Young Justice: Outsiders S03E15 Review: Multiple Hero Factions

Young Justice: Outsiders, Season 3, Episode 15: Leverage

Another great DC superhero show that I like, and another Suicide-Squad-centric episode that is an amazing showcase of how a well-developed world with interesting internal politics and characters is able to really sell the Suicide Squad concept. It's a shame that to the general public, "Suicide Squad" is synonymous to "that horrible live-action movie that DC did one time", because the concept of the Suicide Squad and how it's been portrayed in both comics, cartoon and the couple of times it showed up in live-action TV have always been pretty phenomenal. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself -- one of the best parts of Justice League Unlimited's second season was the pretty neat question of "where do the Justice League fall within the world's politics?" and Young Justice, while having breached some of this in previous seasons, tended to brush things over by having the political ramifications come from aliens (as in season two) or to have their fears be instantly justified when things like the Reach attack or Mongul showing up with the Warworld.

But a running theme across this season, and the previous one, is that while the League's role as protectors isn't exactly questioned... their accountability are. And certainly their right to do anything in foreign countries. The fact that the Team is explicitly noted by at least several characters as a deep-cover strike team, with the only real difference between them and Amanda Waller's Suicide Squad or Russia's Rocket Red Brigade being their ethics... yeah, this episode is here to ask both the cast and the audience some hard-hitting questions. If they vow to not interfere in non-American metahuman conflicts, why then, ignore the Rocket Reds but fight Black Manta's team? Obviously the real answer is that we're working on an "innocent until proven guilty" basis, and comic-book readers know the Rocket Reds aren't all evil, but it's definitely an interesting question to pose.

Throw in a bunch of additional themes near the end of the episode about keeping secrets from people around you, and things get even more muddied politically. Kaldur'ahm and Amanda Waller confront each other, with Waller basically forcing Kaldur's silence about Task Force X by holding the fact that she now knows that the Justice League has a black-ops team. Sure, Waller is kind of a lesser evil compared to the likes of Granny Goodness, Lex Luthor or the rest of the Light, but the sheer amoralness of Waller planting bombs in supervillains' necks and forcing them to be her own personal army of super soldiers isn't all that different than Darkseid's metahuman army. The only difference is that people like Black Manta, Captain Boomerang and Monsieur Mallah are assholes and this is sort of like karmic justice to them. Again, a lot of questions being raised here about the morals of our heroes, our enemies, and everything in between, and it's amazingly done.

(Also, are we going to get a Justice League International adaptation out of this?)

All the while, of course, this is the Outsiders' first outing as part of the Team/the Justice League. And while Terra and especially Forager are still kind of out of focus, it's pretty interesting to see how they react to things. Brion is very reactionary about everything, questioning Artemis' judgment about what could be, in his own words, Russia's own version of Bedlam. And while the Rocket Red program and the horrifyingly painful-sounding screams made by Dmitri Pushkin does look horrifying... they're just soldiers, and volunteer soldiers at that, y'know? They're not supervillains (at least not yet), and compared to things like Darkseid's Furies or the metahuman trafficking ring, the lines between how ethical the Rocket Red program is versus the Justice League superheroes recruiting young children to fight alongside them is blurred.

The Rocket Red Brigade is the next group of characters to have a huge introduction after the previous episode's Furies, and, again, I always welcome an expansion of the DC universe. We really don't see a lot -- Dmitri is the seemingly lower-ranking man and is kind of a flat "I will fight for my people and country!" good yes-man soldier, whereas his commanding officer, Olga Ilyich, is a far more brusque and trigger-happy commander, but ends up standing down when the Young Justice's team's excuses turn out to be true. I'm not sure how much of the Rocket Red Brigade we'll see in future episodes, but honestly, it's a pretty fun little showcase of a couple of new characters, the concept of the team, and the always fun three-way battle between them, Artemis's team and the Suicide Squad.

Which, by the way, was something that caught me off-guard. Seeing Black Manta, Captain Boomerang and Mallah about to attack the Rocket Red Brigade base, I expected this to be something tied into the Light. And maybe part of it is the fact that everything in season one tied into the Light, but it's clearly meant to be a bit of a bait-and-switch, what with two of the three being relatively recurring Light agents. It's not until Black Manta made the call to Amanda Waller and the brain-bombs are revealed that I went "ohhh". Honestly, it really showcases just how effective the Suicide Squad would be in-universe, because most superheroes out there are just going to assume it's Black Manta doing generic evil Black Manta things.

The action scenes in this episode is pretty fun, with highlights going to that sequence with Geo-Force fighting Monsieur Mallah, or the swift transformation that Beast Boy employs to zip his way through bullets and beams before rhinocerosing the villains in the face. Shame that Halo, again, gets subjected to another brutal mortal wound just because she can heal from near-death. Poor girl.

The B-plot, interestingly, takes up a couple of plot points that I sort of assumed would be left to the viewers' imagination off-screen. We get to see the Metahuman Rehab Center in Taos, where we get the very, very welcome return of Eduardo Dorado (both senior and junior) as they work as counselors there. Dorado junior has been one of the more under-utilized characters among the Runaways in the second season, and him bonding with a metahuman girl, Wendy "Windfall" Jones, while also talking to the other youths from the Simon Stagg multi-part episode -- Livewire and Mist -- is pretty great. In addition to seeing that this rehab center is where some other familiar faces like Black Canary and Neutron are working at, it's also interesting to see the efforts they kind of do to make the kids feel welcome. Inhibitor collars are there only if you want them to, and it's not forced upon them. We get some snide remarks about how one of their counselors, Neutron, nearly blew up Central City, but, y'know, clearly rehab is working for good old "Neut". Honestly, just how much more interesting Neutron has became with a couple of character tweaks from "that C-lister Superman villain that's like, a walking nuclear reactor or something" is pretty dang impressive.

Things aren't all fun and games for Wendy, though. Initially super excited at all this "acceptance" speech and seeing all the cool superhero names that people like Livewire or Mist have, she ends up being a bit too eager with showing off her powers and selecting "Windfall" as a moniker... ending in an accident that spins poor Mist around in her tornado, causing a bit of an altercation with Mist's protective friend Livewire, and causing her to nearly damn well kill everyone in the Danger Room if not for Ed Dorado's intervention. This ends with Wendy taking on the collar, which is really interesting. I honestly kind of wonder if this El Dorado/Windfall storyline wouldn't have worked better if it was juxtaposed against some of the themes in the previous episode, particularly how Nightwing and company were giving speeches to the Outsiders about how the hero life is a choice and not a glamorous one.

We've got a bunch of B-plots running along in the background. Goode has been interfering with Beast Boy's Space Trek shooting career, basically forcing him to retake shots multiple times just to make his life hell under duress of legal lawsuits. While I thought this was going to bog him down so he can't go superheroing, I also kind of believe that it's probably just Goode being a massive dick just because she can.

And I do really like the final sequence of shots for this episode, which shows off the culmination of Kaldur'ahm's ominous "we all have secrets to keep" line. In addition to the whole Suicide Squad bit, we get to see Helga Jace finally being allowed into a STAR/JLA-sanctioned laboratory... and seems to be working with a mysterious strand of hair, implied to be Halo's. Beast Boy continues to narrow his eyes and brood at looking at the number of likes on his photo. There might be something going on with all the longing looks Artemis gives to Will Harper.

And, most interestingly, Halo has a mid-battle flashback to her original life as Gabrielle Daou when fighting against Captain Boomerang, with the word "proposition" triggering a memory where she apparently took a bribe, allowing the metahuman assassins to enter the palace... which, of course, isn't just a villainous act, but also one that caused almost every shitty thing that happened to Brion Markov this season. It's her own secret, and one that's potentially far, far more damaging to her and Brion's relationship compared to all the secrets that the season one cast had.

Overall, it's mostly a standalone episode, but still, as always, a very solid one!

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Beast Boy, Tigress, Red Arrow, Forager, Geo-Force, Halo, Aquaman II, El Dorado, Black Canary, Miss Martian, Neutron, Rocket Red #4, Rocket Red #1, Hardware
• Villains: Granny Goodness, Monsieur Mallah, Black Manta, Captain Boomerang, Jaculi (flashback)
• Civilians/Others: Paul Sloane, Lian Harper, Terra, Eduardo Dorado Sr, Windfall, Livewire, Mist, Celia Windward, Amanda Waller, Dr. Helga Jace

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Rocket Red Brigade is a group of Russian superheroes, initially introduced as part of Green Lantern stories, and was raised to a bigger prominence when the member of the Brigade designated Rocket Red #4, Dmitri Pushkin, joined Justice League International and served as a protector of humanity until his eventual retirement. 
• Olga Ilyich is identified as Rocket Red #1 by the credits, but is essentially a new character created for the show. The comic-book version was called Josef Denisovich who was a minor antagonist, while "Ilyich" is a minor member of the Renegade Red squadron, a group of insane Rocket Red members that fought Captain Atom. 
• Windfall, a.k.a. Wendy Jones, was introduced as a member of the five-man metahuman terrorist team, the Masters of Disaster, who battled Batman's Outsiders team multiple times. Windfall became sympathetic to the Outsiders and end up leaving the team, and was a minor supporting character in Suicide Squad titles. Windfall recently also showed up as a sympathetic teenage metahuman unaffiliated with the Masters of Disaster in the live-action Black Lighting TV show. 
• Captain Boomerang makes his big debut in the Young Justice show! George "Digger" Harkness is perhaps one of the more prominent supervillains in DC, being traditionally a Flash supervillain who weaponizes 'trick' boomerangs in order to menace the Flash, but was ultimately elevated to popularity when he became one of the core members of the Suicide Squad comics, acting as the team's most amoral, cowardly and selfish members, often butting heads with other members of the team and generally having a sour disposition all around. 
• Task Force X / Suicide Squad is, of course, a supervillain team that was forced to work for Amanda Waller and the American government, operating out of Belle Reve Prison, in order to do black ops missions for the country. They are motivated both by the chance to reduce their sentence, as well as the bombs implanted in the base of their skulls (exploding armbands in the original comic run). While officially called Task Force X in-universe, the actual comic book title, as well as the nickname its members derisively call them, is the "Suicide Squad". Both names are used in this episode, with Waller referring to the team as Task Force X, while Aquaman mockingly calls it the Suicide Squad. 
• Rick Flag, American soldier and field 'handler' of the Suicide Squad, is mentioned briefly in dialogue, but not seen. 
• The number "16" has shown up many, many times as a recurring gag in the Young Justice show, but this episode makes a gag of its own running gag, with the episode beginning at November 16, 16:16 PST, with Beast Boy filming take 16, of scene 16, of episode 316 of Space Trek 3016. Apparently, thanks to Goode's intervention, Garfield was forced to take 52 takes, with 52, of course, being a recurring number in the broader DC universe, for a while being the amount of alternate Earths that exist in the multiverse.