Welcome back to our coverage of Young Justice: Invasion as part of the 2018 Multiversity Summer TV Binge! With only six episodes, the action is ramped up, the war is begun, The Reach are here…and now so is Mongul. Let’s dive in!
1. Play-by-play
I first want to comment on the way this episode is structured, because it is the first to really utilize the date feature of the episode in any sort of interesting way in a really long time. There’s a lot of perspective switching in this episode first from the League’s trial on Rimbor, to the Reach, the League/Team/ Mongul, to Karen and Mal’s perspectives that go on at the beginning of the episode and is then maintained during the attack on Warworld. This reminded me a lot of something like 24 with so many different plots, perspectives, people. The League detects Warworld, The Reach responds, Mal and Karen see it as it gets close enough to us to be a “second Moon,” and all of this happens over multiple days as place and time shift. It’s cool to watch this whole event play out over space and time as the League attacks the exterior of the Warworld and the Team infiltrates it and The Reach just view it all on camera. A lot is done with the shifting perspectives to highlight almost everyone this season has brought to the fore (minus The Light and Kaldur and co.) and it creates a really cool, well structured, paced, and planned episode.
I’m thankful to fellow Multiversity contributor and my fellow Make Mine Multiversity co-host Nick Palmieri (who I swear is the only one who reads this and the only one who listens to me, mostly cause I make him) for this next bit of information. Nick told me this last week there is a pattern maintained throughout the whole season, which I have since double-checked, of the directors of each episode and the type of things that happen in the episode. Tim Divar, Doug Murphy, and Melchior Zwyer switch off directing in that order. Nick said the Divar episodes are deal with the core Team and push the plot forward, the Murphy episodes are sideshows (like last week’s episode), and the Zwyer episodes are story bombs that focus on everyone. This episode was a Zwyer one, which I think helps to explain some of the well-strucutred nature and broad focus. Thanks Nick!
2. League on trial
Now on to the story. We see the League for the first time since they left to go stand trial on Rimbor 12 freaking episodes ago. In show time they left on January 6th and are standing trial three months later on April 2nd. I was wondering when we’d get back to this. The trial is interesting, Superman seems to be the only one to speak, the League is all in chains, Hawkman watches on the sidelines and Icon clears to not be lawyer-ing well. Kroloteans, who we thought were our first antagonists, mock them saying their done cause they didn’t do the proper bets, and all of a sudden, everyone gets word that The Reach have invaded Earth. John Stewart then drops that The Reach and the Green Lantern Corps have a truce after a conflict ages ago and it’s possible that he may not be able to return to Earth. Yikes.
It’s interesting the contrast of placing this episode in the past, as last episode took place on May 13th, and we immediately jump to May 23rd as Warworld becomes detectable in the distance. Maybe this is supposed to tell us it took the League a month to get to Rimbor, but that doesn’t align with the comic book pseudo-science ideas I have. Definitely took Warworld that long to get there though. Mongul really don’t like The Reach.
3. Mongul and Warworld
So Mongul here is a sort of unfleshed out villain. Trying to reconquer his planet after being ousted as dictator, he wants to conquer literally everything else to I guess go Death Star on his old planet? Maybe it’s good he has a Death Star. What the show does to Mongul here, make him sort of a one-note villain and defeatable after throwing enough muscle and then brought down on a technicality, a little like Despero. The show seems to have track record of making the big puffy bad guys with rich comic book histories just muscles that the combined might of everyone can eventually bring down. It’s unfortunate, but with juggling so many different characters it makes sense. The scenes with Doctor Fate and Rocket protecting Earth from lasers and missles and the League destroying things while the Team fights off Mongul are really well done and shows just how focused and espionage-like the Team can be when thrown at a problem.
Continued below4. Is this really the time?
The one pair that get the spotlight that seems out of place though are Mal and Karen. They’ve been arguing the past few episodes, there’s no spice in their relationship anymore, things ain’t like they used to be you know in high school when…well when you know when things were better. They get paired together in a squad (cause you know Mal’s good to do that now since the Team is low on people), and they just argue while trying to destroy the power to Warworld, but by doing so they take the weapon planet down. Then they kiss and make up and the whole subplot takes precious minutes from other interactions that seemed more pressing here. I’m happy for them, they’re one of the few good married comic couples who stay married, it just seems unnecessary when there’s, you know, literally a planet destroying, wannabe dictator trying to conquer you. But maybe I just am a cynic and don’t understand love. Who knows?
5. Xanatos Gambit x2
I’m thankful for Nick for this point as well as he introduced this concept to me, giving a name to a phenomena I had been witnessing since the inception of this show. Apparently Young Justice creator Greg Weisman also pulled the, “The villain’s are better than you and have been all this time” card on a show prior to this one, namely Gargoyles. He even got a pop culture term coined for it, a Xanatos Gambit, based on the name of the villain of that show. When Vandal Savage fooled the League last season, and also made sure some of them attacked Rimbor and he got away, that was a perfectly example of this. I still think it’s really cool and really smart and works with a show like this since often superhero villain’s are poorly translated, but it is starting to become apparent it’s happening again.
Vandal Savage is on Rimbor and is the little birdie in Mongul’s ear as the League is on trial telling him to go attack the Reach on Earth. I can’t remember seeing Vandal in person all season, perhaps he’s been on Rimbor this whole time. In which case, why haven’t the League seen him? Oh wait no, he was in episode 9, “Darkest,” as Aqualad got welcomed to The Light, but remotely. That episode chronologically took place the end of March.
But more than Vandal even, The Reach had Jaime to make sure everything went good for them on Warworld, and presumably Green Beetle also. Blue takes down the whole Team and steals the crystal key and give The Reach another weapon for their arsenal. Maybe Vandal will trump The Reach later, but they are all playing the heroes as pawns (with Luthor’s we need a team of our own proclamation also thrown into the midst of this). There’s a lot of good villaining here, the Team and what’s left of the League are clueless. Having seen this trope used repeatedly, and multiple times this season, and this episode, I could see people being tired of it.
Thoughts on the episode? Sound off in the comments below and come back next week as we turn back to our planet-sized MacGuffin for more Warworld shenanigans.
