Cartoon Block Reviews for 3/26/12
- Details
- Published on Monday, 26 March 2012 01:00
- Written by Kevin
The DC Nation block gave us new episodes for Green Lantern and Young Justice this week. Green Lantern: The Animated Series has slowly been able to find its footing though it has a lot of ground still to cover. On Young Justice side of things we are slowly getting to the season one finale with things continuing to get more intense. Now how did things turn out for both first year shows? Find out after the jump.
Green Lantern: The Animated Series – “Into the Abyss”
After recruiting Razor to their team Hal and Kilowog have their first big adventure with their new teammate. As usual with these types of episodes it takes each character some time to gel but by the end we did see the three worked together to save a spaceship and its cargo from meeting its doom.
Though “Into the Abyss” does a fine job establishing the roles of the trio it did not move the overall story arc involving the Red Lanterns, Guardians and other Lantern Corps. This episode had much more of a filler-type episode feel because there was not much in terms of story.
Even with Aya joining the team it felt as though this was just introduced to soon because there is not that big of a connection with the AI. I would have liked to see Aya develop more over time before she was given a body as it would have made for a better story later on in the season instead of being part of a filler episode.
At the same time, this episode did help to establish each characters personality as we saw Hal take on the leadership role, Kilowog act as the power of the team and Razor continue his outsider attitude. The writers are continued to do a good job to establish the three and what their roles on the team will be.
As the star of the show, Hal got the time to show that he is much more than a hot head and came out looking strong as he was able to analyze the situation at hand. It was also fun to see Hal continue to use his hot shot pilot attitude in how he piloted the endangered spaceship out of the wormhole.
One interesting development that happened in this episode was Razor bringing up the fact that his ring will be running out of juice soon if he does not get a Red Lantern power battery. This episode showed that Razor’s anger is not fully powering his ring so he will need a power battery soon if he is not going run out of power.
So now that we have the team dynamic set hopefully we will see more of the sub-plots of the series developed. There are a lot of characters the show can introduced, specifically some key characters to each of the members on this new team.
Episode Rating: 5 Night Girls out of 10
Young Justice – “Agendas”
“Agendas” continues the major sub-plot of Young Justice by giving us another suspect on who really is the mole on The Team. The interesting about “Agendas” is that though it gave us another character focused episode, this time highlighting Superboy, this was also the first time we see the entire Justice League have their own sub-plot in the show.
For the majority of Young Justice first season we have seen only Batman, Black Canary, Green Arrow, Captain Marvel and Red Tornado from the Justice League play roles in the show. And even with these five Justice League characters having some sort of involvement with The Team only three out of the five have been given significant time to develop.
With that said it was very surprising to see the writers of the series go with such a route of gathering all of the current Justice League members to decide on expanding their team. This was a very interesting take on the Justice League of this world because just looking at all the members on the Justice League it already looks like the Satellite is a crowded place. At the same time this does feel as something fresh because as a fan and reader of the series I have become so used to only having seven members on the team that this is different and I want to see how this affects the whole story with The Light.
The other interesting aspect of this sub-plot for the episode was the actual discussion of the new members of the Justice League. A lot of the choices presented to the Justice League gave us the opportunity to see the personalities of these version of the characters revealed. It was especially surprising to see that Captain Marvel was placed on the hot seat because of his actual age. That all lead to the discussion if any of the sidekicks should be inducted into the League. While nothing was revealed in terms of who is in and who is out it left us with something to look forward to next week.
Now for the other major part of the episode, we got more development for Superboy’s character. Superboy continues his loner personality by going out on his own to face more truths behind his origins. Bringing back Cadmus with Lex Luthor now in control helped to put the question of who Superboy really is to the fore front.
In the comics Superboy being 50% Superman and 50% Lex Luthor gave the character an added layer of depth and the same thing is the case in this episode. And having Lex takes step to put himself in good standing with Superboy should give us more to question if Superboy, intentionally or unintentionally, is the mole as we quickly near the season finale.
Now, even though this episode really only focused on Superboy we did get a nice, quick scene involving some more fallout from Zatanna still emotionally affected by her father’s sacrifice. I hope we get more of this in future episodes since Zatanna is the newest member on the team and should get some more time on screen.
Overall “Agendas” was a very good episode that helped further some of the sub-plots we have seen develop in Young Justice. I’ll admit that I do want to see more episodes with The Team actually working together instead of these solo episodes, since this is a team series, but this was still a fun episode.
Now my question to everyone is, who do you think is the mole on The Team? Also who do you want to see as part of the Justice League?
Episode Rating: 7.5 Night Girls out of 10
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Kevin started reading comics when he watched the first episodes of Batman: The Animated Series and Spider-Man: The Animated Series. After that his parents bought him a few random Spider-Man and Batman comics as a kid he has been hooked ever since. When he is not reading and writing about comics you can find Kevin as the destroyer of worlds, champion of fighting tournaments and ace Madden player on the PS3. You can catch up with Kevin and all his thoughts at the following links:
Twitter: KevinL007
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