Another week, another couple of episodes where Superman chooses to do very little to help others.
1. The innkeeper’s wife
The first episode, Night of Terror, involves Lois Lane being held hostage in a motel. She stumbles upon the innkeeper’s wife, who was knocked out after her husband was killed by gangsters. She and Lois are put in one of the cabins together, and left until an unseen mobster nicknamed ‘Babyface’ is to arrive and kill them both. Pretty standard stuff for this show.
That is, until we see Lois and the innkeeper’s wife in the cabin. Their relationship plays out half like Lois is her mother, and half like Lois is trying to put the moves on her. There’s a lot of tender embracing for two folks who just met like an hour ago. Now, granted, this woman just saw her husband murdered in front of her, that shit will get to you. But it was an oddly intimate scene, for reasons I still don’t entirely grasp.
Now, of course, Jimmy is mistaken for Babyface, because he, too, has a baby face. This leads to a moment where he’s expected to kill Lois, until the real Babyface shows up and, natch, is stopped by Superman. It’s a pretty slight episode, and definitely the weakest of the series thus far.
2. Longest shot ever
The one scene that really stands out to me in this episode is one of Jimmy Olsen on the phone. It is a standard shot of him clearly not having anyone talking to him on the other line, and so you see him ‘listening’ while nothing is happening. You’ve all seen this before.
The difference is that, since Olsen is talking to Lois (who is ripped away), then the operator, then the police dispatcher, there is a shot that last for one minute and twenty five seconds unbroken on his face. It is an astonishingly long shot that really does nothing to advance the plot whatsoever, and it requires a lot of reacting to nothing. This show has more Tim and Eric moments than I ever realized, and this is perhaps the most obvious one yet.
3. Horrible stereotypes
The second episode, The Birthday Letter is one ridiculous contrivance after another, but it all starts from someplace innocent. A little girl, ‘crippled’ as the episode describes her, writes to the Daily Planet, asking Superman to take her to the fair. Instead of trying to contact him like a responsible media outlet, they print the letter in the paper, letting a band of murderers and thieves to find out where she lives. There’s also an overly complicated plot point about why this hoods want to find the girl: essentially, a wrong number leads to a crook thinking a six year old American girl is his European criminal pal, and so he spills he beans to her on the phone, and now his cohorts want her to give them the information.
The Europeans, who are maybe meant to be French?, are about as broadly drawn as characters can be, as is their henchman, “Slugger,” who makes Mongo from Blazing Saddles look like a MENSA member.
I know this show was not trying to build up a core of repeat villains who could challenge the ideas of right and wrong or anything, but my daughter, who is 6, creates more complex roles when we play Muppet Babies around the house. I’m sure a lot of this is being a product of its time, but still.
4. Slugger
So, Slugger puts on a “costume” that is supposed to represent Superman’s (as seen in the above image), and he doesn’t fool the little girl for long. She asks why they have to take the fire escape instead of fly, and Slugger basically is too dumb to come up with any reasonable excuse. Slugger is the prototypical ‘too dumb to be evil’ character that are all lesser versions of Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
He doesn’t want to kill a child with a leg brace, so he’s essentially the hero of the episode, but he is also the world’s worst Superman impersonator, and I have no idea how the little girl or her mom actually believed he was Superman. But he pulls it off! He pulls it off so well that when Superman shows up at her house, responding to her faux-personal ad in the Planet, her mom doesn’t realize that the guy in her midst now isn’t the same guy who took her daughter earlier. I know that this is before we all knew exactly what everyone looked like because we could look it up at any time, but Superman is on TV and in the newspaper all the goddamn time. You’d at least think that she’d realize the first guy had a bald spot the size of a pancake and the most high-waisted sweatpants this side of Steve Urkell. But nope! A perfect doppelganger! If you excuse me, I have to go trick a room full of Metropolis citizens that I am Justin Bieber.
Continued below5. So…Superman?
I really don’t want to keep talking about how much Superman is an ineffective layabout each week, but for crying out loud, he does almost nothing! In the first episode, he relies on clerks and secretaries to look up shit he could fly over and do in 2 seconds flat. In the second episode, he seems pretty laid back about a girl kidnapped by an impostor. Again, I know the budgets were low on these shows, but they could show him checking literally every building in Metropolis with his x-ray vision until he finds her. Or, have him concentrate and use his super-hearing.
Superman seems like something Clark uses during rush hour instead of a taxi, or an excuse to take a bullet off the chest. Let’s hope he gets more super soon.
