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Stew’s Young Justice Retrospective: Season 2, Episodes 1 – 2
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Animation
Everything Is Different Now! A Young Justice Retrospective, S2 E1-2
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Episode 1
Oh man, as season two starts there are SO MANY CHANGES!
We see the team taking down Clayface in the sewer, but this iteration of the team is Superboy, Miss Martian (that’s okay so far and expected), a new Robin (whoa!), Jaime Reyes’ Blue Beetle, Bumblebee, and Beast Boy. WHERE DID YOU ALL COME FROM?! Maybe the same place as Rocket did in the finale last season. This show loves introducing heroes out of nowhere all of the sudden. They call into base and report to Nightwing, too, so Dick is still around.
Back at Mount Justice, M’Gann is now in a relationship with Lagoon Boy of all people, and Bumblebee has a boyfriend named Mal who she blows off to go to a lab session with The Atom. This is all in medias res-ing me to death here!
Captain Atom calls in a threat at the U.N., and Nightwing sends in the Beta Squad, so who the hell will THIS be?
The threat is Lobo! Awesome! And he’s speaking Czarnian until he activates his translator. There’s really… only so much you can do in PG animation with Lobo, but when he is speaking Czarnian we do hear a distinct “frag”.
Beta Squad is Cassie Sandsmark Wonder Girl and Barbara Gordon Batgirl—and that is a rad team I hope we see more of this season. We not have Tim, Conner, and Cassie. We are one member away from the actual core of Young Justice from the comics.
Anyway, Lobo handles Cassie and Babs, then rips apart a member of the UN, revealing him to be a little alien dude controlling a robot human body.
WE cut to a cross-reference of J. Jonah Jameson and Glenn Beck (called G. Gordon Godfrey, and you younger readers can recall Glenn Beck as a precursor to Tucker Carlson who is more era-appropriate for when this season was released) blaming the Justice League for not being able to scan for these little alien dudes. He sends it over to Cat Grant at the Hall Of Justice, and we see that Rocket and Zatanna are now full-fledged members of the League, and Zatanna is wearing her adult clothes now. How much time has passed?!
Also, I love that Rocket was a member of the team for, what, two episodes?
On the Watchtower, we find out the little alien dudes are the Kroloteans. Adam Strange gives us a science lesson on Zeta Tubes. We see that the missing Just Leaguers from last season are wanted criminals on Rann, but most importantly, Batman tells us FIVE YEARS have passed! Okay, Avengers Endgame, calm down. We didn’t need to miss THAT much, did we? I was thinking, like, one year.
Anyway, Strange says that ALL Justice League members are wanted on Rann, but Dick notes that the Young Justice contingency aren’t JL members. Is that the kind of ticky-tacky-ness you want to play when your teammates could end up being, like, executed?
Back at the cave, Nightwing splits up the team to do some Earth-based missions. Tim’s sent out with the third wave team as field leader to prep him for doing more of that in the future. Dick ominously tells him “Don’t die”, so… did we miss Jason entirely at this point?
Tim, Lagoon Boy, and Jaime think they have a soft mission, but they find a massive underground lair full of Kroloteans, all of whom look a whole damn lot like the genome creatures from season one, but I’m chalking that up more to art than to a story possibility.
The Kroloteans crap their pants at the sight of Blue Beetle and zeta tube out. They set the base to self-destruct, but there are humans to rescue! The heroes save them pretty quickly and escape, with Tim earning praise from Dick as they do so.
On Rann, we see the team of Megan, Conner, and Beast Boy tube in with Adam Strange, but that’s a story for another episode, apparently…
Episode 2
The Rann-sent heroes start off on the run from some giant robot thing, and they have a Rannian girl with a jetpack with them. Superboy saves her when the robot blows her jetpack up, then he initiates a flashback to how they got into that whacky situation.
The girl is Alana, and Adam Strange seems to have a thing for her when he introduces them all upon the arrival on Rann. Beast Boy refers to M’Gann as “sis”, which makes sense based on how he presumably got his powers, right? So I guess they have a neat little dynamic I can appreciate!
Alana’s dad is working on some Zeta blockers, which sounds like something old people have to take to keep their heart healthy when they wake up every day, to stop the Kroloteans from both further invading Earth or escaping from it. He keeps us in suspense by noting the wanted Justice Leaguers, but saying what they are wanted for is a mystery to him. All he knows is other that they were on the planet Rimbor, which sounds like… something else entirely I don’t feel comfortable going into here. But it certainly make me think of pain, that’s for sure!
Adam Strange bails on the team pretty shortly into their mission to distract some guards on a train from catching all of them. So the rest of the team heads into the Rannian jungle with Alana as their guide. Beast Boy tries to reunite Superboy and Megan with some memories of a time he tried to give her flowers, but they brush him off.
The team finds a big base built in the jungle, and Megan phases in… showing she learned that at some point. Even though she literally never struggled with not being able to back in season one, so that whole “I can’t phase like Martian Manhunter” thing never mattered. They gave her a line of dialogue to present an obstacle to what she can and can’t do, then just… forgot about it.
The fleeing Kroloteans from Earth beam into the jungle base, but are little mor than a momentary nuisance before the Zeta Platforms are bombed out of commission by Beast Boy and Megan. But that shows how the heroes ended up getting chased through the jungle, you know? After the bombing, the chase is on! So we’ve fully circled here! To the point that we straight-up repeat what we already saw in the opening seconds with Alana’s jet pack.
Once everyone gets clear from the Krolotean robots, though are also separated, Conner and Megan tell each other telepathically to stay safe. Alana asks Superboy how long the two of them had been together, and he responds “All my life”.
He relays his backstory to her. But all we get on their separation is that he dumped her because “she left [him] no choice”. This show loves punting on its suspense angles, man. Regardless of how unnatural it makes moments like this feel.
Beast Boy and Megan start goofing around together when the robots are clear, and we find out that Queen Bee killed Gar’s mom with a car accident, shit! While they are distracted, the robots abduct them and start taking off for Krolotea.
Superboy saves the two of them, but the warship starts firing on them all. Superboy and Beast Boy go to town on it while Megan is out cold. They cause enough damage to make the ship just retreat into space.
Megan wakes up down on the ground of Rann, finds some fleeing Kroloteans, and fucking mind-murders the hell out of one of them! All so she can… steal the bandolier it wears? What? She just gives it to Beast Boy as a souvenir. Oh, he’s the new Kid Flash, I get it.
Where is Wally, anyway? We haven’t seen him, Kaldur, or Artemis yet this season.
Superboy seems pisses when he figures out what M’Gann did to the Krolotean, but she blows off his concern and says she got the info on what the League did on Rimbor from the mind of the little alien dude she blasted.
So that’s a hell of a season start. A FIVE YEAR time gap, relationship changes, old members are MIA so far or members of The League, and a whole roster’s full of newbies are here.
How will the show manage all of these stories it’ building it up? We shall see…
