A horrible conclusion to a wonderful arc story.
5.0
"Mediocre"
Justice League Unlimited had so much promise. After a mediocre first season that fell well short of the heights of Justice League had set in its second year, JLU began to find its footing. The writers began to adjust to writing half hour episodes, they began to find a good balance between “Big Seven” stories and “second tier hero” stories, and they took the government conspiracy (a re-occurring nemesis from the first season) and expanded their role to create a complex story arcing across many episodes. There were a few clunkers in JLU’s second season, sure, but I’ve never seen a season of any TV show that didn’t. My hopes were raised even higher when “Question Authority” turned out to not only be the best episode of the “Unlimited” format to date, but also the first part of what is (essentially) a four part episode wrapping up the Cadmus arc. I began to think that, if the rest of the arc story was as good as “Question Authority,” the second season of JLU might even rival the second season of Justice League. Then, slowly but surely, everything went wrong.
At first things didn’t seem to be going too badly. “Flashpoint” wasn’t as good as “Question Authority;” it got a little too preachy about its political allegory at times and didn’t have quite the same level of coolness and dark humor an episode focused around the Question would have, but it was still pretty good. The destruction the Watchtower caused to a city was brilliantly rendered, Luthor’s schemes within schemes chilling to watch, and the cliffhanger with an army of Ultimen prepared to attack the Justice League maintained my hopes for an excellent finale to the Cadmus arc. Then “Panic in the Sky” aired and, while not truly bombing, failed to live up to expectations. The founding members of the Justice League turning themselves over to the authorities was a nice touch, and Batman’s reaction to the idea was spot on. However, once the Big Seven were in military custody and the Ultimen attacked the Watchtower, everything began to go downhill. First off there was the logical problem of, if the Ultimen were transported to the Watchtower via missiles, why didn’t Cadmus just send up a few explosive missiles and blow the space station up instead of relying on a clone army? Then there was the fact that the battle between the Justice League and the Ultimen, while cool to watch, failed to be emotionally involving. These new Ultimen were mindless drones, so there was no emotion on that front, and most of the League members they fought had never been given any dialogue before then, and even the ones who had speaking roles on the show before only spoke through inarticulate grunts during the fight itself. The only part of this big battle that could make me actually care about the combatants was the fight between Supergirl and her adult clone, Galatea. Their fight was handled well, being vicious, well animated, and delving into Galatea’s clone complex. Unfortunately, the Supergirl/Galatea fight ended and the Ultimen were defeated with only a few injuries done to the Justice League. This leads me into the main flaw of “Panic in the Sky,” which led to flaws in “Divided We Fall”: the Cadmus storyline ended one episode too early and anti-climatically to boot. Cadmus’s superhuman army got trounced by the League. We learned that Lex Luthor’s hidden agenda was apparently to transfer his mind into an AMAZO android and kill a publicly vilified Superman, but Amanda Waller thwarted this scheme, years in the making, less than a minute after Lex revealed it. Add in how Cadmus and the Justice League have apparently established good terms by the end of the episode simply because they both want to stop Luthor, and pretty much the entire Cadmus storyline was wrapped up with barely any trouble. I should have known this wouldn’t bode well for “Divided We Fall,” but the cliffhanger revealing that Brainiac has been living inside Lex Luthor all this time was such a shock that I didn’t think clearly.
So, at last, we come to “Divided We Fall”, the conclusion of the Cadmus arc and final part of this four part episode. To call it disappointing would be an understatement. With all the plot threads stretching back nearly two seasons resolved, there really wasn’t much left for “Divided We Fall” to build off of. Instead of giving us a satisfying conclusion, the writers instead decided to bring Brainiac back from the grave to ally with Lex Luthor for a traditional destroy/conquer the universe plot. All the political intrigue, all the moral ambiguity, all the complexity that’s been building up for years gets resolved as quickly as possible so that we can watch the Big Seven beat up a super-strong guy trying to destroy the universe AGAIN!? I get what the writers were trying to go for; they were trying to show that the Justice League is ultimately good, not a bunch of costumed fascists, by showing them saving the world from a pretty unambiguous evil. But the fact remains that “Divided We Fall” is just that: unambiguous. A bad guy with plans for destroying/ruling the universe shows up only to be defeated by the Justice League in a gigantic battle, and that’s the end of it. Not only does this story take the time that should have been used to give the ongoing Cadmus plot a proper finish, but it doesn’t even handle the same themes. Oh, it tries to make itself seem relevant by having the Brainiac/Luthor hybrid create Justice Lord robots, making it seem like the “Luthor will kill the Flash” prophecy came true, and having Superman make a big speech to the world about the League’s purpose, but, when you boil it all down, it’s still just the Justice League fighting a guy who is really strong and evil. Superman’s acknowledgement at the end that the League shouldn’t have put themselves above the ordinary people really comes out of nowhere because the plot of this episode doesn’t deal with that at all. The only thing that really makes this episode’s story anywhere close to acceptable as an arc finale is we see that, believing Luthor to have killed the Flash, Superman doesn’t seek vengeance like his Justice Lord counterpart did, a plot point they’ve been focusing on for a while, but did the Cadmus plotline have to be derailed and replaced with a far less original and complex story in order to do that?
A lot of people seem to love this episode, but most of that love seems to be directed towards the action scenes (which were well done, I’ll admit) and references to various comic books. Is that really all we’re supposed to expect from Justice League Unlimited, though? There were times early on when I thought JLU to be a little pretentious when it tried to deal with moral complexities and political allegory, but it eventually began to win me over and think that there really was depth and meaning to it. Now am I supposed to be satisfied with a finale just because it can make me go, “That fight rocked!” and, “Did you catch that reference to The Watchmen? Awesome!” If that’s true, if that’s all Justice League Unlimited is trying to deliver, then this whole arc story really has been nothing but a load of pretension.