Good episode, but I still unimpressed by this season. There are some great stuff, but the whole story isn't working for me. I was liking Blue Beetle story arc, but it just boring. The runaways was good, but not well develop. This season nedds to take a break and let the charcters have some developmente. The plot twist didn't work to me this time. Overall, a good episode, but they need to focus on the characters and not in this convoluted plot that has become The Reach arc.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2022-05-28T06:12:13Z
[7.4/10] I’m glad that we’re giving the Runaways a little bit of shading. There’s a lot of characters in play in season 2, so giving us at least one episode to get to know Virgil, Tye, Ed, and Sam before they inevitably factor into other major events here is a good call.
Granted, it still feels like we only get thumbnail sketches of them. Virgil gets the most sketching (which, hey, I’m not complaining about), with an improvisational bent and an intuitive use of his powers. Ed is basically Nightcrawler with daddy issues. (More daddy issues, I guess?) We know a little bit more about Tye, but we get to see his giant astral projection powers in action, which makes for a cool modern update to the old Apache Chief powerset. And Sam...doesn’t speak English and has vague pulse beam powers.
Okay, so it’s not the deepest character exploration in the world. But watching them bristle against feeling like trapped rats in Star Labs, struggle to break free, but then return to save people on their own terms gives them something to build on as characters. And the fact that they would become Lex Luthor’s personal super army makes a strange sort of sense given his mastermind plan to gain their trust and play on their preexisting concerns after bad experiences with both Star Labs and The Reach.
My only beef is that once Red Volcano shows up, things turn pretty generic. How did he even get free in the first place? It just comes out of nowhere and plays like the young heroes could be fighting anyone.
It does shine a little bit of light on Blue Beetle. He seems to ignore potential civilian casualties, would rather go after the villain than save his friends, and mugs for the camera in lieu of looking after those who helped him. I don’t know how I feel about the twist that all of this is not Jaime turning to the darkside, but rather that Green Beetle was always evil and made it so that the scarab was in control. It seems like the show’s heading for a double bluff of some sort there, and I’m kind of tired of the twists upon twists this season, so it doesn’t do much for me.
Still, it’s nice to see the four new young heroes get a spotlight episode to make their characters feel more real whenever they come back into the fold and become part of the fight. The execution isn’t perfect, but I appreciate the effort.