This Young Justice: Outsiders review contains spoilers.
Young Justice Season 3 Episode 24
Young Justice starts the final run of the season by closing out most of its Apokalips storyline. Who could have guessed that a Gorilla-Beast Boy vs. Business Granny Goodness showdown would be so much fun? Now that I typed it out, I’m sure the correct answer to that is “everyone.”
As The Team headed off to Granny’s Orphanage in space last week, Beast Boy also gathered a crew to go investigate some of Granny’s Earthly holdings. Cyborg is figuring out his powers now that he’s in control of them, so he’s been scanning for possible locations for Halo and found a studio storage facility on the Goode World lot, so Beast Boy, Cyborg, Wonder Girl, El Dorado and Blue Beetle investigate. Cyborg manages to bring Overlord’s X-Pit generator into phase with their reality and that triggers all of them being dropped into said X-Pit as Granny descends to teach Gar a lesson. Meanwhile, Vic’s consciousness bounces to the cyber-plane where he’s attacked by CHONK BOI Overlord.
The Granny/Beast Boy fight is really entertaining, but I think DC wanted it to be a little more emotionally resonant and that just didn’t land for me. I was mostly stuck with the dissonance of this kindly old lady in businesswear beating the piss out of a green gorilla with her face (which, solid B+ dick move by Garfield that I didn’t think he was capable of).
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The fight that stuck was the Overlord/Cyborg duel – this one was almost exclusively about Vic continuing to come to terms with his new identity and used Overlord almost as a setting rather than a character. Vic has to accept his cyborg-ness, and when he does, he takes control of the fight and Overlord and throws everyone out of the X-Pit. Then he and Jaime blow up the generator, which sends Overlord and Granny…somewhere. It’s not a boom tube, but they do disappear, and Vic follows them to track down Halo.
He finds her at the Orphanage, and as the two Grannys merge (business Granny and Apokalips Granny), he zaps the control device off of Violet, freeing her. Halo had been “repolarized” as Anti-Life, so she inverts her polarities and becomes the Life Equation, freeing all the controlled heroes, healing the non-metas, and kicking Granny’s ass. As she’s booming away, Superboy makes sure to dime out Vandal Savage for giving the heroes her coordinates. And with that, we (mostly) wrap up the Apokalips storyline of this season of Young Justice.
Coming into this episode, I assumed that because it would be dropping at the same time as the final two, it would be one long flowing finale. It’s very much not, I think in large part because of how complicated the season has been, and it works. The season got a little cluttered towards the end, so tying off the big story arcs with their own separate episodes was a good choice. Timing wise, just because this episode happened more or less simultaneously with the second half of the last one, it might have made more sense to include that with this batch. But that’s just a structural nitpick. This was a solid episode with good action and a concise story that did what it needed to do in an entertaining way.
OUTSIDER TRADING TIPS
-Luthor spent the entire episode staring at Twitter. Supervillains! They’re just like us!
-There’s something weirdly satisfying about the fact that Granny’s airgapped studio building was NOT numbered 52 like…pretty much everything DC has been for the last decade.
-I really like Zeno Robinson’s Cyborg. His heroic ass-kicker yelling was almost as entertaining as his “I’m losing my shit and barely hanging on” yelling.
-Also, “Booyah!” I can’t believe I get so excited for a catch phrase.
-So Overlord managed to keep Granny separate as two distinct beings for…how long? Long enough for her to become an entertainment magnate on Earth? Let’s all agree not to think too hard.
-“Chipped beef” works two ways: Chipped Beef on Toast is also known as Shit on a Shingle, and I think it’s a very mid-Atlantic diner food and Guy Gardner is from Baltimore.
-…is that Lobo’s thumb growing into a baby Lobo?
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