Plot summary: Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl are the last League members standing as they attempt to prevent Aresia from taking her Man Flu worldwide.
For background on the creation of Justice League and info about how I’ll be covering it, check out the Series Primer.
Notes and Trivia
Episode: 17 (S1.E17)
Original Air Date: April 14th, 2002
Directed: Butch Lukic (9)
Written: Stan Berkowitz (8) (story) and Dwayne McDuffie (4) (teleplay)
Animation: Koko Enterprise Co., LTD (17)
Music: Kristopher Carter (7)
Tsukuri’s comment about liking Aresia (“but not that much”) was intended to be romantic/sexual according to Rich Fogel.
Wonder Woman appears to be the only Amazon who can fly, as Hawkgirl has to save Hippolyta when she falls out of the stealth plane.
Near the end of the episode a statue of Martian Manhunter is partially visible on Themyscira for entirely unknown reasons.
Recap
Aresia confirms to Star Sapphire her intent is to wipe out all the men on earth due to the violence and evil they cause. Hard to argue with that.
Chaos reigns throughout Gotham, with female first responders, Hawkgirl and Wonder Woman struggling to keep up. Batman assists for as long as he can, but he soon succumbs as well.
Hippolyta confronts her renegade ward while she’s trying to steal a stealth bomber from a military base, so Aresia has Tsukuri knock her out and tie her up.
Star Sapphire lures Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl to them by pretending to disagree with Aresia’s plan. They brawl but the heroes can’t overcome a 3-on-2 disadvantage.
The trio take off, planning to detonate missiles full of the plague in the upper atmosphere, but our two remaining heroes can fly, so they give chase and board the plane.
An aerial battle is cut short when Hippolyta escapes captivity and reveals to Aresia that the male ship captain from her backstory gave his life to save her in the shipwreck.
Aresia is unconvinced, so Hawkgirl sabotages the missiles, ultimately leading to Aresia being the last one on the plane as it blows up (safely, apparently).
Diana & Shayera later find Aresia’s notes on the virus and use them to create an antidote which the League distribute to all affected. Everybody makes fun of Flash and all is right with the world.
Best Performance
Susan Sullivan has fewer lines but her reveal about the ship captain who died to save Aresia was nicely delivered. Susan Eisenberg has a stronger showing this time, going back and forth on how she feels about what’s going on.
I might give it to Maria Canals-Barrera. Her tease about Diana’s inexperience with men (let’s not say virgin as she’s clearly fucked women) is well done, and moreover she does a good job with all of the counter-arguments against Diana, Hippolyta and Aresia.
Episode Ranking
This two-parter is just riddled with half-explored ideas.
Hawkgirl continues to get away with some slightly edgier jokes, having previously mocked Flash for premature ejaculation, and this time telling Diana she needs to try some dick before she writes men off entirely. As funny of a moment as that is, it does open up some mildly provocative questions about Amazonian attitudes towards men, as while Wonder Woman doesn’t condone mass murder, she does question the necessity of men. Furthermore, Shayera comments that Aresia is simply taking Amazon doctrine to its natural conclusion, which sort of links up with my comments last time about if their strict culture is more to blame for Aresia’s actions than any ‘inherent’ evil. They don’t really dwell on it though. A running theme, unfortunately.
Like… tell me what the Amazons would have done about the ship captain bringing Aresia ashore if he hadn’t conveniently dropped dead in the process. Would they simply say ‘Thanks, we’ve got her from here, now get back in the sea and swim home’? Would the great lengths he went to in order to save a young girl buy him any grace? Do they have any empathy for random innocent castaways? I figure they’d probably feed him and then give him a boat or something, but I’d rather they’d actually shown me. I know he’s the only man ever buried on the island and that suggests all the kinder actions I’ve hypothesised above, but then Hippolyta coldly states she didn’t think he was important to Aresia’s story!
Which brings us back to the whole ‘Is Aresia justified, or just evil?’ thing. They basically come down on the side of the latter, as she shrugs off Hippolyta’s attempt at a ‘not all men’ argument. I appreciate they’re not equipped to delve into the philosophical debates about immigration, and almost certainly didn’t intend to imply that her villainy is in any way linked to that… but they did still accidentally convey that story.
Plus the resolution to the deadly plague killing their teammates? Just a quick trip over to Themyscira (presumably just Hawkgirl as Diana is still exiled) to grab some notes. Neither of these characters has demonstrated any particular aptitude for chemistry, though the virus could be more magical in nature, which would explain how it was able to infect Superman and Martian Manhunter. Maybe they had help from the Amazons. I have to keep throwing out guesses because this very clearly a ‘uhhh I dunno, they just use her notes to fix it or something’ scenario when they realised they didn’t have an organic conclusion.
Batman getting to briefly be the only man immune to the plague is kind of funny at first, but then you stop and realise he’s literally spending his potential final minutes alive saving as many people as he can and then it gets sad. I love the choice to show so much random ‘everyday’ danger, and the heroes working flat out to try and help everybody. Obviously the root cause is a superhero-specific thing, but I always enjoy when they show these characters engaging in normal, non-superhero activities like natural disasters, car/bus/helicopter crashes etc.
I actively disliked the current bottom two episodes, whereas this is more a series of frustrating ideas, so I’m not going to lower it but it won’t be overly difficult to top either. The general concept of ‘Renegade Amazon tries to murder all the men in the world’ is interesting enough, and they got a decent number of fight scenes and the aforementioned rescue sequences to keep it all afloat. It just falls apart in trying to pay off its central premise.
- Injustice for All
- Paradise Lost
- In Blackest Night
- The Enemy Below
- Secret Origins
- Fury (–)
- War World
- The Bold and the Brave
Rogues Roundup
Aresia (Julie Bowen) (second appearance)
I think her debut was stronger, but she does still basically fight Wonder Woman to a relative stalemate. I wouldn’t say either gets a definitive ‘win’ in their various exchanges. Plus her treatment of Hippolyta is pretty icy.
The writing betrays her, tossing her under the ‘no, she’s just evil’ bus, which is far less interesting than her set-up. But I think I will leave her where she is because she’s pretty memorable.
The Injustice Gang (Olivia d’Abo/Karen Maruyama (fourth appearance)
Star Sapphire not being on board with Aresia’s plan could have been interesting, but they instead just use it for a fake-out. I know she’s a villain, but surely not all of them would be into the idea of killing billions of people? Some kind of internal conflict? No? Nothing? Fine.
The group are shrunk down to just the ladies, obviously. The all-female fight scenes are decent enough. I think their appearance last episode made them ripe for moving slightly down the list, and while they don’t do anything bad here, the lack of any new compelling material means they simply have to slide.
- Lex Luthor
- The Joker
- The Imperium
- Hades
- Draaga
- Aresia (–)
- Deadshot
- Orm
- The Injustice Gang (↓)
- Felix Faust
- The Manhunters
- Kanjar-Ro
- Mongul
- Gorilla Grodd
The Matt Signal 
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