As a number of subplots begin to come together, whole new threats emerge for the various young heroes – and finally the titular Outsiders make their presence felt on the worldwide stage, with very mixed results. Plus a visit back to the Kirbyverse and some secrets leaked out… And remember, #WeAreAllOutsiders

As Beast Boy, the standout character of the entire series, finally sheds the last of his child-like pretences as a TV star, he sets up the Outsiders, telling the “old guard” of Young Justice (oh the irony considering where we were back at the start of Season 1) that the public need to see a young team of heroes, doing stuff that the original Justice League can’t do for political reasons, and that Young Justice can’t do because of their need to be covert. It’s a clever ploy, setting up three tiers of superheroes in the series at this point – although it does have one potential negative point. Young Justice Outsiders now has so many central characters, from Batman and Superman right down to newbies like Violet, El Dorado and Terra, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember who they all are and how their non-hero personas coexist socially in the hierarchy of them all. That said, it is still remarkable that for the most part when someone does get the spotlight in an episode, their characters remain very well developed and deep – it’s just a shame that everyone is struggling for that very spotlight.

The news that we’re getting a fourth run of the show is such fabulous and well-deserved news, but if the creators take anything from this third run, it’s that there are simply too many characters to maintain the balance and the inevitable need to introduce newer ones next season means that even more will fall by the wayside here.

So, in First Impression, the now public Outsiders receive their baptism of fire when the Reach (in reality a bunch of criminals funded by Lex Luthor using stolen Reach technology) make an attack on a town. Whilst their saving of the situation is loved by most of the locals, it’s hated by the Mayor who points out that the law has been broken – so Beast Boy makes the pubic move of allowing them all to be arrested until a second (this time real) attack by the Reach ensures their public profile goes stratospheric.

A clever nod at the cult of celebrity and social media awareness, one of the episode’s highlights is the two swipes from Scooby Doo, firstly as one of their fans loses her glasses Velma-style and then when the fake Reach crims are arrested and unmasked, their leader actually says “We would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you darn kids”. Brilliant and very funny!

The Outsiders’ hashtag centric activities get a bigger boost when they go to Cuba in Early Warning. They go to shut down a farm where young kidnapped kids are being artificially inseminated with meta-human genes and turned irrevocably into superheroes. Cut to a cameo from the Justice League’s Zatanna as the villain of the piece – the brilliant and always welcome Klarion and his familiar Teekl – is banished to Dr Fate’s dimension (kudos for the end credits sequence of this ep carrying on the humour of that).

And now we see the Outsiders finally solidified with the addition of El Dorado, much to his father’s chagrin. The episode also gets very powerful as Violet is informed by Helga Jace that use of her powers is actually destroying the body she inhabits (Gabrielle’s). Violet doesn’t deal with this very well and stars to push her friends away. Whether this is true or Dr Jace has an ulterior motive for telling her this remains to be seen (but I think we can all guess). Either way, alongside Terra (who is still feeding information to Sportsmaster), Jace remains an apparent snake in the camp. Violet’s response to all this, apart from cutting ties with Geo-Force is to skip school and get drunk on the beach, shooting bottles with her new friend Harper Row, who is pretty messed up herself. The two kiss, adding a whole new dimension to Violet’s attempts to live what’s left of her life to the full!!

After all that frenetic activity, Elder Wisdom is a far more passive episode, focussing on the political machinations of Lex Luthor’s Trump-like ability to turn every PR disaster into a positive, and the realisation – both by the viewer and by Luthor – that G Gordon Godfrey is not as daft as he looks. He teaches Luthor a clever lesson in the power of social media when Luthor ramps up his anti-meta human rhetoric by bringing back the McCarthy-like Registration of Super Heroes, something that failed back in the 1950s but he wants to bring it back now. Before long, he’ll probably be building a wall to keep the Justice League et al out. I love the fact that there’s absolutely no subtlety here: before long I’m sure Luthor will say “covfefe” and say he has the “bigliest plans” – and it’s done deliciously. Of course one could argue that it’s dangerous in modern TV, alienating potential audience with their antifa scripts but by the same token, this is a show about integration, acceptance and focussing on the struggle many modern young people have with identity politics, I can’t really think it matters – people offended by the show being so blatantly liberal aren’t going to be smart enough to be watching anyway. God, I love the writers of this show!

The episode balances this with a clever ruse by the Justice League (well some of them, others are pretty pissed at Batman to be honest for doing this) where they set up the Outsiders to have a very publically successful mission after Luthor ensured they had a bad one earlier. But the drawback is that firstly we have to suffer some terrible, terrible Irish accents (okay, there’s an in-story reason for it, but still…) and secondly, the parents of the Outsiders’ younger team members kick off and ban them from taking part in future missions. The trio affected – El Dorado, Wonder Girl and Kid Flash – must win their elders over, which they do using reason and honesty. It’s a really nice moment when parents and offspring finally bond at the end, and gives us an excuse for a lovely beat of three generations of Flash coming together to promote #WeAreAllOutsiders. A great, clever episode, one of the best of the season – topped off by Violet finally telling Tara and Brion the truth of her involvement in their parents’ murders.

Finally we come to Quiet Conversations, a step away from the frenetic Outsiders battles and instead focussing on three kids: Cyborg, Violet and the non-powered Harper Lee.

Cyborg’s Father Box-based armour is malfunctioning and slowly killing him. A quick visit from Forever Person Dreamer reveals that the Father and Mother Box creator was a New God called Metron and they need the Mother Box tech in his mobile chair to save Cyborg. Cue a quick visit to a world where Superman is fighting Parademons and the transporting to Earth of Metron who is wholly disinterested in saving Cyborg but prefers to study his agonising death because it’s a new experience for him. The story is wrapped up a tad too quickly, with a randomly revealed fact that Granny Goodness is working for Darkseid – something everyone already guessed.

This abrupt wrap up is the central flaw of this episode – it feels like two busy episodes compacted into one. All this Kirby inspired wonderment should have been a story by itself, but a series of equally major B plots are shoehorned in, none of which get time to truly pay off, and we are left cheated.

Violet visits Gabrielle’s parents and pretends she is Gabrielle, dying, and saying a finally goodbye – until confessing the real truth of who she really is. Powerful and emotional but before we can really get a sense of this, we have to look in on Miss Martian getting to the truth behind Harper Row’s abuse at her father’s hands. Oh and look, here’s another plot – this one showing Helga Jace undermining Geo-Force and Terra’s confidence at being part f the Outsders/Young Justice. And, finally a fifth plot sees Aqualad taking the water-breathing meta teen from Cuba to live in Atlantis – and the revelation that the original Aquaman is involved with the bad guys. The episode ends with a lengthy series of vignettes rather than animation, wrapping each of these stories up. that suggests maybe 50% of another episode has been condensed into this series of freeze-frames.

Verdict: It’s a terribly unsatisfying denouement to a very major show for the ongoing threads as we head towards the series finale and spoils an otherwise pretty amazing run of episodes since the show came back from its Spring hiatus. 7/10

Gary Russell