot of trouble thanks to them deciding not to keep secrets from each other, and this double-agent fake-death fake-evil operation has gone off the rails and is definitely far less forgiveable than secrets like "my dad's Sportsmaster" or "I'm actually a white martian".

Regardless of whether Kaldur'ahm is truly evil or just pretending to be (most watchers will definitely err on the side of him being good), his actions and the fact that he actually went through with everything and didn't bluff, the Light's inner council (Black Manta replaced Ocean Master during the time skip, remember -- it's a bit of a shame since Orm never actually got a chance to shine) has decided to take Kaldur'ahm into their confidence. 

And, again, that's the huge, huge big world-breaking plot. The side-plot this time around involves Malcolm Duncan (most commonly known as the Teen Titan reserve member Herald in the comics) and his girlfriend Karen "Bumblebee" Beecher. These are two characters that definitely haven't quite gotten as much screen time as a lot of the new members like Impulse or Blue Beetle, and the slight reprieve to their civilian life is pretty human. All Mal wants to do is to be a happy boyfriend and have a night off for a change, and he's being the perfect, understanding boyfriend, but at the same time the friction is there as Karen puts way, way too much effort into her studies and research with her mentor, Ray Palmer. There's definitely nothing romantic going on between the latter two, thankfully, but Karen is definitely more married to the job than anything, and the shot of poor Mal walking away, and the additional bit of focus he got by swimming halfway into the ocean to help drag Nightwing and Wolf out seems to indicate that Mal might finally stop being the token non-superhero member of the team and actually do something. But it is definitely a pretty sobering "growing into adulthood" moment as Karen is way more interested in her work than fooling around and goofing around like they did as kids, a different way of 'maturing' than the heavier maturation of characters in this series.

(Can I just say how ingenuous it is to have Bumblebee be the Atom's student/sidekick in this continuity? The fact that the two aren't related in this way in the comics, but Bumblebee was given shrinking powers retroactively in a homage to a certain Marvel superheroine is definitely a neat excuse to pair the two and add to the whole "Blue Beetle doesn't have a mentor" bit)


Roll Call:

• Heroes: Lagoon Boy, Aqualad, Tigress, Blue Beetle, Impulse, Bumblebee, Mal Duncan, Nightwing, The Atom, Wolf, Beast Boy, Superboy, Kid Flash
• Villains: Black Manta, The Terror Twins, Icicle Jr, The Partner, Shimmer, Vandal Savage, Queen Bee, Lex Luthor, Klarion, The Brain, Ra's Al Ghul
• Civilians: Eduardo Dorado, Asami Koizumi, Tye Longshadow, Virgil Hawkins,

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Artemis adopts the supervillain persona Tigress, which, of course, is the supervillain name of Artemis Crock's comic-book counterpart. Those who are less familiar with the DC comic universe would definitely be surprised to find that Artemis is a full-time supervillain there and is not associated with the Teen Titans, Young Justice or Green Arrow in any way. 
• Artemis' Tigress look has black hair, similar to how her mother Paula Crock looked when she was the Tigress. 
• Ray Palmer, a.k.a. The Atom, makes his first appearance here. As one of the more recurring Justice League characters, Ray Palmer was a scientist experimenting with white dwarf stars when an accident allowed him to harness the power of the white dwarf to shrink into atomic size. While the Atom has briefly appeared in non-speaking cameos in season one among the new recruits inducted into the Justice League alongside Red Arrow, this is the first time that he actually has a role. 
• The events of the season one episode "Terrors" is mentioned multiple times by Icicle -- including how he fell for Miss-Martian-disguised-as-Tuppence-Terror.