This show reminds me of every show when it's in either its final season, or it's about to be retooled.
This episode really made me realize that the whole season should have been like this, and the four-episode arc format was a mistake, kind of like the last season of How I Met Your Mother. The pacing for this season has been absolutely fukked because they're struggling to focus on the original Team while still focusing on the Outsiders, League, and The Light. You would think Nightwing would have gotten the most focus out of everyone, but he's even more of an afterthought in his own arc than Kaldur'Ahm and Rocket were. In fact, only M'Gann and Conner (and maybe Artemis) actually had their arcs be about them. Zatanna's arc was more about The Light, Darkseid, Nabu and Klarion, and Zatanna just happened to be in the middle of it, Kaldur's was about Atlantean politics, and Rocket's was about the New Gods.
Not to mention that episodes get brought to a screeching hault when he have to focus on things like Beast Boy's support group, or Halo picking their pronouns.I actually like both of those storylines, but they at least should have been in their own episodes instead of killing the pacing throughout the season. The whole arc format just feels like an excuse to cut corners on the budget, which leads me to...
The budget for this season is stretched thin AF, and this episode is a clear example of it. I've been on a rabbit hole all week looking up old daytime soaps, and it reminds me of this old soap called Guiding Light. In the last year and a half of that show, they had to slash the budget so much and cut every corner possible because they knew they were in danger of getting canceled. That is Young Justice to a tee right now, and this episode was one of the worst examples of it: people standing around narrating over PowerPoints, whole arcs in places like Mars and the Phantom Zone where they don't have to animate lip flaps, and flashbacks to the first two seasons when the show actually had good animation. Supposedly some of this was due to Covid and lessening the burden for the animation studio, but even so I doubt if the show continues it'll even go back to season three levels of animation.
If this show comes back for season five it needs a serious retool. There doesn't seem to be enough interest or appetite for the Earth-16 spinoff the writers clearly wanted to make the last two seasons, so they need to figure who the fukk they actually want to focus on and stick with it, and use everybody else in supporting roles.
It’s not even necessarily a bad thing that Halo is getting storytime as she was part of the team last season, but that’s not how they marketed and mislead people into the main focus being on the OG team. It literally feels like after the Artemis arc they realized that the 4 episode format was a mistake, but they were too far into production and marketing to change it.
If the show does come back next season, I don’t see it being 26 episodes nor should it be at this point. It’s way past time to start wrapping storylines up to get some semblance of a proper ending.
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