Young Justice: Outsiders – "Home Fires"

Director: Vinton Hueck
Writer: Greg Weisman

It's been almost two months since the adventure on New Genesis brought Forager to Earth and put him in a team of sorts with Geo-Force and Halo. And, naturally, the Light decided the best way to confirm this news was through an overly elaborate plan: hiring Lobo (above) to kill Forager. Our heroes put up a good fight, but Lobo only leaves when Forager fakes his death. But that's the main story, we don't care about. Let's get to Bart!

On September 29, 10:00 CDT, Bart is seen hanging out with his grandma, Iris, helping her babysit her 2-year-old twins (one of whom is Bart's father, Don). The twins both have super speed, so I'd imagine Bart gets called on to babysit quite a bit. He also can't help but refer to Don as his dad and Iris as his grandma, much to Iris' chagrin. Bart plays it off as an accident, but I'm pretty sure he's doing it on purpose. He also refers to them as the "Tornado Toddlers," a tribute to their adult, comic book name, the Tornado Twins. Bart also continues the use of Dick Grayson's old slang word, "whelmed." (It's kind of nice that the show keeps calling back to old stuff, but at the same time, I think these kids would start using different words after a few years.)

Anyway, Iris is hosting a massive playdate with all the young children of Justice League members. All in all, about 20 people show up, including Aquaman's son (who mostly reads his Blue Falcon & Dynomutt comic), Red Tornado and his adopted daughter, Traya, and Lois Lane with her and Superman's son, Jon. The playdate goes off without a hitch, as none of the parents present seem to realize that Ocean Master was hiding in the house across the street, plotting to kill them all. Luckily for our heroes, though, Lady Shiva killed Orm, fearing the Justice League's retaliation after such a devastating blow.




One of Greg Weisman's weaknesses as a writer is his habit of making the heroes look like ignorant idiots until the very last episode of a season. It's nice to have intelligent villains, but it makes absolutely no sense for the Justice League to allow all their children to gather in one unprotected place. This story could have played out the exact same way, but would have been a whole lot better had we been given some indication that somebody — anybody on the good guys' side — was prepared to stop Orm if necessary. Anyway, it was fun seeing all those Easter eggs on screen, even if the show had to resort to using still images to save on animation costs (an unfortunate weakness of this season).

We still don't know much about Bart. Ostensibly, he's still living with the Garricks, although that hasn't been confirmed yet. Interestingly, it appears that Bart is not attending school. Because in this episode, on the same day, Megan and Snapper Carr carpool to school, where they work as a counselor and principal, respectively. So what does Bart do with his time? He doesn't seem to be going on very many missions at the moment. Maybe caring for two super fast toddlers requires round-the-clock presence of at least one speedster. But that's just me speculating. Sadly, we're not going to see Bart again on this show for quite a while. Luckily, though, we have plenty of comics to keep us occupied until then.

Next time, we'll see what Impulse was up to between Flash #50 and Young Justice #1.