Halfway through the run and things are taking a decidedly darker tone – just as you think each character faces redemption or happiness (or both) something comes along to whip the carpet out from under their feet. And in doing so, ramps up the excitement and tension tenfold.

So much of the season has been building to finding Geo-Force’s sister Tara (or Terra as she is now, thanks to her Meta-Human emergence) that one tends to forget that there’s a been a really nice undercurrent of believable relationship building going on, with the charming and very honest one between Geo-Force and Halo at the core of it all. It’s also very nice to finally (well…) have Halo’s origins and mysterious background explained and tied up – and linked-in to all the Fourth World/Apokolips stuff bubbling away in the background.

Equally satisfying is seeing glimpses, however cameoed, of other characters tangentially tied into this season – from Metamorpho and Katana in Ep 10, Beast Boy in 12 and Icicle and Devastation in Ep 13. The most significant development is the introduction of Cyborg who, like Halo, has a connection to the Fourth World stuff and as a result isn’t quite the hero one would automatically assume he is. (Nice nod too, in having his dad voiced by Khary Payton, who played Cyborg in Teen Titans Go).

By far the best episode of this latest batch is the one placing Beast Boy centre stage at last; a really harrowing and chilling look into the tortured psyche of a younger teen whose entire life has been marked with tragedy as parents and replacement parents keep getting killed in front of him, leading him to create a “TV personality” around himself which one of the series other background threads, the Goode Goggles, finally dispels And in doing so, illuminates just how villainous Granny Goodness really is. Throw into that episode a superb (if very dark) pastiche of Teen Titans Go, remade here as Doom Patrol Go (clue’s in the name, folks) and it’s the shining beacon amongst four very powerful and well-developed episodes.

However, there are still moments where you do rather wish you had an encyclopaedia at hand to remind you of the minutiae of earlier episodes, and a list of characters and their links to one another (frankly at this stage, I’m crying out for a “Previously On…”). Ep 11 also seemed to have a bit of pointless padding with Forager and Halo attending school – but one is beginning to realise that maybe everything that seems to be padding or throwaway will actually come back to bite us later.

I can think of no greater compliment to sum up not just these four episodes, but the first thirteen parts of Young Justice Outsiders as a whole – it’s like watching the 2017 version of Twin Peaks. There appear to be a lot of random episodes/plotlines/characters that seem to be going nowhere, or just taking part in little vignettes of characters and moments, but in fact you realise, no, this is all relevant; this is really building up somewhere – and as the closing seconds of ep 13 showed (albeit, no surprise to anyone who knows the DC Comics versions of the characters) the realisation that there’s a traitor in The Outsiders’ midst means that the next 13 episodes should be just as daunting, thrilling, breathtaking and heartbreaking as the first.

Verdict: Oh guys, this show just keeps getting better and better. 10/10

Gary Russell