Plot summary: The League find themselves stranded in the fantastical world of Skartaris, where they’re drafted into a war against the sorcerer Deimos and his mysterious new allies.

Notes and Trivia

Episode: 29 (S3.E3)

Original Air Date: September 24^th, 2005

Directed: Joaquim dos Santos (15)

Written: Matt Wayne (1)

Animation: DongWoo Animation Co., LTD. (5)

Music: Lolita Ritmanis (10)

The turtle-like kaiju from the start of the episode may seem like a simple tribute to Gamera, but is also a reference to the batshit insanity of the Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen comic, which featured an issue where Jimmy turned into a giant turtle man with a crop of read hair.

S.T.R.I.P.E. has had a redesign from the first two seasons where he was almost entirely a background character. He’s also smaller, presumably to ensure he fits inside a Javelin and whatnot.

In the Warlord comics, Skartaris is in the Earth’s hollow centre. The DCAU rejects such affronts to science so instead goes with it being a pocket dimension. Much more believable.

DCAU Debuts

Welcome to the wacky world of Skartaris, the setting of Mike Grell’s Warlord comics which debuted in 1975 cashing in on the sword & sorcery craze.

Travis Morgan is a fighter pilot who becomes the titular Warlord after flying through a hole to the Earth’s center, becoming a hero to the people of Skartaris by going full Conan… plus a gun. He’s aided by his allies Machiste, Shakira and his daughter Jennifer, all seen here. He is seemingly based on Grell himself, who vaguely resembles his creation and had served in the US Air Force. No comment.

Deimos is Warlord’s main adversary, not to be confused with the Greek God of the same name who is an enemy of Wonder Woman. He initially had no true magical ability, instead using Atlantean technology to masquerade as a sorcerer… but after dying and being resurrected he gained true powers, including being able to transform into a giant serpent.

Silver Banshee is barely in the episode and will be limited to cameos throughout the series, but fiiiiine! Debuting in 1987, Siobhan McDougal is an enemy of Superman created by John Byrne. She gained her powers when a family ritual to invoke ancient spirits was interrupted, causing her to be dragged to hell. Well, not literally, but basically. A spirit called ‘The Crone’ turned her into the Silver Banshee, allowing her to return to Earth where she possesses enough physical strength to trade hands with Superman, the power of flight, and her signature Death Wail, capable of rendering a person a husk.

Finally, Stargirl is here too! The creation of Geoff Johns, Lee Moder and David Goyer, Courtney Whitmore is the stepdaughter of Pat Dugan, the retired sidekick of The Star-Spangled Kid. In an effort to annoy her stepdad, Courtney found and donned SSK’s costume, declaring herself his successor. Pat built the S.T.R.I.P.E. armour so he could protect her, finding himself the sidekick to another teen hero. Upon joining The Justice Society she was gifted Ted ‘Starman’ Knight’s cosmic staff, changing her name to Stargirl. She can fly, manipulate energy and all that other fun stuff. Not only did she get her own multi-season TV show, she appeared on Smallville, a whooole bunch of cartoons and was even meant to be in box office smash hit Black Adam.

Recap

Green Lantern, Supergirl, Stargirl and S.T.R.I.P.E are returning home from a mission in Japan when they are caught in a strong magnetic field in the Arctic, being pulled into another world!

Things go from bad to much worse as they’re attacked by a horde of dino-men, with Kara’s powers greatly diminished by the effects of the strange land.

Travis ‘Warlord’ Morgan comes to their aid, explaining the heroes were brought here as they need champions to aid against the evil sorcerer Deimos. They’re fine with this for some reason.

Morgan was an air force pilot who made a new life for himself in Skartara, helping defend ‘The Great Stone’… which turns out to be a giant chunk of Kryptonite.

Deimos’ army of monsters begin their assault, bolstered by advanced technology derived from his new military advisors, Metallo and Silver Banshee!

Metallo goes after the Kryptonite with Supergirl playing defence despite her hobbled powers. She eventually outwits him, knocking out his Kryptonite core, which Stargirl yeets far away.

Warlord defeats Deimos in a final duel as the people of Skartaris rejoice. Green Lantern interrogates Metallo about who he works for but the villain shuts down before he can say anything.

Our heroes head home, with John permanently sealing the portal between worlds. Supergirl and Stargirl soooort of become friends after beefing throughout the episode.

Best Performance

Oh, Malcolm McDowell, the things they have you phoning in these days. The quality of voice acting in the DCAU has dipped so much over the years that a single patronising “love” to Kara feels like a cool affectation by comparison. He’s perfectly fine smack talking Supergirl but it’s all very brief and he’s entirely on autopilot.

I quite like Douglas Dunning’s Christopher Lee impression, I must say. It suits the setting and the character, who they made look more like Lee to match. Solid little villain performance in an episode where he should really have had more time and then might have won.

Nicholle Tom and Giselle Loren are perfectly fine in their slightly frustrating role of bickering teenage girls who dislike each other for no real reason. Again, more time would have been needed to get something good out of them.

So with all of the above eliminated I think I’m going to go with Paul Guilfoyle as Warlord, rising to the silliness of the material and remaining generally charismatic and commanding. He’s particularly good in the triumphant celebration speech after the battle is won. I’ve found a lot of actors struggle to perform well when raising their voice, particularly in animation and green screen heavy action movies. As crazy as it sounds he actually gives one of the better ‘big bellowing rally cries’ I can remember hearing.

Episode Ranking

Supergirl being incredibly popular in Japan is a nice piece of flavour text. We have so seldom seen the impact these characters have on their in-world pop culture, so it’s a little jarring to go from 0-100 as kara has an entire convention full of cosplayers dedicated to her, but I like it despite its deeply stereotypical trappings.

The B-Story to the larger general premise is the cattiness between Stargirl and Supergirl. It’s unfortunate that history is repeating itself somewhat as generally when two female characters are put together in this show they end up arguing. That can work, as I think Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl’s beefs were generally well written and logical reasons were given by both parties, whereas these two dislike each other ‘just because’. I wonder if the decision to switch Kara’s costume to her far more recognisable (and way better!) blue costume came before or after they wrote this little plot-line, as the result of the switch is she and Stargirl look vaguely similar, giving the impression Courtney resents Kara for biting her style. They become frenemies by the end, complaining about the paternal figures in their lives holding them back despite their superpowers. There’s no real impetus for this change in their relationship as Stargirl doesn’t even seem to notice that Kara demonstrated great bravery even without her powers (more on that in a moment) and it’s not like they were stranded together for very long to force bonding. In fact they didn’t even interact for the entire middle portion of the episode! Fine enough idea, but squandered.

Kara goes on a similar journey to her ‘cousin’ when he lost his powers, proving her courage and capability without them. You get tense moments like her bleeding for the first time and struggling to fly… as well as her fiercely wailing as she leaps into battle with a huge sword, not intimidated by the dino men. This of course leads to her one-on-one confrontation with one of Superman’s greatest foes, Metallo, who she has an easier time against thanks to her powers being on the fritz. This doesn’t make much sense to me because while her superpowers and weakness to Kryptonite are both independently tied to her biology, there’s no direct link between them, meaning she should maintain her vulnerability even when she loses her abilities. She doesn’t become human when she is de-powered, so should still be harmed by Kryptonite. I’m nitpicking, obviously, as the end result is simply intended to make it more ‘believable’ that she could fight Metallo, but nitpicking is much easier when there’s a lot wrong with an episode.

It’s a big episode for monster fans, opening with the Kaiju battle and then moving to the world of Sword & Sorcery with dinosaur men riding… well, dinosaurs. These big fantastical brawls are pretty fun, particularly the ‘worlds collide’ aspect whenever someone just uses a fucking gun. I got a similar kick out of the robots dressed as cowboys in ‘Weird Western Tales‘. Yet despite all of that melodrama the coolest moment in the episode is when Warlord and Deimos improvise by swapping swords mid-fight so they can keep duelling up a seemingly infinite staircase.

I’m afraid there are simply too many elements at play for everything to land properly within 22 minutes. I talked about the Stargirl/Supergirl feud already, but that fails to click because there was no time for them to interact or do anything to earn their ‘breakthrough’. Silver Banshee absolutely did not need to be in the episode. She’s treated like we should already know who she is and has a short standoff with Green Lantern and then just vanishes. Nothing was achieved there whatsoever. John could have just gotten stuck in with a cadre of Deimos’ monsters. Hell, even Metallo’s involvement doesn’t quite come together because of the time spent on a botched Kara/Courtney storyline as well as the main attraction of the episode, Skartaris.

This is such a high concept setting, a whole new world with its own factions, conflicts, rules and cast of characters. They’re forced to hit the ground sprinting and just breeze past all of the new faces, with The League made to just shrug and agree to help after basically being abducted and drafted into a war, unclear if they can even get home. Zero protest. Zero arguments with their new allies. Just rolling their sleeves up and fighting. And then Warlord defeats Deimos very easily to conclude what’s ostensibly been a long drawn out rivalry, so even this side of things feels anticlimactic. You can argue Stargirl softened him up by disabling his palm weapons (good for her!) but I inferred he only recently got those from Metallo and they’ve been at odds for much longer than that, so it doesn’t seem like a big enough moment. I guess The League occupying his forces more allowed the duel to even happen… but Metallo and Silver Banshee only arrived recently too!

Bringing things back to the Metallo of it all, I theoretically understand the appeal of a tech-focused villain providing advanced weaponry to a high fantasy army to give them an edge, doing so to gain access to their enormous supply of Kryptonite. Not only would the giant rock provide Metallo with enough juice to basically live forever, it’s also clearly tied to the machinations of Grodd and the Legion of Doom. John’s interrogation at the end of the episode is cut short, presumably thanks to Grodd/Lex hacking Metallo remotely to silence him. Again, this all sounds fine on paper, but when they were already so pressed for time I just don’t think it quite works. It’s also symptomatic of them buying too heavily into the notion of ongoing arcs after the success of the Cadmus story last season. The serialisation is a little softer this time, but trying to tie almost everything to The Big Bad is entirely unnecessary if it comes at the expense of making compelling episodes.

At times this show has demonstrated the potential of a massive rotating cast and the DCAU has usually done a good job paying tribute to past eras. Here we see the flip side, as this episode collapses under the weight of too many things happening, too many characters needing more dialogue, screaming to be a two-parter. Constrained as it is, it does as much as it can to roll call the cast of the Warlord comics, but it has to happen at breakneck speed and it’s difficult to properly invest as a result.

Double Date
For the Man Who Has Everything
Clash
Task Force X
Question Authority
Fearful Symmetry
Panic in the Sky
The Return
The Once and Future Thing, Part 1: Weird Western Tales
Epilogue
Flashpoint
Shadow of the Hawk
The Ties That Bind
The Cat and the Canary
The Greatest Story Never Told
Divided We Fall
The Balance
Dark Heart
Initiation
This Little Piggy
Kids’ Stuff
The Once and Future Thing, Part 2: Time Warped
Doomsday Sanction
Wake the Dead
Ultimatum
I Am Legion
Hawk and Dove
Chaos at the Earth’s Core (NEW ENTRY)
Hunter’s Moon

Rogues Roundup

Deimos (Douglas Dunning) (first appearance)

I appreciate an incredibly competent villain who finds his useless henchmen irksome, as we meet Deimos in the middle of grilling one of his goons for intel on their encounter with The League. It’s not just basic irrational demands though, as he runs through some very logical questions about their numbers, armaments and if they ever addressed each other by name, prompting them to draw Supergirl’s ‘S’ emblem.

I like that they they kept his charlatan origins from the comics, rocking concealed high-tech gauntlets that give the appearance of him being able to fire magical bolts of energy. They don’t really draw attention to the moment when Stargirl disables them, but it’s still fun.

The Christopher Lee impression is hammy but that suits the character, boosting mostly generic dialogue to be slightly more engaging.

Metallo (Malcolm McDowell) (first appearance)

Ripping your own arm off when it starts malfunctioning a little is pretty… metal.

This is literally the only noteworthy thing that happens with him though, as he stalks Supergirl and generically threatens her only to take his easiest loss to date. I talked about the flaws in including him in the episode review, but even without that he’s not really doing much, firing green lasers from his chest and trying to strangle teenage girls. It’s fine, but nothing remotely special. Still, having anything resembling a personality keeps you out of the bottom ten.

Lex Luthor
Steven Mandragora
Amanda Waller & Project Cadmus
Circe
Task Force X
Amazo
Galatea
Chronos
Mongul
Brainiac
Shadow Thief
Granny Goodness
Gorilla Grodd and The Legion of Doom
Deimos (NEW ENTRY)
Dark Heart
Tobias Manning
The Jokerz
Felix Faust
The Annihilator
Metallo (NEW ENTRY)
The Ultimen
Tala
Doomsday
Hades
Roulette
Solomon Grundy
The Thanagarians
Brimstone
Ares
Mordred (and Morgaine le Fey!)
Mordru
Virman Vundabar