With thirteen more episodes complete it’s the end of not just the third season but the entirety of Justice League Unlimited… and the DCAU itself!

Surely I’ll have figured out how to write these season reviews to mark such a momentous occasion… Ahem…

One more time: I keep a secret spreadsheet that attributes ranking points to the episodes which I in turn use to give a ‘quirk and dirty’ score to each director, writer, animation studio and composer that works on the show. It’s flawed but I enjoy it anyway!

More Season Reviews:

Batman: The Animated Series (Season One | Season Two | The New Batman Adventures)

Batman Beyond (Season One | Season Two | Season Three)

Superman: The Animated Series (Season One | Season Two | Season Three)

Justice League (Season One | Season Two)

Justice League Unlimited (Season One | Season Two)

Batman: Caped Crusader (Season One)

1. Season Review
2. Director Rankings
3. Writer Rankings
4. Animation Rankings
5. Composer Rankings
6. Episode Rankings
7. Rogues Roundup

Season Review

Season 3 of JLU is easily the worst and kind of sums up the whole show: An interesting experiment that sometimes yields excellent results but far more often leaves ‘money on the table’. While it landed as many episodes in the upper tier as any other season, it also accounts for a disproportionate amount of my Bottom 10 episodes.

Dwayne McDuffie fully assumed creative control of the show last season, delivering the highly successful Cadmus Arc and convincing Bruce Timm this shouldn’t be an anthology show after all, introducing The Legion of Doom for Season 3. I’m just not convinced that was the correct decision for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the expanded roster naturally lends itself to being an anthology, picking a random weirdo from The League and plunging us into their world. Their powers, their supporting cast, their foes, their hometown etc. They did try that from time to time, with episodes like ‘Shadow of the Hawk‘, ‘Chaos at the Earth’s Core‘ and while he wasn’t a new face, ‘Flash and Substance‘ certainly dove deep into Wally West’s world. The problem is these characters that were meant to get the spotlight had to instead fight for screen time with the ‘Big Sexy Plot’, and one of the Big 7 almost always had to be present.

‘Chaos at the Earth’s Core’ is a great example of this, which should have been a straightforward tribute to Mike Grell’s Warlord series. But for no real reason we get some Legion of Doom stuff inserted, with Metallo almost taking over as the main villain in an uninspired appearance, bringing Silver Banshee with him who does precisely one thing and than vanishes. We’re also ‘treated’ to a catty feud between Supergirl and Stargirl, who is also making her first feature appearance, both of them overseen by Green Lantern who didn’t really need to be there. Oh and S.T.R.I.P.E is technically present too. All these elements are competing for audience attention and ultimately none of them really get served. The fantasy world of Skartaris should have been plenty to craft an episode around, and they could perhaps have let one Leaguer go on a character journey tied to that central conflict, growing and changing from the new perspective this strange land offers. Instead Warlord just defeats his nemesis and it doesn’t seem overly difficult, our feuding heroes patching things up isn’t earned whatsoever, we learn nothing at all about Stargirl or S.T.R.I.P.E., and Metallo gets his brain scrambled to tease the L.o.D. What about any of this would make a viewer want to learn more about Warlord or Stargirl?

Secondly, anthologies lend themselves to high profile guest writers who come in wanting to tell a story about their favourite characters. BTAS traded heavily on this, with FORTY TWO writers contributing to the 65-episode first season. FIVE people wrote for Season 3 of JLU. You know who the best one was? Geoff Johns. You know who the best two writers were last season? Gail Simone and Darwyne Cooke. You know who the two best writers on Justice League were? Andrew Kreisberg and John Ridley. Know who are profoundly mediocre writers? The dudes who wrote the most episodes (Dwayne McDuffie, Stan Berkowitz and Matt Wayne.) We can bicker about the talent of various writers if you want, but I fundamentally believe TV shows benefit from having a variety of creative voices and placing too much power in the hands of a select one or two individuals is generally unwise. Like you have to be VERY good to carry a show. Bruce Timm doesn’t seem to agree, letting two writers, two directors, two animation studios and three composers work on every single episode of this season. The music is always good to be fair, though even that used to be better when they had more people contributing to a more orchestral sound in the days of BTAS.

Finally, The Legion of Doom just wasn’t anywhere near as good of a story as Cadmus. Keeping their faction illusive may have had something to do with it, as that was just a total repeat of the dynamic with Cadmus. Why did this mega alliance of villains have to be a secret? Their base and true schemes are fine to keep in the dark, but The League technically never found out this group existed! To me it would have made more sense to utilise the size of The Legion to counter the size of The League, allowing them to be the villains of every single episode while still providing variety. Instead they appear in half of the episodes, sometimes awkwardly shoehorned in briefly, and their storyline wraps itself up in the penultimate episode before Darkseid swoops in and says ‘I’ll take it from here.’ Lex Luthor anticlimactically seizes control halfway (by just shooting a telepathic gorilla, not even really by surprise!), and it all feels very obligatory.

Speaking of Lex, they set up an interesting dynamic for him that mostly fizzled out. After dozens of episodes as a powerful business magnate he shifted fully to supervillain territory at the end of last season after merging with Brainiac and trying to conquer the world. As a result he spends the season talking to Brainiac, who only he can see, and becomes obsessed with rebuilding it. He’s openly fucking insane and his fellow villains look nervous. This should be really fun! But it becomes clear they hadn’t fully thought this angle through, as ‘Brainiac’ doesn’t appear at all in some episodes, and then when Lex thinks he’s finally achieved his goal, Darkseid is resurrected instead. Again, this could have been interesting, with Darkseid revealing he was responsible for the hallucinations all along, manipulating Lex to do his bidding. Instead Dwayne McDuffie said Tala brought Darkseid back to get revenge against Lex, and Darkseid indicates no influence whatsoever. Luthor solving the Anti-Life Equation was a nice ending to his journey, returning to the quasi-godhood he tasted when he merged with Braniac, but the road to get there was muddy to say the least.

Episodes like ‘Patriot Act‘ and ‘Alive!’ really underlined what a poor job they’d done throughout the series and this season in particular to make us care about the peripheral characters. Red Arrow appeared for the first time and while they got a couple of cute jokes out of it, they had 39 episodes to establish Green Arrow once having a sidekick and instead they’re just like ‘Oh yeah, btw’. And he gets taken down really quickly, contributing nothing to the outcome of the episode. Barely any of the Legion of Doom got to do anything before their big civil war. It’s just unforgivable to me that they didn’t take full advantage of the ostensible format of the show. Their job was to make kids fall in love with wacky characters and want to buy toys of them, possibly start reading their comics etc. Who in Season 3 could that have possibly happened for? Hawkman? Devil Ray?

That’s not to say this season didn’t produce some fantastic episodes and moments. ‘Destroyer’ took the top spot for the entire series, ‘The Great Brain Robbery‘ was very charming, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed ‘Ancient History‘ and ‘To Another Shore‘. When they were able to juggle multiple characters well, or at least identified a key relationship dynamic or leaned into DC’s history, they could deliver. But overall this season really felt like they were ‘over it’, having been surprised to get a third season in the first place, after already being somewhat surprised to get a JLU after Justice League, and presumably being exhausted fighting DC over the rights to Batman and Aquaman.

I frequently found myself questioning if they even understood the premise of their own show; So many of the episodes felt like they would have benefitted from being two-parters, though the return to 22-minute stories was probably a network mandate. In the most literal sense they went out on a high with a tremendous finale, but zooming out a bit more it was disappointing to see them limp quietly into the night, struggling to consistently put together competent scripts and instead embracing homogeny. I talk all the time about how great moments do not make great episodes, and I feel like any warm sentiment towards this third season would fly directly in the face of that.

Director Rankings

Season 3

1. Joaquim Dos Santos (7 eps)
2. Dan Riba (6 eps)

They actually tied, but Dos Santos was entrusted with the excellent series finale, and also had my third placed episode, so 2 of the top 3 gets you the edge in my book.

There’s not really much else to say here. Perhaps them no longer relegating Dos Santos to working with worse writers and animators like they had previously made an impact…

Overall

1. Dan Riba (19 eps)
2. Joaquim Dos Santos (20 eps)

Despite ending up with my top 2 episodes and four of the top ten to his name, Dos Santos owns 8 of the bottom 10 and thus had no real hope of overtaking Riba for the series overall. It did seem at times he was playing with a stacked deck, as Riba was seemingly just assigned the better scripts and more experienced animation crews, but even with that shifting later on, Riba’s episodes were just better on average.

I maintain that it’s bad for the show that only 2 guys got to direct anything, and Riba is such a Bruce Timm guy, delivering consistent but often uninspired work. I’ve talked extensively about how Timm hated when the animators would ‘go rogue’ in BTAS, even if it led to some gorgeous visuals not achieved by the rest of the show. He prefers uniformity. He prefers a lower ceiling but a higher floor. That’s all well and good if you’re running a business, but as an ‘art critic’ I’d appreciate if more swings had been taken.

Writer Rankings

Season 3

1. Geoff Johns (1 ep)
2. Dwayne McDuffie (7 eps)
3. Matt Wayne (6 eps)
4. J.M. DeMatteis (2 eps)
5. Paul Dini (1 ep)

Just as having only two guys direct the entire show is a bad thing, I really don’t approve of having McDuffie and Wayne essentially swap back and forth, having story credit on every single episode and only letting the guests write teleplays based off their outlines. You simply need a greater variety of voices in the room. I guess it’s an improvement on handing the entire show over to McDuffie in the back half of Season 2… though the quality dip may say otherwise.

Geoff Johns was SO much better at screenwriting in his sole try on this show than their only 2 trusted scribes. He demonstrated his extensive experience writing comics, marrying his hardcore DC knowledge with some very basic ‘set it up and pay it off’ knowhow. More than that, he simply had a better handle on the dialogue, taking a concept I greatly disliked (writing John Stewart into the Hawkman/Hawkgirl ‘past lives’ flashbacks) and really making the character dynamics sing.

I will say McDuffie absolutely nailed ‘Destroyer’, exhibiting an ability to juggle a huge cast of characters while making sure a ‘Big 4’ are extremely well served, delivering a level of work not seen from him since ‘Wild Cards‘ in Justice League. I’m writing this entire paragraph because I know what a beloved figure he is to this fandom and I frequently give negative reviews to his work. I absolutely believe he was good at big ideas and was invaluable in the writers room, I just think script-to-script he was lacking.

Overall

1. Gail Simone (1 ep)
2. Darwyn Cook (1 ep)
3. Geoff Johns (1 ep) (NEW)
4. J.M. DeMatteis (7 eps)
5. Jim Steranko (1 ep)
6. Dwayne McDuffie (21 eps)
7. Andrew Kriesberg (1 ep)
8. Stan Berkowitz (6 eps)
9. Matt Wayne (6 eps) (NEW)
10. Bruce Timm (2 eps)
11. Robert Goodman (4 eps)
12. Warren Ellis (1 ep)
13. Henry Gilroy (1 ep) (↑)
14. Paul Dini (2 eps) (↓)
15. Ron Zimmerman (1 ep)

It’s SO damning for the top 3 to be ‘guests’ in Gail Simone, Darwyn Cook and Geoff Johns, all known for their comic book work, not TV scripts. It’s not even a law of averages thing where writing a single decent episode gives you a numbers edge over someone writing more often that gets dragged down by the occasional clunker; these three legitimately wrote rings around the regulars, demonstrating far more personality and thoughtful decision-making.

Once upon a time the mighty Paul Dini was the one lapping the field in this category, being so laughably better at writing than everybody else it was almost embarrassing. Now he’s bringing up the rear thanks to a litany of problems with ‘Far From Home‘ that dragged him even further down the list. If you’ve been reading the site for a while you’ll be sick of reading it, but I’m adamant he and Bruce Timm fell out at some point and as a result of being ‘frozen out’ of the writers room, his work suffered, turning him from a leading creative voice to a freelancer turning in work cold.

Yet the aforementioned top 3 weren’t part of the regular crew either, so how did they pull this off? Well, maybe Dini needs to have that greater level of creative control to do his best work? Maybe he’d simply written too many scripts by this point and was creatively spent? Who can say? All I know is that as the DCAU went on the writing quality of the ‘core staff’ declined. Rich Fogel is gone. Stan Berkowitz’s involvement reduced dramatically. We’ve already talked about Dini. The final Top 5 says everything. Three guests and a story credit from a guy who didn’t actually touch the episode.

Conversely Matt Wayne, who wrote half of Season 3, debuts in the bottom half of the list, indicative of this probably being the worst season of the show.

Animation Rankings

Season 3

1. DR Movie Co., LTD. (7 eps)
2. DongWoo Animation Co., LTD. (6 eps)

Overall

1. Dong Yang Animation Co., LTD. (9 eps) (↑)
2. DongWoo Animation Co., LTD. (10 eps) (↓)
3. DR Movie Co., LTD. (20 eps) (-)

Dong Yang defaulted up to first place despite not having an episode this season, largely because this is a weaker season than the other two, so the remaining studios took hits simply by continuing to work on the show.

What’s really to say anymore? Bruce Timm won this war a long time ago and the show looks nice, conquering the little ugly quirks of early Justice League to deliver a smooth product… but it also feels lacking in soul.

Composer Rankings

Season 3

1. Michael McCuistion (5 eps)
2. Kristopher Carter (5 eps)
3. Lolita Ritmanis (5 eps)

Overall

1. Michael McCuistion (14 eps) (↑)
2. Lolita Ritmanis(14 eps) (↓)
3. Kristopher Carter (15 eps) (-)

Likewise, I have nothing bad to say about this trio of Shirley Walker disciples. But you also can’t really tell the difference between the three of them, and we’ve shifted a long way from almost entirely orchestral scores, which is a huge shame. Again, Bruce Timm won. Everything is the same all the time.

Episode Rankings

Season 3

1. Destroyer
2. The Great Brain Robbery
3. Ancient History
4. To Another Shore
5. Shadow of the Hawk
6. Alive!
7. Flash and Substance
8. Grudge Match
9. I Am Legion
10. Far From Home
11. Patriot Act
12. Chaos at the Earth’s Core
13. Dead Reckoning

It’s a real shame that the spotlights and tribute episodes were so weak given those used to be the bread and butter of the DCAU. None of Deadman, Warlord, The Seven Soldiers of Victory, The Legion of Super-Heroes or The Blackhawks got ideal showings.

I’d say I feel actively good about the top 5 and then everything below that may have some good ideas here and there but the overall episodes simply aren’t working for one reason or another. Normally compromised scripts that can’t get to everything in their runtime or uninspired follow-ups to old episodes. ‘Grudge Match‘ is just way worse than ‘The Cat and the Canary‘ despite boasting a larger cast of theoretically bigger names. Huntress and Black Canary worked before, Shayera and Vixen has worked before, and Wonder Woman being portrayed as an unstoppable monster should be good… but it’s just noise, really. Or the season-opener, ‘I Am Legion‘, which tries to follow up on ‘The Savage Time‘ from Justice League but comes way too late and is pretty bad to boot. ‘Patriot Act‘ ties up loose ends from the Cadmus Arc but just fizzles out in an intensely unsatisfying manner. It goes on and on like this.

Conversely, ‘Destroyer’ was superb and even I’m surprised by how much I liked ‘Shadow of the Hawk’ and ‘Ancient History’ to be honest. Never been a ‘Hawks’ guy, but here we are!

Overall

1. Destroyer (S3)
2. Double Date (S2)
3. For the Man Who Has Everything (S1)
4. Clash (S2)
5. The Great Brain Robbery (S3)
6. Task Force X (S2)
7. Question Authority (S2)
8. Ancient History (S3)
9. Fearful Symmetry (S1)
10. To Another Shore (S3)
11. Panic in the Sky (S2)
12. The Return (S1)
13. The Once and Future Thing, Part 1: Weird Western Tales (S1)
14. Epilogue (S2)
15. Flashpoint (S2)
16. Shadow of the Hawk (S3)
17. The Ties That Bind (S2)
18. The Cat and the Canary (S2)
19. The Greatest Story Never Told
20. Divided We Fall (S2)
21. The Balance (S2)
22. Dark Heart
23. Alive! (S3)
24. Initiation (S1)
25. This Little Piggy (S1)
26. Flash and Substance (S3)
27. Kids’ Stuff (S1)
28. The Once and Future Thing, Part 2: Time Warped (S1)
29. Doomsday Sanction (S2)
30. Wake the Dead (S1)
31. Ultimatum (S1)
32. Grudge Match (S3)
33. I Am Legion (S3)
34. Hawk and Dove (S1)
35. Far From Home (S3)
36. Patriot Act (S3)
37. Chaos at the Earth’s Core (S3)
38. Hunter’s Moon (S2)
39. Dead Reckoning (S3)

Look how many S3 episodes placed low! While there are a respectable number in the Top 10 as well, look at the middle and upper-middle of the list. Not pretty!

Rogues Roundup

Darkseid walked into this show at the 11th hour and completely bossed his way to the top. It wasn’t even close to his best appearance either!

BTAS established the DCAU as a continuity that really got the villains right, delivering definitive takes on so many of them and letting Timm et al hang their hats on how well they handled the adversaries. But if we’re all being honest with ourselves this element slipped more and more with each new show. Darkseid and Lex Luthor would make my overall DCAU villain list, but nobody else from JLU or Justice League would get close, and both were better in STAS.

The worst part of that is this season was set up to really let the villains shine again via The Legion of Doom. Grodd benefitted from this compared to his past appearances to be fair, and Devil Ray was a success, but overall barely any of the Legion made any impact. Tala was cast in an outsized role and while they did some interesting things with her here and there, she had no real business being the functional third biggest villain for most of the season. It was also probably Lex’s weakest season since his very weird STAS S3 appearances.

I really enjoyed Shadow Thief. I’ll say that. Geoff Johns helped them a lot there, but having a strong personality shouldn’t be all it takes to place high on these lists given the high bar set by previous ‘generations’.

Season 3

1. Darkseid
2. Lex Luthor
3. Shadow Thief
4. Gorilla Grodd and The Legion of Doom
5. Devil Ray
6. Tala
7. The Rogues
8. Roulette
9. The Patriot aka General Eiling
10. Deimos
11. Gentleman Ghost
12. Metallo
13. The Fatal Five
14. Sonar

Overall

1. Lex Luthor
2. Darkseid
3. Steven Mandragora
4. Amanda Waller & Project Cadmus
5. Circe
6. Task Force X
7. Amazo
8. Galatea
9. Shadow Thief
10. Gorilla Grodd and The Legion of Doom
11. Chronos
12. Mongul
13. Brainiac
14. Granny Goodness
15. Devil Ray
16. The Rogues
17. Tala
18. The Patriot aka General Wade Eiling
19. Deimos
20. Dark Heart
21. Tobias Manning
22. The Jokerz
23. Felix Faust
24. The Annihilator
25. Roulette
26. Gentleman Ghost
27. Metallo
28. The Ultimen
29. Doomsday
30. The Fatal Five
31. Hades
32. Solomon Grundy
33. The Thanagarians
34. Brimstone
35. Ares
36. Mordred (and Morgaine le Fey!)
37. Mordru
38. Virman Vundabar
39. Sonar