I find it admirable that some of them were giving out food and supplies to the homeless, but the rest of them were just playing dress up or walking around snitching on local weedmen, lol. And why is a "superhero" dissapointed about his gay bash bait plan not working? His team looked sad because they didn't see any action.
shareAs usual I have at least two or three answers.
"Taking them at face value", as an approach, would say that some of them are trying, dammit, trying, to make some positive change in their cities. When we hear that a certain street is dangerous at night, we might shake our heads or feel bad for a second. These folks might plan a "patrol" to actually try to take back that piece of the city, or at least they are "trying".
Running with that ball a bit further, one would expect that they'd have a patient attitude about it, like with trout fishing ... went out two nights with bait, didn't catch anything, let's keep trying .
But, finally, if we do the opposite, then there are other explanations. Bad childhood that kind of made them feel powerless and frustrated, and make them want to feel exactly the opposite of that. In the comic books, the good guys win in the end. That's their hope: that persistence and hard work will result in saved lives, bettered lives, and even adoration from grateful citizens. One or two of them came perilously close to having groupies.
But ... remember that they DID find some action. The first night, they witnessed a van "clipping" a parked car, and they did a GREAT job of hunting the van down and getting the driver. Of course, it turned out the police had no intention of arresting the driver or getting involved in any way ... so the team settled for taking the guy's keys away from him, With His Permission, and letting him sleeping it off in his parked van. Not a bad night's work. The other bait run didn't work, but they saw the street guy get his foot run over, and ... "Zender"? .... the guy with the binary on his shirt for the computer letter "Z" ... ran up and announced he was an EMT (quickly amending his statement to say he was an EMT in training). Fixing the injured man up, helping the police get the guy home. Again, good job, and the homeless may feel someone cares. But ...
You say they seemed disappointed that the bait plans didn't work. Well, it might indeed be some psychological need unfulfilled, as in "we worked out how the target would walk such and such a route, and we trained on our skateboards, and kept in the perimeter, ready to swoop in for a catch, and never got close to getting someone." As in "all our brilliant plans were wasted".
I personally don't want to fault them for that, but reality is reality. Apparently:
#1 to get someone to fall into their trap, they are going to have to keep it up for a good while longer,
#2 But also apparently, if they ever caught someone, how do they know that the police would respond in THAT situation any differently than in the "van/clip" incident? We already heard the "expert" explain that what the superfriends were doing was in a legal gray area. I would not blame the police if they said
"So this superhero girl walked around at two in the morning in a cute dress for a couple of weeks, and finally got attacked? Just the way she was looking for? Not only was she actually looking for it, your whole team was looking for it, so how do we know the Public Defender isn't going to pull the 'entrapment' card on us and win the judge over? We are just avoiding a long expensive court battle that we are going to lose, on camera."
So, after they learned that they couldn't count on the police to cooperate with them, they needed to rethink their plans all the way through again.