Young Justice S02E10 Review: The Beetle Blues

Young Justice, Season 2, Episode 10: Before the Dawn

Coming off the previous episode's storyline, this episode starts off with a brief flashback to how Jaime Reyes became the Blue Beetle, through the archetypal "wrong place, wrong time" moment of destiny as he happened to be skating outside Kord Industries when an explosion shot the Scarab out which proceeded to embed itself on Jaime's back. There's definitely a huge sense of dread and the feel of a climactic mid-season finale moment even before I looked up and saw the episode number that indicated that, yes, this episode is the mid-season finale. And it's a glorious spotlight on Blue Beetle and reveals that the mysterious alien Partner that the Light have been working with all season is, indeed, connected to Blue Beetle's whole backstory. These bug-like humanoids are called the Reach, and while only Jaime and the audience understands their alien language, we get the gist that the Scarab was damaged upon arrival to Earth, which is why our Blue Beetle hasn't been a proper alien infiltrator destabilizing governments and shit. As psychotic as the Scarab can be sometimes, it's clear that the Scarab isn't actually aligned with the evil aliens.

More chillingly, after the Impulse episode dismissed his weird lingo like "crash" and "on-mode" as being weird futuristic lingo, we get the revelation as the Reach Scientist and the Reach Ambassador (they never get actual names, but they will recur throughout the season) talk about the Scarab crashing, and that they need to reboot the Scarab to return it on-mode. The Scientist, thankfully, like all comic-book evil scientist, is too happy to play around and try to figure out why the crash happened instead of just resetting Jaime's beetle immediately. It's possibly one of the more ingenious twists in this series, using a bunch of throwaway dialogue to suddenly become a chilling revelation of the true intentions of poor Impulse, tying in Impulse's mission to the past deeper into the whole Blue Beetle thing.

There's definitely a great sense of combining aspects of old storylines with new ones, and it results in this pretty damn awesome storyline that, at the moment that I was watching, feels fresh and new, yet somehow pretty damn familiar.

Meanwhile, we get Kaldur'ahm, now a trusted agent of the Light, being given the tour of the premises by the Ambassador, and we get some expository dump about how they are trying to study the Meta-Gene within these superhumans, and, if possible, replicate them in new test subjects. It's amazing how the art direction manages to make Kaldur'ahm's face look like a convincing poker face but also resisting the urge to bust out some fancy superheroics. Kaldur'ahm gets the answers to some of the kidnappings -- the human trafficking of regular kids is just farming for test subjects to turn into metahumans; while the kidnapping of actual superhumans is to test just how their powers work, and we're treated to some pretty horrifying scenes as Beast Boy and Impulse are subjected to some electric shocks.

Thankfully, while the Young Justice team can't actually pull out the big guns and just smash their way into the Reach compound (likely because they're severely outgunned), we get Bumblebee, Batgirl and Robin infiltrate the kidnapped civilians, masquerading as your everyday random civilians that are herded into the pods as they are taken by Tigress and the rest of the Manta troopers. Nightwing and the rest of the team follow suit abroad the bio-ship, and we get some acknowledgement about how little people are involved in this when Nightwing handwaves Wonder Girl's question with a "well, wishful thinking" and "um, Aquaman found out about this shipment". Plus, even without the knowledge of the intel that Artemis and Kaldur'ahm presumably supplied, it's not a particularly huge leap to come up with the plan of allowing infiltrators to enter the 'meat' that the Light is kidnapping for the Reach.

And after that, we get the Young Justice Team finally winning, a neat little contrast to the previous episode. Batgirl, Robin and Bumblebee break out of their pods, while Miss Martian zips in and frees Impulse and Beast Boy from their restraints. Superboy has also been impersonating a manta-trooper, and gets to punch Tigress in a genuinely "ow, that could've gone poorly if Conner was a bit angrier" moment.

But the biggest that-went-poorly moment was when Miss Martian came into contact with Kaldur'ahm, and unleashes the full fury of her increasingly-savage telepathic assaults. Again, secrets end up being the Young Justice Team's downfall, as there's honestly no real reason to keep Conner and M'gann out of the loop. M'gann's angry lash at Kaldur'ahm is perhaps justified -- she knew him as a traitor who killed Artemis, kidnapped both her adopted brother and her boyfriend. Plus M'gann's been increasingly brutal this season. And, of course, it's implied that she realizes that she fucked up royally when she sifts through Kaldur's memories... but it's too late as Kaldur'ahm is left catatonic. M'gann realizes the Artemis/Kaldur'ahm deal way, way too late to do anything, and she just collapses to the ground in grief.

Meanwhile, Impulse zips away to quickly find Jaime and free him from his restraints, and basically tells Jaime about how the event he went to the past to prevent is stopping Jaime Reyes, Earth's Blue Beetle, from betraying humanity and becoming a big, burly oppressive supervillain.


That's not the only threat this episode, though, because the main spokesperson for the Reach, a burlier version of Blue Beetle who is given such a gloriously deep voice, Black Beetle, shows up while the Team is evacuating the hostages and prisoners (including Shimmer!). And Black Beetle is scarily effective. He quickly takes out Lagoon Boy, Superboy, Bumblebee, Batgirl and Robin without any trouble, and for whatever reason, Shimmer is apparently professional enough to quickly fight on the side of the bad guys despite being one of the abductees moments ago. It's a part of this episode that I genuinely feel was a bit unnecessary, since Shimmer isn't a major enough character for the more casual audience to really recognize... but I do appreciate it.

And Black Beetle's beatdown of the superheroes is pretty damn savage and protracted. Not long enough to be particularly sadistic, but the moment when Black Beetle just density-shifts the door as Miss Martian is halfway through it is pretty damn painful looking, and the "halfway... the hard way." beatdown as he grabs Wonder Girl and just slams her to the wall again and again and again as poor Wonder Girl screams while the camera pans away to the other defeated superheroes? Pretty damn dark! And also, in addition to Black Beetle being an antagonist, the show makes it clear that basically everything Black beetle is doing is identical with what our buddy Blue Beetle does, but since it's not on the good guys' side it becomes a lot scarier.


Which, of course, leads to the showdown between Blue Beetle and Black Beetle, which is pretty damn glorious. Jaime straight-up allows his Scarab to take full control of their combined body, which might be a stupid thing to do... but the Scarab is fighting alongside Jaime and the shapeshifting armour battle is pretty damn awesome. Everyone else manages to escape, and the battle of the Beetles end pretty inconclusively (Black was definitely winning, though) as Shimmer accidentally blows a hole in the hull, washing Blue Beetle away and allowing Lagoon Boy to rescue him. In a nice touch, Black Beetle actually rescues Shimmer. Is it a reward for her loyalty, or will Shimmer wake up the next day in another dissection pod?

And the episode comes to a close, with the superheroes having a win -- they rescued their kidnapped members and civilians, got a whole lot of intel on their true enemies, and a lot of them celebrate how M'gann totally kicked that traitor Kaldur'ahm's ass! But on the same time there's also the melancholic sense of loss, because as the audience, we share Nightwing and M'gann's grief over what's happened to Kaldur'ahm. Plus, the Black Beetle isn't defeated, merely indisposed, and there's still the ever-looming threat of Jaime Reyes truly transforming into an evil Blue Beetle as the Scarab gets rebooted and/or takes over.

And as our heroes are mostly patting themselves in the back and Nightwing tells Captain Atom about just how they've figured out their enemies' plans... we get the culmination of the G. Gordon Godfrey news reports as we get the revelation that the Reach have made themselves known to the UN, and is doing it the 'proper' way, by declaring their intentions as totally-peaceful harbingers of advanced technology to better help mankind, which means the superheroes trying to denounce the Reach as enemies is going to be a hard thing to do...

Overall, a pretty damn great episode, and a pretty damn great mid-season finale as the true face of our enemy is revealed. The mysteries are answered and now we're building up to a whole lot of tension over the fate of Jaime Reyes. Throw in a lot of other plot points seeded throughout this episode -- like, y'know, cameos of characters that look like pre-existing DC superheroes like Static (who gets a lot of screentime among the freed abductees), seems to be gearing up the second half  of this season to be a pretty content-packed one. 

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Blue Beetle, Aqualad, Lagoon Boy, Beast Boy, Impulse, Batgirl, Robin, Bumblebee, Tigress, Miss Martian, Nightwing, Wonder Girl, Superboy, Captain Atom, Aquaman. 
• Villains: The Reach, The Partner/Black Beetle, The Ambassador, Shimmer
• Civilians: Tye Longshadow, Virgil Hawkins, Asumi Koizumi, Eduardo Dorado Jr, Stephanie Brown, G. Gordon Godfrey

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The enigmatic Partner that has been foreshadowed for the past 9 episodes is revealed to be The Reach, an insectoid alien race that was the origin of the Blue Beetle's Scarab.
• The Black Beetle of Young Justice is a composite character of the Jaime Reyes villain Dawur (as the main strongman of the Reach) as well as an actual villain called the Black Beetle, who is a time-travelling man masquerading as Blue-Beetle-from-the-future, who would steal Reach technology to power his suit. 
• The whole origin story of Kord Industries, the Scarab, and how Ted Kord figured out that the Scarab was alien technology as opposed to being a mystic talisman, are all aspects of Blue Beetle's origin story in the comics.
• While not identified by name, the blonde teenager kidnapped by the Reach who had a couple lines of dialogue is Stephanie Brown, otherwise known as the Batman supporting character Spoiler, and briefly became the fourth Robin.