[7.2/10] I’m glad we’re dealing with the M’gaan issue here. I like the idea that she’s still reeling from inadvertently scrambling Kaldur’s brains and now has a chance to fix it. The situation is one where she’s forced to confront her own great fear and make it up to her friend. It’s a good way to depict Miss Martian getting back on that horse and her making amends to someone she hurt and cares about. But some of the execution is generic and/or shaky. For one thing I am already so sick of Lagoon Boy. He’s a trademark Baxter, and he has a good point about M’gaan freezing him out with what she’s going through, but he’s such a superfluous character who only exists to be a third wheel in the Miss Martian/Superboy entanglement that every scene with him seems pointless. The visit to Kaldur’s psyche isn’t pointless, but it’s also a generic “theater of the mind” setting. I can appreciate the symbolism of Kaldur’s brain looking like the ruins of Atlantis. The trio of him, Miss M, and Artemis working together to rebuild helps make something liminal literal, and I can appreciate that. But the combination of the on-the-nose repair metaphor, the *Matrix*-esque “It hurts you if you *believe* it hurts you” business, and the blunt “we’ll fix you with *togetherness*” speechifying weakens this one. The same dichotomy exists for the Artemis story here. The pressures of being a double agent and having to help your friends while looking like you’re trying to hurt them are significant. The remorse that someone close to you is in a diminished state, where you wonder what you could do differently is also a rich vein to explore. But the rampant voiceover and signposting of all of this takes what could be a really compelling angle for the rare Artemis story this season and overplays the hand. There’s still hay to be made from Artemis’ dual role, and her stand-off with Psimon is good stuff, but there’s too little subtlety to everything. I’m also leery of the exchange between Blue Beetle and Green Beetle. I really hope that Jaime controlling the scarab ends up having to come from Jaime’s self-confidence or acceptance of both sides of him or something, rather than Green Beetle effectively just using martian magic to solve the problem. I can appreciate the character note of Jjaime being willing to risk his life to prevent the scarab from taking over. (Dollars to donuts, whatever Green Beetle did actually contributes to the bad future rather than averts it.) But it seems like too easy a solution in the moment. Otherwise, I did get a kick out of the commercial for The Reach’s fruit beverage, which was on point, even if the idea of a snapple equivalent that makes humanity docile to prepare our species for subjugation is a little silly, even by outsized comic book story standards. Overall, one of the weaker episodes of the season, and frankly the series, despite there being some quality ideas at the core.