User blog comment:Thailog/Ep. 206 "Bloodlines" discussion/@comment-53987-20120602203058/@comment-53987-20120602211114

@Kg1507: For the moment, I'm withholding judgement on Bart's character. His motives are good, but he's still manipulating people that are important to him, and he's still a 15 year old kid.

Even as mature as he seems to be in the flashforward--and I don't doubt that he's also massively emotionally scarred, which isn't going to help matters--by not coming forward with his information and sharing it with his grandfather, Wally and the team, he's basically saying that he trusts his own judgement more than he trusts theirs and is taking away their ability to make good decisions, or even truly decide for themselves. That will make it *much* harder for them to ever trust him in the future if and when they find out, because they're always going to be wondering if he's lying to them or manipulating them. And when family members can't trust each other, well, we call that "dysfunctional" for a reason. So, we'll see how he develops.

But right now, he's very dangerous--because he's systematically lying to the League and the Team and essentially saying that his single mind is more trustworthy and reliable than everyone else's; while he may care about them as an idea, "you're my grandfather!", he doesn't trust them as people, and, in a setting where telepaths exist and can allow people to do wholesale memory sharing with a group, like when J'onn let Strange share his memories of what happened to him on Rann, there's no excuse for Bart's behavior. He can't use the "well, you don't know what's going to happen!" excuse, because Miss Martian could let him share that, as he experienced it. He can't use the "But I need to use the cover persona to protect myself and the information!" excuse either--right now, that information's locked up in one place--his brain. One lucky villain and it's toast. Spreading it around--ensuring data redundancy--eliminates that argument.

Ultimately, Bart's actions say to us, the viewers, that he trusts himself, an emotionally scarred teenaged boy, more than his own family, the Justice League, or the Team--not even Dick Grayson, who has shown that he was capable of keeping a secret and was trained by the World's Greatest Detective--and instead prefers to keep them in the dark and systematically lying to them. We'll see where future character development goes, but right now, he's worse off than Artemis was last season--she was just lying about her ancestry, not her objectives. Bart's lying the other way around--which is fundamentally worse.