What They Say:
Before the Dawn
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The unexpected hiatus sucked. And has been said, completely eliminates any remaining faith in Cartoon Network for seeing anything continuing on realistically as moves like this just kills the enthusiasm and audience since so many people probably don’t even know that new episodes came on. They essentially did the same with ThunderCats and made that a hugely frustrating experience at times and made it so that the show wouldn’t warrant a second season, among other reasons.
With the recent discoveries of how the various heroes have been captured in order to study, along with other humans, the focus this time around brings us to Blue Beetle, giving us a clue to his origin story a little bit as well as showing how the aliens that Aqualad is pretending to work with are investigating them. The idea behind the aliens is pretty good when you get down to it as this particular race is looking to understand the metagene that causes so many variations among humans and weaponize them for their own use. It makes sense and Aqualad plays is very, very cool, again making it clear that he was the ideal one to go deep undercover at the start in order to figure out what the bigger mission the Light has in mind for the world. A mission that may be far grander than they even realize as you know these aliens or someone else wants to take advantage of the situation.
Blue Beetle’s situation is very different though as he’s being examined for a different reason as the scarab that gives him his powers is not what he thought. That it was an advance scout of this race that has bonded with Jaime and now refuses to communicate with its former masters is certainly intriguing. Showing us a seeming overlord style alien here that has a shaded black beetle design about him and a strong sense of power, it definitely shows one avenue that those that wear the scarab can go with it.
Though the episode provides for some good answers, and bigger questions, it also gives us some action along the way as well. With Nightwing leading a rescue mission, we get a solid bit of infiltration at first and then action as the various members that worked the mission reveal themselves. While they can’t get Blue Beetle at the moment, they’re hunting him down and it’s well balanced by having Black Beetle ready to go against the main team. The most dangerous part of the fight though is when Megan comes across Aqualad and does a mindmeld of sorts, gaining a great deal of understanding about what happened when Aqualad turned. It’s a solid reveal, but one that puts both of them in an immense amount of danger.
In Summary:
With a heavy focus on the truth behind the scarab that makes Blue Beetle who he is, we see more clues about what he becomes in the future but also another aspect of the alien invasion that’s going on here. There’s a good deal of information to be had here and with the way it mvoes the narrative around several times with what’s going on, it’s all part of a lot of ongoing stories that are all tying together. Things are a bit quiet at first and it takes a bit to get going, but the action is strong, the reveals are very good and there are real changes made here and I really like that Blue Beetle is such a strong focus of things, even if he doesn’t understand a lot of what’s going on yet.
Grade: B+
