A Certain Pair Cameo in the New Young Justice Episode...

[espanolbot]

Mini-review, so spoilers.

There were two main plotlines in today's episode, with a story involving mainly Roy Harper trying to work out who is trying to kill the negotiator for a peace agreement between the DCU versions of North and South Korea.

And the other involved Superboy and Megan beginning their integration into human society by signing up to the local high school, where they meet a number of characters you can kind of recognise from both the Teen Titans tv show and the comics.

You might recognise these two, for example,


Overall, I thought that it was a fairly good episode, with the school stuff balancing out the political intrigue of Lex and the League of Shadows pretty well. The references to the Teen Titans in Conner and Megan’s school were pretty cute, and I liked the shows depictions of Ra’s and Lex. The Cass Cain/Artemis parallels continue to grow, with a definate David Cain/Lady Shiva vibe being produced whenever the two are together, amongst other things. We’ll see where that plotpoint is going, I guess.

For legality, here is a picture commissioned by Wizard Magazine of Cass and Babs getting into a fight.

Comments

[mullon]

So, is that supposed to be Megan or what?

[icon_uk]

In the picture above? No. But we do find both Superboy and M'Gann's secret ID's in this episode.

[venatosapiens]

Also, it's becoming more and more obvious that M'Gann watched huge amounts of fifties sitcoms. "You're...carrying my books?"
*Blank Superboy stare.*
"...Yes. Did you want them to get all wet?"

[espanolbot]

They pretty much said in the promotional material that Megan learnt about Earth culture purely from watching tons of TV, which is both where she got that annoying "HELLO, Megan!" catchphrase from (they had canned laughter to it in the show she saw, so presumably she adopted it thinking that it'd continue to be funny) and her idea of what human girls do are similarly effected by this.

Hence her baking cookies for everything and acting extremely stereotypically girly, which could be taken as her acting that way because the TV shows she saw were very old fashioned and had a poor portrayal of women in it (causing Megan to unintentionally keep the ideas in circulation) because of this, OR she copied it because "that's how girls act" but she genuinely likes baking and the like.

Nothing wrong with that, not everyone is Artemis or how Babs was in the DCAU, BUUUTTTTT... the kinda meta way of protraying Megan was kind of lost on a lot of people.

The idea of a female character acting kind of one dimensional and stereotypically "girly" because the fictional depictions of woman acted as such and, presumably her culture doesn't have the same entertainment values as us,would presumably be a bit of a complicated thought process to follow.

She has got better as the show's gone on now, she acts more like a person in the newer episodes as opposed to a person playing a "character", if that makes sense.

[kenwyn89]

heh, too clever writing for their own good. Excellent post.

[espanolbot]

Another feature that I like about their version of Mars in this show, is that apparently they're keeping the same idea behind J'onnz's Mars as his original appearance.

In that Mars hasn't gone the way of Krypton, and there is apparently a thriving society of Martians on the planet still. Megan makes reference to having nine sisters or something.

Plus I like the little details that they include every now and again. Like in the episode about Dr Fate, Klarion and Co. Megan makes reference to the Sorcerer Priests of Mars, who sound like the most Metal thing I've heard of in ages.

And and the implication that White Martians are apparently second class citizens on Mars, though it's not entirely sure whether Megan IS one yet, though one did appear in her flashback in the previous episode,

[kenwyn89]

Yeah, I like that idea too. All other races that tend to appear in comics and/or tv with Earth directly involved are either too primitive for space travel or long dead. And you've managed to make M'gann interesting to me now that you've put it like that- I've never really read any title with her in. I've been a little bit sceptical of her and Artemis as the only female characters on the team so far, probably because I liked Raven and Starfire on the Teen Titans show.

The way they're building up the plot is very good too and everything is done very realistically- ultimate-verse(ish), except kid friendly. I was a little surprised to see a North/South Korea allegory in it -.-' but I think it could be in a lead up to a Luthor presidency.

[espanolbot]

Yeah, the Korea thing was kind of obvious, right up to the head of the North Korea-stand-in looking a little like Kim Jong-Il and being referred to by a reversal of the third part of Kim's name: Li.

Overall, although I found the initial couple of episodes to be kind of disappointing, once they got to the Bane episode the series really hit its stride and all the characterisation is chugging along at a respectable pace.

Now if only they stopped Megan using that annoying catchphrase...

[kenwyn89]

Yep, hopefully it'll fade away like most early character gags do and only be used for irony.