The Cat and the Canary

Did you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving yesterday? I know I did! I hope so anyway, I’m writing this on Tuesday. But I’ll pretend it’s Friday. Or try to. Here goes.

Gosh, isn’t it crazy all the shopping stuff today? Deals out the whazoo! I’m not trying to go to any stores though, screw that. I can’t, actually, I’m stuck at work. On the upside, my job is incredibly easy, and there’s not really a day-after-Thanksgiving rush on concert tickets. It’s so slow, I’m working on an upcoming review, just like I am at this very moment here on Tuesday.

Wow, I am so confused.

The Cat and the Canary is up to bat on request from some asshole (I assure you, he’s an asshole). Green Arrow was one of the best things about expanding the show to every fucking hero in the universe (unless their rights were tied up elsewhere.)

The episode opens with some thugs and a shady deal with boxes and a warehouse, we all know this song and dance by now. Black Canary is on a rooftop outside, as heroes often are. She’s using her handy dandy communicator to call Wildcat about getting his cat butt over here because we have to beat guys up. From the sounds of things, he already beating guys up so maybe he just got the wrong address for the party. She’s upset at his perpetual tardiness and he is so getting detention this time. He says he’ll be there in a few minutes and she asks if those are real minutes for Wildcat minutes and prepares to get a calculator out to do the converting because you fuckin’ know they be Wildcat minutes.

Down below one of the heisters is holding a laptop, sitting on the back of their truck, and watching a live pay-per-view webcast using the warehouse’s amazing WiFi access. Boss Heist yells at him to knock it off and the heister explains that he’s gotta see this fight because the last one with that guy only went one round. Boss should chill out because obviously this might not take long but he decides to get pissy instead. Right about the Canary shows up and unleashes a righteous fury of rage in the form of her fists and her boots. It’s a pretty excellent fight scene. The fight scenes got so well-coordinated over the evolution of the DCAU; it’s really incredible.

One of the thugs tries to escape with his truck, but Canary lets loose with the bird call and trashes the thing. As she smugly enjoys her victory, the completely unharmed laptop nearby pipes a woman’s voice declaring the winner in the pay-per-view fight…

Wildcat.

CREDITS!

After the opening credits, we see the sexy Green Arrow in a tight tank top, dreamy as ever and pounding on a punching bag. Canary comes in and asks him about his billions and billions of dollars, and he shrugs and says it’s just billions, not billions and billions, I mean come on. Canary asks if he’d rather go a few rounds with her instead of the bag, and then clarifies that she’s talking about sparring.

It would’ve been weird if he had been doing something else with the bag.

They get into their ready-to-hit stances and Canary charges at GA. He easily dodges, and grabs her, gives her some fightin’ advice and releases her. She isn’t fighting nearly as well as she was earlier, and it makes sense, because obviously she wants GA to be all ya know, grabbing her and stuff. Totally hot. There’s some more sparring before he gets her on the ground in a hold. She butters him up a bit, and then asks if he’ll help her with something, but she doesn’t want the rest of the League to know. Ollie doesn’t like the sound of this, because this is the sort of agreement that turns into “ok, now turn left here to get to the abortion clinic.” She makes a bet. If she can get out of this hold, he helps her. And if she can’t? He gets a boner.

Assuming he doesn’t already have one. And if he does, this is already a win/win situation.

Canary hands Ollie his ass as she breaks out of the hold, and before you know it, they’re cruising down the road on Canary’s motorcycle. Arrow’s leaning back, nonchalantly which is hard to do on a motorcyle. Then Canary tells him he can hold on to her (and if she can get out of the hold…wait, no). She explains to him her concerns that Wildcat is into some heavy shit and she’s gotta get him out. Somewhere in here Arrow hears “my boyfriend, Wildcat” and decides to lean back nonchalantly again.

Wildcat in the meantime is talking to Roulette. He explains that he doens’t want to fight anymore, so he leaves, finds Black Canary, apologizes, she makes out with Green Arrow and that’s the end of the episode.

Oh if only things could be that simple, ever.

Roulette says that Atomic Skull wants to fight him, and Wildcat should be all for that because Skull is a bad guy! And the whole point of the League is to just beat ’em up! Just find them, beat them up, and leave. Don’t bother sending him to jail or anything, Wildcat! No it’s fine, just beat him up! Beat him and let him go! That makes perfect sense and falls in well with your justification for doing this bullshit!

Ahem.

Roulette decides to lay in with the ol’ “in the league, but you don’t have powers” gem. Shut up this is so dumb there’s like a million other guys up there without powers you fucking baby. Anyway, he falls for it and agrees to stick around and fight Skull.

Canary and Arrow put on fancier clothes somewhere and are buying tickets to the metabrawl from a pro basketball player.

Canary is working a deal out with him and the guy says something about “fish in the ocean” for a reason I can’t even fathom. Did she dump him somewhere in that exchange? She asks Ollie for a thousand bucks to buy her ticket and Ollie’s a little miffed about being used for his cash, and tells Canary that she’s gonna spend all summer mowing lawns to pay him back.

At the fight, she and Ollie are hanging around, looking for Wildcat, and checking out all of the rich people who have finally said to themselves, “fuck the opera.” The arena for this shit is huge; I have no idea what they’re using as a front for this. I seriously can’t believe that a few thousand rich as fuck people showing up at a huge building doesn’t scream of suspicious behavior.

Our two heroes make their way back to the locker room where they find Wildcat warming up. Canary pleas with him to leave, but he explains that he doesn’t want to because he’s Wildcat, “the guy who fights.” Which is really something that separates him from everyone else who simply negotiates. He tells Canary that he can leave anytime he wants, he just doesn’t want to. I use this same line of reason to explain every failure of my entire life.

“I could’ve gotten an A in that class, I just didn’t want to.”

“I could’ve nailed that high-paying job, I just didn’t want to.”

“I could’ve gotten away with killin’ that guy, I just didn’t want to.”

Wildcat complains that the League treats him like a babysitter, working long hours in the Justice League nursery, changing diapers, warming up bottles before finally putting the kids to bed and watching TV for four hours until their parents get home and then collecting your check before they can notice how much of their food you ate.

Canary gets up in his face about what’s really bugging him (not having powers, same thing that bugs me) and Wildcat stews in denial. Arrow steps in to keep them from killing each other. He and Canary leave the locker room, and he whines about how hasn’t gotten any action yet, and this is bullshit. Canary convinces him to stay and help again, despite this being around the third or fourth time he’s gotten pissed about this stuff. Arrow looks for a place to change and Canary says to do it right where they are, which looked to be maybe just a hallway?

I swear to god superheroes have magic clothes that fold up super tiny and they keep them in little pill-sized containers in their pockets.

Arrow glances back at Canary taking off her jacket and she asks “Drop something?”

“My jaw!” he says, before pausing to think if that’s how that exchange is actually supposed to go. He’s pretty sure it isn’t.

In the ring, Wildcat and Atomic Skull are starting to go at it with another excellently staged fight scene. Wildcat is pounding right on his skull, and as it starts to crack, Canary and Arrow zip in to put a stop to this shit. She declares that the “show is over…forever. We’re not gonna be back after these messages. This isn’t a brief intermission. We’re not the half-time entertainment. Why would there be half-time entertainment for something that isn’t even timed? You rich people sure are dumb.”

Roulette sends in a bunch bad guy goons to take out Arrow and Canary. They fight them for a while but are backed down the walkway from the ring. Arrow whips out a net arrow and gets the villians trapped under it, and everyone feels dumb trapped under a net. You’re all crouching and sorta pawing at it and you can’t believe you’ve been foiled by a fucking net. By ropes.

One of the villians however is armed with a knife, the perfect answer to rope’s cruel riddle. Wildcat steps in like maybe he’ll stop them, thinks about it, and then pusses out living up to his new name, Pussycat.

Highly outnumbered, and too close to use Canary’s birdcall, she strikes gold on an idea to get them out of this jam. Canary turns towards Roulette and offers to fight Wildcat in the ring. Roulette agrees and makes it clear to the audience that they are going to have a hot chick fighting this dude. This old guy is so excited, his monocle falls out.

Everyone goes backstage and the rich people just chill out, I guess. I don’t know maybe they had more fights scheduled. In the locker room, Wildcat still doesn’t want to fight Canary, but Roulette says she’ll be fine and Wildcat just goes “oh, ok” and goes along with everything.

In Canary’s dressing room, Arrow is asking what the actual plan because beating Wildcat up doesn’t seem like it would actually be the plan. Canary explains that, yeah, that’s the plan. Arrow decides to whine about still not getting laid and insists Canary come over by him. She does, and he gases her with his gas arrow. As he stands there holding her, Roulette walks in, without even knocking, I can’t help but note. Arrow assures her that she’ll still have her fight.

In the ring she makes announcement regarding a change of fighters. Instead of Black Canary, Wildcat is going to fight Green Arrow. Even though at least 80% of the appeal of Canary fighting was that she’s hot. Like “hey let’s go to that wet t-shirt contest” and then when you get there, it’s all dudes in wet t-shirts. And how are they handling the gambling here if they keep changing the contestants constantly?

Wildcat doesn’t want to fight Green Arrow, because his ripply muscles, and perky goatee makes him uncomfortable in the pants, though it’s a reaction we can all sympathize with. Arrow asks if maybe he’d rather fight a woman, like maybe that would make you less aroused and as you can imagine, this angers Wildcat enough to finally throw a punch at Arrow. There’s some more good fighting here, one sided as it may be.

In the dressing room, Canary wakes up, declares Ollie to be an idiot, and runs to the ring. She gets to the cage where a couple of the bouncer-esque dudes finally decide to grab her and she tells Wildcat to stop. He explains that Arrow asked for it, if he doesn’t want me to hit him he shouldn’t make me feel uncomfortable about my sexuality by being so gosh-darned attractive!

Seriously, Ollie is like dreamy and a half.

As Wildcat pounds on him, Ollie fights back with his wit until Wildcat hits him so hard, he dies.

DIES.

Wildcat goes to take his pulse and drops Ollie’s hand and the crowd is stunned and they go fucking nuts. Canary finally breaks away from the guys holding her back, and runs into the cage, super fucking pissed at Wildcat. I believe at this point I would call the Watchtower and say “Yeah, transport for one…to jail!” The sight of a dead body finally makes Wildcat go “oh I’ve been dumb” though, so I guess no need to punish him, whatever.

Later, all of the rich people have departed for the evening to go about their rich people business and check their stocks and stuff.

Arrow’s body has just been left exactly where it was, no one’s bothered to move it or anything, it’s fine there. Canary is sitting next to it, talking to it, we’ve all talked to bodies. She leans in to give him a kiss finally now that he’s fucking dead, goddammit, and as she does OH WHAT DO YOU KNOW HE’S NOT DEAD!

He explains that he used a stunner to put himself in metabolic stasis “for a few minutes.” The longest few minutes in known history. The few minutes it took for absolutely everyone to leave.

Wildcat assures him that the playing dead stunt worked but Roulette says that he’ll be back. Canary decides to wreck the giant hall with her birdcall even though they’re all standing inside it. Whatever.

On the Watchtower, Canary has signed Wildcat up for Fightaholics Anonymous which they were going to call “Fight Club” and then thought better of it. It involves weekly therapy sessions with J’onn. Also Wildcat is the only member. And he has to submit to random fight tests to make sure he’s not sneaking off and fighting on the side.

Arrow is hobbling around on one crutch with on arm wrapped in bandages.

He asks Canary if she wants to get some coffee and then tells her that she’s buying, even though they’re on a giant orbiting space station and probably, the coffee is free.