Daredevil S03E12 Review: Ace Attorney

Marvel's Daredevil, Season 3, Episode 12: One Last Shot

A pretty fun penultimate episode for Daredevil's third season. A very valid complaint that I have for this season that I haven't had the chance to address in my reviews of the previous episodes is how much Vanessa Marianna ends up shaping the Kingpin's decisions and motivations... but at the same time, how little she shows up in this season. Honestly, it got to a point where I was wondering if they couldn't actually get the actress to reprise her role or something. But she shows up this episode, finally reunited with Fisk... and I was kind of dreading that she basically ends up being a plot device character, sort of there just to be Fisk's motivation.

Thankfully, the funk that Vanessa is in for a good chunk of the episode wasn't because she's intimidated by the return to criminal life or anything, but because she isn't actually fully let into the finer workings of Fisk's operations. It's a far more interesting direction to take Vanessa in, especially when the show's trying to sell us this idea of Fisk and Vanessa as this perfect, if utterly flawed, pair. It's not the most well-told of stories since it sort of tries to do way too much character development in half an episode, but the scenes we get are powerfully acted. Especially the last set of scenes, where Vanessa notes that she isn't just another art piece to be collected and admired, she wants to live in it. Fisk ends up letting her sit in the chair and orders his men to speak plainly in front of her, and Vanessa ends up giving the idea -- and the order -- to eliminate Nadeem entirely.

Meanwhile, Bullseye is feeling pretty jealous and neglected, especially when Fisk clearly doesn't want to discuss any of this shit in front of him, and basically pulls a "you have disappointed me" segment. And considering just how much Dex has built Fisk up to be his personal compass and the almost god-like being he has to please, this ends up with him apparently going off-screen and murdering that poor old lady to get back the Rabbit in a Snowstorm painting, something that Dex does on his own incentive to get back into Fisk -- and now Vanessa's -- good graces. Vanessa is smart enough to realize the bloodstains on the frame of the painting, and Fisk isn't particularly pleased that Dex killed someone he spared. 

Speaking of the Kingpin's henchman, this episode features a surprisingly grateful Kingpin dealing with Felix Manning. Felix, clearly scared shitless that Kingpin will pull the same "punch his minions to death" bit that he did last episode, informs Fisk of their continued failures to eliminate Daredevil... but in gratitude for Felix protecting Vanessa when he couldn't, Fisk allows Felix to keep the job.

That's all the Kingpin part of the episode, which was... handled reasonably well. Meanwhile, the body of the episode actually has significant focus on Daredevil, Karen, Foggy and Nadeem, who hides out in officer Mahoney's house. We get some genuinely well-deserved talking down of Nadeem from his wife. Sure, Seema might not be anything but a one-dimensional morality check for Nadeem, but she's actually acted fairly well, especially that line about how she was terrified shitless in the bathtub waiting for the gunmen to come.

With Nelson & Murdock, Attorneys At Law(tm) back on track, though, Foggy basically uses his election post as a bargaining chip to get the current DA, Blake Tower, to listen to Ray Nadeem's testimony. This is actually a pretty clever bit by Foggy since Fisk is putting pressure on his family to force him to drop out anyway, and while I haven't been the most invested in Foggy's part of the story, this part is reasonably well-crafted.

Meanwhile, Nadeem continues to be told how shit his decisions are, this time by Matt, who shouts at him in their makeshift base. Partially in preparation to how Nadeem's going to answer to Blake Tower's questions, but partly because... Nadeem kinda deserves it. After some guilt-slinging, Nadeem finally realizes that everything happened because he "took the damn bait" and wanted to be responsible for the FBI catch of the year, never realizing that he was being strung all along and not really caring when Foggy or Karen told him about Fisk's plans.

The conversation with Tower also goes in a surprisingly realistic way, because while Tower is happy to arrange some hearing or whatever to take down Fisk with Nadeem's testimony, we get the fact that Tower refuses to give Nadeem full immunity. Something that, by the way, Nadeem doesn't deserve, and thank god that the show actually agrees with this. As much as Foggy and Matt tries to argue against Tower, Nadeem acknowledges that, yes, he has to serve time for his crimes. It came from the best intentions, and he was trying to protect his family, but at the end of the day, Nadeem did basically stand aside while Fisk's monsters did their work. It's a pretty neat scene, honestly, and I think the final deal ended up being Nadeem being jailed for five years.

Meanwhile, as all of this goes on and Matt and Foggy are having good vibes at maybe reforming their lawyer firm, Karen goes through the Luke Cage disguise kit and uses a hoodie to basically make herself invisible from the public, hunting down Ellison and basically arranging a press conference to reveal Nadeem's confession and Poindexter's role as a Daredevil impostor.

We then get a pretty fun action scene! Matt brings Nadeem to the courthouse through a decoy van, but it quickly comes under fire. I'm not sure how Matt's no-kill rule applies when he instructs where Nadeem has to shoot with his super-senses, but I guess it's sorta-implied that Matt is getting Nadeem to shoot them non-lethally? There's some really impressive and fun action scenes of Daredevil using his senses to basically tell where the incoming gunmen are, and when they have to move and when they have to stop. Doing this in a civilian suit, and alternating between pretending to be a confused blind man and whacking people with his walking stick is a pretty fun set of sequences.

Ultimately, the duo make it to the courthouse, meet up with Foggy, Mahoney and Karen... but after the trial or hearing or whatever, Matt gets the chilling realization that the jury has been threatened by Fisk's people, who knows all of the addresses and names of the jury members. Because that's how the Kingpin rolls. And it's at this point where all their plan falls apart. Karen and Nadeem are both quickly discredited, and Foggy's speeches about how the "system will work" honestly ends up feeling pretty damn unrealistic. Hell, it's been pretty unrealistic since the get-go considering how, y'know, Kingpin has been able to control so much ever since he was thrown in jail, I was never really convinced that this was anything but a bad plan.

And after that little cutaway to the Vanessa/Kingpin scene, we get Nadeem punching Foggy in the face, returning to his house and seemingly record a last message to his son... before Poindexter is sent to eliminate Nadeem. We get a nice little last scene between these two former co-workers and friends, and it's a badass little act of defiance as Nadeem refuses to be herded into his house by Dex. That last conversation is bittersweet as Nadeem ends up getting shot in the head. It's a pretty tragic end, made even worse by the fact that Nadeem's efforts seem to have gone to waste in this episode. I've admittedly not been the biggest fan of Nadeem until maybe these last two episodes, but that's definitely a pretty great way for the Agent Nadeem storyline to be resolved. Overall, while far from perfect, and while the show never really sold me that Foggy's pretty naive plan was ever going to work... it's still a pretty great sequence of events, I feel. 

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.

Daredevil S03E11 Review: Internal Revelations

Marvel's Daredevil, Season 3, Episode 11: Reunion

A pretty fun episode, mostly because the show finally decides to get its main characters sitting in the same room again for the first time in a long, long while. Daredevil's third season has really tried to give Foggy and Karen things to do on their own respectively, to varying degrees of success. Honest kudos to the writers for trying, and while they're not the most interesting storylines, the actors involved managed to make me at least get somewhat invested in their respective fights to take down the Kingpin.

The first one-third of the episode is a pretty well-executed cat-and-mouse game as Bullseye goes back to his guise as FBI agent Ben Poindexter, and basically orders Nadeem and the other FBI goons to crack down on the church and flush out Daredevil, citing that Daredevil and Karen Page are apparently accomplices. Sister Maggie is probably the MVP of the show, basically showing up as this confused nun that tries her best to get the FBI to go in different directions, and while none of them succeed until the dramatic bit where she blocks a bloodstain, she does manage to slow down the FBI search enough for Matt and Karen to hide within a coffin.

While all this is going on, Matt and Karen, trapped in the church's basement, take some time to actually talk shit out about the things they've been going through this season. I actually love how a lot of Matt and Karen's plans are actually foiled by them not communicating with their potential allies, which is nice! Matt talks about how he was about to take his "one shot", while Karen also confides in her own plan to take out Kingpin. Both of their plans are ill-advised, obviously, since Karen's plan also involves her getting maimed or killed by Kingpin, while Matt clearly is going to have his own morality panic if he had stayed in the hotel.

We get a "killing is wrong" speech from Karen that the previous episode's flashback is supposed to give some perspective to, but... eh, I don't really buy it as a concept, that Karen's case in particular is a textbook case for the whole "kill once and you have doomed your soul" argument. It's a valid argument, I just don't think Karen's story is a particularly good one to be an example of it. Still, the whole talk about Karen and Matt arguing about Matt putting up barriers and having this entire abandonment complex when everyone around him is willing to follow him off a cliff... that's a verbal slap that Matt Murdock has needed all season, so good on Karen for saying that. As much as I'm not the biggest fan of this show's pacing, they do some really great character work here.

Meanwhile, everyone's favourite NYPD policeman, Brett Mahoney, shows up and basically pieces together that something is fishy -- some inconsistencies about the actual relationship between Daredevil and Karen, especially from actual eye-witnesses. We also get a particularly clever bit of nice bit with the tracking dogs actually swarming around Dex. Aside from the whole symbolism of him being the "bad guy", of course Dex would smell like the blood spilled all over the church!

Dex begins to unravel, and it is actually nice to see him slowly go more and more insane, demanding to Nadeem that they will not, by any circumstance, call off the search, and that he'll order a door-to-door investigation if he has to. Meanwhile, in addition to fumbling with keys and blocking bloodstained coffins, Sister Maggie also plays faux-unaware psychologist to Agent Nadeem, asking him if he considers himself a moral man and basically calling Nadeem out on helping the bad guys.

Foggy gets a bit of a talk with his brother on whether to accept Fisk's deal, and... while I kind of get Foggy's belief in the system and desire to stick it up to the big man, the man's kind of naive, huh? Still, that's Foggy Nelson for you. The argument with his brother sort of gets put on hold as Foggy's drawn to basically set up a conspiracy bit with Sister Maggie and Brett Mahoney, showing up to 'arrest' his client, Karen Page, as she surrenders to the NYPD. The subsequent scene with Bullseye going absolutely livid and ready to pounce on his prey -- especially with the caveat that Daredevil's actually gone up the rooftop... while I don't believe Bullseye would kill everyone there, I figured that either Nadeem or Mahoney could easily be casualties of Bullseye's temper at this point.

It's an interesting bit as Nadeem finally decides to do something to stand up against Kingpin and basically steer the investigation away and pull the FBI out. Bullseye is angry, but Daredevil listens to all of this from the rooftop. Nadeem is easily my least favourite part of this season, but damn, actor Jay Ali delivers amazingly well with showing someone who is scared shitless of the almost god-like reach of Wilson Fisk, but is determined to do the right thing.

Speaking of Fisk, various scenes show that he's free, and that speech denouncing Daredevil as the real murderer and orchestrator of all the crime in New York City? That is an amazingly delivered speech from Vincent D'Onofrio. A lesser actor would probably make the speech sound more comical with a wink-wink at the audience, but D'Onofrio's delivery is just so well done that I do buy that the crowd around him is slowly cowed to silence as they lower their "Lock Fisk Up" signs. The conversation with Ms. Falb, owner of the Rabbit in a Snowstorm painting, though? That was just... it's a scene that is amazingly well-acted, and I get that it's sort of a Kingpin thing to do, but I felt like it was utterly out of place, happens almost apropos of nothing, and just felt like a cheap way to shoehorn some "Fisk has some humanity left in him" plot point.

Of course, the next scene after Fisk allows the lady to keep the painting is Fisk in a car, learning of Karen and Daredevil's escape, and he demands the jacket of the mook next to him and bashes his face in. Yeah.

The little conversation between Foggy, Karen and officer Mahoney is neat, as short as it was, of them basically telling each other about how they have a common enemy in Wilson Fisk. The conversation between the three main characters on the rooftop between Matt, Foggy and Karen? It's just amazingly done, and both the pretty great cast and the great chemistry and history between the characters really do sell that these guys are old friends with a lot of differing opinions. There's really not a whole lot for me to dissect here other than the fact that I like it, and apparently Foggy's plan is to get a super-foolproof witness to take down Kingpin. Agent Nadeem, it seems.

And Nadeem? That scene as he rushes into his house, the little fake-out with the broken vase, and the terrified shootout he has with Kingpin's forces as he tries to protect his family... pretty tense stuff. Of course, like a goddamn superhero, Daredevil swoops in to save the day, take out the attackers, and earn Nadeem's trust with a dramatic unmasking. Again, I've found Nadeem's character to be pretty unnecessary to the third season, but damn if they really do make great use of him in this episode and the previous one. Good stuff. 

Black Lightning S02E09 Review: More Runaways

Black Lightning, Season 2, Episode 9: Gift of the Magi

Yeah, I kind of didn't realize that there was an additional episode of Black Lightning that I haven't reviewed, but the whole "Book of Rebellion" storyline has been pretty unengaging to me. I honestly don't really think I have much to say about this particular "Book" in the second season. It's still better than the Loker mini-arc, of course, due to the relatively tight focus it has with Jennifer and Khalil's running around... it's just not a particularly fun focus. It doesn't help that Jennifer and Khalil are pretty one-dimensional, all things considered. They're teenagers running away from different sorts of 'cages', they are really in love with each other, and they have powers. That's honestly about it, and this episode honestly feels more like a repeat of the previous episode, but with less hectic running around and more crying.

We do get a pretty great sequence when Jennifer genuinely realizes that Khalil is dying due to the poison that Giselle Cutter had infected him with, and that her little antibiotic-stealing spree isn't doing anything. There's, again, no real reason for her to not actually try and get Khalil to a hospital or contact her super-smart-doctor-scientist mother when Khalil is quite literally on his deathbed. I get the whole running away from home to be free and to be in love thing, but I really don't buy this part of the story. Of course, we basically get Jennifer fighting Cutter, torture the antidote out of her by poisoning Cutter as well, and they're on the run again. It's a solid story, but not a particularly interesting one.

Meanwhile, Jefferson, Anissa and Gambi pretty much spend the entire episode running around trying to look for the duo and basically missing them by a step. There's some little rehashes of last episode's arguments, but that's just that -- rehashes. Lynn, meanwhile, has a bizarrely bland B-plot of running around and trying to be useful, looking for Khalil's father and... getting nearly no information other than the address of Khalil's apartment and some backstory about Khalil's brother. Honestly, I don't think there's any real reason not to lump Lynn in with the other three.

The rest of the episode is the introduction of a bunch of new characters. We've got Todd Green (played by the Blue Ranger from the new live-action Power Rangers movie), a super-smart dude who gets passed over for a grant by racist people, and then basically gets roped into Tobias Whale's operation. It's a neat enough introduction, and gets Tobias back into the criminal mastermind seat instead of being an abusive, petty boss. Oh, and there's this one other dude in the final scene that's teleporting around killing people in the bar. Apparently he's a hitman called to Freeland?

Overall, a pretty bland episode. Granted, part of me is just not being invested at all about the runaway teenager storyline, and considering that took up like 95% of the episode, there's no real surprise that I'm not particularly impressed with this one. 

The Flash S05E10 Review: White Bumblebee

The Flash, Season 5, Episode 10: The Flash and the Furious

We've got episodes from the CW shows returning since last week, but, y'know, as with everything else, I'm still trying my best to play catch-up. This episode of the Flash is... it's an interesting episode with a pretty solid set of revelations, but the episode itself doesn't feel particularly strong. Don't get me wrong, though -- I get what the episode's trying to tell me, but at the same time it's all bogged down with so much simple arguments from all sides of this whole X-Men style superhero power ethics debate that it ends up feeling like a particularly childish and over-melodramatic episode, even by Flash's standards. I don't know. Maybe it's because I've had a break from CW shows for a while during the winter break, but this isn't an episode I feel was particularly solid.

Let's talk about the parts that I think was done well -- Weather Witch. Introduced as a one-off villain in the pre-break part of this season, it turns out that she is feeling a whole ton of remorse over all of the harm she's done, particularly when Nora describes in loving detail how deadly weaponized lightning strikes are in front of the court. Moreover, you can really feel the conflict as she is being pulled on all sides -- a new villain, Silver Ghost, tries to basically recruit her into a new incarnation of the Rogues, while she herself is feeling a lot of remorse and just wants to do her time. Meanwhile, her attempts to turn herself in ends up with XS handing her to the police... and I totally buy that this frustrated young woman ends up following Silver Ghost when she does break her out and bring her along to steal a prototype ARGUS supercar, implied to be a prototype Batmobile. One that also happens to be a Cheverolet Camaro, and has a menu run by emojis, a hilarious little detail I loved.

Also a great part of this episode? Cecile. She doesn't have a lot of scenes in this episode, but the usage of her empath powers to realize that Weather Witch is actually genuinely remorseful, and might actually deserve a lighter sentence, is a pretty powerful bit, and is a very powerful counterpoint to Nora's far more ballistic POV.

The Flash is taken out by some convenient constant-vibration blast from Silver Ghost's technology-manipulation powers, and with both Ralph and Joe also calling in sick respectively, the cast is pared down to its B-team. And it's... well, it's not the best outing, I feel. Nora Allen has always been a bit of a brat, and with the revelation that she's at least in contact with Eobard Thawne, with the scenes being particularly ambiguous on how deep their partnership lasts, she's in a particularly bad headspace. I just feel that the execution ends up causing her to feel a bit too bratty. It makes sense, but the execution isn't particularly as well-done as it could've been.

The scenes between Nora and Eobard are pretty interesting, but the insistence of the show to keep Nora's backstory and intentions mostly vague leave us with the unfortunate fact that even though he's supposed to be the enigmatic plot device, Future!Eobard ends up coming off as a better-written character than Nora in this episode. Between his rant about how he wanted to be Flash, to him (maybe) earnestly begging for a second chance, Eobard Thawne is portrayed amazingly well, and honestly, it definitely could go either way as to whether Eobard is actually telling the truth or not on his repentance. We also get the revelation that Eobard has like 50 minutes left to live, and Nora's been zipping back and forth while time-travelling to this countdown.

It's just that... I dunno. Nora's been pretty inconsistently written, sort of like how her dad was in previous seasons. Her character development just ends up being far more severe than her father's, though, going from happy hero to "NO ONE CAN CHANGE" to giving everyone a second chance in the space of thirty minutes just because of a pep talk from her dad. I guess this ties into the whole 'excess' thing, but I really felt like this could've definitely either been toned down a bit to feel more realistic, or actually given room to breathe.

The B-plot this time around is Caitlin and Cisco's argument about the notion of a cure for metahumans, which is a pretty X-Men storyline. That's not the problem, though -- the problem is, again, the over melodramatic fashion that everything takes place. It's like the script writers had a bunch of arguments for both sides of a metahuman cure, and basically had the two actors read them, and then resolve it into "we can make a cure, as long as we give people a choice" bit at the end. Honestly, Carlos Valdez and Danielle Panabaker have great enough acting chops and chemistry to make the scenes work, but I feel like this is a conflict that really feels shoehorned and blown out of proportion. Considering how the characters have been for the past five seasons, this just feels like a weirdly bizarre avenue for them to explore -- everyone over-reacts so much, with Caitlin jumping straight into the "CURE IS BAD WE CAN ACCEPT OUR POWERS" bandwagon, being super-protective of her newfound split-personality-buddy, while Cisco is pretty bizarrely in the "ALL OR NOTHING" mentality, just because the episode calls for a conflict, and they have to resolve said conflicts at the end. Honestly, both Cisco and Caitlin's reasoning for wanting a cure and not wanting a cure are very, very solid. It's the execution that makes it feel pretty bland.

Sherloque, meanwhile, continues his investigation to Nora's little code book, and finds out that even though he has access to Gideon's files, they're all wiped permanently by Nora. Meanwhile, Barry finds that Mick Rory's novel is actually to his tastes, which is a nice bit of cross-show pollination I love. Silver Ghost, meanwhile, is another pretty bland villain-of-the-week.

Overall, an episode that honestly could've been pretty great if the script and direction had made it feel less like a wangst-fest, and more of an introspective episode for the three main characters involved.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Silver Ghost is loosely based on a gender-flipped version of Silver Ghost (Raphael Van Zandt) from the comics. In the comics, the Silver Ghost is a minor villain of the Freedom Fighters of Earth-X, who is a criminal boss with the ability to transmute objects into silver.
• The super-car that Silver Ghost and Weather Witch steal is noted to be a high-tech prototype from Wayne Enterprises. That, and the plethora of gadgets stuffed into it implies that this is a prototype version of the Batmobile in all but name. (I somehow can't see Batwoman or Batman riding around in a Camaro, mind you)
• Heat Wave's romance novel made its debut recently in Legends of Tomorrow's episodes. 

Young Justice: Outsiders S03E06 Review: Exile Bros

Young Justice: Outsiders, Season 3, Episode 6: Rescue Op

A pretty interesting episode, with a bunch of character reveals that clearly hit me out of the left field. While the red-hooded ninja and Talia's baby might be a lot more 'mainstream', so to speak, compared to Halo and Geo-Force, it's still surprising that we're actually getting even more new characters and potential Team members revealed here and there.

The cold open is pretty interesting, too, showing the Goode-VR item again that makes me pretty sure that it's going to be an important plot element going forwards considering how much it's been shoved in our faces for the past couple of episodes. Some schmuck in Bialya gets attacked by the wise-cracking Black Spider from the League of Shadows. And while Black Spider doesn't have a whole ton of screentime, he gets to make a whole lot of work with it, wish Josh Keaton giving what's essentially an evil version of his Spider-Man voice. All that quipping! And then, suddenly, Black Spider's mark is killed by a gigantic rock that squashes him flat almost comically, done by Black Spider's partner.

What a fun little cold open! We follow this up with another person playing on the Goode VR console -- Oracle! The episode doesn't really call any attention to Oracle being a crippled Batgirl/Barbara Gordon, so less attentive viewers might not even really realize who she used to be in season two, but Young Justice has tended to not try and shoehorn exposition all that much. Anyway, we get a brief scene between her and Dick that's pretty sweet. I like them!

Speaking of nice scenes to make you warm, we get the little 'adopted' Outsiders hanging out around the apple trees outside Superboy and M'gann's house, with Halo apparently not even remembering what hunger is because "Artemis feeds [her] regularly". We get a brief handwave of Forager communicating with them with the revelation that M'gann has downloaded the human language to Forager's brain. "Except pronouns", Superboy snarks, but turns out that Forager just has a very strong sense of self. This allows Forager to be adorable and speak in the third person!

Adding to even more mystery on Halo, though, is perhaps the most disturbing and sinister part of her yet, when she suddenly goes on a near-encyclopedic recital of random facts of New Genesis like a computer. Forager is just happy and amused that Halo knows about his home, but everyone else is... far more shaken. More hilarious is the interaction that Prince Brion has when he sees Forager, a real alien. Not like the half-Kryptonian Conner or the martian M'gann, not at all. It's hilarious.

After that bit of joking around, we get some heartwarming bonding between Brion and Forager, where the two of them bond over the fact that they're basically exile bros. I also love how Halo and Brion acknowledge that the senior members of the Team always try and talk about what to do with them, something that they do a lot. In this case, though, we get the glorious return of the Bio-Ship, which transforms into a trailer and gets along pretty well with Forager and his glorious apples. Forager loves his apples and that's just adorable. We also get some fun "is X's gender not obvious?" bit regarding the show's robotic sidekicks.


And this is where the cold open becomes relevant, where the combined conversations with dr. Helga Jace (still not allowed to hang out with the Outsiders, and who Jeff still has the hots for) and Dick has basically led Brion to get some confirmation that his sister Tara is still alive, probably has the same Geo-Force powers that he and Baron Bedlam have... and that she might very well be the mysterious rock-manipulating assassin in Bialya. Of course, the senior members of the Team are quick to note that there are many ways that people in the DC comics universe can lift rocks -- telekinesis, magic, super strength... but Brion is pretty convinced that he has to pursue this lead, if nothing else. Also, believing that Tara is under mind-control isn't a hard sell, considering how Plasmus, Plasma and presumably the other two random meta-kids used by Ma'alefa'ak have been mind-controlled.


Dick is not unwilling to help out, but he wants time to prepare for the simple reason that you don't mess with someone with the resources that Ra's al Ghul has. Of course, this isn't going to stop Brion Markov, though, who calls Jace for help. Halo is quick to be roped into all this, and Forager also wants in because 'helping the hive is the Bug way'. Forager is a good boy. Halo, having befriended the Sphere, basically coaxes him to take them to Infinity Island. Exile Hive-Bros, away!

The Team finds out that Halo's real name is Gabrielle Daou (a slight change from her comic-book 'Gabrielle Doe'), but when they go to inform Halo, they find out that the kids are gone! Thanks, Wolf. We get a fun little parallel to this scene as the Hive-Bros arrive on Infinity Island, and Halo decides that she wants the civilian name of "Violet", based on something Brion said to her last episode regarding her violet coloured light.

And then the Hive-Bros encounter Sensei... and, hoo boy, I know we've met Sensei in season one, but he was wholly unremarkable back then. He has taken several levels in snarkiness, and Keone Young gives us some absolutely fun line deliveries. "I am trying to meditate."  "Who does not know of the foolish prince, banished on live television?" "You are here to make a fool of yourself." and best of all, the absolutely badass comeback of "I don't need an army. I trained the army."

Of course, what the Exile Hive-Bros are doing is basically what any young team of superheroes will do, and isn't particularly different from what the various members of the Team did in seasons one and two -- charging into a fight that they're unprepared for, with very little resources, because they think they can handle what the world throws at them. The difference, though, is that the likes of Dick, Kaldur and Wally were already superhero sidekicks when they assaulted Cadmus. The Exile Hive-Bros are all very much un-trained.

And as an increasingly irate Sensei snarks about how Brion has ruined his meditation space, he shows off that he's not just any martial artist, being apparently able to judo-throw Forager, dodge the Super-Cycle's laser blasts and walk on lava. "Pain is an illusion" indeed. Sensei then quickly shows just how they are in the real world by... instantly snapping Halo's neck. Of course, the audience knows very well that Halo has regenerative powers and it's far less gruesome of an injury than having half her head burned off by Plasmus in episode three... but it's still a shocking moment for sure.

This shock value is increased when Sensei's backup team shows up, including, quite hilariously, motherfucking Ubu with a chest cannon that takes out the Super-Cycle and forces it to revert into the Sphere. A mysterious red-hooded ninja takes out Forager with martial arts. Sensei dumps everyone in a cell, and Halo, of course, heals herself with violet light in a pretty uncomfortable-looking scene of her neck snaping back in place. "Is Halo a New God?" has to be another fun line from this episode. Honestly, the scripting of this season is just so hilarious!




We get Ra's al Ghul watching this from a monitor, with a very, very panicked Sensei apologizing and telling Ra's that he had felt the life drain from Halo's body. Ra's al Ghul doesn't really give two shits, though, because as someone whose entire gimmick is being able to return from the dead (as he had since the climax of season two), "Resurrection does happen around here."

The big boys led by Nightwing arrive to break out the Hive Bros, but are stopped by Sensei's small army. Sensei brings a god-damn lightsaber katana this time around! We get some pretty fun scenes of the senior team faring far better, with Nightwing fighting against the nameless ninja and M'gann basically using her telepathy to keep Sensei in the air and unable to move. It's Brion's powers malfunctioning thanks to his anger that ends up being disadvantageous to the good guys, although any further conflict ends up being stopped by Ra's al Ghul, who shows up and mocks Dick, telling him that the Detective would be disappointed.

Interestingly, Ra's al Ghul reveals that he is neither a member of the Light, nor is he the leader of the League of Shadows anymore. Nightwing insists that Ra's al Ghul never lies, which is... okay, then? I'm not sure if I buy into that, but taking this at face value, we learn that someone has apparently replaced Ra's al Ghul in the council of the Light. Ra's does confirm that Tara might be among the League of Shadows... it's just that there's no way to get to Tara from him. We get a fun little exchange between Tigress and Ra's, too, which is a fun nod to their meeting in season two.

This leads to what's basically the formation of the Outsiders, sort of -- Nightwing just wants them to commit to their own team, even if it's not the Young Justice Team, and all is forgiven. We get some hints of them working from the outside, clearly foreshadowing the formation of the Outsiders. Oh, and Halo basically rejects the Gabrielle Daou name, not wanting to associate with her old life and wants to just be Violet. We get some flashbacks to said old life, but I'm not sure if any of them are important beyond some vague "people are racist towards Quracis".

Far more interesting is Ra's al Ghul's part of the final scene, where Talia shows up holding a baby, while the mysterious, red-hooded ninja (the credits' name for him) recognizes 'Grayson', with Ra's being pleased that his memory is back. Neat foreshadowing! Overall, it's a pretty solid episode, mostly focusing on the Hive Bros as they bond together over their similar situations of being rejected by the world around them.

Roll Call:

• Heroes: Oracle, Nightwing, Wolf, Halo, Brion Markov, Forager, Superboy, Miss Martian, Tigress, Black Lightning, Bio-Ship, Sphere
• Villains: Black Spider, Terra, Sensei, Ubu, Mysterious Red-Hooded Ninja, Ra's al Ghul, Talia al Ghul
• Others: Jaqqar Marlo, Talia's Baby

DC Easter Eggs Corner: [Spoilers for subsequent episodes]

• Ra's al Ghul was last seen mortally stabbed during the climax of Young Justice's second season, although as noted by Ra's himself, his whole deal is that he has access to the life-giving Lazarus Pits, allowing him to return back to life. 
• Ra's mentions "the Detective", a moniker for Batman that he uses almost consistently in the comics to refer to Batman whenever they meet each other. 
• Talia al Ghul and her mysterious baby! Talia, of course, is the daughter of Ra's al Ghul and probably as prominent as Ra's himself in various adaptations, characterized by her being torn between her loyalty to her father and her love for Batman. In far more recent stories, Talia would be revealed to be the mother of Batman's child, Damian Wayne, the most recent Robin. 
• Red-Hooded Ninja! Heading into spoilers territory, based on his name, the Red-Hooded Ninja is clearly Young Justice's adaptation of Red Hood. After the second Robin, Jason Todd, was murdered, he would be brought back to life by a combination of Superboy-Prime punching reality and a Lazarus Pit (most adaptations outside the original comic basically just ignore the stupid reality punch and revert back to Lazarus Pit). In the comics, Jason Todd spent a not-insignificant amount of time amnesiac as one of Ra's al Ghul's minions before slowly regaining his memory. 

Daredevil S03E10 Review: The Origin Of Karen Page

Daredevil, Season 3, Episode 10: Karen

Yeaaaah, I'm not really doing any of these in a timely fashion, am I? I just really can't really find the energy in the past few weeks to sit down and watch Daredevil. It's a great show, don't get me wrong, and everything is done well. The writing is great, the acting tends to be good, the twists are well-done... it's just that watching an episode of Daredevil is so tense and draining that instead of going to the next episode immediately, I tend to just want to take a seat and unwind. I don't know. 

Anyway, this episode is... it's solid, but it also feels a bit self-indulgent. It did take me four separate watching sessions to finally get through the episode in its entirety  Not that it's bad, but it's just so slow and "real", I guess. At the same time, though, Karen Page is a main character with a lot of built-up mystery that has been... well, I won't say problematic, exactly, because I've seen so many other superhero show protagonists be far more problematic, but Karen is always a character that I felt the show writers had no idea what to do up until this season.

And here's the second flashback episode of the season, I guess, focusing on Karen and... and it's all right. The episode takes just shy of 30 minutes from the episode's 50-minute runtime, and it's... I don't know. Parts of it felt really, really slow, while parts of it felt like it blazed quickly just to get at that chaotic end-point where Karen ends up getting caught in a nasty situation with her bodyfriend Todd and her brother Kevin. It really feels bizarre, honestly, that both Todd and Kevin feel so supportive and kind (Todd's drug dealing nastiness notwithstanding) to try and avert the "abusive boyfriend" trope, but then you jump straight from Kevin having an argument to Kevin... burning down Todd's home? And then to Kevin getting beaten up by Todd with a crowbar? At least Todd has the excuse of both being on drugs and having seen his house burn down. Everything else in that flashback felt like it worked other than the jump to Kevin burning down Todd's trailer house. 

Anyway, I do kind of like the portrayal of Paxton Page as a complex... antagonist, I suppose. He feels a lot like a three-dimensional character. On one hand, he's verbally abusive and dismissive of Karen, and does that irresponsible dumb parent thing of splurging money on super-expensive things while they're pinching coins. On the other hand, he clearly is deeply distraught at the death of his son, and he has his moments of niceness when he makes those pancakes to celebrate Karen going to college, actively supporting her at times. Also, while he was a gigantic dick about it (being more worried about how it "reflects on us" more than anything), there is some point to him telling Karen not to do drugs. He's ultimately an asshole for what he did to Karen, especially at the end, but I kinda get it, sort of. That argument after the pancakes about their mother was also well done on both Paxton and Karen's actors' part. 

Ultimately, though, we sort of knew how this was going to end. Karen shoots Todd (not to death, I think) when he's beating up Kevin, but ends up getting into an accident because you shouldn't drive when you're drunk and high, causing Kevin's death. It's a well-executed flashback sequence for sure, and a Netflix show is certainly one where you can spend 30 minutes delivering a pretty slow-paced sequence. So... yeah, there's that. 

The remaining 20 minutes of the episode deals with Kingpin sending Dex to murder Karen Page, although not before we get another slow scene of Karen talking to Father Lantom in the church's basement, with some fun lines and Lantom quoting John Lennon and telling Karen to come to mass. And Daredevil, of course, goes back to save Karen in the church even if this costs him the chance to take down Kingpin (I'm legitimately not sure why we needed that hacker lady from a narrative standpoint).

We get a gloriously creepy bit of Dex in the Daredevil outfit murdering people in the church and demanding for Karen to come out, and we get a pretty badass fight between Dexdevil and Daredevil, and... well, what is there to say? Daredevil always delivers in its action sequences. Dex also incorporates a whole lot of throwing things at Daredevil in his fight movements, which is neat. The action flows well, and we get a couple of neat scenes of Karen whispering to tell Matt what to do so that she can help evacuate the people in the church.

Unfortunately, though, Karen's attempts at being a distraction ends up with Father Lantom taking a bullet (or a knife or whatever it is that Dex threw) to the chest. RIP Father Lantom, you're cool, but your death was kind of telegraphed. The fight ends up escalating and I do like that Karen manages to contribute to the fight, dropping Dex off the second floor before tending to the wounded Matt. 

Overall, though, it's... it's a slower episode that I definitely don't hate, but not one that I'm particularly in love with either. Honestly not sure how I could fix this. Is it its positioning? Is it the pacing? Would it have worked better if it lasted an entire episode so I'm actually invested in Karen's flashback cast more? Would it have worked better if the fat was trimmed off and it lasted around 15-20 minutes? I don't know... it's an episode that I definitely have mixed feelings about. There's certainly a lot to like about this episode, but at the same time, it took me a long, long time to finally get through it.