Young Justice: Outsiders S03E20 Review: Metron's Chair

Young Justice: Outsiders, Season 3, Episode 20: Quiet Conversations

An... interesting episode? It's more or less self-contained, dealing with the storyline of "Cyborg gets possessed by the Father Box, and the heroes need to get the help of the kooky god-hermit Metron to help out". It's a very comic-book-y storyline, and the information dump to the glacially-paced New Gods storyline (which I sincerely doubt is going to be resolved this season at all) is definitely welcome. As a huge fan of Metron, seeing him just fly around as this unhelpful dick, while we get random information and exposition about the Source Wall and the Mother/Father Boxes is pretty neat. Cyborg's basically been utterly sidelined as being emo and distant throughout the entire second half of season 3, and bringing the focus back to him is pretty welcome, even if it does seem like we're basically just going to set up both Cyborg and Halo as walking plot devices. Literally!

Victor Stone's character is one that we've explored in many different places over the past couple years of DC comics' other media. Between live-action movies to animated movies, there's a significant push for good ol' Cyborg, and it's sort of the same kind of fatigue people are feeling when they see Uncle Ben or the Waynes get shot up again, y'know? But the distancing that Victor and Silas has with each other is honestly told pretty well, and Victor's very bitter yelling at his poor old man is amazingly delivered by his voice actor Zeno Robinson. And it's hard to fault Silas for wanting to reach out, even if Silas's constant attempts is what is triggering poor Cyborg being taken over by the Father-Box side of his techno-biology.

Ultimately, after a couple of exposition and a welcome bit role from the Forever People, we get a team going off to the Source Wall in order to get the eccentric New God Metron and his Mobius Chair to come to Earth and fix Victor Stone. The smaller team of Superboy, Black Lightning and Forager also makes this episode feel a lot more tightly-paced than the previous Outsider-centric episodes, too. As much as the DC geek in me love the larger cast, it really did feel like the writers have no idea what to do with anyone in the Outsiders squad other than Beast Boy. Here, Superboy, Black Lightning and Forager all get ample dialogue when they show up and time to shine, and Metron (now with some... interesting blue face makeup in this incarnation) is an amazingly fun character to bounce these guys off of. Black Lightning and Superboy have never been the most patient of people, particularly when lives are on the line, and seeing them deal with this god-like entity who seems to have no emotions and is far more intent on observing Victor Stone being consumed by machines than even entertaining the thought of helping out... yeah, pretty neat. The random Superman cameo also gives Superboy some neat little dynamic with his adopted big brother, which is much, much needed ever since the end of the first season... while also giving a sneaky way for Metron to give some cryptic plot-advancing stuff about the Apokolips stuff.

All the while, on Earth, Victor and Silas have more of an argument, with Silas trying his best to calm his son down and insist that he's there to help, while Silas's mere presence ends up stressing Victor out even more. I did feel like we're probably missing one or two scenes of Victor and Silas arguing, though, because we sort of go from "your presence is stressing me out!" to "I trust you to put me in a medically induced coma".

Eventually, Team Superboy end up convincing Metron to come with them, but turns out that Metron is only interested in observing how a Father Box will consume an organic person and transform Victor completely into a cybernetic creature. And it's a pretty neat "this being is so timeless that mortal lives don't mean jack to him" moment, and we do get a pretty nice sequence of the superheroes attacking a very indignant Metron to get to his chair. Ultimately, Victor ends up being cured when they get him to the chair, and we get to see a mysterious beam of light being absorbed by Metron's chair... which, according to Forager, is the Father Box's soul returning to the Source. Metron ends up leaving, although also with a cryptic answer of "no but yes" at whether Apokolips' Granny Goodness is the same as Earth's Gretchen Goode. Okay?

Also, pretty interestingly is Terra observing everything throughout the episode, and she ends up giving a report to Deathstroke that there's been no major developments. It's actually interesting! With the changes made to this adaptation of Terra's famous Judas Contract storyline, this seems to be a huge subversion that really ends up working out. We've been looking at Terra lurking in the background, watching and waiting, knowing that she's a double-agent all this while. But this version of Terra has been traumatized and now has been shown kindness by the superheroes, so it's actually interesting that this version of Terra isn't just a bitch manipulated by Slade, but an actually conflicted person who seems to really end up taking a liking to the Team.

There are a lot of B-plots running throughout this episode, and I don't really like a whole lot of them. The Violet stuff is neat. I'm still very much unsure about how Violet was handled in "Early Warning", and honestly, I do end up leaning more towards "that was handled poorly". I get the sensation of Violet being frustrated at what the fuck she even is, and she's dying even before a proper self-discovery journey, but man, that scene in "Early Warning" really doesn't come off well, yeah? We get a bit of a far, far better "I am confused and I am still searching for who I truly am" sequence here as Violet, masquerading as Gabrielle Daou, returns to Gabrielle's family and attempts to give them closure by telling them that she's dying... only to eventually break down and tell the Daous everything, including the fact that she's technically an alien entity taking over Gabrielle's corpse. There's some amazing voice acting from Zehra Fazar, too.

There's also a subplot about Helga Jace telling Brion to basically calm down and try and understand Halo's situation, but considering the moments in this episode of Helga going off to talk to her mentor, as well as her subtly noting how Brion and Tara could return to Markovia if they keep up her exploits, it's interesting to see just what Helga's main game is.

Another B-plot that ran through this episode is the relatively all-right sequence of Kaldur'ahm bringing (the currently still unnamed) Dolphin to Atlantis. It's a neat bit to give Kaldur something to do after being more or less reduced to a background character this season, and I do like having some answers as to what's going on with the first Aquaman, as well as Kaldur's parents. It does really feel kinda samey with a lot of the teenage-metahuman rehabilitation scenes we've seen with Ed Dorado, though we do get a bit of Dolphin trying to comfort Kaldur for flinching at being reminded of the Anti-Light's lies from the previous episode. I do really like Dolphin's line about how Kaldur'ahm is a good man because he feels guilt while lying (bad men will lie without guilt). It's a nice, slow-paced character moment for Kaldur'ahm, although I did roll my eyes a bit at the overblown "psych, you think Dolphin is a love interest for Kaldur'ahm? Nope, he's got a boyfriend all along!" And I don't mind the fact that Kaldur'ahm's bisexual, not really -- it's at least a positive representation of LGBT relationships as opposed to the poorly-handled disaster that's Violet/Harper, but the fact that it was basically used as the punchline to "haha, you guys thought we were building up to making a new shipping thing, aren't you?"

And... there's the whole M'gann and Harper Row storyline. And I'm not saying that child abuse and standing up to abusive parents isn't an important topic. Because it totally is! But the way that this is handled felt extremely shoehorned in, and barely has any sort of thematic significance to any of the things going on. It also is a storyline that's a bit 'too real', I feel... which is fine if Harper Row was a character I cared about, but she's just kind of there as a slightly more prominent recurring background character, and the whole sequence felt like a poor attempt to shoehorn in a Very Special Episode. The scripting and voice acting is all right, but throughout all of the M'gann/Harper stuff I felt a genuine disconnect, like I'm watching some other show about characters I'm not invested in. Considering how well-done Young Justice has incorporated more mature topics into their plotline before, this is definitely a miss for me.

Ultimately, this was an episode that genuinely felt 'whelming to me. The Cyborg and Team Superboy stuff were decent but ultimately kinda bland, and ditto for the Kaldur'ahm stuff. The Violet storyline felt kinda inconsistently paced, though, and I'm not the biggest fan, while the Harper stuff just made me sort of shrug it off. Definitely kind of a stumbling block as far as Young Justice goes, an episode with multiple smaller storylines, ending up feeling the most 'filler' out of this season's episodes.

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Cyborg, Forager, Geo-Force, Black Lightning, Dreamer, Superboy, Tigress, Miss Martian, Sphere, Halo, Aquaman II, Superman, Aquaman (Orin), Wynnde,
• Villains: Parademons
• Civilians/Others: Terra, Metron, Dr. Helga Jace, Harper Row, Madia Daou, Samad Daou, Dolphin, Eduardo Dorado Sr, dr. Silas Stone, Sha'lain'a, Calvin Durham, Cullen Row

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Hooray, Metron and his Mobius Chair make their debut in Young Justice! Metron is a character that is affiliated with the New Gods of the DC universe, often portrayed as a benevolent but ultimately detached observer. Moving from one place to the next with his teleporting chair, Metron is not affiliated with either New Genesis or Apokolips, often observing and documenting events without really intervening. 
• Young Justice credits Metron with creating Mother and Father Boxes, but in the comics, Metron only created the Boom Tube technology while the boxes were created by a different New God, Himon. 
• The Source, as well as the Source Wall, are recurring major elements of the New Gods' mythology. The Source is basically the metaphysical, Star-Wars-Force esque god-like energy that flows through the gods, while the Source Wall was the 'edge of all known universe', which separates the physical universe from the Source itself. Many gods and former gods have tried to peek behind the Source Wall, only to be trapped and become part of the wall itself, a fate that various characters in the DC universe have subjected to each other multiple times. 
• Forager casually mentions that they have teleported into the head of Gog. In the comics, Gog was an anti-hero from the Kingdom Come alternate universe, who grew disillusioned with the superheroes and ended up becoming an antagonist. In the New 52 reboot, Gog is teleported from Earth-22 (the Kingdom Come universe) to Earth-1 and ended up fighting our heroes, and eventually got imprisoned in the Source Wall. 
• Calvin Durham in the comics is a former minion of Black Manta who ended up becoming an ally of Aquaman after Black Manta continued to abandon his promises of an utopia, focusing more on vengeance on Aquaman. The character of Kaldur'ahm is very loosely based on the comic-book "Cal" Durham, who ends up being retconned into Young Justice Kaldur'ahm's foster father. Sha'lain'a is original to Young Justice, as far as I can tell. 
• Superboy's team met Superman and the Parademons in the Minosyss Ring, which borrows its name from Minosyss, the planet where the Teen Titans storyline The Return of Donna Troy takes place. 
• Dreamer makes her first reappearance since the season one episode "Disordered"! She mentions that apparently, Big Bear attacked Metron in the past.