If the first two seasons of Adventures of Superman were all about common crooks doing boring crime, seasons three and four have been all about common crooks doing absolutely insane crimes. “The Big Freeze” and “Peril by the Sea” both fit this mold, and they are each an unique and special kind of nuts.
1. A familiar problem
One of the knocks on Superman is often that he is too superpowered, and that his abilities make every situation so insanely tipped towards him that all of his stories have to be scaled so far up that it is hard to do less than 100% bombastic Superman stories. Well, Adventures of Superman has no such issue, because they don’t have him use all of his powers all the time. When a stranger slips a note under Clark’s door in “The Big Freeze,” he runs to the door to catch a glimpse of the person before they walk away, instead of using his canonical to the show x-ray vision to see through the door. Similarly, when tricked into entering a lead safe because Jimmy and Lois may be in there, he doesn’t use his super-hearing to listen for their voices, breathing, or heartbeats.
Because Superman is often not utilizing all of his powers, the show is able to paint him into corners that would be ridiculous in almost any other telling of the Superman story. It makes for more dramatic episodes, but only if you forget about his other powers. If you remember he has x-ray vision and super-hearing, it just makes it a frustrating viewing experience.
2. So fun
So, a crook hires a scientist to make essentially a freezer that goes down to absolute zero in a matter of seconds, so that he can lure Superman into it and temporarily depower him. Why freezing him would depower him for a week is a little suspect, but let’s just go with it. The show does an amazing job of making Superman look ridiculous, covered in white paint on his costume and head. We see Clark use Lois’s makeup to revert back to a more normal look, which is one of the more fun Golden Age moments in the series thus far. These sort of moments are so much fun that they take away all the logical problems that pop up just minutes apart.
Also, they should make a limited edition Frozen Superman action figure. I’d buy one.
3. Partisan Superman
It is made very clear in this episode that in the Metropolis mayoral election that the incumbent is a good man and the challenger is a mafia stooge. So, when the Daily Planet staff is talking about how the incumbent must win, it makes sense. However, it is weird to see Superman, in costume, shilling for a candidate. In his “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” mantra, you would expect a more hands-off approach to the machinations of local politics. But as I’ve pointed out time and time again, this Superman isn’t really representative of the classic archetype.
4. Perry White, hobby scientist
“Peril by the Sea” is built on the premise that Perry White is a very capable research scientist who took a month off from the Daily Planet to work on enriching uranium from sea water. Sure, why not? I don’t know why the show felt that Perry had to be the one to crack this code, but we get the ridiculous image of Perry at home, with test tubes all around him in a labcoat.
This also impresses Jimmy to no end. In “The Big Freeze,” we learn that Jimmy isn’t old enough to vote, which means he’s under 21 (if my very limited understanding of election rules and protocol from 30 years before I was born are correct), so I suppose he’s still young enough for people having hobbies to appear novel. But he’s so impressed that he breaks not only newspaper protocol but government confidentiality by publishing an article about Perry’s scientific prowess. Oh, that Jimmy: dumb as shit but still employed for reasons I’ll never understand.
5. The premise goes from absurd to absurd to the nth degree
Look, it’s crazy that Perry found an ancient formula to make sea water worth billions. Obviously, criminals would want their hands on the formula to make themselves rich, but instead of having the show handle this in a normal way, they make the criminals pirates who own a submarine and are going to blow Perry’s house to smithereens so that he can’t talk. (Perry, quite coincidentally, lives on the ocean)
Oh, and by the way, in this episode Superman’s super-hearing appears to be working just fine.