Plot summary: Black Canary recruits Green Arrow to help convince her mentor, Wildcat, to stop participating in an underground fighting ring.

Notes and Trivia

Episode: 14 (S2.E1)

Original Air Date: February 5^th, 2005

Directed: Joaquim dos Santos (8)

Written: Stan Berkowitz (4) (story) and Robert Goodman (3) (teleplay)

Animation: DR Movie Co., LTD (8)

Music: Michael McCuistion (5)

This marks the first time none of ‘The Big 7’ from Justice League have any dialogue, though J’onn J’onnz does appear briefly at the end.

Black Canary mentions Wildcat had a hand in training other members of The League. This presumably includes Batman who learned boxing from him in the comics.

They’re not getting listed in Rogues Roundup, but among the villains competing in Meta-Brawl are: Sportsmaster, Amygdala, Atomic Skull, Electrocutioner, Tracer, Evil Star, Hellgrammite and of course Bloodsport, who was played by Idris Elba in The Suicide Squad.

DCAU Debuts

While she walked past briefly at the end of ‘Initiation‘ to intrigue Green Arrow into sticking around, this marks the proper debut of Black Canary, who is in contention for best hand-to-hand fighter in DC… and has a very convoluted backstory. Debuting as Dinah Drake in 1947, she was a prominent member of the Justice Society. She was succeeded by her daughter, Dinah Laurel Lance, created by Denny O’Neal and Dick Dillin in 1969. Both are known for their martial arts prowess, while the younger Canary also has a super-powered sonic scream – the ‘Canary Cry’ – and is a long-time member of both The Justice League and Birds of Prey. Where things get complicated is the brief attempt to merge the two into a single character during The New 52. We don’t talk about The New 52. Muddying things further, Arrow created a new character, Sara Lance, who went by ‘The Canary’ before handing the mantel to her sister, Laurel… only to return and become The White Canary to offset Laurel’s Black Canary. Jurnee Smollett played her in Birds of Prey. Elements of her were incorporated into Watchmen‘s Silk Spectre, particularly the mother/daughter legacy aspect. An obvious knockoff, Black Siren (not to be confused with Black Siren!), appeared in ‘Legacy‘.

Ted ‘Wildcat‘ Grant is simpler by comparison. One of the oldest characters in DC, he was created by Bill Finger and Irwin Hasen way back in 1942. One of the finest professional boxers in the world, he accidentally got caught up in organised crime so fashioned his costumed persona. He joined the Justice Society and helped train the likes of Batman and Black Canary, hence this episode. His longevity is attributed to magically being granted nine lives. A wildly different version appeared in Arrow. An obvious knockoff, Catman (not to be confused with Cat-Man!) appeared in ‘Legacy’.

Finally, Roulette is much newer, having only debuted 3 years before this episode was written, the work of Geoff Johns and Derec Aucoin. She’s broadly identical to her gimmick here, running an underground superhero fighting ring. She popped up in Smallville and Supergirl.

Recap

Black Canary busts up an arms deal by herself, annoyed that her mentor/partner Ted ‘Wildcat’ Grant is running late… until she learns he’s competing in an underground fighting ring.

Concerned, she recruits Green Arrow, insisting they keep their infiltration from the rest of The League. Ollie runs hot and cold, flirting and demonstrating jealousy towards Ted.

Ollie drops the cash required to get them into the next event, where Dinah pleads with Ted to leave with them, but he refuses, resenting his ‘babysitting’ role on The Watchtower.

Thus the main event of the evening begins, with Wildcat taking on the heavy hitter Atomic Skull. Ted is clearly winning… but Green Arrow and Black Canary intervene, telling everybody to leave.

Ted still refuses, so Canary challenges him to a fight; if she wins he’s banned from competing ever again, and if wins she drops the matter and leaves him to it.

The promoter, Roulette, loves the idea, but Ollie has other ideas, using knockout gas from one of his arrows to put Dinah out for the count and then taking her place.

Wildcat beats the absolute piss out of Ollie who keeps taunting him until he seemingly dies from his injuries. Roulette is thrilled, but Ted quits on the spot.

Ollie was of course faking and Black Canary destroys the arena once the crowd has left. Everybody heads back to the Watchtower, and the budding lovebirds agree to get a cup of coffee.

Best Performance

Morena Baccarin became somewhat of a victim of her own outrageous attractiveness for a while, being typecast as provocative characters, but it’s difficult to deny she’s got the goods as the sultry and fiercely independent Black Canary. It’s an easy character to over-sexualise, but I think Baccarin does a really good job keeping her flirty in a non-exploitative way, ensuring Dinah feels like an actual human being with her own wants and fears. She also manages to convey that Canary is aware of her own sex appeal and uses it in a calculated manner, such as buttering Ollie up to get him to help her, but not in a way that’s completely stringing him along, sounding genuinely wounded when he questions her motives. She wobbles a little in the motorbike sequence, but I imagine trying to pretend you’re speaking over traffic noise is somewhat difficult.

Kin Shriner proves to be a solid dance partner, and their chemistry carries much of the episode, but hearing them side by side it’s clear he’s not on her level.

Dennis Farina is an impeccable choice for Wildcat, perfectly embodying the kind of slightly older man that would call a woman ‘Dollface’ and draw eye rolls but not full-on HR complaints. There’s just enough charm and sincerity to undercut the problematic aspects to his personality. One of my favourite comic uses of Wildcat was in Darwyn Cooke’s The New Frontier where he boxes Mohammed Ali at a huge arena, and Farina sounds like he’d be right at home in Vegas in the 60s.

Episode Ranking

During my review of Season 1, I commented that the animation had become far more fluid over time, so I’m grateful this episode immediately proved my point by delivering a fight scene that’s beyond what was possible in the past. It’s not that there haven’t been any compelling brawls in the past, but rather they’ve never executed fight choreography of this complexity before, and possibly never even tried. There’s simply a sense of fluidity to Black Canary’s throws and takedowns that is light years ahead of martial artistry displayed previously in the DCAU, which relied more heavily on BIG thudding punches and kicks to get a point across. It’s a little on the nose, but the pairing of her kicking ass with the fight commentary for Wildcat’s bout works nicely. The cage matches aren’t quite as compelling as the opener, but there are still some nice little moves.

At first I thought it was nice that they toned down Black Canary’s raunchy design a smidge… but then when she removed her jacket and her tits defied the laws of physics I realised they probably just found fishnets too difficult to animate. That disappointing second aside, obviously a lot of this episode hangs on the outrageous flirtation between Black Canary and Green Arrow, and they do wholly succeed on that front. I initially rolled my eyes at the idea of him giving her combat tips when she’s by far his superior in the comics… but then it became clear she was just testing him and ends up kicking his ass once she’s seen enough.

I think there’s also some really interesting stuff on display here when it comes to male egos. Most obviously there’s Wildcat, an older superhero with his best days behind him, now mostly relegated to training and not taking it well. He turns to the ring where his lifelong talent for throwing hands still has value and he gets to feel like a Big Shot again. Roulette doesn’t have to try overly hard to sweet-talk him into staying after he tries to leave, while he resoundingly rebuffs Black Canary’s pleas for him to walk away, embracing the idea of ‘once a fighter, always a fighter’, and resenting those with actual superpowers.

More subtly, we see how Ollie handles perceived rejection from the object of his affections. I personally think you really see who a person is when they’re told no (particularly men) and Ollie sure does pout a lot in the first half of the episode. At first it seems harmless – almost respectful – when he retracts his arms from around her on the motorcycle, as if he feels guilty for misconstruing the situation. But he keeps on sulking from there on out, accusing Dinah of only wanting him for his money and whatnot. He does come back around when she clarifies the situation, which isn’t the ideal message to send, but hey. Depending on your stance he either does her a kindness by substituting for her in the fight against Ted, or undermines her agency by taking the decision out of her hands. If it’s the latter you get to see him take his lumps as karma, but even that scene is fun because of how easily he gets under Ted’s skin by labelling him washed up. There’s something so deeply fascinating about the male trope of taking a horrendous beating to prove a point, faking his death to shock Wildcat into quitting as he comes to terms with the consequences of his ‘way of the fist’. I’m pleasantly surprised they opted to end the episode with Ted sitting down with J’onn J’onnz for a therapy session. Let’s unlearn these dangerous male behaviours!

Obviously I’ve done a lot of psycho-analysis of the characters in an episode that’s primarily about a secret cage fighting league, and I do enjoy the idea of that too, it just pales in comparison to what we can glean about this trio of heroes. It’s a tiny cast this time around, with even the villains barely even having a presence, but that demonstrates the true strength of JLU as it means Ollie, Dinah and Ted are all extremely well catered to by the script, backed up nicely by three solid voiceover performances.

For the Man Who Has Everything
Fearful Symmetry
The Return
The Once and Future Thing, Part 1: Weird Western Tales
The Cat and the Canary (NEW ENTRY)
The Greatest Story Never Told
Dark Heart
Initiation
This Little Piggy
Kids’ Stuff
The Once and Future Thing, Part 2: Time Warped
Wake the Dead
Ultimatum
Hawk and Dove

Rogues Roundup

Roulette (Virginia Madsen) (first appearance)

There’s nothing unique about Roulette, she’s just a good old fashioned manipulator, using Ted’s ego to play him like a fiddle, first by identifying his hangup about not having superpowers, and then talking him out of taking a dive for Canary by bringing up his undefeated record. Plus she was SO excited when she thought somebody had died in the ring as it meant she could truthfully promote the idea that anything could happen in Meta-Brawl, and that’s kind of fucked up!

Still, she’s more of a script necessity than a rounded character, so I can only really put her above the true duds on the list.

Lex Luthor
Circe
Amazo
Chronos
Mongul
Galatea
Project Cadmus
Dark Heart
Tobias Manning
The Jokerz
Roulette (NEW ENTRY)
Solomon Grundy
Brimstone
Ares (and The Annihilator!)
Mordred (and Morgaine le Fey!)
Mordru