Young Justice: Outsiders S03E10 Review: Batman and the Outsiders

Young Justice: Outsiders, Season 3, Episode 10: Exceptional Human Beings

This is a bit of a slower episode that sort of focuses on two particular plot points, and both of them are... more 'obvious', I guess? I'm a huge DC geek, though, so there might be a lot of people experiencing these stories for the first time, and I definitely appreciate that. It's a wholly solid episode, but because more than anything that has happened in this season I sort of can guess where everything's going to go, it doesn't quite generate as much hype as it probably would.

Perhaps the most obvious storyline is that of Victor Stone's origin story, in an adaptation of his New 52 neglectful-father and Mother/Father-Box fusing with him storyline that... that I won't lie, I've been exposed to a whole lot of times recently, so perhaps part of me felt a bit burnt out that they chose to focus on yet another retelling of Cyborg's New 52 backstory instead of any other character. But it's done well, don't get me wrong! All the emotional beats are amazingly executed, as predictable as they were. This whole story starts with Victor asking his father to come to watch an important football game and his father being distant due to being absorbed with researching the Father Box -- we get a nice little tie-in with 'Tryptich' where the machine that Team Shade was trying to steal ended up being in Silas' possession; as well as the ongoing background war against the Parademons happening offscreen with the JLA powerhouses.

And then, of course, we get the game, we get a couple of fun cameos from Cisco Ramon, Ron Evers and a whole lot of boo-yah's, but Silas, of course, never even showed up to the game. It is interesting to note that despite them recasting Beast Boy to have him voiced by Greg Cipes, they didn't do the same thing with Cyborg despite Khary Peyton being a series regular (he voices Aqualad, Black Manta, Black Lightning... and Silas Stone, ironically enough). Kinda weird, but Zeno Robinson does deliver a very earnest performance. It's all just set-up for what I'm assuming to be an origin episode either in the next episode or some time soon, which is neat!

The other bulk of the episode finally showcases what Batman himself is doing, leading two members of the comic-book Outsiders team, Katana and Metamorpho, into a little stealth operation in Santa Prisca. There's a lot less dialogue, noticeably because both Batman and Katana are super-professionals, but compared to the rest of the cast of this show, even the wise-cracking Metamorpho keeps his bantering really subdued. A pretty great direction that while doesn't leave me much to commentate on their action scenes beyond "holy shit, it's cool", does illustrate how much more dry and professional the Batman Squad is. It also sorts of ends up confirming that, at least for the time being, we're not going to get the comic-book Outsiders lineup properly, and that the posters that prominently showcase Katana and Metamorpho arrayed with Geo-Force, Halo and the others are just kind of a misdirection. I don't mind that, considering Young Justice's original squad cobbled together different incarnations of Teen Titans.

Anyway, as Batman, Metamorpho and Katana continue to infiltrate Santa Prisca, we get to see that Lady Shiva's basically taken over Deathstroke and Sensei's job, seeing her training a bunch of ninjas... among them Cassandra Savage! We get the confirmation that Deathstroke is the new leader of the League of Shadows, something that definitely was implied in the previous episode but never really confirmed. In addition to some generic villainous ominous stuff, we get a fun little tidbit that Tara Markov was on that island, but has been moved to 'Granny's' operations. It's actually a fun, realistic way of showcasing just how sometimes it's another team that ends up finding the relevant information, which is neat.

And then, of course, we get the three-way battle as Bane, Lady Shiva and Deathstroke bar Team Batman's way out of the island. Batman delivers a sick burn to Bane by lampshading how many people actually got in and out of his island -- and that's just the ones we see in this show! We get a pretty badass display of Metamorpho's shifting powers as he whirls around into rocky monsters and swirling gas clouds as he fights Deathstroke, while Shiva and Katana get to do the whole swordsmen-will-fight-swordsmen stuff. Shiva even gets to name-drop Soultaker and note that it's the superior blade between their two swords, which is neat! We get some badass one-liners from all combatants involved, before Batman just summons the Batwing to motherfucking carpet bomb Bane's base, causing him to bemoan "oh noooo my guns!", easily the comedic highlight of the episode thanks to the delivery of the line and the animation.

Either way, it's a pretty impressive information gathering moment for Batman Incorporated. There's not a whole lot for me to discuss beyond just noting how gosh-damned-cool all the action scenes are. The rest of the episode does actually feature the Outsiders, but it's kind of just fluff. Conner and M'gann engage in some sexy times, and so do Jeff and dr. Jace (who I am still convinced has her own agenda). Halo adopts the civilian name of Violet Harper (sadly, not Violet Ice Cream), naming herself after Will Harper... which is actually a very clever bit of nod to the comic book lore that coincidentally works with Will Harper being present as a quasiparental figure. We also surprisingly get a brief, tender scene between Will and Cheshire, who's perched nearby looking at Lian but refusing to get too close. It's pretty bittersweet.

We get a brief little training exercise where Nightwing fights against the Exile Bros, which I thought was juxtaposed pretty neatly against the Deathstroke/Metamorpho fight elsewhere in the episode of a highly-trained human being able to go toe to toe with a metahuman. We get another Dick/Brion altercation, where Brion doesn't appreciate being kept in the dark. He's being a dick about it, but to be fair... that is his sister we're talking about. And Dick is kind of being a dick.

Overall, it's a pretty dang solid episode! I really have very few complaints about this episode or frankly anything in this season -- clearly, the show-writers have had a lot of time to think of how they were going to structure this season during Young Justice's long, long hiatus, and it's just such a delight to see how well done even an episode where nothing particularly groundbreaking happens. It's just a very solid episode all around.

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Batman, Oracle, Katana, Metamorpho, Steel, Superboy, Miss Martian, Nightwing, Geo-Force, Forager, Halo, Black Lightning, Tigress, Red Arrow, Green Lantern (Hal)
• Villains: Lady Shiva, Deathstroke, Cassandra Savage, Bane, Cheshire
• Civilians/Others: Dr. Silas Stone, Victor Stone, Dr. Helga Jace, Cisco Ramon, Lian Nguyen-Harper, Ron Evers, Bash Bradford

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Metamorpho, a.k.a. Rex Mason, makes his Young Justice debut. Archaeologist Rex Mason was hired by corrupt businessman Simon Stagg to retrieve a rare Egyptian artifact known as the Orb of Ra. During the process, Stagg arranges for Rex Mason to be killed, but he was exposed to the Orb of Ra (actually some sort of radioactive meteorite) that transforms Rex Mason into a being that is able to shift his body into any element. In the comics, he was one of the original founding members of the Outsiders. 
• The team-up between Batman, Katana and Metamorpho is apparently a reference to Brave and the Bold #200, the precursor to the whole "Batman and the Outsiders" title. 
• Cyborg, a.k.a. Victor Stone, makes his debut here. While more recent works have associated Cyborg with the Justice League, he is most well known as one of the core members of the New Titans team. An aspiring athlete, Victor Stone was maimed when he arrived at his scientist parents' laboratorium while they were experimenting with cross-dimensional technology, causing him to be maimed and left near-dead by an extradimensional being, causing him to be rebuilt into, well, a cyborg. New 52-based material like the live-action JLA movie and the direct-to-DVD movies have changed Cyborg's origin story and tied it to the Apokoliptan super-computer, the Mother Box/Father Box. 
• Victor's football team make several usages of "Boo-yah!", Cyborg's catchphrase popularized by the 2003 Teen Titans cartoon. 
• Like all New-52-based material involving Cyborg, his father Silas Stone is highly involved in the research of a Father Box to the point of ignoring his son. 
• Cisco Ramon, better known as the superhero Vibe,  makes a brief cameo as one of the towel boys in Victor's team. A metahuman with the ability to generate shockwaves, he was a member of the Justice League Detroit team. Thanks to the efforts of the live-action Flash TV show, though, Vibe's character has been extremely popularized compared to how he was in the past. 
• Ron Evers, one of Victor's teammates, is Victor's childhood friend that was steered to a life of crime, and fought against the Teen Titans when a botched robbery attempt caused him to be caught in an explosion that required him to be grafted with the same sort of cybernetics that Cyborg was. 
• Brad Bashford, the sports scout, was a minor Superman character from his days operating as the Superboy of Smallville, a local bully that ended up being temporarily dosed with superpowers. 
• Bane mentions that he no longer uses Venom as a crutch, a character development that he actually goes through in the comics not long after his original debut. 
• "Violet Harper" was the original name of the human that did and was merged with the Aurakle that became the comic-book Halo, who adopts the 'Gabrielle Doe' pseudonym. Here, the context of the two names end up being reversed.