Mercifully, this is my final installment of the 2019 Summer TV Binge. Adventures of Superman has been another slog this summer, but I must say, the final episode of the season is one of the episodes that feels like a true Superman story. Let’s dig in.
1. Return engagement
“The Whistling Bird” is typical of so many of the problems with this series, but there is a somewhat pleasant surprise: Sterling Holloway, from earlier this season’s “The Machine That Could Plot Crimes” returns as the same character, Professor Oscar Quinn. The character is a broad characterization, but it’s at least a nod to the fact that real life tends to put the same people in our lives over and over again.
Funnily enough, Holloway appears in an episode next season, in an episode that sounds absolutely bonkers:
A nutty professor uses his time machine to send Clark, Lois, Jimmy, Perry and himself back to 50,000 B.C., along with a notorious gangster who decides he likes prehistoric times.
Though, because this is Adventures of Superman, Holloway isn’t playing the same character. He’s a different nutty professor. Sigh.
2. Clark doesn’t have a clue
I honestly don’t understand what Clark is thinking 90% of the time. In this episode, he has to place a stamp on a letter, spurred on by Professor Quinn’s new flavored glue (ewwww). Instead of pressing the stamp down like a normal guy, he slams his fist down like a goddamn caveman. Now, it turns out that the glue is an explosive device, and so it explodes. But maybe it exploded because Clark used his quite literally super powered fist to smash something?
A little later in the episode, Clark can’t come up with a good excuse for why he has to stay back at the Daily Planet. We know it is because he has to turn into Superman. But instead of saying “Lois, I’ll stay here in case someone calls in with some new information,” he basically says “I can’t make any difference, so I’m going to stay here. I’m a nihilistic dickface.”
It wouldn’t be hard at all for Clark to not be constantly dodging suspicion, and it would take just a modicum of believability and empathy. But instead, he’s the biggest jerk he can be at any time. Sigh.
3. Continuity? What’s that?
I often marvel at how older television shows and films didn’t give a lick of attention to continuity. I’m not even using the term in the comics way; I mean like, making sure things are consistent from scene to scene. So, Jimmy, the professor, and his niece are stuck behind a secret wall, lined with lead, and one of their ideas to get out is to set off the fire alarm, so that it will draw people’s attention to their trap. Ok, I follow so far. Jimmy needs to be boosted up to reach the sprinkler head, (which is about eight feet off the ground, and at least a foot from the ceiling) in order to put the match by it and set it off. Everything is working fine.
Superman eventually arrives, hears the water rushing from beneath the floorboards, punches through the floor, and pulls everyone to safety.
Everyone who, apparently, is now 9 feet tall, in order to be easily pulled through the ceiling without needing a boost. Sigh.
4. It’s the end of the season! Let’s get sad!
This is, hands down and without question, the saddest episode of the series yet. It begins with a contest that seems like a nightmare in 2019: kids write in letters, and the winner gets flown around the world in Superman’s arms. I imagine most parents wouldn’t be so quick to let their kids just fly off with an alien on a trip around the world, but I digress. A little girl, Ann, wrote the winning letter, but signed her mom’s name to it, because she wants her mom to take the trip. She explains that her mom has to work so hard that she can’t see the world for all of its beauty.
Oh, and Ann is blind, because that story wasn’t sad enough.
But wait! It gets sadder!
Continued belowAnn is blind because of a car accident that occurred when her dad was driving, and the mom took out the anger at her daughter’s blindness on the dad, who is “the finest man [she’s] ever known.” So, the parents separate because of the strain of a newly disabled child, and the child desperately wants her parents to get back together. Holy fuck, is it dusty in here?
5. An actual Superman story
All of that sounds very sad, and it is, but this show finally turns into a Superman show in the process. Superman not only uses his x-ray vision to help identify the cause of Anne’s blindness (the ol’ glass in the optic nerve goof), but also helps put her parents back together, and flies Ann all over the world. Superman helps Ann learn to believe in him, not through tricks or badgering her, but through simple demonstrations that don’t require her eyes. He’s patient and kind, and is focused on helping her, not just protecting his secret identity (though he does show up in Clark’s clothes for some reason). Ann also sort of busts him for sounding like Clark, so sike, your disguise sucks.
But it is nice to see Superman doing truly super things. It was a lovely way to end what has been and up and down season.
See ya in 2020!
