Welcome back to Boomb Tube! Welcome to Boomb Tube! Here, we chronicle and give recaps for the various comic book related animated series on the air. This week: DC Nation makes its long-awaited return! Spoilers ahead! Oh and details about the plots too.
Green Lantern: The Animated Series came back in very strong form by continuing where the series last left off. Namely, Hal had just been blasted to a whole other universe by the Anti-Monitor and all his friends believed him dead. I didn’t remember this until I started watching these shows, but Cartoon Network chose the cruelest possible cliffhangers to leave hanging fans hanging for three months with. Anyway, Hal lands in Gaslight by Gotham Coast City. There, he meets a steampunk powered superhero with a jetpack and lasers named The Rocketeer with Lasers The Steam Lantern. On this planet, The Steam Lantern was able to defeat the Anti-Monitor and send it away to Hal’s dimension by just firing hella bunch of lasers at it. So, in order to get Hal back home to stop the Anti-Monitor, who Steamy keeps calling a “trigun” despite the fact that I’m sure I’m both not spelling that right and it’s not a real term, Steam and Green Lantern team up with Steam’s amazingly British workers’ rights activist lady friend to defeat the planet’s dictator, Victorian Nigel Thornberry.
In the Victhorianberry”s lab, the Lanterns and British woman are captured by Nigel’s steam punk robots and Steam is forced to admit that he was not the one to save everyone from the Anti-Monitor, it was Victhorianberry. Nigel apparently made a deal with the Anti-Monitor to let his planet go, after the AM had already devoured every other planet in the universe, in exchange for building a machine that would send him to a new, more populated universe. In order to get the dimension-hopping laser ready (this universe loves lasers SO MUCH), Victhorianberry created a bunch of robots to enslave the world and get everyone to work in Victorian coal mines to get the laser ready.I hope I will be able to type that sentence again one day, it felt so great. Before anyone can question why Victhorianberry couldn’t just use the robots to make the laser and forego the enslaving humanity shindig, the sun goes out and everyone realizes that the Anti-Monitor depleted its energies before leaving the universe, dooming this Earth to die. Works’ Right Activist tells everyone to lay down, get a cuppa, and wait for death, but then Victhorianbery thinks hard about his life choices, before allowing Hal Jordan to use the dimension laser’s last charge to retur home. Hal turns into hero mode, however, and uses his ring’s power to stretch the portal and keep it open long enough for an entire Steampunk Earth to enter our own dimension. If a Steampunk planet in DC Universe Space doesn’t become James Robinson and Tony Harris’s next project, then DC and I are done. One last important note: this episode also included a not-so-subtle reference to Alan Scott which will hopefully be picked up again sometime soon.
Review Score: 9/10 – Green Lantern is really coming into its stride now.
This week on Young Justice, The Light, The Team’s arch-nemeses, revealed that the aliens they were partnered with were actually The Reach who really wanted to get in on that one word followed by “The” naming gimmick. Robin and Batgirl disguise themselves as teenagers in order to sneak in with the next batch of kidnapped teens being sent to The Reach to have their metahuman genes painfully activated. One blonde female teen notices them, but Robin and Batgirl aren’t allowed to acknowledge who she will eventually become or else DC will shut down the entire show or recolor her hair and say she’s a second Barbara. The rest of The Team show up and free the teens aboard the ship. Impulse immediately runs off to find Blue Beetle who is being tortured by The Reach so they can take off his scarab. Apparently, Jamie’s scarab was supposed to turn him into a full-on murder machine but he crashed the mode and now all of Impulse’s gibberish makes sense. Impulse’s mission turns out to consist of making sure that Jamie does not go full mode and turn into the genocidal Beetle that Bart knows from the future.
Continued belowMeanwhile, Miss Martian sees Aqualad and, not knowing about his cover identity, just straight up flushes his mind. Oops. Elsewhere, a Black Beetle appears and fights The Team who are trying to escape. Everyone on The Team fails for the most part except for Jamie who has an amazing fight with Black Beetle after allowing the Scarab to take full control of him. Would’ve been even better if I wasn’t distracted by Static Shock hanging out in the background not doing a damn thing. Anyway, Jamie and The Team are able to flee from Black Beetle and safely get back home.
Later at the base, The Team discuss what to do about The Reach. They figure they should just get the word out, but before anyone can send one goddamn tweet, The Reach appear at The UN to bro-fist the President of the United States. G. Gordon Godfrey breaks the news to everyone, further teasing the inevitable Legends adaptation that will happen any episode now. Everyone laughs back since they figure “Oh The Reach probably just brought one ship!” Unfortunately, they’ve never seemed to watch their own show, as a final shot reveals hundreds of Reach ships hiding in the Mariana Trench.
Review Score: 8/10- Great characterization in Blue Beetle and another fun episode. Not enough steampunk lasers though.
