天下制覇

That got annoying quickly.

Impressions:

Now this was an eventful episode. In no particular order, Artemis rejoins the team, gets ‘killed’, is revealed to be alive and now wearing a perception filter (I blame Dr. Who for making these popular again), is being sent off to go be a runaway ‘kidnapped’ teen, Blaqualad is secretly a mole, Lagoonface was captured and sent off to be… whatevered…, and Connor broke up with MM because of all the mindraping further cemented when she tried to mindrape him. Aaaaah, it feels good to have things happening to actually talk about, unlike just about every other show this season. He says as he then begins to poke holes in it.

I’m really not sure what they’re trying to do with that last part. I get the powerful psychic and corruption angles, but that doesn’t mesh particularly well with teenage melodrama. Lagoonbrain probably isn’t helping either since he seemlessly made the transition from oaf with bad fish puns to ginormous fish jackass this week. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for either him or MM when they’re both acting like self-centered amoral dicks the entire time. Since when has mindraping ever been okay? She’s not even doing it in life or death situations now. She’s doing it so her boyfriend won’t break up with her for mindraping everything around her.

I do think they could’ve handled the whole Artemis ‘death’ thing a bit better too. Let’s not kid ourselves about what this show is and killing off a character like that, particularly by a former protagonist, is jumping quite a few notches on the violence chain in one go. Taking it down a step or three to just catastrophic injury resulting in coma or the like would’ve been a lot easier to swallow in a show that is always trying to be sooooo clever anyway with half the major developments being trickery of some sort or another. It probably would’ve helped if they hadn’t shown her ‘death’ at the very start of the episode too. I also laughed more than I should’ve at the team’s genius plan to fake Superman’s existence. It all hinges on nobody in the press pool… or at a supposedly historic launch… having brought binoculars… or a camera with a zoom. Great plan, team.

Very belated edit:
Apparently the show’s off for an indeterminate amount of time now, this apparently being the midseason finale. No clue when it’s coming back. I’ll deal with scheduling and whatnot if/when it does.