Young Justice S02E17 Review: Guilt-Off

Young Justice: Invasion, Episode 17: The Hunt

We're in the home stretch of Young Justice: Invasion now, with four more episodes left, and we have a whole lot of storylines that we need to conclude. And after tying up the Kaldur/Artemis deep cover story in the previous one, "The Hunt" deals with the fate of the rest of the team, who are revealed to be captured and kept in stasis cubes abroad the Warworld as prisoners of the Reach. There's a bit of oddity where apparently both the Justice League and the Reach are apparently inhabiting different parts of the Warworld, which initially seemed silly... but at the same time, it is a moon-sized space station, and while it might be sort of dumb for the Leaguers to just hover around the crystal key of the Warworld without realizing that they're sharing the neighbourhood with a bunch of aliens, it is kind of believable enough.

Black Beetle and the Scientist share a couple of angry dissent regarding the Ambassador, noting that he's keeping them from moving against the Justice Leaguers, and have also sort of wasted a good chunk of their fleet fighting Mongul's Warworld. Apparently they just don't have that many Beetle-style warriors, then? Meanwhile, Arsenal remains the only member of the Team to have eluded capture, unable to contact anyone but still giving the Reach warriors hell by shooting them with lasers and shit.

Interestingly, the Ambassador is not having a good day! His initial appearance has him give a press conference extolling just how badass the Blue Beetle is, how badass the Reach are for aiding humanity in their time of need, and how the Reach will assist humanity until such time that they're ready to utilize the Warworld. Of course, this is the same humanity whose opinion are quickly turned against the Justice League at the slightest hint of duplicity, so the Ambassador's second scene taking place around halfway through the episode has him appear in G. Gordon Godfrey's show, and we do get a pretty awesome bit where Godfrey turns from friendly to damning, questioning the Ambassador hard on just why they were hiding an armada of warships under Earth's oceans, damning the Reach for being as duplicitous as the Justice League and maybe even worse, and replaying the Ambassador's original claims about how the Reach only has one single non-military ship.

It's actually a scene that plays up Gordon Godfrey's pre-established xenophobia and confrontational attitude, and honestly feels pretty neat! Godfrey's still a gigantic asshole, but at least he's an asshole that calls things out as he sees it -- a unique stance to take on a mainly-antagonistic character. Bigger DC fans know what G. Gordon Godfrey is really all about, of course, but in the context of this season, he's a neat representation of what we can assume to be public opinion, and a genuinely fun way for them to showcase this.

Meanwhile, M'gann has teamed up with Nightwing to investigate and hunt down the missing members of their team, and the two have a hilarious "guilt-off". Nightwing and M'gann both admit the sheer amount of times they've fucked up this season, with Nightwing rightfully calling out his mistake in making the mission way too hush-hush for its own good, while M'gann notes how wrong she was with her brutality earlier this season, as well as failing to detect Green Beetle's true intentions due to her own mental issues. It's moments like this that keeps the show grounded despite its epic scale, and it's just a huge shame that other than Blue Beetle and Impulse, none of the new cast really quite got as much development. That's not to say that they are forgettable, of course, but characters like Wonder Girl or the new Robin really got shafted in terms of real character development.

Meanwhile, the Runaway Squad of the Reach-modified meta-kids are working for Luthor, who gives them a mission that was totally framed as a mission for good. Luthor provides them with a Father Box, tells them to take a boom tube to Warworld and save the Young Justice team. Luthor's Runaway Squad have something that none of the superheroes have -- a surefire way to track Superboy, undoubtedly one of Luthor's own designs to use against Superman/Superboy. Oh, and Luthor sends in Deathstroke for another mission while the Runaways are busy basically being a distraction, while Deathstroke slips in during all the chaos to steal the Key to the Warworld.

This then lead to a pretty fun three-way battle where Arsenal is blowing shit up, Nightwing and M'gann (and the Sphere, who returns in pretty epic fashion) are investigating more slowly, while the Runaway Squad enter and show off their raw yet enthusiastic glee in wrecking things up as a true wild-card no one expects. The Runaway Squad aren't subtle or experienced, but they have enough firepower to wreck enough things and take down Reach minions, allowing Arsenal to follow them.

Unfortunately, even though the Runaways do make it to the holding cells, Black Beetle arrives with his creepy-ass voice and the fact that he's actually beaten nearly the entire Team on his own. The Runaways can't fight Black Beetle with force since he's more than capable to dish it out, and this is where Arsenal and his awesome cyborg arm shows up and helps to coordinate the team. Arsenal gets the Runaways to distract Black Beetle with hit-and-run tactics while he breaks open a cell and sics Mongul upon Black Beetle, a genuinely fun little bit of not to how Mongul actually showed up on Earth to get rid of the Reach.

This distraction allows Arsenal and the Runaway Squad to fully free the members of the Team, who make their way out of the room while Black Beetle and Mongul are busy trying to murder each other. Of course, though, Arsenal isn't completely blameless, with Bumblebee pointing out that it's the fact that Arsenal blew open an airlock that the Team got captured by Blue Beetle in the first place, causing a tense conversation between Arsenal, Nightwing and Bumblebee about how Arsenal is off the team indefinitely due to his unpredictability. It's a conversation long time coming, and interestingly could've been avoided had, say, Robin called Arsenal's destructive tendencies out during that one farm episode, but of course, as the cast themselves point out, the enemy's base is hardly the time to discuss such matters. Things get even more heated with the Runaways, who balk at the idea of having to follow the Young Justice Team's orders to the letter... something that, if you remember, was the whole genesis of the Young Justice Team in the first place. Sadly we don't really have much of an opportunity to really delve on this bit of irony for the simple reason that they're on an alien ship.

Arsenal decides to leave with the Runaway Squad, who escapes with the Father Box... but when they realize that Luthor has been feeding them half-truths, and this mission was partly serving as a distraction for Deathstroke to steal the Warworld's Key (having Arsenal to vouch against Luthor also doesn't help out Luthor's case), the Runaways decide to not take orders from anyone, blow up Luthor's laptop and the Father Box, and just go off on their own. This is, sadly, the last we'll see of the Runaways squad until the finale, a perhaps necessary evil because they really aren't going to develop much more than this in the limited amount of time we have left, and they've sort of came full circle in terms of their little character arc.

Overall, it's a neat little episode that moves the plot forwards a lot. We finish the Luthor/Runaways storyline, wrap up Arsenal's story in this season in a neat little tie, break the good guys out of jail, and establish that the Reach is starting to lose its popularity and foothold on Earth. Lots of good stuff to love in this episode, and it's overall a pretty dang good one.

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Plastic Man, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Superboy, Wolf, Batgirl, Impulse, Bumblebee, Wonder Girl, Guardian, Robin, Beast Boy, Arsenal, Blue Beetle, Nightwing, Miss Martian, Sphere*  *I've not been keeping tabs on Sphere throughout the rest of the series, but considering his epic entrance here, I'll start doing so.
• Villains: Black Beetle, The Scientist, Mongul, Despero, The Ambassador, Lex Luthor, Deathstroke
• Others: Eduardo Dorado, Sam Koizumi, Virgil Hawkins, Tye Longshadow, G. Gordon Godfrey

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Father Box is the 'pair' to the far more commonly seen Apokoliptan/New Genesis technology, the Mother Box. It's appearance and usage have varied far more than the Mother Box throughout its sporadic appearances in the comics.
• The Runaways are far from the first superhero team that worked under Luthor under false pretenses thinking that they're doing good.