Young Justice: Outsiders S03E07 Review: Main Villain Backstory

Young Justice: Outsiders, Season 3, Episode 7: Evolution

One of the biggest complaint about Young Justice as a series is how vague the threat of the Light actually is. For what is essentially a Best Of compilation of the many main villains of DC comics, the Light spends a significant portion of the first season just showing up at the end of every episode and vaguely hinting that it's all part of their huge master plan, and when they do actually execute said plan, the Light functions more as a group more than a collection of villains. And while they do get some really badass moments in the second season, they're also sharing the spotlight with the more prominently-featured Reach. I'm a huge enough DC fanboy to geek out over the fact that Vandal Savage, Ra's al Ghul, Lex Luthor, the Brain and a bunch of other awesome villains are working together, but I do have to admit that none of them really stand out as characters -- particularly Vandal Savage, who the show totes about as the leader of these big bads, but in actual practice, it is characters like Black Manta and Lex Luthor who end up feeling more like actual characters.

Thankfully, "Evolution" ends up being an episode that surprisingly acts as a focus episode for Vandal Savage, an episode that I think was pretty overdue considering how long the show's been running. And, interestingly, Vandal Savage's backstory and motivation is told by a pretty interesting format. Last season, Vandal Savage manipulated events and took control over the Warworld while everyone else was busy dicking around with the Reach invasion, ostensibly to protect Earth so that the Light can rule it. This time around, Vandal Savage ends up being forced into a position to defend the Earth against a couple armadas of alien invaders, all the while two of his attendants, the young Cassandra Savage (an adaptation of Scandal Savage, I guess) and the elderly Olympia Savage discuss the titular history of human evolution, particular of Vandal Savage.

And up until the reveal at the end of the episode, it is actually a pretty easy route to think that Olympia is Cassandra's mother, teaching the new heir as to what the great Vandal Savage is all about. We learn that Olympia has written a book, and that Vandal Savage, a man known by many names, was once a mere caveman who finds a mysterious meteorite (the Skyfire Rock) that granted him powers. So far so good, it's Vandal Savage's classic comic-book origin story. It's told well, though, and we get some pretty badass scenes of the newly-empowered Vandal Savage fighting off a bear, essentially feeling like a god after "conquering his own personal nightmare" and getting those bear scars on his face, juxtaposed against Savage unleashing hell upon the alien invaders. We also get Nightwing's later speech about neanderthals being wiped out by Homo sapiens be juxtaposed against caveman Vandal Savage doing exactly that, which is nice. Honestly, without trying to jump around too much, the general editing of this episode as it seamlessly moves back and forth between current events and Vandal Savage's backstory is genuinely so well-done. Cassandra reading the book about how Vandal Savage essentially really, really epitomizes 'survival of the fittest' is also well done.

Speaking of which, after basically being a nebulous background detail for the past six episodes, we finally learn a bit about what the Light is doing. We learn that the Light was definitely the one responsible for dismantling the League -- Luthor causing half of the League to resign was deliberate, while Savage claims responsibility for orchestrating the heavy hitters in space. We also learn that since the end of the second season, the Green Lantern Corps are busy fighting the bulk of the Reach race, as well as fighting their 'partner', who we learn this episode is Darkseid -- something that's been honestly kind of obvious since the beginning of this season. Meanwhile, Klarion (and I love that Savage and Luthor count Klarion as one of their heavy hitters) is apparently doing something called... "Project: Rutabaga"? I'm not sure if I'm mis-hearing things, but okay.

Anyway, it all falls to Vandal Savage to essentially single-handedly use the Warworld to protect Earth, and this is juxtaposed with caveman!Savage's own struggles with having to contend with the neanderthals in his past, just as a second alien armada appears, set to the backdrop of Dick's monologue about how we could argue about the struggles of men versus supermen, Bugs versus New Gods, and Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis... and now it's humanity against metahumans, with Vandal Savage, apparently being the very first metahuman.

Meanwhile, the alien invasion ends up being a bit too much because they're coming in from two different directions, so Savage is forced to call in some favours from their ally, Darkseid, who obliges due to the fact of their deal. It's interesting how they handled Vandal Savage as seemingly completely calm and in control, despite clearly put on so much of a backfoot that he's forced to call Darkseid for help. He refuses to rise to the taunts of Darkseid's son, Kalibak, and basically just acts all professional throughout the whole extermination of the alien invaders.


Interestingly, we get some really unexpected backstory to the pair of Vandal Savage and Darkseid, something that doesn't just inform the characterizations of the characters involved, but also a huge part of the history of the setting. Turns out that Apokolips attempted to invade Earth during the 13th century. And Vandal Savage, then known in as Genghis Khan, led the battle against Apokolips with his two metahuman children. While Darkseid ultimately won, he was pretty impressed by the superhumans of Earth, and the two conquerors apparently had a deal and made a proposition to conquer the galaxy, because as Savage puts it, "more can be gained while controlling men in peace than in the chaos of war."

Also, while I am just praising the writing and the awesome backstory bombs, can I just say how ridiculous the Apokoliptan warships are in the show? They have giant Darkseid heads on them! It's just bizarrely fun. We also learn that apparently Apokolips can send out these poor Metron-esque dudes strapped to a floating space-chair thing as portable human weaponry that blow up and wipe out chunks of the alien invaders.

And as Kalibak's little suicide bomber wipes out a chunk of the armada, we see that the aliens are apparently being controlled by Starro parasites, who take the form of starfishes latched on to the alien's faces. This causes Vandal to show irritation and anger for the first time in this episode, telling Cassandra to take over the Warworld (with a pretty badass speech about 'directing the ocean'), and we learn even more backstory, noting that Vandal Savage had faced Starro -- or a Starro -- in the past when he was known as the demigod hero Marduk, king of ancient Babylonia. Interestingly, this was apparently the origin of the term 'the Light' as everyone glorified the Savage family had brought light back to the world.

Even more interestingly, Vandal Savage had two more metahuman children in this period of time. One was a woman called Ishtar... and the other was NABU. Or an incarnation of Nabu, in any case, but it's still a surprising reveal for sure, that ties in to Nabu's recent prominence in the previous episode.

And this leads to Vandal Savage taking into the battlefield himself and engaging the main Starro body and stabbing it straight in its icky alien eye, again, once more, juxtaposed in the episode against Vandal-Marduk doing the same to the Starro in his period.

With the crisis done, we get a surprisingly tender moment as Vandal Savage talks to Olympia and Cassandra, with Vandal sternly noting that Olympia should not be keeping any records of their exploits. Olympia notes that her favourite story of it all is that with the bear, since it was the story from before Vandal Savage was changed by the meteor... but then we get the sad revelation that Olympia has been slowly losing her mind and is just repeating the same things over and over. Vandal calmly hugs Olympia before snapping her neck, and revealing to the audience that Olympia was his daughter. It's such a surprisingly sad scene of a mercy kill, and we get the impression that Vandal Savage has gone through too many children since becoming immortal, and it's honestly pretty damn tragic.

Meanwhile, the titular Outsiders are... they spend most of this episode essentially in downtime at the beach, but that's not to say that their scenes are 'filler', not at all! Seeing Forager imitating a crab is extremely precious and is worth the price of admission alone. We also get the debut of super-suits for Halo and Geo-Force, complete with a fun little joke about Forager being naked. "What is wrong with naked? Forager is naked now." Jason Spisak is an amazing voice actor, honestly, nailing all of the deliveries as Forager pretty well.

We get some fun bits of Forager being a snarky little bastard against Nightwing while training --  "Mind the short arms; Forager fights dirty". That's fun! Halo, in her new Kamen Rider Ghost-esque hoodie, shows off a new power, which is that the green light causes her to make clones. We get some charming anecdotes that Brion and Gregor used to argue the whole "Batman versus Superman" argument when they were kids, something that Nightwing and Superboy hilariously dismisses as something that's never going to happen. This fun line of dialogue, incidentally, led to the men-vs-supermen speech that I really do like. The specific term for superhero name is apparently 'cryptonym', which is a pretty damn clever bit of wordplay. Halo chooses Halo as her cryptonym and confirms that her civilian name is 'Violet', while Brion ends up adopting Geo-Force after every single person there laughs at "Hot Lava", something Artemis deems to be a stripper name -- which, in turn leads to Dick and Artemis making fun of each other's current cryptonyms, which is just hilarious. Oh, and Jefferson is still being all smitten with dr. Helga Jace, even going so far as to spend the night together.

Overall, it's a very, very well-written episode. I know I've said this a couple of times throughout this season, but this might very well be my favourite episode of Young Justice just straight-up. The editing, the voice-acting, the background monologue, the character work, the world-building... it's honestly all just so amazingly well-done, and I am just genuinely surprised that they did all this for the main villain, a character that can be rightfully criticized as a flat villain prior to this episode. Great stuff. 

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Superboy, Tigress, Halo, Geo-Force, Forager, Nightwing, Black Lightning
• Villains: Cassandra Savage, Olympia Savage, Vandal Savage, Lex Luthor, Darkseid, Parademons, Desaad, Kalibak, Kanto (?), Starro the Conqueror, Mongul, Despero
• Others: Steve Lombard (voice), Dr. Helga Jace, Unknown telepath, Nabu (flashback), Ishtar (flashback)

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We've talked about Vandal Savage in the past before, and this episode's adaptation of Vandal Savage's origin story of a caveman granted immortality and intelligence by a mysterious Sky Fire meteor is true to the comics. 
• Cassandra Savage is an adaptation of Vandal's comic-book daughter, Scandal Savage, although she draws her name from a different adaptation of Scandal Savage from DC's Legends of Tomorrow TV show. Olympia is original to Young Justice. 
• Ishtar is a Mesotopotamian goddess of love and power, and in the DC comics, she is an actual goddess that's the source of minor DC comics hero Sala, as well as a minor character in the quasi-canonical Sandman comics.
• The two Genghis-Khan-era children aren't named, but they seem to have electrical powers. That and their colours seem to imply that they're probably a sly nod to the original Lightning and Thunder, two oriental heroes and reserve members of the New Teen Titans... especially since the show's likely to save Thunder and Lightning for the cryptonyms of Black Lightning's children.
• Starro has appeared before in Young Justice, but mostly as a corpse. This episode's incarnation of Starro as a race of Star Conquerors that use smaller versions of itself to control people's minds, while a much larger "Starro Prime" controls it all, is taken from the Grant Morrison JLA comic book.
• Kalibak, son of Darkseid, makes his first appearance here. Kalibak is a brutish ogre that tries his best to impress Darkseid, who has nothing but barely-concealed disdain towards him. 
• I'm not sure who that Thanos-looking dude standing next to Kalibak and Desaad is in the flashback to Savage and Darkseid shaking hands. I want to say it's Kanto, but Kanto doesn't have purple skin. 
• We hear a radio show from Steve Lombard, a minor supporting character in Superman comics and a rude jackass co-worker of Clark Kent's. 
• We get the brief mention of Victor Stone in Lombard's show, who, of course, is the civilian alter-ego of the Teen Titan Cyborg.
• More of a continuity nod than anything, but Marduk-Vandal dumps the Starro that they killed in an icy ocean, explaining why Starro came to be trapped in ice back in the first season episode "Downtime".
• As noted in the body of the review, Brion basically brings up the all-too-common "who would win if Batman and Sperman fight" debate, while Nightwing and Superboy dismiss that the only reason that they would fight is mind-control... something that actually happened to both of them in Young Justice's first season!
• Appellaxia, where the JLA heavy hitters are fighting, is another alien planet that was previously featured in Young Justice, with their golems being a villain of the week in season two.
• This episode is dedicated to the late Miguel Ferrer, former voice actor for Vandal Savage in Young Justice's first two seasons, and among his very prolific voice acting roles are Superman: The Animated Series' Weather Wizard and Aquaman, as well as Spectacular Spider-Man's Silver Mane.