To Another Shore
Episode #30 - To Another Shore
Original Airdate - September 24th 2005
Wonder Woman stumbles onto a plot to steal the powers hidden inside
the 3000-year-old, frozen remains of the legendary hero, the Viking
Prince.
Originally titled "Elegy."
Media by Bird Boy
Review by Bird Boy |
Credits:
Written by Dwayne McDuffie
Directed by Dan Riba
Music by Kristopher Carter
D.R. Movie Co., LTD.
Voices:
Susan Eisenberg as Wonder Woman
Carl Lumbly as J'onn J'onzz
Kin Shriner as Green Arrow
Scott Patterson as Agent Faraday
Clancy Brown as Lex Luthor
Powers Boothe as Grodd
Michael Beach as Devil Ray
Jennifer Hale as Giganta, Killer Frost
Lex Lang as Heatwave
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Review
After a disappointing “Chaos in the Earth’s Core”, we got a pretty good
episode with Wonder Woman in “To Another Shore.”
The basic story here is that a Scandinavian warrior named Prince John
(or “The Viking Prince”) had a love thing going on with a Valkerie and
the Norse god Odin got mad, forbade John from ever being with the
Valkerie. Begging forgiveness, Odin gave in and said that if John died a
heroic death, he’d be reunited with his true love. Odin, however, gave
John invulnerability to metal, wood, fire and water, so John could
technically never die. But, that all changed; John sailed north and away
from all of the knowledge of men, where he (and his ship) was later
frozen in a glacier. I guess Odin was a crappy god, since he didn’t
protect John from freezing to death. That or he knew John would freeze
to death and that’ not very heroic…so either way, John got screwed.
Moral of the story is to not fall in love with a Valkerie.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Gorilla Grodd and his Legion went after this
frozen Viking ship after it was discovered as a glacier melted in the
arctic. Grodd wanted to reverse engineer Prince John’s immortality
to…well I guess give himself immortality. We don’t really know since the
Justice League foiled his plans again (per usual).
In addition to the cool Viking flashback (more on that later) and more
expansion on Wonder Woman’s character, we actually got to see J’onn in
action (though we did see him in action in “The Ties That Bind”, “Panic
in the Sky” and “Divided We Fall”). Not only this, but at the end, J’onn
leaves the Justice League in order to reconnect with humanity, since
he’s a Martian and is going to live a long, lonely life otherwise. While
he’s leaving, we get a rather sad poem that Wonder Woman recites which
doubles as a send off for both Prince John’s ship and J’onn. It was a
rather touching ending; I hope we see more of J’onn in the future; he’s
always been a favorite character of mine.
But, enough about the heroes, lets talk about the Legion some more. We
got to see the debut of Black Man—er, Devil Ray, Heatwave and the
reappearance of Giganta and Killer Frost. While they’re all bad in their
own way, Killer Frost really shined in this episode, with some gorgeous
ice animation, a few humorous quips and a lot more chatter from her this
time compared to her only other (speaking) appearance in “The Secret
Society.”
The animation was pretty damn good looking in this one. In addition to
the aforementioned ice effects for Killer Frost, we had some (admittedly
not animated completely) awesome looking drawings for Prince John’s
flashback; I’m going to assume producer Bruce Timm drew these, as they
look like his work. They were gorgeous to look at, whether the still
frames or the panning shots, it was all awesome to behold. Timm seems to
do flashbacks of this sort well; there was a similar batch of these in
Justice League's “Paradise Lost” as Diana told the history of
Themiscrya, Hades and Hippolyta.
The music was good as well. The score accompanying the history of Prince
John was extremely soft and very nice sounding; I’d love to hear it
without Grodd talking over it…it fit the images incredibly well and the
rest of the show had some nice cues as well, especially at the end with
the John/J’onn send off.
Overall this was a pretty good episode. With the exception to the
extremely odd Wonder Woman spin/change (homage to the show, I
know…doesn’t make it any less odd), it was a solid episode. We saw
Giganta have her head shorted out like Metallo did in “Chaos at the
Earth’s Core”, more Green Arrow (who had two of the best lines in this
episode: “You did it in ink again, didn’t you?” and “And Black Canary
said a saw-blade arrow was self-indulgent.”), more Agent Faraday. All in
all it was a pretty fun time to be had. Too bad we won’t see anymore new
episodes for awhile… |
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