Plot summary: Roulette re-starts MetaBrawl, this time featuring female fighters forcibly recruited from The Justice League.

Notes and Trivia

Episode: 35 (S3.E9)

Original Air Date: March 11^th, 2006

Directed: Joaquim dos Santos (18)

Written: J.M. DeMatteis (7)

Animation: DR Movie Co., LTD (18)

Music: Lolita Ritmanis (12)

This episode’s most famous contribution to the DCAU is the two-second cameo from Nightwing watching on from up high when the heroes arrive in Blüdhaven, where Dick moved to get out of Batman’s shadow in the comics. Barbara Gordon mentioned the move in Return of the Joker. His appearance is so brief because of the Bat-Embargo, but he was originally meant to appear in a feature role in the episode that became ‘Double Date‘.

The short-lived Birds of Prey live action series had an episode called ‘Gladiatrix’ which featured forced participation in an underground fighting ring, with Black Canary and Huntress as the star attractions.

DCAU Debuts

Even by the DCAU’s standards, Sonar is a niche pull to give such a large role to. Real name Bito Wladon, he was a Green Lantern villain created by John Broome and Gil Kane in 1962. Shunned from society due to having deaf parents, he develops sound-manipulation technology and becomes a criminal, at one point murdering the fucking royal family of the fictional nation of Modora and installing himself as leader. You get none of that in the episode though, so he’s just a dude in an unusual costume that doesn’t match his name.

Even more niche? The two boring fighters at the start of the episode are Hellhound and Shatterfist. The latter was actually in ‘Clash‘ as the group taken down by Shazam at the start of the episode.

Recap

Roulette (remember her?) laments the sad state of her dwindling metahuman fight club, approaching Lex Luthor, who has recruited too many villains into the Legion while also taking a bigger cut from her operation than Grodd.

Lex needs money himself to continue his Brainiac schemes, so they groupthink a solution: all-female fights using captured superheroes.

Huntress mocks Black Canary for shoddy work against a mugger, taking it upon herself to surveil Dinah, bringing her to Bludhaven and Roulette’s thriving new endeavour, Metabrawl: Glamour Slam.

Black Canary defeats Fire in a surprisingly intense battle. Helena tries to talk to Dinah after but she attacks her. Huntress wins and snaps her out of it, but they both get captured.

Roulette pits the pair against Hawkgirl and Vixen, but they’re able to remove their League earpieces, which were being used to facilitate the mind control.

Unfortunately Roulette also has Wonder Woman on her roster of fighters, and even with their powers combined they can’t do a thing to Diana.

Instead Huntress and Black Canary escape the cage and go after Roulette, disabling the brainwashing just before a confused Wonder Woman can murder Shayera and Vixen.

MetaBrawl is shut down (again) and everybody heads home, but Helena and Dinah can’t resist finding out which of them is better, starting a best of three fight.

Best Performance

Amy Acker, how I adore thee. I know it kind of loses meaning when I say it every time she appears, but Huntress is SO far removed from the kinds of characters she often plays: a flirtatious badass. Her attempt to initiate phone sex with Question after she gets bored of spying on Black Widow was funny, and I also liked her muttering to herself while picking a lock and then calmly making a charged comment to the elevator full of security guards moments before beating them all up. She also just sounds cool in all her plentiful fight banter. Her beau, Jeffrey Combs, is obviously fantastic with his Baskin Robbins joke, but he’s barely in the episode.

Virginia Madsen is plenty of fun, taking naturally to the pre-fight hype schtick and comes across sultry and commanding in her interactions with Lex, Tala and the heroes. But she’s simply outgunned.

Morena Baccarin is solid, particularly in selling the injured throat, but I’m surprised she agreed to come back given how measly this is compared to her previous appearances.

Episode Ranking

There are some little things I like about this episode but I think it’s simply too rotten at its core to escape the lower portion of the list.

I’m afraid the leap in logic in the cold open is too much for me. Lex takes too big a cut of Metabrawl and also restricts access to too many villains. Tala and Roulette threaten to fight each other because the former is jealous of the latter getting handsy with her man. Lex says this has given him an idea… and Roulette then beats him to it by suggesting all-female fights. Like… I understand the eureka moment came after two women were about to fight, but why would Roulette think this is a good idea when she still doesn’t have any good fighters to use? Lex is the one who then brainstorms the final piece (kidnap a bunch of female heroes), so why has Roulette already enthusiastically agreed with him? And if our final destination is kidnapping heroes… why do they need to be female at all? All it would have taken was Sonar explicitly saying he loves watching women fight when complaining about Lex getting between the two to make this all hang together a little better. But even then, these are two separate solutions to the popularity problem.

Also… if you’re able to brainwash members of the Justice League to quietly engage in underground fights… are there not more useful things you could be doing with them? They had Hawkgirl, Vixen, Fire, Black Canary and fucking Wonder Woman under their thrall for goodness sakes. That’s bordering on enough firepower to take down the likes of Superman, or at the very least rob some banks and steal some resources for Lex, who helped with the whole scheme in the first places because he needed more money for his research. When the entire premise is this deeply flawed it makes it harder to engage with the rest.

Similarly, while the fights are grander, visually, the strength of the previous MetaBrawl episode was the strong relationship dynamics between Black Canary, Green Arrow and Wildcat. Ollie and Ted may not have superpowers like most of the participants of this episode, but Ted beating the snot out of Ollie meant something. Ollie ostensibly fucking died to prove a point and snap Ted out of his addiction for goodness sakes! By comparison these brawls are just for shock value and that only goes so far. Fair enough, after spending a long time not properly communicating how powerful Wonder Woman is, she comes across as the fucking Terminator here, but that’s not enough to build an episode around.

There are also several shoddy visuals at play. Nothing dramatic, but below usual standards when it comes to things like textures/backgrounds. A few fuzzy edges, if you will.

On the more positive side, I am once again lamenting Huntress and Question not getting to be a central part of a ‘Batman and The Outlaws’ spin-off. They’re both SO fucking good. Q is making more of a cameo to give Huntress somebody to bounce off to set up the premise, but even in those couple of minutes he rules. Excellent showing for Huntress though, ‘aura farming’ with the thug and Black Canary near the start, and then doing the Winter Soldier elevator fight. Kinda. It was a nice touch to have her immune to the brainwashing because she was previously ejected from The League so doesn’t have an earpiece anymore, and it was cute to have Dinah offer to get her back on the team at the end.

They do get in a few fun little jokes as well. I really liked Hellhound and Shatterfist relentlessly taunting each other but not actually doing anything in their boring cage match. Likewise Diana sternly asking Hawkgirl and Vixen to explain themselves when she snaps out of beating the hell out of them. None are as good as the one where The Question discovers a secret 32^nd flavour at Baskin Robbins, because nobody beats Question for jokes. See also his attempt to spice up attempted phone sex by Huntress by saying “orange socks.”

Fundamentally though if you’re going to return to something you did already you absolutely have to top your previous effort, and this falls dramatically short. Worse written, worse animated, with infinitely less at stake and just some profoundly stupid Big Decisions.

Double Date
For the Man Who Has Everything
Clash
The Great Brain Robbery
Task Force X
Question Authority
Fearful Symmetry
To Another Shore
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
Flash and Substance
Kids’ Stuff
The Once and Future Thing, Part 2: Time Warped
Doomsday Sanction
Wake the Dead
Ultimatum
Grudge Match (NEW ENTRY)
I Am Legion
Hawk and Dove
Patriot Act
Chaos at the Earth’s Core
Hunter’s Moon
Dead Reckoning

Rogues Roundup

Roulette (Virginia Madsen) (second appearance)

Thank goodness she got a second appearance and it’s better than the first because her placement to date has haunted me for a bit and now I feel better about it.

She repeats a lot of what made me like her before, demonstrating ruthless business acumen and hype-woman skills, and expands on it by revealing she’s actually a solid fighter in her own right, shocking Huntress by coming for her throat in a brief skirmish. I think they’ve also done a solid job of making her seem like a bigger deal than she is, carrying herself like someone important. Charisma matters.

Sonar (Corey Burton) (first appearance)

Honestly, what are we doing here if Sonar is getting a write-up?

They justify the name very late into the episode with his briefly-used sonic-gun and a little gizmo that makes Black Canary hear an agonising ringing in her ears. He instead spends most of his time just being a generic flunky in a colourful costume. He’s dumb and not in a funny way and he’s not intimidating. Straight to the bottom! Congrats on defeating ‘Jigsaw with a German accent’!

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