Content warning: this video will discuss mental health, depression, and anxiety.
Also spoiler warning for Young Justice season 4. This new Young Justice season is really shaping
up. It s getting exciting! All the plot threads are starting to tie together in super fun ways.
But I don t want to talk about General Zod, or the phantom zone, or even Forager s sudden
love for Shakespeare soliloquies. No, I want to talk about Beast Boy, aka Garfield Logan,
and one particular scene the scene in which the Justice League s resident therapist Black Canary
finally gets through to Garfield, who d been on a pretty self-destructive path
since the start of the fourth season. Because this video is my entry into
The Costume Codex s playlist One Scene for Hope . I ll link her original video below,
which explains the goal of this project more fully, but in a nutshell: now, more than ever,
the world feels like a pretty dark place. We all need to band together and fight for optimism
and to that end, this is a playlist based around creators finding a scene in our infinite ocean
of audio/visual culture which offers a sense of real hope, and exploring how and why that hope
is generated. There s a bunch of other really cool videos in this playlist which you should
definitely check out, on topics from Star Wars to Casablanca. There s a really strong sense of
fighting back against all the hopelessness here, and these videos all feel personal and genuine.
And I wanted to try and strike a similar tone with my entry. But initially I wasn t too sure which
angle to come at it from. After all, I m straight, white, and male. And the thing about us straight
white males is that at least in wealthy western countries like mine we re not always the ones
facing the harshest odds. The bloodthirsty maw of the late capitalist engine clamps down on us
with a little less ferocity than it does other groups. We re all in this rat-race together,
but in many ways, people like me get a bit of a headstart. Except for one and that s
when it comes to mental health. Obviously all sorts of people struggle with mental health,
some demographics disproportionately so, but I think it s fair to say that this is one of
the biggest issues in societies like mine against which men like me aren t particularly privileged.
But what does any of this have to do with Young Justice? Well let s get back to Beast Boy. At the
start of Phantoms, Garfield wasn t doing great. Leadership duties on his team the Outsiders,
as well as difficulties in a long-distance relationship, and a misplaced sense of guilt
over the fate of his former teammate Geoforce, had Garfield fighting to keep it together.
Superboy s seeming death is the straw that breaks the camel s back. After getting back to Earth,
Gar stops going on mission with the Outsiders, he pushes his girlfriend Perdita away, and he starts
taking sleeping pills. Lots of sleeping pills. For the next bunch of episodes this story takes a bit
of a back seat, but we see little vignettes here and there of Garfield retreating from his life,
putting up walls between himself and concerned others, and generally failing to process Conner
s death. What s more, he s in denial about the whole thing. He thinks he s managing just fine.
While all this was playing out in the background, fan response was mixed. A lot
of viewers felt this storyline was being dragged out, but when it came back into the foreground
in the season s second half, this opinion began to shift, following two major scenes
-a failed intervention led by Garfield s sister M gann, and then a few episodes later,
a mental health assessment with Black Canary. It s that latter moment we re focusing on here.
There are two reasons this changed people s opinions on the Beast Boy storyline. First,
it brought back the Canary-as-counsellor dynamic which the show d used once or twice before,
to great success which, incidentally, I ve talked about before on this channel. But second,
and more importantly, Garfield s meeting with Canary is really powerful to watch.
At this point, Garfield s still in denial, and he s only attending this meeting to tick
the necessary boxes. He thinks he can just breeze by, drop some platitudes about how he
s processing trauma in his own way, then go home and return to his malaise. Initially,
he s giving nothing to Canary, just like he gave nothing to the group of teammates
and friends who attempted that intervention a few episodes earlier. But soon enough, that changes.
After Canary realises that the thing driving all this, the thing responsible for turning
Gar s mental state from not-great to disaster , was survivor s guilt, around Conner s death,
as well as all the other people Beast Boy had lost previously, his blank fa ade cracks.
This is a really powerful scene, but it s also pretty heavy. We re seeing Beast Boy finally break
down, after half a season of buildup. So why is this my One Scene for Hope? Well, as distressing
as it is to watch, this is what needed to happen, to stop Garfield from sinking even further into a
swamp of trauma and a lifetime of misplaced guilt. He doesn t magically snap back to his healthy self
in many ways, this is his lowest point yet but for the first time he s able to stop blaming himself
and to see that he needs help. Alright, so it s a positive step for Garfield. But he s a fictional
character. Why does this scene give ME hope? Well, I think what we see here is a reflection
of the way that others can SEE and REACH struggle, when they know how to, and when they care enough
to go beyond the surface. Beyond just asking if you re OK. Garfield thinks he can answer a few
surface-level questions with the right buzzwords, and that ll give him a pass. That he ll be able to
keep trying to move past his issues by himself. But Canary doesn t let him. She could it would
be easy to but she prods when he gets flustered, and she listens intently to what he says, picking
up on the little hints he s unintentionally dropping, that tell her what s really going on.
Canary s engaging in-depth with Garfield s trauma narrative, she s recognising the
feelings which drive his despair, and she s unpicking that narrative in simple terms,
undeniable terms. She s so astute at this that she s able to get to grips with the specific
issues Gar s grappling with, and guide him into making the crucial realisations for himself
I ve been lucky enough to never struggle seriously with depression myself, but throughout my life
I have known many other men friends and family members who haven t been so lucky;
who have been pushed to their breaking point by depression, despite society s increasing
awareness of the issues. Because awareness alone doesn t really help that much.
Nowadays there s slogans and posters on buildings, buses,
even beer mats. Saying things like 1/3 of all men deal with depression in their lifetime,
talk to your friends , or other stuff like that. And while destigmatising this kind of
stuff is helpful, this sort of thing isn t a solution for anyone. Everyone s problems are
specific and unique, and aren t fixed by a beer mat reminding them that they re struggling.
This Justice League mandated mental health checkup initially seems like just another example of this
pattern the way society s aware of the problem without really SEEING individuals and SEEING
individual struggle and trauma but then we see that the boxes Canary s been checking during
their session don t exist. She s been making fake checkmarks on a blank piece of paper. This was
never a formality, an empty gesture toward mental health awareness, like we see so often in reality.
No. Instead, this scene depicts what happens when someone really tries to see, and to help
a struggling person when someone who knows what they re doing wades into that swamp of trauma
and shares the burden. This scene reminds us that therapy isn t for the weak it s for those strong
enough to admit they need help. It reminds us that people like Garfield aren t just statistics,
they re individuals who are traumatised or hurt for complex and heartbreaking reasons,
reasons they may not even be aware of themselves. And it reminds us that they re never beyond reach.
That s why I think, at its core, this is a really hopeful scene. It s hard to watch,
but it s worth it. And I want to sincerely thank Young Justice for telling Garfield s story.
And the thing is, I m not even just saying this because it sounds good for the video, because it
s a strong rhetorical point to finish on. I ll be real with you for a second while I ve never
struggled seriously with depression, I ve been having a pretty bad time recently with anxiety. I
won t go into the details, but the last few months particularly haven t been very cash money for me
in this regard. And honestly, when it s been at its worst, I ve been kind of like Beast Boy
the way he struggles to sleep, the way he can t do the things he normally would. This story,
then, made me re-examine my own coping mechanisms, and the way I ve been dealing with this anxiety.
It made me ask myself have the methods I ve developed to fight this problem been working?
Are they sustainable? At the moment, I think so. Currently, I think I ve got a
handle on things. But that s also what Beast Boy thought and that s gonna stay with me.
The other thing is this IS a cartoon. We don t all have access to the therapy skills of Black
Canary in real life. Accessing help like this is often slow and expensive if you
re in a position to access it at all. But in the future? Depending on how we vote,
depending on how we influence our governments, their budgets,
and their stances on healthcare it s conceivable that this doesn t have to be the case forever.
So, in keeping with the theme of this playlist let s not lose track of that hope.
As we wrap up, I want to stress explicitly that in this video I wasn t attempting to frame mental
health struggles as an exclusively male domain obviously, this is far from the case. But I wanted
to explore the hope I found within this scene from the viewpoint of my life, my experiences,
and my perception of the strange phantom presence that mental health awareness and depression have,
and don t have, in modern masculinity. So that s what I ve tried to do here. I don t even know
if this is the correct reading of the scene, or of Garfield s wider plot in Young Justice:
Phantoms. For one, I don t know how the whole intervention thing a few episodes earlier fits
in with what we ve been talking about and the way I ve approached it. But this is what the
scene said to me. And art s kinda more about what you get out of it than what s put in.
You should all check out the rest of this playlist, One Scene for Hope it s linked in the
description below. Coincidentally I m running a collaborative playlist of my own currently, though
perhaps one with a slightly less lofty purpose, trying to promote a fan revival campaign for an
old show, Avengers: Earth s Mightiest Heroes. So check that out too if you re interested,
link down below also. And I ve got a bunch of other Young Justice videos in the works too,
so make sure to subscribe if you want to catch those when they come out. Otherwise, thanks for
watching, and thanks to all my Patrons onscreen now, especially Kevin Douglas and Ian Fyfield.