[7.2/10] This is a weird episode. It has a lot of ideas I like. I’m glad that they devoted an episode to bringing back the young heroes who took the stage in season 2. Not all of them were my favorites, but they were a major part of the show, and it’s nice to check in on them. What’s more, I enjoy a good Thanksgiving episode, since they’re much rarer than the standard Halloween or Holiday episodes. And this one is thoroughly watchable, with a solid action A-story at a harvest festival gone wrong and a nice found family B-story back in Star City.
But there's a lot of weird stuff here that gives me pause. The point in the A-story about everyone being paired up, from Garfield and Perdita, to Blue Beetle and a girlfriend we’ve never met before named Tracy, to Bart Allen and Ed, to even Psimon and Devastation, is alright enough to show teenagers being teenagers or Static feeling a little put out. The episode hits the “I gotta get a girlfriend” point awfully hard though.
That’s a trifling thing though. What’s more odd is Beast Boy’s “We’ve got to step into the public eye” takeaway from this whole thing. The crew’s run-in with Psimon and Devastation is perfectly fine as a standard hero vs. villain throwdown. But why it prompts Beast Boy to go public with the covert ops group is a little opaque. Most curiously, it runs directly counter to the message from season 2, where Blue Beetle stepping into the spotlight was a sign that he was under the control of The Reach. The dialogue does plenty of contortions to justify this, with Garfield emphasizing that it’s about setting a good example rather than taking credit, but it’s still odd that the message here seems to run counter to one of the big messages from the prior season.
The Thanksgiving vignettes at the Crock-Harper house are mostly solid as well. I like Forager helping convince Vic that this could be his new “hive”, even if he still feels uncertain about the path forward. Halo feeling guilty about the bribe Gabrielle took and confiding in Dr. Jace advances that storyline without too much trouble. And the episode gets the controlled chaos of a family celebration of Turkey Day down right.
That said, I have real mixed feelings about the confrontation between Artemis and her mother. On the one hand, I like the idea that her mom wants her out of “The Life” having lost most of her family to it in one way or another. That’s a legitimate conflict, one with no easy answers and where both characters’ perspectives are comprehensible. I hope we get more of it.
But I don’t know why it has to hinge on her getting together with Red Arrow romantically. Beyond the fact that I’m not really asking for that, I don’t know what it has to do with Mrs. Crock’s insistence that “Lian needs a mother.” Artemis could be just as much of a mother to Lian without being romantically involved with Lian’s biological father, and it feels weirdly 1950s for her mom to insist on that. The whole Artemis/Red Arrow thing has felt weird from the jump, and this interlude only deepens that feeling.
Overall, this is a fairly normal, perfectly fine episode on the surface. But under the hood, there's some strangeness to its perspective and relation to past adventures that left me scratching my head.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2022-07-13T05:12:00Z
[7.2/10] This is a weird episode. It has a lot of ideas I like. I’m glad that they devoted an episode to bringing back the young heroes who took the stage in season 2. Not all of them were my favorites, but they were a major part of the show, and it’s nice to check in on them. What’s more, I enjoy a good Thanksgiving episode, since they’re much rarer than the standard Halloween or Holiday episodes. And this one is thoroughly watchable, with a solid action A-story at a harvest festival gone wrong and a nice found family B-story back in Star City.
But there's a lot of weird stuff here that gives me pause. The point in the A-story about everyone being paired up, from Garfield and Perdita, to Blue Beetle and a girlfriend we’ve never met before named Tracy, to Bart Allen and Ed, to even Psimon and Devastation, is alright enough to show teenagers being teenagers or Static feeling a little put out. The episode hits the “I gotta get a girlfriend” point awfully hard though.
That’s a trifling thing though. What’s more odd is Beast Boy’s “We’ve got to step into the public eye” takeaway from this whole thing. The crew’s run-in with Psimon and Devastation is perfectly fine as a standard hero vs. villain throwdown. But why it prompts Beast Boy to go public with the covert ops group is a little opaque. Most curiously, it runs directly counter to the message from season 2, where Blue Beetle stepping into the spotlight was a sign that he was under the control of The Reach. The dialogue does plenty of contortions to justify this, with Garfield emphasizing that it’s about setting a good example rather than taking credit, but it’s still odd that the message here seems to run counter to one of the big messages from the prior season.
The Thanksgiving vignettes at the Crock-Harper house are mostly solid as well. I like Forager helping convince Vic that this could be his new “hive”, even if he still feels uncertain about the path forward. Halo feeling guilty about the bribe Gabrielle took and confiding in Dr. Jace advances that storyline without too much trouble. And the episode gets the controlled chaos of a family celebration of Turkey Day down right.
That said, I have real mixed feelings about the confrontation between Artemis and her mother. On the one hand, I like the idea that her mom wants her out of “The Life” having lost most of her family to it in one way or another. That’s a legitimate conflict, one with no easy answers and where both characters’ perspectives are comprehensible. I hope we get more of it.
But I don’t know why it has to hinge on her getting together with Red Arrow romantically. Beyond the fact that I’m not really asking for that, I don’t know what it has to do with Mrs. Crock’s insistence that “Lian needs a mother.” Artemis could be just as much of a mother to Lian without being romantically involved with Lian’s biological father, and it feels weirdly 1950s for her mom to insist on that. The whole Artemis/Red Arrow thing has felt weird from the jump, and this interlude only deepens that feeling.
Overall, this is a fairly normal, perfectly fine episode on the surface. But under the hood, there's some strangeness to its perspective and relation to past adventures that left me scratching my head.