Monsters of Television

“All this life is pain.”

I’m going to try and let go of the complaint about the time skip as much as I can. It’s here to stay, and we all know it’s short-circuiting the show’s character development, so hammering the show on this front is just going to get tiring. Unless a particularly egregious exploitation of the time skip occurs (which I don’t think is likely to happen since “Salvage” answers most of the lingering character questions), I’m not likely to mention it again.

 That being said, the time skip’s implementation here isn’t as bad as has been in previous instances (Aqualad, the M’gann and Conner break-up), and I’m generally okay with the results it (well, not ALL of it, but that’s for after the jump). My bigger issue is that we’re just repeating a lot of what happened last season in whatever this new plan is.

So what’s that bigger issue? That we’re just doing more shadowy (That, okay, may not be Darkseid, but maybe an evil Ted Kord? Other thoughts?) maneuvering, using alien tech to test things but not really hit on any targets. We’ve done this sort of thing before, and the “Invasion” season isn’t offering anything more narrative or action compelling than what we got last year (Merged Appellaxian husks? Yawn).

I feel a bit silly complaining about it since a lot of superhero arcs tend to be variations on the previous ones, but this just feels, so far anyway, just like a re-tread of last season’s shenanigans. It could be the lack of interesting new villains, or that we’re just going to bob along with a shadowy Partner with Sportsmaster when I’d rather just have the reveal happen so we could move along with the plot.

So that leaves the character work to keep the episode going, and I do think “Salvage” offers some decent examples of that. I don’t feel like Roy’s obsession with finding Speedy (referring to them this way is how I’ve decided to differentiate between the clone and the original) suffers from the timeskip, and his emaciated frame (the closest, I imagine, we’ll ever get to the “Roy Harper is addicted to heroin” storyline) and living in squalor is the sort of thing that works out okay in the timeskip, I think, since it would be dead end after dead end.

But the marriage and subsequent child with Cheshire IS something that doesn’t completely work due to the time skip, and I would’ve liked to have seen that relationship develop. Admittedly, it is somewhat tied to the search for Speedy, so I may be talking out of both sides of my mouth here.

Along the lines about Roy’s decline is Wally and Artemis’s happiness. Their departure from heroing works well enough because it wasn’t motivated by some fall from grace, but the achievement of happiness with each other. Sure, seeing their relationship reach that point would’ve been nice to see, but the resolution of happy relationships isn’t as dramatically compelling as the breakdown of them, right M’gann and Conner?

DC Nation Short – “Vibe”: The conclusion of the 1980s-tastic (seriously, folks, it feels like an episode of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) break dance showdown has Vibe defeating his android competitor that was constructed by Dr. Ivo. However: I do not buy the fact that Vibe was ever able to defeat Amazo.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• “That was me holding back. Way back.”
• “You know, I’m bilingual and I still have no idea what you said.”
• “What kind of dirt would I be if I forgot Valentine’s Day? For the fifth year in a row.” Oh, Wally. (And taking Vietnamese lit, huh?)