Monsters of Television

“It makes me angry! Wanna see me channel that anger?!”

Flash would be so proud of Wally for getting beaten by Black Canary. Kid Flash: WIN

Six words: Superboy angry! Superboy smash! Noel yawn!

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration as I did like the episode overall, but you get my point. As was mentioned earlier, Superboy is pretty much defined by his anger issues, which has made him kind of uninteresting. Not saying that he doesn’t have a right to those issues, but the show hasn’t done anything to make those issues be more than a character shorthand and not a part of Superboy’s (hopefully) larger personality.

But this episode does make steps to remedy this flatness as it allows Superboy the opportunity to begin working through his anger (and for Batman to tell Superman to, well, Superman up).

The Superboy/Superman dynamic, as the episode makes clear with its talk of fathers by Bruce and Clark at the Bibbo‘s diner (he’s the waiter, by the way), is about estranged relationship between a father and son, a common enough trope in stories of teenage-hood that I’ve been expecting Superboy to get himself a red jacket (and Superboy does like jackets). I do like that the show has made the counter-intuitive leap to have Sueprman, normally so, well, “big blue boy scout”-y, to be the cold and distant one here, as opposed to the obvious choice of Batman. It’s a nice change up in the dynamic (Bruce seems awfully supportive in general) of the adult heroes that can hopefully translate into nice character development for the younger ones.

However, all this talk of fathers and father figures leaves me in the lurch a bit. The show is so very patriarchal that it’s starting to grate my patience a bit. Everyone’s mentor is male, and the episode makes the very obvious show of highlighting this given Superboy’s issues (J’onn checks in on M’gann, Batman compliments Robin). I get that much of this stems from many many superheroes being male (and their creators and audiences and such) and thus taking on male partners/sidekicks is the obvious route, but there’s no need to perpetuate it here.

So, with that in mind, I appreciate that Black Canary is set up as a potential mentor for Superboy, but given the story with Bruce and Clark, it reeks of a placeholder until Clark comes around to his responsibilities (whatever those may be). And that’s not exactly what I’m looking for when I say want stronger female characters on the show.  I’ll even take Artemis’ indirect appearance in the episode as a good sign (she joins the show in full next week, according to the episode summary). Fingers crossed.

All that aside, the episode was good. Action sequences were well-staged, and I enjoyed the constant laughter/chattering of the M.O.N.Q.I.s (“Have you met my Mobile Optimal Neural Quotient Infiltrators? … Aah. And after the trouble I went through finding an acronym for monkey.”) I do feel like Amazo is suffering from the Worf Effect in the DC universe now. Whenever we need to learn how tough or good someone is, Amazo is trotted out. What do I mean? I took the League four hours and eight members to  dismantle Amazo. Three members of Young Justice did it in, what, 10 minutes? Poor Amazo. Gets no respect.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• “I’m whelmed.” I do love a good callback joke.
• Well, at least they identify that it’s August so it doesn’t seem weird that Robin’s not in school.
• I did enjoy Batman’s tone as he referred to Green Arrow continuously calling for reinforcements to battle Amazo as nearly disastrous. The tone being, of course, “He’s idiot.”
• Villains this week: Pretty easy to identify since names are given: Professor/Doctor Ivo and Amazo. And kudos are given for Peter MacNichol’s excellent turn as Ivo. It hits all the right notes of snarky, over-confident, and bored scientist that doesn’t veer too close to his tenure as Doctor Octopus on The Spectacular Spider-Man (though there are little hints of it).