Imperial Privilege

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

So I finished my YJ marathon, and I have to say that was a heartbreaker. Things really picked up as the show moved along, and the powers-that-be pull the cord after an incredible framework is being laid for season 3. It feels like that would have been the final season, too. How else are you going to top Darkseid?

The plans and counter-plans made the whole thing feel more like a game of chess than the usual, face-punching heroic antics. It gave the show some gravitas. You can't throw plasma bolts at something like The Light. You've got to beat them at their own deadly game. Like I said, I've really enjoyed how YJ plays with expectations and jukes some superhero standards.

I was especially happy to see Vandal admitting that his plans were in shambles and he was seething in rage at Kaldur having played him for a fool. After a season and a half of perfectly executed plans, The Light needed to be knocked down a peg. Then again, with the way Vandal greeted Darkseid in the end, maybe that was just another plan within a plan.

It's not like the show will ever be able to explain that now.

Not to say the show was spotless. The biggest problem was a sense of split focus.

Building up the original six, only to jump ahead five years with a mostly-new, radically expanded team killed a lot of the show's momentum. That chemistry I had come to love was almost entirely gone, replaced by a lot of relationship drama about Superboy and Miss Martian's breakup.

I've always hated romantic sub-plots in almost any form of media. The hero's journey does not necessitate hooking up. It's a rare day indeed that I see a romance developing and don't feel it's a huge waste of time. Superboy and Miss Martian's budding affection was one of those rare good examples in season 1. Then it became a cancerous mass sucking up more and more screen time in season 2.

If the writers were going to flesh out the huge cast, time would have been better spent on newbies not named Blue Beetle (see: Wolverine). As it is, I know hardly anything about them. So many of the fresh faces were one-dimensional. Beast Boy got some attention early on before turning into a generic "big gun" with his big animals and no lines. Bumblebee likes science and neglects her boyfriend. Wonder Girl is a fangirl. New Robin doubts himself. Batgirl is indistinguishable from the rest of the Bat-crew once you get past the long hair. (Was it really necessary to have three flavors of Bat-Kids on the team? I might have bought it if they brought an interesting team-within-a-team dynamic to the show, but they were just interchangeable Bat-brats.)

Lagoon Boy was one of the few with some nuance and depth as he puts up the cowboy attitude to mask his feelings of inadequacy and betrayal over Conner and Kaldur, respectively. He could be an obnoxious oaf, but I actually really came to like that guy. The puffer fish-sumo schtick was fun enough to help.

The Runaways were great fun in their unique perspective on the whole superhero gig and their very real grievances with the supposed good guys. They seemed like they were being set up as a looser version the Team, so then three of them retire at the drop of a hat. What? I know they weren't jazzed about having powers in the first place, but it felt like a non-sequitur.

The Roy Harper sub-plot was a little weird in the sense that it all felt very familiar. Arsenal was doing in season 2 what Red Arrow spent most of season 1 doing. There is a logic in that, of course. Same guy, same way of thinking. It just feels like a waste to bring back the original when he's Red Arrow with a crew cut and a mechanical arm.

I guess they wanted to give Red some peace after torturing him for so long without losing their rebel on the edge, but it undercuts the idea of them being two different people. They really were interchangeable in the end, which undermines Speedy/Arsenal's freakout in the hospital bed.

As much as I complain, though, Speedy/Arsenal's attack on Lex was fucking hardcore.

I can only wonder who they would have brought in to season 3. I've read various interviews with Weisman that he was interested in Ravager (Deathstroke's daughter) and the Wonder Twins. Vandal also mentioned being a father, which seems like a hook for Scandal Savage, and some people have said that there were cameos from a young Arrowette and Stephanie Brown (The Spoiler/Robin/Batgirl). Not a terrible roster, but I suspect Scandal and Ravager would have been a retread of the Artemis-Sportsmaster sub-plot. Stephanie would have been another interchangeable Bat-Kid if this show's record is anything to go by, but YJ-styled Wonder Twins could have held some real promise.

Then again, stuffing more kids into the Team is a very risky proposition when the cast is already so bloated it's turning its nominal leads into wallpaper. Wally was barely in the second season at all and only really came back to berate Nightwing before he died. He's lucky he was in the first season or his death wouldn't have meant anything.

It was still a fun show all-in-all, and it's revived my interest in animated DC enough that I'll probably catch up on the DC animated movies I've been missing. That series has a pretty good track record with what I've seen so far. Under the Red Hood and New Frontier were fantastic.