Well, with the year and The
Mandalorian both closing out, I might as well finish with another episode of
Young Justice. What? I’ve liked doing five of these things a month, so I’d
rather not break the pattern.
Last time on Young Justice the Team
moved into its new digs. After a short tour and newbie member Miss Martian
learning about Superboy’s telepathy hang ups, the local town of Happy Harbor is
attacked by a supervillain. The teens do battle with the villain, an Iron Man
looking fella with wind manipulating powers named Mr. Twister and get spanked
hard. They come at him hard a second time, and use Miss Martian’s shapeshifting
powers to trap him, and defeat the robot. In a cut away, we learn that it was
created by Dr. T O Morrow (groan) who is looking to capture the Team’s adviser
and his own runaway creation, Red Tornado. It’s a very busy first day, I tell
you what. Let’s get to it.
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| As cool as Superstrength would be, I think I'd turn it down if I also had to deal with skin ripping muscle enhancement. Just Sayin'. |
We open to a prison on the fictitious
island of Santa Prisca. You might recognize the name, as it’s the home of reigning
Batman Back Breaking Champion, Bane (Played by Danny Trejo). Bane’s Venom
manufacturing facility has been taken over by Cobra, a snake worshiping cult
not unlike the villains of GI Joe but still a separate entity. Cobra agents release
Bane and return his Venom injector, claiming that they’ll leave the island if
Bane fights and defeats their champion. Bane, feeling cocky for some reason,
agrees. Cobra’s champion walks in as Bane bulks up. He’s a string bean looking
kid, until he gets an injection of a purple chemical cocktail. He basically
triples in size, dwarfing Bane, and getting so huge his skin seems to rip open
to expose muscle. Gross. Bane get’s the piss beaten out of him as the assembled
Cobra solders start chanting Hail Cobra and their leader, one might say their
commander, Cobra smiles evilly.
…
Are we sure that GI Joe doesn’t
have grounds to sue?
Anyway, we cut over the Team as
they fly to Santa Prisca. In a flashback, Batman gives the kids their mission. The
island’s main illegal export is the neo-steroid Venom, the weird thing is that
the factories are all still running according to heat scans, but they haven’t
shipped any Venom out in some time. The Team is being sent in to covertly
observe and report what is happening on the Island. Robin is rather eager to
hear who of the group is going to be Team Lead for the mission, but Batman and Tornado
think the kids need to figure it out. As the mission begins, their ship goes
into camo mode, and Aqualad dives in to sneak aboard the beach to give the
others a landing bad. The rest of the kids drop, after the more brightly
colored members switch to “stealth gear,” black variations of their costumes.
The only ones to obtain are Robin and Superboy, who both dress largely in dark
colors normally. Group B makes for the factory while Group A, consisting of
Aqualad, will meet up with them at the factory.
Group B is nearly set upon by a pair
of guard patrols. Thankfully Superboy’s hearing tips them off. Robin disappears
into the jungle the moment they think they hear something, much to Kid Flash’s
annoyance. The others almost go unnoticed, until Kid Flash goes to find Robin,
slips, slides down the hill and lands right in front of Bane’s crew. Whoops.
Kid Flash just barely escapes getting shot before the rest of the team join him.
Robin reappears and berates his allies for not following his lead and vanishing
into the jungle. They take out both groups of guards as Aqualad rejoins them.
 |
| I can accept superpowers, aliens, and a lot of other weirdness, but even my suspension of disbelief gets stretched too far when there are supposed to be TWO nerds on a team. *Joking* |
Robin tells the team about the Cult
of Cobra, and they’re able to piece together the general plan. Cobra snuck in,
took over the factory to get Venom and are using it to pump up their crew. Kid
Flash is all for calling it Mission Accomplished and heading home, but Robin points
out that none of the goons are on Venom and wants to know why the higher ups of
the Cult must be hording the stuff. Robin tries to assert his dominance over
the group, which Kid Flash vehemently rejects. Off to the side, Superboy and
Miss Martian both agree that neither of them is really cut out for leadership,
so they’ll leave it to the other three to sort out. Superboy’s hearing catches
the Bane goons trying to figure out a plan. Bane offers to lead the kids into
the factory via his secret entrance. Miss Martian confirms that there is an
entrance via telepathy but also senses that Bane is obviously hiding something.
He just smiles and says “Nah-uh-ha Chica, Bane is not that Easy,” and mentally
recites Futbol scores in Espanola to protect his thoughts. Bane claims the old “Enemy
of my enemy,” adage.
At the factory, Master Cobra is expecting
their contact to arrive and buy their new product. Master Cobra tells his
minions to prepare.
The kids see Cobra goons preparing the
product and agree that they need to identify the new buyer. Bane leads them
into his secret tunnel. They make it inside the factory, and Robin disappears
almost instantly, with Kid Flash zooming after him to try and beat his friend to
the ops center. Robin makes it there and starts hacking. The others observe as
the Cobra goons get the product ready, Superboy noting that they’re only taking
the new stuff, not the Venom stockpile they’d accumulated. And then tells the
group about an approaching helicopter. Superhearing isn’t typically up there
when it comes to favorite powers, but it is damned useful.
In the lab, Kid Flash joins Robin,
who explains that he’s found chemical formulas on the main computer.
Considering this is a drug manufacturing plan, that really isn’t too
surprising. No, the weird thing is that it looks like the baddies are combining
classic venom with a new chemical, the same Blockbuster formula they ran into
at Cadmus Labs. The one that turned a simple geneticist into a blue hulk. Oh
no. According to Cobra’s research, the combine formula, dubbed Cobra Venom, is
three times more potent, and the transformation is permanent. Yeah, that’s all
kinds of bad. Kid Flash and Robin realize that whomever the buyer is must have
also supplied the Blockbuster formula, and try to radio the info into the others,
only to find coms blocked.
 |
| So I guess Mr. Freeze and Calendar Man aren't the only formerly comedic Batman villains to get a bad ass injection. Looks like you're on your own, Condiment King. |
Outside, the helicopter touches
down, and the buyer steps out. This is Sportsmaster, a usually almost comedic
Batman villain redesigned into a mercenary badass. He’s the “Buyers” point man
on the operation. Sportsmaster claims the formula is potent enough that the
baddies think it’ll let them go toe to toe with the Justice League. Given the powerhouses
on that team, that’s a hell of a lot of confidence. Miss Martian, watching
invisibly from above, lets the others know what the buyer looks like. When they
discover coms are out, Bane leaps in, causing a massive brawl between the Team
and Cobra soldiers. Superboy brawls with Cobra’s super warrior, Mammoth, while
the others take care of the soldiers. With coms down, Miss Martian uses her
telepathy to link the up and be the de facto radio. Aqualad takes command and
calls a retreat. They make for the secret tunnel and sprint away. Superboy
smashing support beams to cover their exit.
In the tunnel, Robin bemoans the
fact that his “first mission as leader” went so haywire. Aqualad points out
that it really isn’t a lack of skill on Robin’s part that is the issue, it’s
actually his overabundance of it. In universe, Robin has been at this since he
was around 8. Five years later, he and Batman can operate pretty much operate silently.
So Robin expects that from the rest of the team, which is kind of an unfair
standard to expect the first time out. Robin and the others all agree that Aqualad
should be in charge, which he accepts, but tells Robin that he’ll just hold the
spot until Robin is ready for it. Or more accurately the team is ready for him.
Top side, the Helicopter is
stalled, with Sportsmaster and Master Cobra both realizing it was probably
Robin’s doing.
The kids run for the exit. As they
do, they realize that things are way more complicated than they might have
originally thought. They know that Sportsmaster isn’t the type to hire anyone
to do his dirty work, and that he nor Cobra have the chemistry chops to attempt
to bond two neo-steroids together. So obviously there’s a large force at work
here. They realize this just in time to see Bane attempt a double cross. He explains
that he plans to kill the kids in a cave in to try and force the Justice League
to step in and kick Cobra out of his factory. This gives Kid Flash more than
enough time to super speed over and steal the detonator. Miss Martian lifts
Bane with telekinesis and then drops him into a Superboy punch. Yeah, he’ll be
out for days.
The team attacks the helicopter
just as it’s about to take off. They divide and conquer, having Aqualad and Kid
Flash handling crowd control, Superboy and Miss Martian try and destroy the
shipment, and Robin battling Master Cobra. They actually use Bane’s mines to
destroy the shipment and cause the copter to crash into the factory. Nice plan
kids. With five on one odds, Master Cobra somehow does that Batman vanish into
the shadows trick. Weird. Robin is surprisingly chipper about not leading now,
as it means he won’t have to explain to Batman why they ended up blowing up a building
on a recon mission. Dick move… Dick Grayson.
 |
| You know it's a really evil group when they can rock a name like The Light and not sound too silly. |
Back at Mount Justice, Batman first
yells at the kids for said exploding building before congratulations them on finishing
the mission. With the bad guys, Sportsmaster reveals to his bosses that he only
was able to save a single injectors worth of Cobra Venom. His bosses don’t seem
too concerned, as they will be able to reverse engineer the formula from that.
No, they’re much more interested in these kids butting into their operations.
Cadmus and Mr. Twister were both their ops. They claim that Enemies of the
Light must not stand. Well, that’s ominous.
Overall, this was a solid continuation
of the Young Justice story. We got to see how the kids handled an actual
mission. While they tried to work as individuals, they kind of sucked at it,
but as soon as they started to coordinate and talk to one another, things got
much, much easier for them. In their first stand off against Cobra, Kid Flash
was running around wildly, Superboy was too focused on taking Mammoth down,
Robin was trying too hard to get a Batman brawl with Master Cobra, and Miss Martian
and Aqualad were just trying to survive. Round two, things were much more
focused, with Kid Flash focusing on the normal Cultists, Aqualad using his
powers to take Mammoth off the board entirely, and Miss M and Superboy focusing
on the important, chemical destroying part of the mission. Robin still went
after Cobra’s head, but hey, he was more focused this time. I also liked the
reveal that ultimately the kids only really delayed what the big baddies are
planning. This is a recurring plot point for the Team, while they almost always
are successful on their main mission, the episode usually closes out on the
reveal that villainous Light organization got either it’s main or secondary
objective completed. It makes a greater amount of dramatic tension when
the heroes don’t have the foggiest idea about how screwed they might be. And
obviously I love Danny Trejo as Bane. Why the hell did no one think to make him
Bane in that STUPID Batman Forever film? Bane is an intimidating and
intelligent Hispanic supervillain, Danny Trejo is all of those things. Or can
at least fake the two-character traits super believably. I’d better start stop
before I go on a Screw you Batman Forever rant. Have a Happy New Year,
everybody.
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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