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Ask a Simpsons writer or the brain trust behind the DC reboot.

After awhile you get tired of hearing, “You guys already did this story.” Sometimes, you just want to shake the Etch-A-Sketch and start all over again.

But continuity is also the tool that allows TV and comics writers to tell stories you could never shoehorn into a 90-minute movie or even a 300-page book – stories that take months, years to tell.

Iron Man uses continuity correctly in “Look into the Light,” in which the recently repentant Living Laser is resurrected and split into good and bad halves.

Tony has to trust the good Laser to beat the bad Laser; but he’s having trouble trusting anyone since Gene Khan (Tony’s frenemy/the Mandarin) betrayed him last season.

This could have been a stereotypical episode about teaming up with the bad guy or the bad guy going good. Instead, the writers ground the conflict in Tony’s trust issues and allow him to mature.

(I complain about a lot of different aspects of this show; but one thing Armored Adventures has done well consistently is develop Tony’s character.)

This episode isn’t perfect by any means. The final fight suffers from ridiculous pseudoscience (even by comic book standards.) Somehow putting the good and bad Laser in a teleporter together is supposed to fuse them together.

Furthermore, the script calls for Tony to ambush someone who moves at the speed of light. They have Tony do it instead of the good Laser because… well, that’s never explained – something about trust. The script willfully obsfuscates the explanation because it wants to reinforce its theme.

But at least it has a theme to reinforce, one that makes sense for the character, which makes this episode better than the disappointing season two premiere.