Featuring some of the most complex storytelling in a DC show, Young Justice (2010) provides an plethora of Xanatos Gambits. Even after almost every defeat of their operatives, "The Light" manages some sort of victory and one step closer towards their endgame. This show is run by the man who created David Xanatos, after all.
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In General
- Like many modern militaries and companies, the Light invokes Xanatos Gambit as standard operating procedure. If the primary objective can’t be accomplished, the second one can be. Due to their agendas, however, sometimes the main goal WILL be the second one, it’s just that their minions don’t know that.
- It’s also justified to an unprecedented extent, as the immortality of half the Light's members means they can always try again later.
Season 1
S1 E01/E02 Independence Day/Fireworks
- Dubbilex starts a fire to lure the Justice League to the Cadmus facility. Regardless of whether the Team successfully escaped, it guaranteed that the Justice League would discover Cadmus and liberate the G-Gnomes sooner or later. Guiding them to Superboy and successfully escaping was just the best-case scenario.
S1 E04 Dropzone
- On a smaller scale, Bane pulled one by stampeding the Team towards the forces of Kobra, who conquered his island of Santa Prisca. Either they destroy Kobra (and Bane wins), or Kobra kills them, and the Justice League destroys Kobra to avenge them (and Bane wins).
S1 E05 Schooled
- The seeming mission of Dr. Ivo is to destroy the Justice League with Amazo, but the real objective is to obtain as many of their powers as possible and then re-obtain the robot whether or not they defeat it. The Justice League ultimately destroyed it, but the Team faced off against Ivo's M.O.N.Q.Is sent in to reclaim the parts and ultimately faces trouble when they succeed in reassembling Amazo.
S1 E08 Downtime
- Manta's job is to steal enough of the Starro organism to be used as a weapon, so it doesn't matter if he gets the whole body or just a sample. He is forced to destroy it when confronted by Aqualad and Tempest, so only a single arm is brought up to be used later, which the Light eventually steals during Klarion's later bout of chaos.
S1 E09 Bereft
- Psimon removing the team's memories guarantees they'll be vulnerable and disunited. Regardless of whether they escape, this at least buys the army time to figure out who they are and what they're doing. This is done successfully, even if they later defeat him and get away.
- The team went to Bialya, disrupted their scientists' experiments and the telepath Psimon, and went home with a metallic sphere with some advanced technology. It's not a significant loss for the Light. They'll get more technology down the road. The main goal was to test their new partner's transportation system: a Boom-Tube.
S1 E10 Targets
- Lex Luthor and Ra's arrange for an attempted assassination of the former. Regardless of whether superheroes showed up, Mercy would've protected Lex with Lexcorp weapons and created the demand for them in the two Rhelasias. The Team, mainly Red Arrow and Aqualad, interfering is an unexpected bonus, as it lets them covertly get intel from Red Arrow while they're there.
S1 E11 Terrors
- A gambit is put into action since the pilot episode and culminates in episode 11. The ice-based villains, these being Mister Freeze, Icicle Jr., Killer Frost, and Captain Cold, were quickly defeated in episode 1. This is part of their plan as each of them manages to get sent to Belle Reve before carrying out their plan: Break every supervillain out of there.
- What's impressive is that this was part of another Xanatos Gambit. The team stops the supervillains (except for Riddler) from breaking out. However, this attempted escape causes Amanda Waller, the warden, to lose her job to Hugo Strange, an agent of The Light. Now they have control over what is practically an army of supervillains. It ends up only being a temporary victory over time as Hugo Strange is deposed offscreen at some point after the Justice League later realizes what's going on, and Amanda Waller reclaims Belle Reve to set up the Suicide Squad there.
S1 E12 Homefront
- T. O. Morrow deploying Red Inferno and Red Torpedo to attack Mount Justice and capture the Team is implicitly meant to lure out and capture Red Tornado. But by Artemis being forced to shut down the entire mountain with an EMP arrow, it forces Red Tornado to come to the mountain himself when he notices the shutdown, allowing the enemy androids to reactivate and take control of him anyway.
S1 E14 Revelation
- Regardless of whether the Injustice League succeed (unlikely) or fail (which they do when the Team catches them), the Justice League will think they've uncovered the masterminds that have been hounding them, getting them off the Light's back.
S1 E17 Disordered
- The Forever People showing up is one for DeSaad. Either he successfully co-opts Infinity Man permanently and gets a powerful new toy, or he successfully stalls them long enough for everyone, mainly the Forever People and Superboy, to escape.
S1 E19 Misplaced
- Klarion mainly wants to cause chaos, so splitting the adults and children causes this, and gives his allies in the Light time to pull off operations (Sportsmaster and Riddler stealing the arm of Starro). Even if the spell is cut quickly, both of these are accomplished (it also has the side effect of forcing Zatara to become Doctor Fate).
S1 E20 Coldhearted
- Vandal Savage gets one with his part in the heart delay plan. Regardless of whether he kills Kid Flash or not (admittedly unlikely this time around), he succeeds in making Queen Perdita's death look natural.
- The plan only fails because Kid pulls a Xanatos of his own: fake the queen's death and then covertly put her in the room with Vertigo. Regardless of what he says, Vertigo will openly reveal his criminality, which means she can revoke his immunity.
S1 E21 Image
- Queen Bee pulls one with blackmailing Miss Martian. Even with her being thwarted from manipulating the merge of Qurac and Bialya, depending on whether M'gann lets herself be blackmailed, Queen Bee either gets a mole inside the team or sabotages their trust in each other.
S1 E22 Agendas
- Lex Luthor pulls off several at once by setting Superboy on Cadmus. The real purpose is to build a rapport with Superboy and leverage him with the patches, so it doesn't matter how much he does. Discovering Match, the Genomorph city, and getting to tell him where half his DNA comes from were all just best-case scenario outcomes.
S1 E23 Insecurities
- Cheshire pulls off one by goading Artemis. Regardless of what she chooses to do, it's likely to be spurred by her insecurities, which will have bad consequences for the team that's already not sure about trusting her. This works perfectly.
S1 E25 Usual Suspects
- The Light pulls one with the ambush from Riddler, Mammoth, Shimmer, and Cheshire. Regardless of whether anyone on the Team is hurt (unlikely, since they're trying to throw the fight, but not impossible in the chaos of battle), the Team is going to end up with the Starro tech and take it to the League (allowing Red Arrow to implant it all into the Justice League under Vandal's orders).
S1 E26 Auld Acquaintance
- And unsurprisingly, Vandal Savage pulls one. Regardless of whether they control the League long-term, the good guys will run into trouble when they go galactic because of the missing sixteen hours, later revealed to be an intergalactic rampage that gets Earth noticed by alien forces such as the Reach, Despero, and Mongul, and forces those same Leaguers to go off-world to stand trial.
Season 2
S2 E07 Depths
- Black Manta pulls one to test his son Kaldur's honesty if he fails. Kaldur is sent to destroy a Martian communication satellite set to launch. While Kaldur & his team cannot stop the launch of the satellite, the rocket containing it gets destroyed anyway due to a bomb that The Light had placed on days before the launch. The best case outcome of faking Artemis' death so she can sneak undercover, with Kaldur actually being a mole is just a bonus.
S2 E19 Summit
- The Team Beat Them at Their Own Game. They'd taken so many steps that no matter what the Light and Reach did, they were screwed. The meeting at the summit continues? They're recording everything for an Engineered Public Confession to wreck the Reach's Villain with Good Publicity act. Artemis and Kaldur's Fake Defector act is uncovered? Miss Martian already replaced Deathstroke and fakes their deaths. Kaldur triggers what seems to be a Dead Man's Switch that reveals the Light was playing the Reach and shatters their alliance. Vandal Savage calls in an army of Mooks to kill them? The rest of the Team has already disguised themselves as mooks and turned the tables. The result is the Ambassador, Black Manta, and the Brain and Monsieur Mallah are captured, their alliance obliterated, the Reach exposed as the invaders they are, and Vandal Savage has a Villainous Breakdown.
- But even here, the Light manages to pull a Xanatos Gambit. Lex Luthor and Queen Bee are absent from the scene (likely due to their Villain with Good Publicity acts). Vandal Savage has to unleash Klarion (by having the witch boy magically turn the sword Miss Martian telekinetically pointed at Vandal into a fire snake to make her let him go), who then teleports him out, and Ra's al Ghul will inevitably be resurrected with a Lazurus Pit (though in the long run he gives up his seat in the Light as well). Then the Light steals the War World from under the Justice League's nose, threatens the rest of the universe should they invade Earth, and then reveals that they are in league with freakin Darkseid. It ends with Vandal Savage commenting, "Business as usual." Even when the heroes win, they lose!
Season 3
S3 E08 Home Fires
- The Light hires Lobo to kill Forager, leading to the Czarnian mercenary assaulting Nightwing's splinter team. After a long battle, Forager pulls one of these plans by molting his exoskeleton to fake his death and trick Lobo into thinking he'd won. But the Light did have a good reason to send in Lobo. It was to trick Nightwing's team into revealing themselves and who was part of it to the shadowy organization.
S3 E26 Nevermore
- The third season finale sees the Team, and Outsiders return to Markovia when Baron Bedlam escapes prison and performs a coup d'etat. When they get in, Terra, performing her usual mole role, is ordered to assassinate the Outsiders' leader Beast Boy at a critical moment with the hopes that the Light can use it to set up registration rules for future metahumans to traffic. Instead, the heroes knew (via Batman sneaking around on Santa Prisca as part of the Anti-Light and reading Deathstroke's microexpressions) she had been a mole and use their kindness towards her to convince her to side with them instead fully. As her brother Geo-Force had been Locked Out of the Loop, he executes Baron Bedlam, their Evil Uncle, in rage, and takes over the throne from his older brother Gregor instead. Because he was another member of the Outsiders, the Light banked on substituting Terra's attempted murder of Beast Boy with Geo-Force's violation of Thou Shalt Not Kill against Bedlam to set up their law, except Black Lightning accessed the communicator that Terra threw to the ground, catching Luthor red-handed, and works with Cyborg, Superboy, and Superman to oust him from the United Nations, with Troia successfully now elected its secretary-general.
- However, the Light had other plans that enabled them to survive this. Luthor wasn't the only criminal inside the United Nations. So was Ambassador Zviad Baazovi of Markovia. He used psychic manipulation to enable Geo-Force's takeover from internal impulses he felt deep down but were nudged to the surface, rendering him a Puppet King to the Light and securing their control of Markovia, with Luthor's Infinity, Inc. serving the country. Zviad may have been subtly manipulating Geo-Force for the entire season, potentially manipulating Geo-Force's brother Gregor into banishing him to build these impulses up. The Light essentially sacrificed their control of the United Nations (and their control of the Justice League through sanctions) for control of Markovia and Geo-Force. And as season 4 reveals, if the Light can't continue their metahuman trafficking rings from all the damage done to them in season 3, then they can at least manipulate Geo-Force into turning Markovia into a nation solely consisting of metahumans with the intent of giving them a peaceful place to live, while kicking out all non-metas into the neighboring nation of Vlatava. Gathering all their important metahuman assets into one place to rely on them for later.
Season 4
Season-long
- Both Vandal and Darkseid were playing the long game this season, as both of them had interests in what Lor-Zod was doing. As in the process of releasing the House of General Dru-Zod, they both had high hopes of them causing devastation on the Justice League. But regardless of what happened next, Vandal and Darkseid both had an idea of what they wanted from all this. For Vandal, capturing the House of Zod as well as the rest of the Phantom Zone Kryptonians for a new army, alongside the metahuman forces in Markovia, for the future battle for the galaxy. For Darkseid, he gained the one prisoner he wanted more than any to use amongst his Furies: Kara Zor-El. In addition, although Darkseid's Martian ally Ma'alefa'ak was cast into the Phantom Zone with the House of Zod, he is returned to Darkseid no worse for wear, rewarded with the planet Durla, potentially giving Darkseid a future Martian army in the process.
Targets
- The rescue of Perdita requires the Team to make a gambit by bringing garlic pills that allow several male and LGBT members susceptible to Queen Bee's control (these being reserve Justice League member Red Arrow, Arsenal, and the non-binary Halo) to fake being controlled and fake blood so the ones not able to be held under control (Miss Martian, Tigress, and Arrowette) would be able to fake their deaths at the hands of the seemingly controlled Team members. But even when the heroes do save Perdita, the Light still gets the kryptonite she attempted to smuggle to the Justice League, they simply lose out on making Vertigo the face of an anti-metahuman movement which would have allowed Markovia to gain more metahumans for the Light to keep tabs on. This was accomplished by creating Metallo and making him use kryptonite as a power source, meaning the heroes would have to kill him to take it, which they don't want to do.
