The title is a bit confusing but hopefully it’ll make sense when I’m done. Before we start, I should probably clarify what I mean by time skips. A time skip, or time jump, is a gap in a story where nothing significant happens. Usually, in movies, it’s accompanied by “x years later”, or “x months later”, or such phrases like that. These time skips have been used extensively in different types of fiction. From fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty to action movies like Olympus has Fallen. Most notably in recent times there was a five year time skip in Avengers: Endgame. Time skips are usually used for emotional effect; something big has happened in the story and now the characters have had to adjust for the intervening time period. In Endgame, the five year period let the characters become used to the new reality, that is until Scott Lang came to give them more hope. It can also be used to give the characters extra motivation. Back to the Endgame example, Tony had a child in that gap which ultimately affected his decision-making: he was less brash and impulsive because he had something to protect.
So after that Crash Course into time skips, it’s time to move on the main part: Young Justice. Young Justice is an animated TV series based on characters published by DC. It follows some sidekicks of major DC characters as they form their own team, go on missions and grow as people and superheroes. It is, by all accounts, a great show. There’s just one problem: how they use time skips.
The show starts by introducing us to Robin (Dick Grayson), Kid Flash (Wally West), and Aqualad (Kaldur). These are the characters that we’ll be following throughout the story. As the season progresses, we come to learn more about them. We see the team grow to include Miss Martian, Artemis, and in later episodes of season 1, Zatanna and Rocket. We see these characters form attachments, we follow their development from brash young sidekicks to capable heroes in their own right. Some of them form relationships, and with some (Robin) we see the beginnings of them. Then season 2 happens and we jump 5 years into the future. Everything has changed with the characters and we have to start the process of learning about them from scratch. Robin is Nightwing now, okay; Kaldur is Aquaman; Wally has retired. Some characters just fell off the face of the Earth, with no explanation. By the end of the second season, we once again feel like we know these chaps. Juggling getting to know the characters with following the plot of the series is no easy feat, but it’s doable. Then the third season happens and there’s yet another time skip.
So what makes these time skips “bad”? Well, for one thing, it means that every new season starts with a barrage of questions before we even get started. Why is Robin Nightwing? What happened to Zatanna? Who is this new Robin? Many of the questions are either not answered or answered very unsatisfactorily. Also, the Team, the basis of the show, keeps getting changed drastically between seasons. We can’t connect with these new characters because, quite simply, we don’t know them. New additions to the Team feel foreign because they are foreign. I’m unfamiliar with these new people so their struggles don’t really impact me as much. Compounding on this problem is the fact that we don’t get too much by way of development of these new characters added because we’re too focused on the plot. A lot of these are less egregious in the third season, mainly because there’s only a two-year time skip. It’s still plagued with faults, but for different reasons.
Young Justice is a great show, but I feel like the time skips are unnecessary and don’t really add to the narrative of the show. If the time skips don’t exist, the story isn’t weaker or worse. Hell, it could be argued that the narrative, and the story improve without the time skips or with shorter periods. For this reason mostly, the first season is by far and away the best of the three.
Time skips can be a useful tool in a story, but when used badly, like any other tool, it can seriously hamper the quality of the story being told, and the characters in that story.
