Plot summary: Green Lantern & Hawkgirl delve deeper into the true nature of the strange retro comic book world in which they’re trapped.
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: 19 (S1.E19)
Original Air Date: April 28th, 2002
Directed: Dan Riba (10)
Written: Andrew Kreisberg (2)
Animation: Koko Enterprise Co., LTD (19)
Music: Lolita Ritmanis (7)
I didn’t acknowledge it in Part I but the writer of these episodes is Andrew Kreisberg, who was writing for The Simpsons around this time, but more relevently for this site, went on to co-create and write for CW’s ‘Arrowverse’ (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl etc.), which presumably has made him extremely wealthy.
Speaking of things I left out before – this time because of spoilers – Ray Thomas’ mutated form is very clearly Brainwave, another Injustice Society member.
Based on the Justice Guild’s deaths occurring in a nuclear war 40 years ago one can infer the Cuban Missile Crisis went a very different way in this world.
These episodes are dedicated to Gardener Fox, who wrote the original Justice League comics and is credited with inventing the DC multiverse, as well as writing the first League/Society team-up story.
Another piece of evidence for the ‘Green Lantern powers are ineffective against yellow’ in the DCAU, as John’s beams fail to break through a yellow forcefield.
Recap
Hawkgirl shares her findings (that the Justice Guild are all dead), which John doesn’t take very well at all and flies off to see the graves for himself.
Demanding answers, he shakes down an ice cream man for info but only gets vague answers about ‘him’, so he and Shayera’s investigation takes them to the library…
Meanwhile the Injustice Guild compare hauls, with Dr. Blizzard winning because he captured Flash and Black Siren, thus he gets to choose the group’s next caper.
He chooses a daring robbery and escape by blimp, because why not? The shorthanded Justice Guild struggle at first, but reinforcements arrive and they eventually capture their foes.
The group return to their headquarters, only to be confronted by John and Shayera who discovered evidence of a massive nuclear war from 40 years ago, killing millions of people.
Martian Manhunter’s telepathy points him to the group’s teen sidekick, Ray Thompson, being the source of the illusion, forcing him to reveal his true monstrous form, mutated from the war.
Ray wipes the floor with the League, but the Guild eventually prevail, waving goodbye as they and the perfect town fade away and the decimated real world is revealed.
Luckily the trans-dimensional gateway Tom Turbine built (but could never power) remains for some reason, and John’s ring gives sufficient juice to let the stranded Leaguers go home. John and Hawkgirl have a moment.
Best Performance
This might be one of the best episodes for voice acting in the entire DCAU.
“That’s why I lead the league in steals” is a killer line of dialogue and Michael McKean delivers it very well. He’s also great in the big battle sequence against the heroes. Corey Burton didn’t get as much dialogue as his fellow villains last time, but very casually flexes his voice acting credentials when he’s allowed to talk more here.
Neil Patrick Harris obviously gets a little help from some vocal effects once Ray’s true form is revealed, but he was generally note-perfect before that as the pastiche of classic teen characters like Robin, and he also does good work once he switches to open villainy.
The various Guild actors probably do a quietly better job this time than last, albeit in reduced roles, and I really liked how they all handled the serious stuff once the truth comes out. David Naughton calmly facing death head on (for the second time) is a lovely touch. Likewise, the voice actors for the various townsfolk adjust their work from perpetually chipper to more naturalistic after the reveal.
I’d be remiss to not also acknowledge Phil LaMarr and Maria Canals-Barrera’s touching work throughout, and especially at the end.
SOOOO where does that leave us? I may just cheat and say Andrea Romano for her stellar direction. If that bothers you I’m just going to declare some kind of enormous tie, so pick your poison really.
Episode Ranking
Part I traded on the fish out of water element – the heroes we know in a world they do not. The metatextual honouring of DC’s past was cute and funny, with plenty of material to mine, but with a subtle undercurrent of intrigue about what was really going on and how they’d get home. They could have very easily coasted off that for Part II, and there certainly are more of the things that worked before, such as The Streak condemning the villains for committing crimes on a Sunday, and more shenanigans from the villains.
Instead they pivoted into an open ‘this world is not quite right’ mystery, which I’m eternally a sucker for. Characters noticing subtle abnormal behaviours that the residents seemingly don’t (the ice cream man driving around waving all the time but never selling anything.) Plus if you refer to an ominous unidentified character people live in constant fear of, you’re going to intrigue me every time. The empty library full of blank books, the brick wall behind the creepy basement door, the desolate apocalyptic world that lies beyond it… just all great shit. Plus the detail that new dangers always cropped up when people got close to discovering the truth is a nice touch.
As for the nature of the truth, I’m a little torn on it. It feels just a smidge too convoluted to have the comics of The League’s world be the product of the writer(s)’ subconscious link to a parallel universe, especially as they say they stopped being published after The Guild all died. I get the idea the writer(s) might suddenly run out of organic ideas, but that they were completely incapable of coming up with anything new, even if it were worse, is too cute. I feel like it would have been fine to have the world be a manifestation of comics native to that world, and it gives John Stewart a little button for his largely bland personality, but trying to cross the comics of our world into this alternate reality is just one step too far in my opinion. A nice compromise may have been that the comics existed in both worlds, letting them keep John’s personal connection to them, and Ray wasn’t conjuring real people, just bringing his favourite fictional heroes to life.
AND YET! It’s a really cool concept, and tying it all to the most innocent and unlikely character, their teen sidekick, was a tremendous idea. J’onn of course gives us the final piece thanks to his telepathy (evoking all the weird flashes he experienced in Part I), and the story takes on this really somber tone from there, between the tragedy of Ray’s motivations and the Guild accepting their potential deaths but helping anyway. True heroes! Them smiling and saluting as they fade away devastates John, and for good reason. In my opinion this may be the best individual moment in the show to date. AND THEN they take a victory lap by revealing the townsfolk are actually real and thank them for freeing them, accepting their role in the destruction of their world, and letting the whole thing end on an optimistic note as they pledge to rebuild.
There’s still a lot of fun to be had from the campy world, and I got a kick out of Catman living up to his parallel as the Batman of his group by being the one to take down the villains despite being the only one with no powers, and I appreciate that he did it in the most Batman ’66 style way: driving a motorcycle into an elevator so he could drive it off the roof and land on the blimp. Madness. It’s not just for laughs though, as I think a blimp is about as large of an escalation as stories set in this kind of world could conceive, so it’s a fitting grand send-off to the more front and centre story arc before we turn over to trying to unpick the larger mystery. And they give you this big triumphant ‘ending’ in the middle of the episode, complete with the swelling score by Lolita Ritmanis, who has crushed the music in both parts. Very smart scripting that lets them play in both lanes at once.
Oh and don’t think I didn’t make note of John and Shayera’s investigation forcing them to have some alone time. Their final interaction at the end of the episode was touching and humanises both of them a lot.
All in all, I think this episode does plenty to maintain the top spot in the rankings. ‘Injustice for All‘ had some very high highs, but there were also so many little problems threatening to unpick it. These two episodes basically have zero flaws (again, unless the camp factor bothers you), as my biggest criticism is just them going one step too far with the true extent of the reveal, and even that doesn’t actually detract. Oh, I guess the gateway remaining at the end was a bit trite, but whatever. Best episode(s) in the show.
- Legends (–)
- Injustice for All
- Paradise Lost
- In Blackest Night
- The Enemy Below
- Secret Origins
- Fury
- War World
- The Bold and the Brave
Rogues Roundup
The Injustice Guild (Udo Kier/Michael McKean/Corey Burton/Jeffrey Jones/Neil Patrick Harris) (second appearance)
While the group certainly didn’t look like pushovers last time, now that we’d dispensed with treating this world like a joke, greater emphasis is put on the fearsome foursome’s combat proficiency as they fairly easily rough up The Justice Guild during the blimp scene. They went out strong, in my opinion.
Helping their case, I’m going to include ‘Brainwave’ in their numbers, as he was a member of the Injustice Society that this group are designed after, and I don’t want this list to get too out of control.
The reveal of Ray hiding in plain sight as an innocent little cornball is great, but he also puts in a strong shift after that, both in terms of his design (love his constantly pulsing brain and one arm being longer than the other) and how effective his psionic powers are against the League. Plus, ya know, maintaining a constant illusion he lives in forever.
Bad news if you object to mostly comedic villains placing high on a ranking list, because I’m sliding them up to third place. I suppose if I separated them the group would have stayed where they were, and Brainwave would have debuted ever so slightly lower. I’ll think on it.
- Lex Luthor
- The Joker
- The Injustice Guild (and Brainwave!) (↑)
- 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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