Young Justice: Outsiders S03E23 Review: Just Like Season One

Young Justice: Outsiders, Season 3, Episode 23: Terminus

An okay episode, I suppose? At this point it's clear that we're barreling headfirst into the conclusion of the storyline, and one of my biggest fears for Young Justice juggling such a huge cast -- or indeed, any superhero material with such a huge cast at all -- sort of comes true. With so many characters in play, things end up feeling more like a roll call and a play-by-play, and honestly, I can't fault more casual viewers from just tuning out so many of the background characters who end up not really doing much. Likewise, Cyborg and Halo end up basically reduced to plot devices. And while the episode certainly ranks high in the "major plot events" and cool action sequences part, it does have a huge lack of fulfillment that the climaxes in the first two seasons have -- with the sheer amount of characters running around, there really is a massive disconnect between the major plotline and the major emotional storylines. In fact, I'd go so far that the most effective emotional storylines between the Halo/Geo-Force/Helga Jace bits have sort of been wrapped up in the previous episode.

That's not to say that the episode isn't exciting, though, because it certainly is. The Justice League unleashes hell upon Granny Goodness' Orphanage, learning from their past mistakes and weaponizing a squadron of Green Lanterns to hold it in place. Of course, the Justice League A-Team gets instantly taken out by Granny Goodness' Anti-Life Equation, which ends up holding them in place with no free will.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Jefferson Pierce sort of mopes around silently while the Team and the Outsiders attempt to track down where Granny/Gretchen has taken Halo to, and quickly figure out that she's off-world. Dick is cured and is ready to go into action. Conner and M'gann get a bit of a neat argument that sort of builds up on their relationship in the past couple of seasons, with Conner rightfully pointing out that while he intellectually understands why the Anti-Light was formed, he doesn't understand why M'gann would join in after the disastrous events of the second season with them faking Artemis's death, or the mind-altering offscreen incident between seasons 1 and 2. Of course, this drama has to be tabled for now, because we need action and plot.

Vandal Savage quite literally shows up just to give a cryptic message, offering them coordinates to Halo's whereabouts, essentially using the Team as a power-play against Darkseid, presumably in retaliation for Darkseid making use of the Light to get what he wants and then abandoning them. Despite that fantastic Vandal Savage episode earlier this season, the Light has ended up basically fading back into the background as a pretty cryptic and honestly nebulous threat, and other than Luthor and Slade, has been pretty much been kinda-there.

Eventually, it's the original season 1 team, plus Geo-Force, Terra and Forager, going off to the Orphanage to rescue Halo, while presumably Beast Boy's with the rest of the superheroes on Earth doing something we'll see next episode. The new blood basically bugger off with instructions to find Halo while the season one team ends up fighting the Parademon army and the Female Furies, before we get one hell of a fever dream as Nightwing's sick mind reimagines everyone as their fun, happy season-one selves, complete with guest ghost star Wally West. It's an unapologetic, unabashed love letter to how far the series has came, and how far the characters have grown (or fallen apart, your mileage may vary). I'm not the biggest fan because it did really take a while and it sort of reminds me just how insanely under-utilized more than half of these characters are in season 3, but it's a nice little homage, I guess? Again, the actual events happening in season 3 are fun, but the general lack of direction really ends up hurting it, and I feel like this sequence makes me yearn more for the olden days of the first two seasons where the world-building and the individual character arcs are hand-in-hand instead of one coming into a screeching halt in favour of the other.

Plus, I think that this sequence would've felt a bit more special if we hadn't gotten a Kid Flash maybe-ghost-maybe-mundane cameo earlier this season.

It does bring to mind, though, the fact that despite getting a fancy new moniker, Kaldur barely did anything in this season, and didn't get any real development. Likewise, the most we got out of M'gann other than the single episode with her brother was this argument with Conner. Artemis, Dick and I guess Conner fare a bit better, but ultimately they just sort of acted as generic mentors, and other than maybe Artemis, remained pretty static throughout the season. Sure, the rotating ensemble cast means that not everyone is going to be thrust in the spotlight all the time, but it really is unfortunate that we got this juge nostalgia flashback and all I can think of was "yeah, they juggled their characters so much better in the past seasons". Because comparing this season with the second one, the older characters and the new inclusions (mostly Jaime, Bart, Virgil and Lagann) had a pretty neat balance of screentime. Here it feels like the show itself is confused with how to juggle the sheer size of its cast and we get awkward moments like Cyborg or Nightwing disappearing for huge swathes of episodes, or the randomly shoehorned "hey Malcolm and Karen still exist" bits.

The episode ends up climaxing with another action scene. Granny Goodness with the mind-controlled Halo, with the rest of the Justice League members also being mind-controlled. We get the revelation that the Anti-Life Equation has greater side-effects on non-metahumans, which is kind of a weak way to tie in the two main Apokolips-related storylines. We get a brief face-off between Geo-Force and Granny Goodness, and it's... it's all right? It plays on the same old "can Brion control his temper when he's being taunted" storyline that he's sort of been saddled with throughout the season, though at least there's something in that confrontation. Ultimately, the brainwashed Justice League take out Geo-Force and his squadmates pretty easily, Season One Squad comes in too late to assault the machine, Brion can't break Halo out of her trance, and she ends up being activated and enveloping everyone in the Anti-Life Equation.


And... I dunno, it just feels so low-key, y'know? The entire episode just feels so... so underwhelming, despite by rights being an episode that really should be exciting and eventful. But comparing it to the equivalent episode in the first season (which would be the revelation that the Justice League got mind-controlled by the Light), "Terminus" just feels so much like it's going through the motions. A lot of the desperation feels artificial because, well, there's a literal army of heroes that are left on Earth. A lot of the factions going up against each other also feels very underwhelming and under-developed, particularly the Vandal Savage bit. I dunno. Again, while the individual episodes of season three are all pretty solid in and of themselves, this episode, I feel, forces me to sit down and look back at the third season as a whole, and particularly the second half... and recognize just how haphazard the pacing is, both from the larger grand-scale planning to the juggling of the many, many characters. I dunno. I'll reserve my judgment until we complete the season.


Roll Call:

• Heroes: Green Lantern (Guy Gardner), Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Green Lantern (John Stewart), Elongated Man, Superman, Icon, Captain Atom, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Halo, Black Lightning, Static, Beast Boy, Cyborg, Tigress, Forager, Geo-Force, Aquaman II, Nightwing, Superboy, Miss Martian, Kid Flash I (vision), Wolf
• Villains: Granny Goodness, Dr. Helga Jace (flashback), Gretchen Goode, Vandal Savage, Parademons, Mantis, Gilotina, Lashina, Overlord
• Civilians/Others: Terra, Kirby Jacobs, Lynn Stewart-Pierce, Jennifer Pierce, Anissa Pierce
• Various other characters appear in flashbacks to previous episodes. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The doorman of Garfield Logan's building is called Kirby Jacobs, an obvious allusion to Jack Kirby, the comic-book author that codified a lot of the New Gods material that season 3 drew upon. 
• In addition to the original members of the season one Team appearing in their shared hallucination as their season-one personas, we get a couple of homages to specific moments in the first season. The "we heard that... you know I can still hear you" antagonism between Kid Flash and Artemis is from the episode "Infiltrator". The lines "today is the day" comes from the first episode, "Independence Day". Kid Flash's initial crush on M'gann and antagonism against Artemis is evident. Kid Flash calls dibs on souvenirs, Robin makes new un-words, and Robin's chibi-heads in his computers return. Plus, the original season one theme plays out during the scene. 
• In the comics, Elongated Man gets his powers from a reaction his body has with the drink called Gingold, with the superpowers technically not coming from an internalized power... but for anyone watching the show, it'd probably be confusing why he gloops apart among the humans, huh?