Wonder Woman

…you indoctrinated Robin into crime fighting at the ripe old age of nine.

Batman

Robin needed to help bring the man who murdered his family to justice.

Wonder Woman

So he could turn out like you?

Batman

So that he wouldn’t.

Nov 25th — The Justice League’s orbital Watchtower hangs unnoticed high above the world. Its large sunlit foyers are home to plants and flocks of tropical birds. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman watch the garden, until Aquaman arrives to tell them that everybody else is ready. Massive shutters begin closing as they enter the League’s conference room, isolating them from the rest of the world until their meeting has finished. The four heroes stress to the assembled Justice Leaguers that what they decide today will have ramifications for how they League works and how it is seen by the world at large. “We have work to do” says the Batman.

Meanwhile in Mount Justice, Wally West is hanging out in the kitchen as Miss Martian and Zatanna prepare a full Thanksgiving Roast. He’s eating with his own family, but sticks around just long enough to lift some free cranberries. It is Zatanna’s first Thanksgiving without her father Zatara, who has been co-opted as the host body for Doctor Fate, and she’s finding it difficult. Superboy is in the lounge and mutters to himself “at least she had a dad”. Superboy’s thoughts are interrupted by a painfully high-pitched sound. Its a voice which explains that, with Superman off world, he’s the only person with hearing sensitive enough to hear it. The message then asks him to come to a park in Washington DC.

The League’s discussion comes around to another expansion of their membership. Superman nominates Icon and Wonder Woman counters by nominating his side-kick Rocket saying that the League needs more female members. They also consider the Atom for membership. Flash mentions Earth’s third Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, but his idea is instantly shot down by the two Green Lanterns already on the team. Green Arrow nominates Red Arrow, but Aquaman questions Roy’s maturity given the way he parted company with Green Arrow.

Superboy and Wolf take the Super-Cycle and follow the message to a shaded corner of East Potomac Park. They are met by a white limo containing a bald-headed business man who introduces himself as Lex Luthor. Luthor extends his hand to Superboy and tells him that he’s the new chairman of the board at Cadmus. However, Superboy rejects Luthor’s hand and says he wants nothing to do with Luthor or Cadmus. He is about to walk away when Luthor tells him that Cadmus has created a new super-clone – that news convinces Superboy to revisit the laboratory which originally created him. Guardian, Cadmus’s director, is distracted by a series of geneomorphs that have gone missing and neither he, Dr Spence, or Dubbilex know about any new super-clone. All cloning projects were meant to have been been shut down following Superboy’s escape.

Guardian gives Superboy a tour showing them Dr Spence’s new medical research and how the geneomorphs are being given more independence and education, some even have names. During the tour, Dubbilex telepathically tells Superboy that the Guardian can be trusted, but he must understand the plight of the geneomorphs that were left behind in Cadmus when he escaped. In many ways their role has just changed from weapons to that of menial labour. After Superboy says he wants to free the super-clone, Dubbliex tells him that he’ll question the older geneomorphs about any hidden projects. The entire tour is watched by Lex Luthor from his limo via Cadmus’s security cameras.

Guardian tells Superboy that he has his own missing geneomorphs to find and leaves him to look around on his own. Superboy eventually ends up back in the Project-Kr vault where he was once “kept”. He and Wolf discover a hidden doorway that leads to massive chilled warehouse containing row-upon-row of frozen specimens and a pod labelled “Project Match”. The pod contains a super-clone identical in almost every way to Superboy except that its eyes are black. Superboy frees “Match” and tries talking to him, but it lashes out with a feral anger. The Match clone is faster and strong than him, but it is when Match flies that Superboy is really surprised – Match has powers that he doesn’t. Match knocks Superboy unconscious and then stares at his own reflection. Match’s S-shield has been ripped off so he uses his heat-vision to brand the S back into his flesh, however, he uses his reflection as a guide and the S ends up reversed. Luthor’s video feed of the fight suddenly goes off line.

The Justice League’s debate continues with Superman agreeing that Red Arrow is old enough, but he refuses to induct the rest of the Team as they are still technically children. Doctor Fate’s rapid rejection of Zatanna’s membership prompts Wonder Woman to point out that Zatara is influencing Fate’s decisions. Captain Marvel then questions why Doctor Fate is even on the team after he coerced Zatara into giving up his body. Fate says that Zatara wants Fate to remain in the League, if only to keep a close eye on him. Eventually the Flash says they have to tackle the issue of whether the Captain himself should stay a member following the revelation that he’s actually a 10-year-old boy in an adult body. Batman stands up for the Captain and admits he knew all along. There is then a spirited exchange between Wonder Woman and Batman on the indoctrination of children into crime fighting. The discussion then turns to whether 18-years-old is a suitable minimum age for joining the League and what that means for alien and clone applicants.

Superboy is horrified to find that Cadmus has put him inside his old pod to heal, he breaks out and accuses Spence of being another Cadmus mad-scientist. However, Guardian says that she was as shocked as he was to see the security footage of Match (of whom they can find no trace). Lex Luthor contacts Superboy after the others have left the Kr-Vault. He reveals that kryptonian DNA is notoriously difficult for human science to sequence. Superboy only has partial kryptonian powers because he was created using a partial kryptonian DNA sequence that was completed using human DNA. Match was created as a pure kryptonian, but his poorly sequenced DNA has left him insane. Luthor then gives Superboy a pack of “shield” skin-patches that will suppress his human DNA for about an hour allowing his kryptonian DNA to dominate, boosting his abilities to full kryptonian levels. Superboy says he doesn’t want them, but Luthor says to keep them anyway.

Superboy continues his search of Cadmus for Match and demands to know what Dubbilex has found. Dubbilex tells him that Match is actually Superboy’s older brother. He was created first, but he was put on ice when they found that he was uncontrollable. Superboy was Cadmus’s second attempt. Dubbilex also lets Superboy know that Lex Luthor was the founder of Cadmus and was in on the process all along. Dubbliex then admits that he has taken Match. Superboy disappears from Luthor’s security monitors as he heads deeper into Cadmus. He and Wolf finds a hidden geneomorph community called “Geneomorph City”. One by one Dubbilex has liberated the geneomorphs from Cadmus so that they can live freely in his city.

Match is there in chains, kept passive by three g-gnomes. Dubbilex fears that Match would set back his cause by decades if he got loose, but Superboy angrily accuses him of being no better than Cadmus for holding Match prisoner. Superboy’s presence rouses Match from his docility and he snaps the chains holding him. The fight between the more powerful Match and the weaker Superboy rages through Geneomorph City until Superboy comes to the realisation that he cannot beat Match without using the power-shields given to him by Luthor. Superboy places one of the shields on his arm and feels an instant change as his abilities and senses become supercharged. Superboy is surprised to find himself flying for the first time and can barely control his new heat-vision. Match uses his own heat vision to temporarily blind his younger brother.

Superboy is finally able to wrestle Match to the ground, but his own anger is growing and he was to be snapped out of his rage by Guardian’s shouts. The Guardian, Mercy (Luthor’s aide) and a squad of human security have found their way into Geneomorph city. Superboy may have defeated Match, but Dubbilex’s secret city has been exposed. There is little option other than to return Match to his frozen Pod, he’s just too uncontrollable to be let loose. Superboy meets with Luthor again and accuses him of placing a tracker in the shields box, that’s what led Guardian to Geneomorph City. Luthor explains that he initiated the cloning projects because he wanted Superman to “meet his match” and that he used both Match and Superboy to discover the location of “his” missing Geneomorphs.

Luthor then admits that the human DNA used to bridge Superboy’s kryptonian DNA came from him. He taunts Superboy that Superman believes in a world of black-and-white and has never truly accepted Superboy because he was made by the bad-guys. Luthor talks about shades of grey, and points out that Superboy went along with the suggestion to refreeze Match even after he was so set on freeing him. Luthor calls Superboy his son and tells him to keep the remaining shields. When it looks like Superboy is about to threaten him Luthor simply says “red sun”, a preprogrammed command phrase that shuts Superboy down. When Superboy regains his senses its night, he’s still stood in the park, and Luthor is long gone. Despite that Superboy still can’t bring himself to throwaway the shields.

The Justice League has finally finished their deliberations and have a full list of candidates for League membership, they include the possibility to reaffirm/deny Captain Marvel and Doctor Fate’s continued membership, extend membership to the members of the Team, and membership for the heroes Atom, Blue Devil, Icon, Rocket, Red Arrow, and Plastic Man. They debated criteria for age, gender, size, and power, but Wonder Woman reminds them that above all the fundamental criterion much be “who do we trust.” They then put the membership to a full vote. Afterwards the League unanimously ratifies their results and Batman adjourns the meeting.

• This episode takes place on November 25th, Thanksgiving day in 2010 — the year that the Young Justice dates are based on.
• The Justice League gathers to review potential new members. The final list they vote on is: Plastic Man, Red Arrow, Zatanna, Doctor Fate, Kid Flash, Miss Martian, Superboy, Rocket, Icon, Atom, Captain Marvel, Blue Devil, Robin, Aqualad. Captain Marvel and Doctor Fate are up for reaffirmation following the events of “Misplaced”. Plastic Man, Rocket, Icon, Atom, and Blue Devil are brand new potential members. Icon was nominated by Superman, Rocket by Wonder Woman. Red Arrow was nominated by Green Arrow. The only name we heard about that isn’t in the final list is the Green Lantern Guy Gardner. The entire Young Justice team is included except for Artemis.
• The Geneomorphs at Camdus have greater independence and education, a few have even taken on names (benny, aaron). All cloning projects have been stopped since Superboy’s escape and Guardian took over its running. Dubbilex tired of the slow pace of geneomorph emancipation so he founded a hidden geneomorph community in the caverns beneath Cadmus.
• Kryptonian DNA is very difficult for human science to read (to sequence). Match was the first attempt to clone Superman, but the imperfect DNA replication made him insane and uncontrollable. He was left on ice and a second clone was created by patching the damaged stretches of kryptonian DNA with human DNA taken from Lex Luthor. The result was Superboy, but his was liberated from Cadmus before reading maturity. The human DNA limits the clones powers, specifically flight and heat-vision. This limitation can be removed for up to an hour by using special skin patches (“shields”).

The Watchtower

This is the first time we’ve seen the Earth-16 version of the Justice League Watchtower. The League’s first two head-quarters were a cave called the Secret Sanctuary and a space station called the Satellite. On Earth-16, Mount Justice, Young Justice’s headquarters, is a recommissioned version of the Secret Sanctuary. The switch to the Satellite took place in the 1970s and it is emblematic of the time when the League was at its largest and most stable. A later orbital headquarters was called the Refuge. Both the Satellite and the Refuge were destroyed by White Martian invasions (the type of Martian that Miss Martian was so terrified to be associated with).

The first space station to be called a Watchtower (originally the name of a moon base in the comics) was in the DCAU Justice League cartoon. The Earth-16 Watchtower was mentioned in the first episode of this series, “Independence Day”, but wasn’t shown. The League maintains a high-profile ground base called the Hall of Justice, but that’s really just a zeta-tube teleportation gateway to the orbiting Watchtower. Only Roy Harper (Speedy, later Red Arrow), knew about the Watchtower before he revealed its existence to the Aqualad, Robin, and Kid Flash — it was a secret used to demonstrate how little the League actually trusted them at that point.

As blogged earlier, the secrets of the Earth-16 Watchtower were described by producer Brandon Vietti in a post on his own blog. This Watchtower was a decommissioned Green Lantern space station that was re-purposed by Hal Jordan and John Stewart. They towed it into orbit and gave it to the Justice League. There are hints of its Green Lantern origin in floor patterns (which aren’t visible in this episode) and the fact that its really difficult to get around unless you can fly.

Match and the Agenda

The Agenda were long running badguys from Superboy’s own comic (the Conner Kent version). The original DCU Cadmus was run by a quartet of grown-up sidekicks (the Newsboy Legion) who use to run with the Guardian in the 1940s. Some of their practises were suspect at times, but they were generally the good guys. They were succeeded by a more suspect character called Director Westfield.It was Westfield who cloned Superman with the aim of creating a Cadmus control replacement after the original was believed deceased (he got better). That clone broke out of Cadmus before it reached maturity and became the DCU Conner Kent.

Westfield was eventually killed off. It was originally thought that Westfield had used his own DNA when creating Superboy, but it was revealed years later that Luthor had actually had it replaced with his own DNA. Westfield also survived through his daughter, Amanda Spence. She blamed Superboy for her father’s death and went evil in many attempts to kill him.The scientist shown in this episode shares the same name, but may or may not be evil. She certainly isn’t as sympathetic to Superboy as the other guest cast.

Cadmus’s opposite number are the Agenda. Cadmus has boundary issues with genetic manipulation and cloning, but they are generally on the up-and-up (like Guardian and Dubbilex in this episode). The Agenda on the other hand are down right evil. They are controlled by a woman called the Contessa whom we know little about except that she was Lex Luthor’s ex-wife. The Agenda were behind Match’s creation, he was their attempt to re-create Superboy’s creation and to duplicate Cadmus’ patented cloning process.

The Agenda reappeared for a second plotline, a major crossover called “the Sins of the Youth”, where the Contessa teamed-up with Klarion to target all the world’s teen heroes and sidekicks. Their spell reversed everybody’s ages — the Justice League became teenagers and Young Justice were turned into adults. I wound not be too surprised if that plot line reappears sometime.

In this episode we see more of the geneomorphs from the first two episodes. Each of heir types is named after a mythological races (G-Gnome, G-Troll, etc). The one type we didn’t get to see much of in those episodes were the worker drones, the G-Dwarves.

Wonder Woman

While her involvement isn’t Earth shattering this is Wonder Woman’s first speaking appearance in Young Justice. She is voiced by actress Maggie Q, the female lead in the series Nikita. She spoke to TV Guide about taking up the iconic role:

Taking the role was a no-brainer for Maggie Q. “In my head I am her,” she says with a laugh. “No stretch there. When I was a kid, I used to dress up as her. I couldn’t afford a costume, so I would make her headband, wristbands and the lasso out of paper and tape it to myself. And [I'd] run around, climb up roofs and try to jump off them.” She was inspired by Lynda Carter’s iconic performance as the Amazon warrior in the 1970s live-action Wonder Woman series. “As kitsch as it was, it still had that concept of woman power,” she says. “To me, as a young girl, that was more interesting than being pretty or being popular. Being strong, to me, was cool.”

The Producers Speak

Hawkwoman and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) only have one line each and their voice artist isn’t credited. From memory Greg believes that Hawkwoman was voiced by Danica McKellar and Hal was voiced by Dee Bradley Baker. (Ask Greg)

On secret identities:

Batman knows the secret identities of everyone in the League. They do not all know that he knows.

There is a scene missing from early in the episode where Superboy lands on Cadmus’ roof and demands to be let it. It was cut from the broadcast version to fit the episode into the shorter DC Nation timeslot. It remains on the version of the episode sold on iTunes and similar services.

The Geneomorphs with names are named after members of Greg Weisman’s family.

Allusions

• Data & Lore — The plot that Superboy is the younger brother and this it is his older brother, the earlier model, which is faulty/evil has parallels to the Star Trek: The Next Generation plotline of Data and his evil brother Lore.
• Ultrasonic message — Lex Luthor contacts Superboy with an ultra-sonic signal in scene that is a homage to the way that Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor first contacted Christopher Reeves Superman in Superman The Movie (“Only one thing alive with less than four legs can hear this frequency, Superman, and that’s you.”)
• Number 16 references: the number of heroes considered for League candidacy.
• The codephrase that Luthor uses to shut Superboy down is an allusion to Krypton’s star — kryptonians like Superman gain superpowers from Earth’s yellow-son, but lose them under a red-sun like their native star.
• Curt Geda was one of the Storyboard Artists. Okay this isn’t an allusion as such, but Curt Geda is a name that stands out in DC animation as some one with a long pedigree — he worked on the old DCAU including stints on the pilot episodes for Superman and Justice League.

Highlights

• Seeing the Watchtower.

Oddities

• Just when as Hawkman and Hawkwoman going to say or do something in this show.

My Thoughts