User blog:WoTee129/Young Justice Secrets Review

Hello, I'm new on Wikia. I do a lot of reviews for shows like Young Justice, and I will post them here. I have quite a stockpile of reviews of YJ, so if this one is successful then I will post others. I have reviews for every episode of YJ, and I may post ones for previous episodes later on. I wrote this review and others quite a while ago for another forum, so some information may not be up-to-date, and I may also refer back to things I said in previous reviews. If it becomes confusing, I apologize in advance. Also note that I tend to write extremely long and in-depth reviews. You've been warned.



    Well, I hope everyone enjoyed this episode, because YJ's not coming back for three weeks. For the next two weeks, YJ has been pre-empted for TV specials and premieres.

   Secrets was intriguing; it was a great episode, but it left much unsaid. Specifically, it offered a lot of new insight and continued a number of plot and character progressions, but gave no resolutions. I'm still trying to decide whether that's good or bad; I think it's a good thing because that just means that all the loose ends will be tied up in later episodes, strengthening YJ's continuity while allowing the threads to fully mature before they are tied off. Secrets also had three separate stories, which subsequently were Artemis and Zatanna's fight with Harm, Conner and M'gann's school dance, and Aqualad and Robin's meeting with Batman to discuss the possibility of a mole on the Team. Ironically, only the school dance, the least important story line, had an at all satisfying ending.

    Harm was a fearsome villain, but not quite what I expected. I thought he would be working with someone associated with The Light, or working for The Light, even if it was not immediately obvious, but he just seemed like a rogue psychopath. We never even learned his goal, if he even had a goal, he just wanted to kill people. I wonder if we will learn in the future if he has or will have a larger role in YJ. I must say though, I loved the references to Harm from the comics. [POSSIBLE SPOILER BEGINS] In the comics, Harm was Billy Hayes, an orphan boy adopted by loving, middle class parents and their daughter, Greta. Eventually, he made a deal with the demon Buzz to become powerful, the price of which was the death of Greta by his hand. Also, because of this, Greta was trapped in this plane of existence, and became the incorporeal superheroine Secret. Much of this was hinted at in Secrets, but none of it was established, so it is possible that Harm will appear again in YJ. Then again, it could simply be Weisman and Vietti's way of using Harm and Greta's blurry past to allude to the comic versions of the characters. The ambiguity of Secrets is the reason why I have a "possible" spoiler alert. [POSSIBLE SPOILER ENDS] Harm also had some great characterization in this episode. For most of the episode, he referred to himself in the third person and called everyone else "its." Then, when he saw Greta's ghost as Secret, he said, "Harm's not sorry! I'm not!" As psychotic as Harm was, this shows that something of his former self, something capable of grief and regret, was still in there. But again, what's the point? What purpose does Harm serve in the bigger picture of YJ? Only time will tell, but at this point I am unsure that there is one.

    Artemis was great in this episode. I loved her anger and ferocity from the realization that Conner and M'gann are dating, but why did she react that way? When I was watching the episode, I thought that by the end of it, Artemis and Zatanna would have had that talk, in which Artemis would have revealed why she was angry at learning that Conner and M'gann were secretly dating in addition to perhaps sharing some of her own secrets with Zatanna, but that talk never came. Hopefully, within the next few episodes Artemis will confront M'gann and Conner about their relationship and then we will learn why she was so upset. This is probably better, because then we might see Wally find out as well. There has been some speculation that Artemis was angry at finding out about M'gann and Conner's relationship because she herself has feelings for Conner. I doubt this. She has shown no sign of attraction towards Conner besides her flirtation with him in Infiltrator, and I think that was all it was, simple flirtation. More likely is that she felt betrayed that her close friend M'gann would date someone without telling her. M'gann's betrayal then perhaps reminded her that she has been betraying M'gann and everyone else from the start. Zatanna was great in this episode, but I feel like she was just kind of there, she didn't really have a purpose other than supporting Artemis. That's not a bad thing, though, she is a supporting character, and a very well done one at that.

   Aqualad and Robin's meeting with Batman, Red Arrow and Red Tornado to discuss the possibility of a mole on the Team was perhaps the greatest scene of the episode. Before, YJ had only given a few possible answers to the question of the identity of the mole, meaning Artemis and Red Tornado, but Secrets opened up a whole slew of them. I had before hypothesized that Conner might unknowingly be the mole by means of some special... installment... that Cadmus and The Light had put in him during the cloning process, but now YJ has actually recognized it as a possibility. We definitely know now that M'gann is a White Martian, too. Her panic at becoming white in Disordered combined with her sudden appearance on Martian Manhunter's ship and the fact that he has a few hundred nieces and nephews makes it clear enough. We can also guess as to why she left Mars; her people were treated as second class citizens by the Green majority, and she had always dreamed of coming to Earth, so she stowed away on Martian Manhunter's ship to realize that dream. This brings up a slight incongruity, however. In Bereft, when M'gann had lost six months of memory, she still referred to J'onn as her uncle when Red Arrow said in Secrets that it was only five months ago that she stowed away on his ship as his "niece." I would not be surprised, though, if this was intentional by Weisman and Vietti and if it will be addressed in the future. Artemis is now officially a suspect for the mole, but I'm less sure that she's the mole than I was before. I previously hypothesized that she is a double-agent for Batman, but this I know is wrong. She has been acting too innocent and has been shown to care too much for the Team to be the mole, and yet [SPOILER BEGINS] her ties to Sportsmaster are too strong for her not to be a suspect. [SPOILER ENDS] And Robin showed some guilt when Aqualad said none on the Team is a traitor; could he be the mole? I seriously doubt it, it is more probable that he is still feeling guilty that he let everyone die in Failsafe, and thus feels that he betrayed the Team. The great thing here is that Red Tornado has already been proven to not be the mole, and now we have a multitude of new suspects, as well as the doubt that there even is a mole at all. This is turning into quite a driving plot line.

    Conner and M'gann's school dance was a great sub-plot that really added to the Halloween feel of the episode. I loved the Justice League costumes, especially Mal Duncan's "Superman done right" costume that gave a tip of the hat to the comic version of Superboy. This was also a great way to keep Conner and M'gann's school friends relevant in the show. And before the dance we got to see Wally hitting on M'gann again, and right in front of Conner. Awkward. Actually it's pretty cool because it indicates that Wally is still in denial over the events of Failsafe, a condition in which he reverts back to his womanizing self. We also saw Captain Marvel get rejected by the Team. His character is truly great in this show, but are we going to see any more actual progression for him anytime soon?

    Overall, Secrets was a great episode, but it painfully continued the trend YJ has always had, but especially since Revelation: the progression the plot in agonizingly small steps. The plot of YJ went a moderate tempo when it was laying out the groundwork in episodes one through nine, then sped up dramatically in episodes ten through fourteen, fourteen being, of course, Revelation, the mid-season finale. Since then, however, The Light has not appeared and the pace of the show has slowed to crawl. This is pretty interesting, actually, for it indicates that the pace of the show is linked to the activity of The Light. In episodes one through nine, The Light was fairly active but had not yet put into action their biggest schemes, thus the pace went at a moderate tempo. Then The Light began executing bold maneuvers such as taking control of the Rhelasias and Belle Reve and then finally using the Injustice League as their proxies in episodes ten through fourteen, and so the pace increased dramatically. But at the end of Revelation, Vandal Savage said that The Light was once again free to operate with impunity, and so we have not seen them since and the pace has slowed to a crawl. But that has given the show time to focus on its characters and to foreshadow future events, so it is not all bad. Also, because the pace has slowed, anticipation and suspense is building so that when The Light does reappear, the pace will soar to greater heights than ever.