Kid Flash

Aqualad and I found the tracer on a caboose and I don’t mean Cheshire’s!

Dec 4th – The Black Spider, one of Ra’s Al Ghul’s League of Shadows, target’s Star City journalist Bernell Jones as he is putting his young daughter to bed. The Black Spider pulls Jones through his apartment window and then lets him plummet towards the street below. However, Jones is saved at the last moment by the arrival of Green Arrow and Artemis. Jones’ daughter looks on in awe as their arrows drive the Black Spider back. Green Arrow tells Artemis to take the lead so she snares the Spider with her own webbing arrow. Artemis is still talking about his capture when Green Arrow sees her teleport back to Gotham City. Red Arrow appears as soon as Artemis has left. Green Arrow wanted to talk to him, but a police dispatch report catches their attention.

Meanwhile, the Sportsmaster slips into Belle Reve Penitentiary during a pre-arranged gap in the security cycle and visits Professor Ivo in his cell. If anybody were to look for Ivo they’d find him visiting his rival T.O. Morrow in the Hospital infirmary. However, that Ivo is a robot duplicate controlled by Warden Hugo Strange. Shortly afterwards a truck carrying medical waste passes out of Belle Reve without comment. However, it contains a hidden passenger compartment holding the Sportsmaster and the real Ivo.

Red and Green Arrow leave the thieves behind for the police. Green Arrow then tells Red Arrow the news that he’ll shortly be inducted into the full Justice League. However, Green Arrow asks him to set a good example and join the Team first, no matter how briefly. Artemis is still calming down after her adventure and her mother, Paula, tells her that being a hero suits her. They reminisce about how Green Arrow and Batman discovered her after she saved Kid Flash (in “Schooled”). Paula lets slip that she talked with the heroes first and asked for their help in keeping Artemis on the straight and narrow. Artemis is horrified to think that they only took her on as a “pity case” and leaves before her mother can explain properly.

Dec 5th – Sportsmaster and Professor Ivo arrive at a warehouse near New Orleans Docks where they are met by Klarion and the Brain. Klarion is angry to see Ivo until Teekl again explains that their first choice roboticist, T.O. Morrow, is in a coma. Sportsmaster then says that Ivo’s equipment is on its way.

Artemis’s self-confidence has been bruised, but she talks herself around by saying that she’s “one of a kind”. However, when she arrives at Mount Justice she discovers that Red Arrow has finally joined the Team and she is no longer their sole archer. Green Arrow then describes their mission, the Sportsmaster was spotted going through New Orleans airport. Green Arrow tells them to find out what he’s up to and suggests that only a small group made-up of the former sidekicks need go. Only Green Arrow and Artemis knows that the Sportsmaster is actually her father. Artemis says she wants in and responds “Absolutely!” when Green Arrow asks is she is sure. During the journey Kid Flash tells her that she has “nothing to prove” to him at least. At the same time Red Arrow is telling Aqualad that the real reason he’s joined the Team is to smoke out the mole Sportsmaster boasted about (in “Targets”) and Artemis is his main suspect.

Once in Orleans Parish they trace Sportsmaster to a boat rental company. Red Arrow and Kid Flash follow him on motor vehicles, while Aqualad swims underwater, and Artemis flies overhead in the Bioship. Their mark comes ashore near a railway line. Red Arrow is calling the shots. He moves in for a closer look, but Artemis ignores his instructions to stay in the Bioship. She is interrupted by Cheshire (her sister) who reveals that she isn’t too happy to be working with their father. Cheshire does not spot Red Arrow until his web arrow pins her to a tree. Cheshire jokes that she and he are now dating and that she doesn’t want to hurt them “much”. Cheshire knocks Red Arrow off his feet and then steals a kiss from him. Kid Flash sudden arrive and throws Cheshire from him.

Cheshire’s play has been to distract the Team away from the Sportsmaster. He caught an attaché case thrown out of a passing train and when makes his getaway by boat. Red Arrow shouts to Artemis to place a tracer on the fleeing boat, but she hesitates and says he’s too far away. Arrow then does it himself and leaves them to deal with Cheshire while he goes after Sportsmaster. Cheshire baits Artemis by telling her that “he made the shot that you weren’t even willing to try.” Red Arrow takes a dive to make it look like the Sportsmaster has lost him, but Sportsmaster knows them better and destroys their homing device. He then leaves behind to depth throw off Aqualad. Red Arrow and Aqualad survive, but Sportsmaster gets away.

Aqualad and Red Arrow double back to the Kid and Artemis. Cheshire has vanished, but not before Artemis put her own homing device on Cheshire’s sword. She puts a second device on a passing train. Red Arrow and Artemis have words and Kid Flash stands up for her. Aqualad asks why she did not stay aboard the Bioship, but Artemis bluffs by saying that she saw Cheshire sneaking up on Red Arrow. They then continue the hunt as originally planned, but Red Arrow remains suspicious.

Sportsmaster’s boat returns to the New Orleans and he delivers the contents of the attaché case to Professor Ivo. The villains then work to combine the contents of the canisters, with the Atlantean sample, and Klarion’s magic. Artemis has followed the tracer on Cheshire to the warehouse while the others unwittingly follow the tracer on the train in the other direction. She is found by Cheshire who admits that she quickly discovered Artemis’s tracer and that Red Arrow has actually planted one of his own tracers on Artemis. Cheshire when shows her a security feed of Red Arrow about to be ambushed by the Sportsmaster.

Artemis thinks quickly to spoil the ambush. It then her versus Cheshire and Red Arrow versus the Sportsmaster. Arrow radios Aqualad to come to their coordinates. Sportsmaster and Cheshire are a match for Red Arrow and Artemis one-on-one, but Kid Flash and Aqualad’s arrival mixes things up. Kid Flash keeps Cheshire busy while Artemis investigates that they are protecting. Artemis shouts “freeze” as she bursts through the door but is unprepared to see the Brain, Mallah, Ivo, Monqi, Klarion, and Teekl staring back at her. They’ve finished whatever it was they were doing. Ivo almost boasts about what they have recreated, but he’s cut off as Klarion whimsically obeys Artemis’s command to freeze. The villains are magically replaced by ice statues which immediately shatter leaving no trace of who or what was there.

While the others have been chasing Sportsmaster, Miss Martian, Superboy, and Zatanna have been left behind in the Cave. They soon find that they are pretty bored and Zatanna notes that Red Tornado has an apartment above the Cave that nobody has ever seen the inside of. She questions what he does up there seeing as he does not need to eat or sleep. The inquisitive teens wait until after the Tornado leaves and then uses a spell to sneak into his part of the Cave. They find what appears to be a body under a sheet. Superboy pulls its aside to reveal a human like robot. Their snooping is interrupted as the Tornado catches them. He explains that body is an android he is working on – it can pass as a human and will be his alter ego, “John Smith”. Tornado plans to download his consciousness into the new body at times so he can pass as a normal person.

Dec 6th – Back at Mount Justice Aqualad declares their mission a failure. Artemis restates that she saw Ivo, but Red Arrow refuses to believe her (Hugo Strange has “proof” that that Ivo was in his cell). Kid Flash stands up for Artemis again, but Red Arrow then reveals that Artemis sent them on a wild-goose chase while she went after Cheshire herself. Kid Flash believes that it was because she was freaked out about Arrow joining the Team and wanted to bring the bad guys down herself. She says nothing in her defence and Kid Flash, who had been warming to her, says she all she’s proven is that she’s insecure and selfish. Red Arrow then asks when she’ll betray them again, but Aqualad stops him. He them tells the Team to get some sleep while he reports to Batman.

As Artemis is leaving the Cave, Red Arrow quietly warns her that he knows she isn’t who she says she is and that his riding of her isn’t over yet. A depressed Artemis returns home to Gotham City, but she says nothing of her problems to her mother. However, she finds her father, the Sportsmaster, waiting in her bedroom. He guesses that her Team blamed her for their defeat and questions whether they’ll keep her around now that Red Arrow has joined up. Her father tells her that she can fight Jade (Cheshire) and him, but she cannot fight who she really is. Artemis does not correct him when he says that she belongs with the bag-guys and just Artemis hangs her head.

• Roy Harper, as Speedy, stormed out of the pre-Team group in “Independence Day” and refused to join in “Welcome to Happy Harbor”. He turned up again as Red Arrow in “Infiltrator” to discover that Artemis has joined the team — the reverse of this episode. He started working for Aqualad in “Targets” when the Sportsmaster boasted about a mole on the Team. Red Arrows knows that Artemis’s cover story about her being Green Arrow’s niece is false, but he doesn’t now the truth.
• Arrows: Foam arrow, webbing arrow, freeze arrow, explosive, tracer arrow.
• T.O. Morrow has been transferred to Belle Reve infirmary where he remains in a coma.
• Red Arrow thinks that Artemis is improving. He’s been approved to join the Justice League, but Green Arrow asks him to join the Team first for appearances.
• Artemis’s mother references the time that Green Arrow and Batman first approached her as shown in Young Justice (vol. 2) #8 (Nov 2011) and Artemis references her save of Kid Flash from “Schooled”. Her mother’s codename was Huntress. She mentions that she “begged” Arrow and Batman to keep Artemis on the “straight and narrow.”
• Batman and Robin are on a case in Gotham.
• Red Tornado’s apartment is directly above the Cave’s meeting area. He is building himself an android body which can pass as a normal human being. His alter ego of “John Smith” was first referenced by the Martian Manhunter in “Targets” he also appeared to be pretty interested in the Brom Stikk android from “Welcome to Happy Harbor”. Maybe Smith is reverse engineered from Stikk.
• The Atlantean tentacle fragment first appeared in “Downtime” and was stolen from STAR Labs by Sportsmaster and the Riddler in “Misplaced”. Seeing as Ivo is involved the contents of his canisters are probably robotic so they could be related to the Utility Fog from “Infiltrator”.
• The Star City zeta-tube booth is disguised as an old British Police Box, the same disguise used by Docto Who’s TARDIS.

The Black Spider

The Black Spider was Eric Needham, a minor Batman villain who first appeared in the pages of Detective Comics #463 (Sept 1979). From the start it’s fairly clear that he’s a homage/pastiche on Marvel’s Spider-Man, although the degree of this depends on whim of the individual writers and artists of his appearance. There were several Spiders in the comic-book, but Greg Weisman has confirmed on Ask Greg that this is Eric Needham, the original.

The Black Spider / Spider-Man connection is made explicit here as the writer, producer, and the Black Spider voice actor all have links to the Spectacular Spider-Man TV show or comic book. Writer Peter David wrote Spider-Man’s adventures in the original comic-book called The Spectacular Spider-Man and in Spider-Man 2099. Producer Greg Weisman’s last job before Young Justice was as the Supervising Producer on The Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon (named for the comic book). Josh Keaton, who voices Black Spider, was the voice of Spider-Man in The Spectacular Spider-Man. Keaton also voiced Hal Jordan in Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Flash and Aquaman in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths.

The Other Blond Archer

The journalist at the start of this episode is Bernell “Bowstring” Jones. He is the husband of the first Arrowette, a female competitor for Green Arrow’s affections. Their daughter, Cissie King-Jones, has hot housed and drilled by her mother to become a second Arrowette. It was the Cissie Arrowette who was the comic book Young Justice’s archer, a role served in the cartoon series by Artemis. This episode was written by Peter David, the writer of the original Young Justice comicbook.

Weisman Speaks

• There was a scene that was cut showing Superboy use one of Lex Luthor’s shield so he could fly up to the Tornado’s apartment. A later scene of Superboy rubbing has arm where the shield would have been was left in. (Ask Greg).
• The girl in the tag is Cissie King-Jones who is nine-years old at the time of the episode. She will return “given enough episodes and/or comic book issues.”

Misc.

• The police dispatcher at the end of the tag sounds like Khary Payton (Aqualad). The address given by the dispatcher is the corner of Weisinger and Papp, Mort Weisinger and George Papp were Green Arrow’s creators in the 1940s.
• The Guards checking the vans leaving Belle Reve are the same guards that appeared in “Terrors”.
• The tag for this episode is unusually long, 3 minutes 30 seconds.
• Cheshire: “A kiss is just a kiss” / Kid Flash: “and a sai is just a sai” is a misquotation of “As Time Goes By”, the signature song from the film Casablanca.
• Do gorillas have fingerprints? Apparently they do as Mallah uses one to open the case holding the Atlantis specimen.
• The New Orleans warehouse where Ivo and co meet appears to be the same warehouse where the Justice League captured the Terror Twins in “Terrors”. Or at least its the same set of Mardi Gras statues in the background.
• Kid Flash’s souvenir: Red Arrow’s tracer.

Highlights

• Artemis and Green Arrow on patrol.

Oddities

• What was Artemis actually trying to do — hide her secret identity or capture the villains herself?

My Thoughts