How Young Justice: Phantoms Revived the Green Lantern Animated Series

Cut to 10 years later. Kilowog and Tomar Re are heading to New Genesis for a summit with the New Gods, Rocket, and Jay Garrick about an alliance to fight Darkseid’s game playing on Earth. The Lanterns respond to a distress call from elsewhere in that solar system and find…Razer. In a Blue Lantern outfit. About to die, because his ring, powered by hope, isn’t working anymore because he’s all out. 

From there, the show more or less completely integrates Razer’s story from Green Lantern: The Animated Series into Young Justice continuity. He never finished his quest (even whispering Aya’s name at the very end of the episode), but he did give up his Red Lantern ring when the Blue ring found him. He felt that his rage was complicating his search, so he handed the red ring to Metron, jerkiest of the New Gods, for safekeeping. Metron spent four years studying the red ring and goading Razer into losing hope, so he could swap out the rings and study the blue one. As was the case last week, the classic New Gods lore here is great, as Metron is a giant asswipe in both the original Kirby comics and this episode. 

Razer and Metron’s encounter culminates in a big flying fight through Supertown. Girl Forager gets inadvertently hurt, powering Razer’s fury even more, but he also manages to rip the blue ring out of Metron’s containment field and wear both rings at the same time, reworking his red costume into a slashy, blue-red mix that looks like Lantern Corps Zubaz, something I said at first as a joke but now really want in my life. 

The subtle fun of this episode is the slow realization first that they kept the same voice actors as the GL show, and then that they used those same voices because they were already working on Young Justice. Jason Spisak is two characters in the same episode – Boy Forager and the returning Razer – and Kevin Michael Richardson picks up where he left off a decade ago with Kilowog after spending a good chunk of the first half of the season as Nabu. Josh Keaton and Grey Griffin (Hal Jordan and Aya, respectively) aren’t in this week’s episode, but both are regulars on this show as Black Spider, Helga Jeice, and others. 

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