Previously: Superman and Aquaman (the King of Atlantis) had managed to avert a war between the surface world and Atlantis caused by Lex Luthor’s flagrant disregard for Atlantean sovereignty (Superman The Animated Series: Fish Story). Relations remained strained, however, and elements in the Atlantean military pushed Aquaman to take a more militant stance. Prince Orm, Aquaman’s brother, hired the assassin Deadshot to kill him while he was attending peace talks. Orm then seized control of the Atlantean Throne, claiming that the surface world was responsible his brother’s dead. In reality, Superman and the Justice League had saved Aquaman’s life, but they discovered the Atlantean connection too late to stop Aquaman’s capture by Orm’s guards (Justice League: The Enemy Below Part One).

Orm tells Aquaman that he is tired of watching him lead Atlantis to ruin and General Brak accuses him of siding with the surface world against his own people. The deposed King remains defiant until Orm shocks him unconscious with an energy blast from his own Royal Trident. Moments after the guards have dragged out Aquaman, Mera bursts into the Throne Room saying that she has heard about her husband’s return. Orm tells her that it was an unfounded rumour and then reveals that he has taken her son, the infant Prince, into protective custody. He ominously tells her that, “The Prince will come to no harm as long as you cooperate!”

Unaware that Aquaman has already been captured, Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and J’onn J’onzz rush to alert him to the threat from within Atlantis. However, their path is blocked by one of the massive Atlantean submarines. Superman quickly disables it, but the League are stunned unconscious by depth charges fired from guns hidden in the canyon walls. Orm makes a show of displaying his new prisoners to the court and announces that their incursion is to be considered an act of war. The League are to be executed immediately, but Mera knocks out the guards and frees them. She agrees with them that somebody in Atlantis has betrayed Aquaman and they set out to search the city. They dodge Atlantean marines, but find no trace of the Aquaman or Orm.

Aquaman is no longer in the city however, and has been chained to a boulder above an underwater volcanic trench. Orm tells Aquaman that he has found a solution to the issue of his succession to the Throne. He then pins the blanket holding Aquaman’s son to the boulder. Orm will automatically inherit the Throne after they are dead. Orm blasts the base of the boulder and leaves it to topple into the volcanic chasm. As it slides down the cliff face, Aquaman manages to free one of his hands, but there is not enough time to free his other hand before they hit the lava. With his infant son’s cries ringing in his ears, Aquaman uses his razor sharp belt buckle to sever his chained han.

Clutching his son, Aquaman staggers into the Atlantean Throne Room and demands to know where Orm has gone. The League are stunned by Aquaman’s intensity, but neither they nor Mera know Orm’s location. While Aquaman is being fitted with a prosthetic hook (to replace his severed hand), Batman calls to warn the League that a situation is developing near the North Pole. Aquaman identifies the cause as a Thermal Reactor, a doomsday device that will melt the polar ice cap and flood the surface world. Atlantis built it as their last defence against a surface attack, but it was never armed. Orm must have used the stolen plutonium from the USS Defiant (The Enemy Below, Part One) to arm the reactor.

The tranquillity of the Arctic ice is disrupted as Aquaman and the League race to reach the polar reactor. General Brak and his Navy try to block their way, but his forces can only delay the League. Aquaman telepathically summons a Killer Whale to smash through the Atlantean line. He is the first to reach the hidden ice caves containing the thermal reactor. The caves and surrounding glaciers are crumbling as the reactor heats up. Orm ambushes Aquaman and their battle carries them into the cavern outside the reactor room. Orm has the upper-hand until he looses his grip on the powerful Royal Trident. At the end of the fight Orm is left hanging on to a ledge above a precipice by his finger tips. Aquaman is unswayed by his brothers pleas and lets him plummet, presumably to his death.

Orm had deliberately sabotaged the thermal reactor’s controls to prevent it from simply being turned off. The Batman believes that he can still shut it down from inside if Green Lantern’s ring can shield him from the radiation. Their gambit is successful and the disaster is averted. Back in Atlantis, loyalist soldiers bring the captured General Brak before the King. Brak protests that he has just been following orders, but Aquaman is in no mood to hear his excuses and orders him taken away. The King later confesses to the League that his fear of the threat of the surface world blinded him to the threat from inside his own kingdom. Going forward, Atlantis is left with the job of rebuilding its Navy without the boats the League had to destroy or General Brak and the other officers who supported Orm’s coup.

Mercy Reef

The scene where Aquaman is chained just below the surface of the water echoes part of the his origin mythology. In Atlantis, yellow-hair is rare and is considered a cursed trait because of an ancient tyrant called Kordax who happened to have yellow-coloured hair. The trait is considered so ominous that babies showing it are abandoned to die on Mercy Reef, a reef that is exposed at low tide.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Aquaman’s superpowers include the ability to breathe water when they actually include the ability to breathe air. You see in the comic books, Atlanteans breathe water and only water, but unknown to them Aquaman had the ability to breathe air and thus survived his exposure on Mercy Reef.

The name Mercy Reef was said to have been a working title for the Smallville spin-off series that would have featured Aquaman. However, only a pilot episode was ever produced.

The Hand

Aquaman originally lost his hand in Aquaman (Vol 5.) #2 (Sept 1994) when a super villain called Charybdis plunged it into pool of piranhas that refused to obey Aquaman’s commands. He compensated by tying a harpoon to his stump. After the Atlantean’s had left the infant Aquaman to die on Mercy Reef he was found and raised in by a pod of dolphins. This addition to the legend by writer Peter David follows the mythological archetype of the feral child that had been raised by wild animals, e.g., Tarzan, Mogwli, Romulus and Remus, etc. The particular harpoon Aquaman tied to his stump may have been one that had been used to kill one of the dolphin family that raised him. The simple harpoon was later replaced by a proper prosthetic hook that he could fire on a rope as a grapnel.

Aquaman uses the red blanket that his son had been wrapped in to bandage the stump of his severed hand. Its a smart slight-of-hand that allows the producers to show Aquaman with what appears to be a red, blood-soaked bandage, while it is actually just a cloth that happened to be red to start with.

The Trident

In this episode the Royal Trident that Orm wields is not given a name or a background; the trident is just a big pointy thing that fires energy blasts. It, or a very similar Trident, appears in The Terror Beyond where it is revealed to have been the weapon of the legendary Atlantean sorcerer-ruler King Poseidon. It was used to focus the magical energy that banished the old, dark god of the Atlanteans. A side effect of that banishment was to cause Atlantis to sink beneath the waves. It appears that the Trident has become part of the Atlantean royal regalia.

In the comics Orm Marius, as the super villain called Ocean Master, wields a Trident, or at least a trident-like staff. In those stories, Orm and Aquaman’s father was an immortal Atlantean wizard who fathered them by separate mothers because he believed that the Throne of Atlantis must always be fought over by brothers – one of those mystical, destiny, prophecy things. Originally Orm didn’t know he was Aquaman’s brother and couldn’t even breathe underwater. His weapon is a trident-like mystical staff that was sold to him in a bargain with a demon. The catch is that he cannot let go of the staff without being racked with excruciating pain.

Misc

Things that may just be my imagination:

• Mera with a mace. The show’s producers really have a liking for a red head with a weapon.
• The medic/technician that gives Aquaman his hook has a certain Kirby look to him.
• When Mera asks “Is it madness to sacrifice all for some one you love?” Green Lantern avoids her gaze. It may be his response to her rebuff, but he was pretty much willing to do just that in the last story, The Blackest Night. Albeit for Green Lantern, the “some one you love” was the cause of justice rather than an actual person.
• The Atlantean Docks look like a James Bond villain’s base.

Great Moments

The Hand Scene – see below.

Runner up: “I saw it, but I still don’t believe it.” – Green Lantern’s incredulity to Aquaman riding a killer whale into battle.

Oddities

They’re racing to reach the thermal reactor, so the League stops to hover in mid air as Aquaman strolls across the ice. The conversation may be necessary, but everybody seems to loose their urgency. Superman could have made it to the reactor and hefted it into orbit while everybody else is chatting.

My Thoughts

The scene where Aquaman cuts his own hand off to save his baby son is one of the most intense that they’ve ever included in the Justice League cartoon. Its a merging of three separate parts of the Aquaman mythology – Mercy Reef, the loss of his son, and the replacement of his hand – but the result is something quite new. Its gives a grander, more mythic feel to the loss of the hand and really underscores the intensity of his personality. Aquaman is one of the stand out characters in the cartoon and rebuffs every accusation of blandness that has ever been directed at the comic book character.

The rest of the episode isn’t bad either. I originally watched this episode as the hour-long story, but I think its one of those that actually works best as two half-hour episodes. The first part, with the USS Defiant and Deadshot set pieces, wraps up fairly conclusively with Aquaman’s capture and even the back reference to the Defiant’s plutonium could have been dropped without harming the story. The only real problem I had with his episode is that there are a couple of points where the animation on Aquaman goes very weird – when he’s looking directly at the camera in the hospital scene and later when Orm shocks him from behind.

The Verdict