Young Justice S02E11 Review: Cage Match

Young Justice: Invasion, Episode 11: Cornered

After a couple of heavy episodes that revolve around the series's more long-running plots like the Kaldur'ahm infiltration, the Reach invasion, as well as the Roy dilemma, this episode feels obviously intended as a breather. Sure, some ongoing plotlines still get covered here, but for once it's a very optimistic and relatively simple episode. That's not to the detriment on the episode at all -- in fact, I'd argue that this was a pretty perfect place to stick a more 'filler' episode like this.

The main plot involves the arrival of classic JLA enemy Despero, who comes to Earth to challenge its mightiest superhero team. Despero doesn't speak a single line of dialogue, but it's clear from his sycophantic robot butler L-Ron that Despero is some sort of trophy hunter, and wants nothing but a challenge. And while Despero isn't very pleased to discover that Earth's mightiest defenders are under arrest in Rimbor, there are still other superheroes for him to do battle against and turn into trophies. And the superhero fight and Malcolm Duncan's eventual rise into superhero-hood is pretty damn badass, but let's talk about the B-plot first, yeah?

Throughout the episode, we get brief cutaways to JLA-interim-leader Captain Atom as he meets up with UN head Tseng and the Reach Ambassador, and G. Gordon Godfrey keeps spouting hate talk about the JLA thanks to just how secretive the JLA are being. The Reach Ambassador ever-so subtly drops hints about members of the JLA being wanted criminals in the galaxy, or about how the JLA has a Watchtower orbiting around Earth, before going "oops, was that not public knowledge?" and just making the superheroes of Earth look even worse. Throw in the fact that Tseng is actually intimately familiar with the League's "child operatives", and the fact that Captain Atom doesn't even have a shred of conclusive evidence, and the League just buries itself in a hole deeper and deeper. The Ambassador even manages to swerve around Captain Atom's accusations of being involved in human abduction and spins it into "oh, do all alien races look the same to you?", which is just such a gloriously dirty card to pull out.

Between the Ambassador and G. Gordon Godfrey, the Justice League PR is taking a huge, huge nosedive. Hell, the Reach Ambassador even pops in at the end of the episode to easily deactivate Despero's giant laser pyramid and to hand over Despsero to the space police, saving the day when the military and the JLA members couldn't. It's a neat little buildup to the discrediting of the Justice League and the Team in public eyes in favour of the Reach, and while it's not enough meat to take it through an episode, as the B-plot that the episode keeps cutting away to in a simpler "fight this bad guy of the week" episode. Add that to some glorious scripting and story beats, and this is easily my favourite parts of the episode.

And that's not to say the fight against Despero isn't well-done, mind you. Despero and L-Ron make for a pretty fun duo, and Despero's desire to fight only non-magic-using warriors is pretty damn fun. The fight is pretty well-scripted, with the cage match pyramid being a neat way to force the action to take place almost exclusively in the Hall of Justice. Hell, Captain Marvel -- a recurring guest star in season one -- even makes a brief comeback to be one of the bigger muscles against Despero! We get a brief bit of M'gann trying to get herself out of her guilt-ridden funk after the previous episode, which is neat, eventually culminating into her finally getting her fighting spirit back. The action scenes are still damn spectacular, though, with Despero being near-unstoppable, and M'gann's reluctance to fight as well as Zatanna and eventually Captain Marvel being taken out of the picture with Despsero's telekinesis when he deems them not trophy material ramping up the stakes.

The best part is as the Hall of Justice get absolutely wrecked, Mal Duncan decides to don the costume of the Guardian, and just bluff the hell out of Despero by acting as Earth's greatest hero. Mal has been honestly nothing but the team's token romance-interest-guest-star character, and it's definitely a welcome surprise to see him finally bite the bullet and don a superhero mantle for himself. Sure, he doesn't beat Despero, but he manages to buy enough time for M'gann and Superboy to take down Despero... but at the cost of their own base.

Speaking of Mal, the episode actually gives some neat little buildup to his relationship with Karen. And I really wished that we had spent more time with Karen and Mal prior to this season, because if there's one thing that Young Justice doesn't do quite right is balancing the side-characters in the second season. We get a brief bit of Mal trying to drop hints about wanting to move in with Karen, but Karen's just not quite ready for that sort of commitment. Add that into the pile of rockiness between Mal and Karen's relationships, why don't you? We'll see if him becoming a proper superhero will change anything in their dynamic. Also, it's pretty ironic that after Nightwing shows off the rickety warehouse base to replace Mt. Justice, the Hall of Justice gets blown up too.

The other B-plot that runs throughout this episode is the therapy session for Black Canary towards the abducted characters, which is definitely welcome. The Black Canary therapy episode is one of my favourite episodes from the first season of Young Justice, and while this doesn't quite take as long, it does serve a couple of very interesting foreshadowings. We've got the obvious foreshadowing of Virgil Hawkins becoming the superhero Static, as the Reach experimentation has given him static electricity abilities.

Meanwhile, it's Blue Beetle that has the biggest struggle with himself. In this quieter moments when he's not held prisoner by aliens and forced to do battle with Black Beetle, he's far more introspective. Both Impulse and the Scarab tells Jaime to keep the Scarab's true nature and Jaime's future role as possible-enslaver-of-Earth a secret from Black Canary and the rest of the League, and, well, maybe the Scarab really shouldn't  lead with "that is a great idea, kill the Impulse before he changes his mind". And eventually, as Black Canary wraps up his session, Jaime bursts in and spills the beans about the true nature of the Scarab, demanding that the League rip it from his back to prevent the Reach apocalypse.

And that's the thing with time-travel stories, isn't it? Is it Impulse's words that cause Jaime Reyes to go from trusting the Scarab to deciding to get it off? Is Jaime's decision to get rid of the Scarab the one that causes the Scarab to throw its lot in with its creators? We'll have to see, but it's neat that what is essentially a filler episode can genuinely build up a lot of plotlines and character development running throughout the season.

Overall, definitely a pretty fun episode, and one with a fair amount of content.

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Superman, Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, Icon, Captain Atom, Captain Marvel, Impulse, Blue Beetle, Lagoon Boy, Beast Boy, Black Canary, Mal Duncan/Guardian, Miss Martian, Nightwing, Wolf, Superboy, Bumblebee, Zatanna, Black Lightning
• Villains: Despero, L-Ron, The Reach Ambassador
• Others: Secretary Tseng, G. Gordon Godfrey, Neutron, Virgil Hawkins, Eduardo Dorado Jr, Asumi Koizumi, Tye Longshadow, General Wade Eiling, Ida Berkowitz

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The alien tyrant Despero is an alien adversary who famously appeared in Justice League of America #1 (the team previously starred in various 'crossover' titles). Hailing from the planet Kalanor, the three-eyed mutant Despero was a fearsome tyrant who has faced the Justice League again and again over the years, and has also changed his appearance over time. He has super-strength and limited psychic powers with his third eye, which varies depending on the portrayal.
• L-Ron (full name L-Ron H-bb-rd) is a robot that was initially owned by minor alien warlord Manga Khan before being traded into the Justice League as something of a base-keeper, before being used by Despsero at one point to reconstruct his body.
• Malcolm Duncan has finally taken over the mantle of Guardian! In the comics, the Guardian has mostly been traditionally Jim Harper (or clones and/or descendants of Jim Harper), but when Malcolm Duncan first came into contact with the Teen Titans, he briefly took over the mantle of Guardian when he came into the costume of the superhero. Mal Duncan's role as Guardian in the comics wasn't that long, however, because he would reinvent himself as the Herald when he came into possession of the mystical artifact Gabriel's Horn, allowing himself to create portals through space-time. 
• He's had a brief cameo in the season's premiere, but this is the first real appearance of Black Lightning, a.k.a. Jefferson Pierce, one of DC's first black superheroes. A superhero that operates out of Metropolis's Suicide Slum, Black Lightning would join the Outsiders and eventually the Justice League. He recently had a live-action series in the CW!
• "John Jones" neighbour Ida Berkowitz in the comics is a minor supporting character of the Linda Danvers Supergirl, a kindly neighbour to Linda Danvers. 
• Virgil Hawkins (the superhero Static in the comics) notes that his series of treatments can be compared to "static shocks", which is, of course, the name of Virgil's animated series, Static Shock. We'll do a proper origin story section for him later on. 
• General Wade Eiling, DC's resident "grr superheroes are evil!" military commander, makes his actual appearance in the show. He did appear in the season one episode "Failsafe", but it was part of an episode-long illusion. 
• We've covered the series of costumes that is seen (and scattered) during the fight against Despero in "Alienated".