I figured we might have a thread about Young Justice ending. The second season was a disappointment, and I’m not really surprised it killed the show. But it’s complicated, because in a way it was very good - it was just a completely different show than the first season.
I admit I’ve never seen a show do this kind of move before, and it was definitely ballsy. For those not in the know, they closed the first season on a minor cliffhanger… and then jumped five years into the future. While it was certainly a gutsy move, there were several key problems with it:
First, the characters in some ways changed massively, but with no real explanation. Oh sure, they promised implicitly to dribble out secrets over the rest of the show, but that’s something of a dick move right there. A lot of these changes weren’t terribly exciting: OMG two characters eventually got married! Well, that might be interesting to see, but there’s not much fascination with telling us a relationship eventually somehow happened. it would have been pretty cool to see the relationship seriously form, especially as it involved some third parties in interesting ways (it would be hilarious for Sportsmaster, Red Arrow, Cheshire, and half the villains around show up to the wedding with half the heroes around…)
Second, it could be really interesting to see many of the new characters grow a bit and become superheroes. It’s not that interesting to see them suddenly take over the entire show. In fact, the biggest problem with Young Justice was that it efectively wasn’t the same show anymore. I had no problem new characters developing and joining the team. The trouble was that we had so darn many of them all at once in the second season that the entire series was thinned out to deal with them. Nobody really got enough development except possibly the new Kid Flash and Blue Beetle, and even they weren’t that interesting. Both had essentially one gimmick, which got rather tiresome.
Another flaw of the timeskip was the huge gap it made in the villains. there’s been little change, aside from Ocean master being swapped with Black Manta. This isn’t a change beacuse Ocean Master* wasn’t a character* in the first season - he was just a name; he never did anything, so who cares? While I suppose you can assume the villains had various evil schemes going on in the timeskip period, it didn’t seem to make any difference and nothing they did seems to have mattered. Apparently a minor character who showed up for exactly one episode got killed, but that doesn’t mean anything to the audience. You have to show the impact. You cannot tell the impact.
To me, this is a huge case of the creators falling in love with their own creation. They loved it so much - and there’s a lot of good here - that they tried to shortcut to the parts that really excited them. But this fails precisely because it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters. The audience does want to see how the story turns out, but only after enjoying the whole tale. Had this been season six, with the missing five years showing the characters grow, go off for training and development, new characters joining, and old ones rejoining in new roles, this could have been the pinnacle, the end of this tale by crowning off everything that came before. As it was, it killed the series precisely by abandoning what made it successful.
By way of analogy, it would sort of have been if you jumped from Frodo reaching Rivendell and resolving to continue the quest, to the last part of the journey through Mordor. Yes, there are lots of UNASNWERED QUESTIONS and MYSTERIES OF THE PAST, especially because the characters never talk about it coherently, because that would spoilt the “surprises”. But you’d also cut out the heart of the story. If you don’t see Frodo’s journey, then no amount of dramatic tension at the end matters. It could be the best ending in all literature, but nobody’s gonna give a damn.
I would also there were some structural problems within the season itself. The Reach aren’t terribly exciting villains. Blue Beetle isn’t my favorite hero, and Jaime Reyes is OK but not terribly engaging. There was a distinct dearth of new villains, so that the heroes frankly seem to have everything under control - hence why the very start of season 2 requires virtually all the powerful, capable heroes to be whisked away. Even without them, the villains don’t seem to do much except scheme quietly and hide from the heroes.
Despite that, I did enjoy the second season… until about a third of the way through. Then, for some reason, it just seemed to drain away interest. The various problems and issues were so uninteresting to me that it became just noise, and I stopped regularly watching it. Now I can watch it and just shrug; another series with potential that simply didn’t go anywhere I cared to visit.
Anyway, that’s Young Justice for me. But what are your throughts now that everything’s wrapped up?
