Chris: Greetings programs and welcome to another edition of Whatever We’re Calling This Now That We’re Not Watching Lois & Clark Anymore With Chris and Ronnie. As you no doubt remember, we’ve moved on from covering the just mentioned middling-to-bad mid 90’s Superman network romcom to Nightman, the only one hour superhero drama conceived, produced, and financed entirely by the runners up in a 1997 Marin County middle school AV Club talent contest. Our first episode of the day is called “Chrome” and hold onto your hats folks, because we’ve got a mythology episode. Turns out that karate loving, sleeves hating, jazz guy Johnny Domino wasn’t the only person to be struck by that magic bolt of lightning back whenever it was that he was struck by that magic bolt of lighting. Turns out that a whole bunch of folks all over the world were also struck by that very same bolt of lightning at that very same time and imbued with super powers all their own. Turns out that’s a thing that can happen. I was surprised too. But that one scientist guy from the first episode (played by Patrtick Macnee? How did I miss that?) pops back up to inform Nightman that not only are there an unknown number of superdudes running around, one of them is evil and has dedicated himself to hunting and killing all of his supersiblings.

His name is Joran (oof), and he’s discovered (somehow) that when one member of the Lightning League (what I’ve decided to call the people given powers by the lightning) kills the other, they gain the dead Leaguers powers. You know, like in Highlander. Joran (that’s really the best name they could come up with?) is played by an Irish actor named Shane Brolly and he’s like the homo erectus version of Daniel Bruhl’s Baron Zemo. He’s supposed to be one of those menacing villains who defeats the hero without breaking a sweat in their first encounter, triggering a crisis in confidence in the previously unflappable hero. You know, like in Rocky III. But unlike in Rocky III, Nightman has a plucky black sidekick to help him regain his mojo and strategize a dynamic new strategy to defeat his opponent. Oh wait, that’s also Rocky III, isn’t it? Okay, how about this? Instead of facing off against an astonishingly racist caricature of a Scary Black Man (remember how in 30 seconds of screen time Clubber Lang questions Rocky’s sexual potency, low-key threatens to rape Adrian, and kinda-sorta kills Mickey? Jesus), Nightman instead does battle with a smug, sexually ambiguous, eurotrash fancy boy? That’s different, right?

Better costume, honestly.

Joran (Repetition isn’t making it better) is one of those villains who’s presented as a terrifying new, brain meltingly difficult opponent that puts everyone on edge in the same manner as Venom did in his first appearances in Spider-Man. But instead he comes off like The Vanisher (first appearance, X-Men 02, November 1963), an “unstoppable” villain who’s dispatched with comical ease (The Vanisher is a teleporter whose lethal danger is demonstrated when he steals top secret military plans from the Pentagon despite the fact that said plans are safely stowed in a briefcase kept on a small table surrounded by army men with guns. Just one of the countless near nuclear catastrophes that could have been avoided by a locked file cabinet.). It would be insane to expect any kind of epic “dramatic showdown” from the seventh episode of a 90’s superhero show, but “Chrome” still manages to clothesline itself on the low-ass bar of cheapo syndicated TV. Juran (still a no from me) telekinetically hucks a bell at Nightman, who steps out of its way, and that’s about it. And he wasn’t there anyway because it was just the Nightman hologram, so who gives a fuck? Also am I crazy or does Nightman’s hologram accidentally trip a landmine? What do the makers of Nightman think a hologram actually is? Anyway, it’s all wrapped up in a classic TV “To Be Continued” when the villain escapes by forcing the hero to choose between killing the bad guy or saving an innocent life. So the villain is foiled, but the hero’s noble bloodlust goes unsated, and we the audience are forced to contemplate the inevitable rematch. I guess sometimes nobody gets what they want.

Ronnie: “Chrome” is a real humdinger of an episode for multiple reasons. For one, it broaches the larger Night Man mythos in a way we’ve not seen before. Previously our assumption was that Johnny was the sole beneficiary of the lightning strike to the cable car, perhaps because of his unique jazzman DNA structure. No, others received powers as well. I’m not well versed in the Malibu Comics Ultraverse yet but from the Ultraforce cartoon that I binged with a friend the other streetcar lightning recipients became a superteam called The Strangers. They included black speedster Zip Zap, Genis-Vell (and others) ripoff Atom Bob, Grenade (who despite his design is not the gay member of the team) and sex toy gone sentient Electrocute. What does this have to do with Night Man? Nothing, because I’m almost certain the license for the TV show was for the title character alone and every other Malibu character was tied up in other licensing deals. I bring all this up to mount an explanation for why Joran/Chrome exists. I imagine if they had access to the whole Malibu roster the show would pick a character from the comics. Instead they were faced with the worst situation possible: having to use their imagination.

I suppose I should talk about the actual episode instead of flaunting my knowledge of flamed out 90s comic book companies that were later subsumed and squandered by one of the Big Two. We open on a scientific demonstration of a woman being able to astral project. It’s described as “the ability to virtually be in two places at the same time” which to me is just describing Night Man’s garage opener jazz hologram, but that’s me. Things go awry when Joran kills her using his ability of glowing eyes. “How many more will he kill before we can stop him?” intones Patrick Macnee. How much time you got to fill? Don’t worry, there’s also a subplot about a reporter twigging to there being a crimefighter in town. She even puts a bounty on information about Night Man. This reporter is played by Alexandra Hedison, aka Mrs. Jodie Foster, so that’s neat. Didn’t we already have a reporter character? Whatever happened to her? Oh well, it’s Mrs. Jodie Foster’s time to shine.

This is not the most compromising position Raleigh’s found Johnny in, let me tell you that much.

Joran meets up with her and finds out the common denominator for all Bay City strange goings on is Johnny Domino, so he requests a meeting with him via the reporter, which is how you press the flesh with a jazz musician in this town. You need an intermediary. Joran thinks killing other people with abilities allows him to absorb their powers, which I will note is the premise of Sylar from Heroes. Do I believe Tim Kring, the creator of Crossing Jordan, stole from syndicated TV for his show Heroes? Oh, 100%. Joran is a trial run for Sylar. Instead of Quinto’s mesmerizing eyebrows imagine a dodgy Eurotrash accent and rape eyes. Frank, ever the proud father, dishes to this strange man about his son. “Johnny loves his music. But I tell you, had he become a cop, that kid would’ve gone all the way.” All the way to what? Police chief? RoboCop?

To be fair, Joran almost immediately figures out Domino = Night Man, although Mrs. Foster isn’t convinced. I like how in their first confrontation Chrome ties Johnny up with a fire hose and then telepathically controls the Prowler. This is really the point at which Night Man comes into itself. Imagine sitting on your couch or in your chair and you’re watching a man trapped by a fire hose with a car bearing down on him. And that’s a commercial break. Raleigh fumes: “what kind of monster makes a guy’s own car turn against him?”. Johnny’s advantage over Joran is that since everything the latter does is evil, Johnny can predict his every move. I’m not sure that’s how it works, but okay. Meanwhile, Chrome tries to engineer a camera crew filmed lampooning as well as frames the Night Man for a robbery. Fortunately, our himbo hero knows his foe’s weakness, which leads to a conclusion so insane I hardly believe it happened. And I’ve seen this episode multiple times, over multiple decades.

Chris: Remember when Elaine threw Joe Mayo’s fur coat out the window because she thought it was Puddy’s and then Joe wanted to Elaine to replace the coat, not because she was the one who threw it out the window, but because the person in charge keeping track of the coats should therefore be on the hook for any that went missing on said persons watch? And remember how Elaine thought that Joe was way out of pocket for insisting that she replace the missing coat because it was ridiculous to think that her agreeing to gather and throw all the coats onto a bed in another room somehow made her liable for what happened to them afterwards? You know how Elaine insisted to Jerry and George that whoever it was that threw the coat out the window was the party at fault and should be made to replace the coat? And that when Jerry pointed out that she was the person who threw the coat out the window Elaine pointed out that Joe Mayo didn’t know that and had no way of proving it so she didn’t think she should be held responsible even though she was? That she was being scapegoated for a crime that she was in fact guilty of? Remember how baffled Jerry looked by Elaine’s insane tortured logic? That’s how I felt when Nightman finally cracked the manner in which he would defeat his nemesis.

Nightman’s whole deal is that he can sense evil thoughts and intentions or whatever. And it’s an unconscious, reflexive thing more in line with Spidey’s spider-sense than, say, Superman’s x-ray vision. It’s not something he turns on and off, is what I’m saying, so much as it’s something that’s always active, but not always engaged. So, when Nightman realizes that he can use his ability to sense evil or whatever to sense what Chrome is going to do next, he’s basically discovering that the power he’s had since the beginning of the show can be used to do exactly what it’s been doing the whole time. It’s like if Spider-Man spent an entire issue fretting over how he was gonna stop some bad guy and then MJ was like “yeah, but this is just a guy with a pistol. Don’t you dodge gunfire from automatic weapons every day?” And then Spidey went “oh yeah! Right!” And proceeded to punch the guy out. That’s not really a satisfying conclusion to a story. And to make matters worse, the big climactic fight turns out to be between Chrome’s astral projection and Nightman’s scam-to-get-out-of-work hologram. So what actually happens is a hologram manages to outsmart a ghost? Is that right? But then, and I know I brought this up earlier but I think it bears repeating, the hologram also trips a landmine? Am I remembering this correctly? A weightless massless light construct accidentally depresses the trigger of a mine and detonates it? So a problem is solved due to the discovery of facts that the protagonist was already aware of, leading to a physical confrontation between two non-corporial projections that incurs significant property damage due to explosions triggered by one of the phantoms. That can’t possibly be right.

I’m glad you brought up the Heroes connection, because I noticed it too but kind of thought it would be gouache to mention both how Night Man ripped off Highlander and was then in turn ripped off by Heroes. That’s an embarrassment of trash right there, and I would have been remiss to take more than my share. Unrelated, but you just know that there are gonna be people that complain that this Highlander reboot somehow tarnishes the legacy of the original, and that’s just gonna be fucking nuts. Because all those movies suck. I’m not saying the first one isn’t fun to watch, or that there isn’t something compelling about the core concept, but come on. We’re talking about a film where a large portion of the story takes place in Scotland and whose main character is himself Scottish and is played by  Christopher Lambert, a Frenchman raised in Switzerland with an impenetrable accent and a voice that sounds like he gargles shards of glass before every take. Then they have the audacity to cast Sean Connery and make him play a Spaniard who lived most of his life in Egypt and Japan. But you know what he sounds like? He sounds like Sean fucking Connery. Because Sean Connery doesn’t fuck around with accents. His Irish-American Chicago street cop sounds like his suave British secret agent sounds like his Russian submarine commander sounds like his Baltimore Industrial Magnate sounds like his Robin Hood. What the fuck, movie?

Just had to get that off my chest.

They call this photograph editing “Lenoing”.

Anyway, this is probably my favorite Night Man episode to date. After a half a dozen episodes it’s settling into its identity as a terrible superhero show instead of the previous half hearted feints in the direction of being a terrible science fiction show, a terrible horror show, or a terrible noir/crime show. It’s blindingly obvious that no one behind the scenes had any idea what they were doing or where they were going and the show’s panicky attempts to impose some kind of coherent mythology onto this madness were delightful. We covered the return of Macnee, introduction of a super genius nemesis and the suggestion that somehow the same bolt of lightning managed to simultaneously strike numerous people all over the world. As well as the half assed crisis and climax. You also mentioned the delightful decision to introduce a plucky blond reporter lady in one episode, only to replace her with a new, different plucky blond reporter lady to serve the exact same function a couple episodes later. The only other thing I wanted to draw attention to was Nightman’s team’s attempt to draw Chrome out by appealing to his vanity via a clearly doctored image of what is supposed to be Chrome but looks more like mid-80s McDonald’s celebrity spokesmonter Mac Tonight. I honestly don’t remember what this was supposed to do or why it was supposed to do it, but I liked the phrase “celebrity spokesmonter” and wanted to wedge it in. Can you remind me what that was all about?

Ronnie: This is also my favorite so far for many of the reasons you elucidated. As for why the Night Man team effects such a vicious lampooning on Chrome, it’s simple: Chrome is vain. “Joran’s fatal weakness, his Achilles’ heel, is his vanity.” The object is to get the television network to run the picture and bait Chrome into a duel “at the old world’s fairground at midnight”. Then it’s trickery via hologrammatic Night Man. So all that is to say that the vandalized photo is completely irrelevant to the plot at hand and you could easily cut it out without losing anything. Except for the hilarity of Joran looking like Flabber from Big Bad Beetleborgs, that is. Chrome lives to bedevil Night Man another day when Johnny has to choose between saving Patrick Macnee or apprehending the villain. He chooses the boring choice. Patrick Macnee is an old man; why NOT gamble with his life?

He’s got Bette Davis eyes…provided Bette Davis’ eyes were all shiny and shit.

Jennifer Parks reminds me of Rene Russo in Nightcrawler: she’ll do anything for a story and her ethical scruples are a moving target at best. Lou Bloom vs. The Night Man, who you got? I feel like Bloom is hungrier even if Night Man’s got the physical advantage. Parks would actually do for a solid supporting character but she only appears in one other episode of the series, spoiler alert. Giving Night Man a varied cast of supporting roles, like on Lois & Clark, would both make too much sense and also the finger thing means the money. Nonetheless, she has a good send-off in this episode when she and Johnny are dining and she muses “either you can’t keep a promise or you can’t be two places at the same time”. Night Man promised he’d do a fly by for her camera crew, and it’s about time that happens. Just as Johnny is about to leave, oh, look, it’s Night Man from a distance. This actually isn’t a use of the hologram, which is weird because this is the exact scenario the hologram was created for, but instead Raleigh wearing the suit. Very Silver Age Superman this storyline, from concept to resolution. I liked it.

Look, Night Man is never going to be The Shield in terms of entertainment I enjoy without reservation and without irony. So this C+ episode of Night Man might be the highest we get, and that’s fine because it’s not about being good, it’s about being insane. “Chrome” introduces plenty of absurd elements that hopefully are revisited in future episodes. I can at least spoil that later on in Season 1 Chrome/Joran returns in the creatively titled episode “Chrome II”. Something to look forward to amidst the gaffes and bad puns.

Odds & Ends

-According to IMDB, Chrome is also the name of a San Francisco rock group that formed in 1976. Good looking out, IMDB. To be fair, it keeps with the title naming conventions’ relationship to music.
-The incidental jazz music sounds like Hell’s soundtrack if I’m being honest. That means what you think it means: BIG TIME OPERATOR RETURNS!
-The cable car accident happened on October 22nd.
-Frank and Charlie discuss the rise of swing in the 90s. If nothing else (lol) dates this show it’s that.
-”He’s got all the moves of a jungle predator” is an exceedingly weird way to speak of anyone, least of all your son.
-“If you’re not with me, you’re against me” – Jennifer Parks created the Cheney Doctrine!
-Joran calls himself “Mr. Chrome”, which is a mistake.

1X08 “TAKIN’ IT TO THE STREETS”

Chris: So the first, and most sensible in my opinion, impulse one has after watching “Takin’ It to the Streets” is to remove the DVD from the player, break it into a half dozen pieces, mail each piece to a different continent, then burn your house down with everything you ever loved inside, change your name, start life all over again and never speak of what you saw to anyone for the rest of your life.  If that’s not a viable option for some reason, your second best option is almost certainly suicide. Honorable or otherwise. If you’re one of those miserable bastards that can’t even get killing yourself right, then your only remaining option is to slink into the always open arms of the home away from home for bitter babbling cranks everywhere, the internet. And holy shit, internet, do I have a yarn for you. Because in “Takin’ it to the Streets” Night Man takes on inner city violence. Before we jump into the episode proper, let’s take a quick  look at that episode title. You know what’s never a good sign? A title using street style abbreviation and/or punctuation to denote some kind of authenticity. Oh sure, occasionally things work out like in 1984’s Breakin’ and it’s better known sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, released later that same year (Little known fact, the success of the Breakin’ cycle was what gave French filmmaker Claude Berri the inspiration and confidence to film his now classic diptych, 1986’s Jean de Florette and Mannon of the Spring, or as it was titled in America: Jean de Florette 2: Electric Boogaloo). But mostly it’s an embarrassing disaster like Mo’ Money from 1992, or 2003’s Biker Boyz. Is it any surprise that “Takin’ it to the Streets” falls squarely into the latter category?

That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is no.

So, Night Man has decided to tackle the problems of gangs, black on black crime and its inexorable pull on young black athletes. Oh, and point shaving. In forty-four minutes. Yeah. So Night Man has that one black buddy/accomplice Raleigh who’s the brains behind Night Man’s whole supersuit. At the top of “Takin it to the Streets” we learn that Raleigh has a bea-u-tee-full new girlfriend who is also one of those tough as nails inner city high school teachers who all the kids dig because she’s a sexy lady who isn’t afraid to get down on their level and have a real bull session when the situation calls for it. When she brings Raleigh in to talk to her class about whatever AV gobbledygook he does and one of her students, without raising his hand mind you, “so you’re the guy who gave us Milli Vanilli” (let it never be said that the writing staff of Night Man didn’t have their fingers on the pulse of young black in culture in 1997) she fires right back that they all better sit back and shut up because since all the budget cuts this is their only chance to learn about faking earthquakes through the use of sonics and manufacturing hard light holograms of white Jazz Guys.

Blew Chips

Later that day, or maybe it was before, honestly who cares, Raleigh and his girlfriend are on a date along with Night Man and Night Man’s dad (“Wanna go on a date with me, a buddy of mine, and my buddy’s elderly father?” “Do I?”) when some of the girlfriends students roll up. They’re about to really get into some good natured jive slinging when Night Man’s evil-sense draws his attention to a town car over-flowing with armed men speeding right towards them and is barely able to raise an alarm before the bullets start flying. There’s a promising moment in the immediate aftermath of the attack when the girlfriend asks Night Man how he knew the car was gonna start shooting and Night Man goes “Well..” and trails off before something else pops up to derail the conversation and I was screaming “FINISH THE THOUGHT, NIGHT MAN!” But they never get back to that and instead the plot follows one of her students, basketball-prodigy-and-otherwise-slow-on-the-uptake all-star K-Train and his dalliance with a local crime lord who runs book and a protection racket out of what appears to be an exercise gymnasium/whore house. What follows is a plot that’s incomprehensible even by Night Man standards that involves murder, rigging high school basketball games, the use of the phrase capping on several occasions, a plan to unite the Bay City underworld under one banner at a meet-and-greet held in his gym’s cafeteria and one scene where the crime lord yells “Whitey made a fool out of you” at K-Train.

Ronnie: I think Night Man deserves credit for exiting its comfort zone and broaching sensitive topics. It botches the broach but isn’t the effort worth anything? Well, not really. “Takin’ It To The Streets” is about a guy named Artemis pressuring star athlete Kelvin “K-Train” Barnett into performing poorly in a game to benefit his gambling outfit. This is done in the most erotic “take a dive” scene I’ve ever seen; to wit, it takes place in a hot tub with babes. Is this Night Man or Red Shoe Diaries and is there really a difference? Cut to a depressing high school gymnasium and K-Train is throwing the game. Johnny gives him a pep talk, jazzman to black man, to dissuade him from his illegal activity.

I don’t think Night Man can’t address real issues that affect real people because any art can try to do anything. Go big! Swing for the fences. I don’t think Night Man succeeds at having anything of merit to say about the epidemic of teen sports phenoms being seduced into the luxurious world of point shaving. I doubt anyone on the writing staff has spoken to a black youth, much less had enough insight into the crushing poverty that motivates such mercenary moves. Percentage of writers who call them “the blacks”? Over 50%, definitely. Whoever had the temerity to write the line of dialogue “whitey made a fool out of you”, that’s who uses “the blacks”. While not as offensive as it could be, “Takin’ it to the Streets” is nonetheless pretty paternalistic in its portrayal of Kelvin needing the moral guidance of the resident jazz musician.

See, according to the comics Night Man should look like this all the time. He doesn’t have to sleep ever and he’s hypersensitive to light, hence always wearing sunglasses. Maybe they were going to go that route until they realized Matt McColm looks like an even bigger douchebag with sunglasses than without.

What really sinks it is the sinister and/or homoerotic villain, Artemis Burton. I don’t know actor Evan Lionel from Adam but he fucking stinks. He delivers a performance so campy it’s impossible to take anything seriously. Well, why take Night Man seriously? That’s a good and fair point. All I know is that a high school basketball rigging operation eventually segues into Artemis sitting on a throne, saying “to the dawn of a new era” and initiating a cage fight between Raleigh, Frank, Levin and some guy with dreadlocks among other hoodlums. Shit looks like a Street Fighter level. Actually, those look better than this green screened mess. Raleigh holds his own but Night Man is there with the assist. Johnny also kills the bad guy, quipping “now it’s your turn in the pit” after lasering him into falling a great height. We should’ve kept a tally of the character’s kill count. By now I think it’s already in the double digits if you count henchmen, and you know that we do.

You know, we fought a war so there’d be no thrones in this country.

Chris: So here’s what I’m wondering, it’s obvious that no one who worked behind the scenes on Night Man in any capacity was black or had ever interacted with a black person in their life. We know this because a quick scan of our friend mr internet reveals no reports of any kind from when the episode would have been being filmed of a desperate, sweaty, freaked out individual running out into traffic and banging on windshields while screaming incoherently ala Kevin McCarthy at the end of the 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Martin Lawrence in the spring of 1996 at the end of post production of A Thin Line Between Love and Hate. But what we don’t know, is if anyone was familiar with another old friend, 1988’s syndicated Superboy and its eighth episode of the first season “The Fixer”. Loyal reader will remember that we covered that episode back in the Bad Old Lois & Clark days and it too covered the scourge of gambling’s involvement with amateur basketball. I think it may also have involved a homoerotic hot-tub seduction scene as well, come to think of it! If I was Superboy writer Alden Schwimmer the only thing keeping me from suing the producers of Night Man for plagiarism is the fact that I would then have to stand up in a court of law in front of God and everyone and acknowledge under oath that I wrote for Superboy. I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world, I’m being honest. But that’s the only reason. Well, that and I’m dead.

It would be extremely difficult to say that Night Man is getting better in any conventional sense; it’s still laughably incompetent, but it does seem like it’s hitting some kind of bizarre, atonal stride. The last two episodes have been just as terrible as the first half dozen, but they’re making more of an impression, too. It doesn’t take as much work to remember what happened. Maybe the plots are settling down a little, becoming more conventional. Other episodes ripped off movies and aped the styles of other shows, but the actual ways they unfolded were incoherent. If you mix terrible plotting with wretched acting, tin-eared dialogue and amateur special effects the result is a formless mess that’s almost impossible to retain because it’s really hard to get a grip on something so profoundly chaotic. It becomes too much work for your mind because it can’t rely on any of the foundational elements of storytelling to ground anything. It’s like, imagine you had to walk somewhere you’d never been, but the ground is like that part of Last Crusade where Indy has to leap from letter to letter to spell out Jehovah because all the other letters would collapse underneath him and he’d fall to his death. It’s hard to take in the sites and enjoy the atmosphere if you’re spending all your time focusing on the elements of walking you usually take for granted, is what I’m saying. It feels like the Night Man ground has stabilized a little, and that makes it easier to take in the sights.

Who designed this gym, Joel Schumacher?

Ronnie: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, yeah? Night Man took the shot that it had something to say about the travails of urban youth and it turned out it didn’t have anything to say. Look, you know, at least they’re trying. What show in the superhero genre other than Superboy dared to broach the subject of point shaving in school sports? I thought so. So yeah, this isn’t very good and is very potentially offensive. At least it makes you feel something, and that’s what I believe separates Night Man from its fellow travelers. Another show would do an unmemorable episode with this, whereas Night Man conjured up a memorably bad one. Again, it’s a something and not nothing situation. This kind of reminds me of the well-intentioned liberalism of Marvel Comics where they’d try to increase diversity but do so only with stereotypes and caricatures. You know, like how the next X-Men team came from all sorts of different countries and backgrounds and mostly that resulted in characters peppering their dialogue with the couple foreign words or phrases Chris Claremont remembered. That’s why I think I reacted to this with amusement rather than Chris’ belief that one can only be pure if they burn down their house after watching this. because it reminded me of heart-in-right-place, head-in-bucket storytelling you’d see from nominally liberal people who’d never, you know, met a black person before. At the very least I can say there’s nothing malicious behind “Takin’ It To The Streets”.

Odds & Ends:
-IMDB pops up again, this time to tell us that “Takin it to the Streets” is also the name of a Doobie Brothers song from 1976, proving once again that IMDB is bottomless well of useful context and that the writers of Night Man really had a firm grip on the music that was speaking the urban black youth of 1997.
-Bay City’s gangs seem to have taken a page from Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors and adopted festive, eye-catching theme costumes so as to help each crew stand out. My favorites were the proto-Matrix styled cyber punks and KISS-esque Kitty Cat Men.
-”You’re tuned to the frequency of evil” goes hard and should’ve been sampled in industrial songs and I will die on that hill.
-I love how Night Man’s power use is denoted by a closeup of his forehead. Matt McColm is not an actor who can pull off “thoughtful” so that makes it even funnier.

NEXT TIME: Johnny befriends a KGB assassin because she’s a pretty girl; the son of J. Edgar Hoover brings back famous criminals from the dead. Yes, really.

But then things changed. Superhero comics moved from a genre that was comfortably on the edge of the mainstream (“Hey, a new Batman movie? Cool! Some superhero that isn’t Batman? Fuck that and fuck you.”) to the undisputed center of the pop culture universe. People know who Ant-Man is. Nobody should have to know who Ant-Man is. Superhero shit was everywhere, and a numbing sameness had settled over much of it. The formula for how to make these things was obvious and grating, particularly on the CW where their Arrowverse churned out cookie cutter show after cookie cutter show that had a relatively small but super loyal fanbase. I don’t like any of those shows. I tried a couple and outside of the superlative second season of Arrow and Calista Flockhart on Supergirl, it all seemed uninspired and, frankly, community theaterish. But then that fucking pandemic hit and those of us lucky enough to be able to stay inside isolate from the rest of the world had all this time to fill. And none of us wanted to think about the world because it was basically on fire (thank god that’s over, right everybody?) and we all had streaming services and we all basically spent a year watching old TV. Again, those of us lucky enough to be able to stay inside and isolate.

So yeah, I had this idea. Superhero media had become so dull and routine that I wondered if the very elements that made L&C so mediocre back in the 90s would make it entertaining today. Would the stutterings and failures of this early genre exercise that were eliminated on the way to essentially perfecting and mass producing it give the show a depth and quality that the impersonal, assembly line IP content lacked? Basically, would what made it bad in the 90’s make it good in the 2020’s? This is the type of shit that occupies my mind in place of whatever skills are required to accomplish any kind of household chore more challenging than changing a light bulb, finding a good job, or showing up anywhere on time. But that’s what we did. We watched it all, and we wrote about it all. It took three years. We wrote thousands and thousands of words. And now we’re here and we can finally answer the question. Do the failures of Lois & Clark add a layer of charm and warmth to the show make it a better watch now then it was then? Is it good show? The answer, is no. No, it doesn’t, and no it isn’t. Lesson learned.

Ronnie: I don’t want to say that we wasted literal years of our lives watching and writing about this show, but we kind of did? I’m being hyperbolic of course, yet it’s difficult to discern what we learned from the endeavor, other than the Burn After Reading “not to do it again” sort of thing. I suppose the tack I’ll start out with is trying to place Lois & Clark in the overall Superman franchise trajectory. Lois & Clark is about as close a John Byrne Superman adaptation we’re going to get; Smallville, Superman & Lois, even Man of Steel to a degree have taken from his revamp but to lesser degrees. Lois & Clark has Clark as the “real” identity and Superman a persona he adopts. Lex Luthor is a corrupt businessman posing as a philanthropist. Ma and Pa Kent are very much alive and part of the supporting cast. In short, the show reflects the comics that came out concurrently, culminating in the comics and the show both marrying off the couple around the same time. That said, I think Lois & Clark has had a marginal at best influence on the character/franchise. It was a reflection of the times, and those times emphasized Superman as a man, not a Kryptonian trying to blend in as a man. Basically the opposite of what Bill says in Kill Bill Vol. 2.

The most noteworthy attribute to the series is its focus on romance. It should go without saying that most comic book writers abhor romance because they have no experience to draw from. Celebrated writer Jonathan Hickman, for example, has never even seen a woman before, much less kissed one. Comics also have an unlimited budget whereas Lois & Clark makes you think about the budget every time Dean Cain suits up. While the television writers did better at conveying a love story than the average comic book writer (remember Joe Quesada broke up Spider-Man and his wife because of a mid-life crisis), a lot of it coasts on Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher having decent chemistry. Their relationship over the course of the program is prone to fits and starts. The first three seasons are as sexy as the stock footage of the fat guy getting hit by the cannonball whereas the last season overcompensates by making the couple’s collective libido positively Duchovnyian. It’s especially weird looking back, that the show went from seemingly having no conception of sex to devoting screentime to a subplot about Lois’ sexual frustration at Clark’s Superman responsibilities preventing her from getting off.

As a corollary to the romance focus, Lois is a co-lead as opposed to a supporting character. Her name’s in the title, after all. That was a good choice and not only because Teri Hatcher is a better and more versatile performer than Dean “Bigfoot Skeptic” Cain. Lois is a fully fleshed out character with her own hopes and dreams and while she is regularly kidnapped and put in harm’s way, it’s almost always of her own volition and not just because she’s connected to Superman or Clark Kent. I think if this show has any lasting legacy it’s making Lois Lane more of a multi-dimensional character as opposed to a psychotic hellbent on marrying Superman, which is the enduring image of Lois Lane for several decades preceding Lois & Clark’s airing.

If pressed to ask what the show did well, I suppose I’d go with the character of Lois Lane. She would hold her own against Margot Kidder for sure. What about you, Chris?

Chris: Oh man, what does the show do well. What does the show do well? I guess I think the first season does a halfway decent job making Metropolis seem like a bustling place. There’s, what, two extra main characters in Lex and Cat and another two or three recurring with Lex’s various henchmen and that one contact of Lois’s who’s always eating? That’s something I think. And it managed to sustain over season two despite losing Lex and Cat by having more recurring characters like Tasha Yar, the Trent Reznor Cosplayer/Mad scientist trying to revive Lex from the dead, and Tony Baloney and Underused Woman From Wings as potential rivals for L&C’s affections. And while Intergang was never able to quite replace Lex as the primary villain, its tumultuous leadership and constant turn-over of leaders that were fun and played by fun performers kept the show feeling lively. And even the, oh let’s say racially questionable episode set in Chinatown offered variety and scope to the city.

I also think the show did a pretty good job keeping Lois and Clark’s relationship flowing in a (reasonably) consistent way. Like, their relationship at the beginning of season one is different from the end of season one, and there even seems like there’s growth between the end of season one and the beginning of two. Then the end of season two is different from the beginning and on and on. Like, if someone were to watch a random episode of the show with nothing but a vague understanding of the relationship arc they’d probably be able to figure out what season it was from pretty quickly. Which isn’t something every show like this can do. There are, of course, some all time bad stalls and obstacles thrown in their way, but you never get the feeling the show is doubling back on itself; once Lois and Clark are together, they’re together. No make up break up shit is thrown in to distract the writers that they have no idea what to do with the characters beyond high school level emotional drama. Each season has its own character and feel. And let me throw it back to you and ask what you think the best and worst seasons were, and why? Similarly, looking away from the two main characters for a second, and taking Lex and Cat off the board, what did you think of the way the show used the supporting cast?

Ronnie: Season 1 is the best season for me, because the show had more promise back then. We didn’t know it was going to be what it ended up being. John Shea as Lex, while he didn’t necessarily have a reason to be in a lot of episodes, was always entertaining. I’d give worst to 3, just because of the faux wedding cul-de-sac. The individual episodes may not have been the worst, but it killed the momentum of the series and it took a while into Season 4 for that momentum to be regained. But really, I think you could make convincing arguments for any season being the best or worst because of the consistent mediocrity of Lois & Clark. The best season has crap and the worst season has inspired jaunts, you know?

As for the use of the supporting cast, I think one word describes it: poor. Like, I think a lot of my affection for the supporting cast stems from the actors and not necessarily the material they were given. The Kents are great, but their plot utility consisted of showing up whenever Clark and maybe Lois needed advice. Their inner lives faded pretty quickly from the show–remember when Jonathan was jealous of Martha taking a painting class or whatever? Not the most scintillating plotline ever written, but it was something. Likewise, Lane Smith imbues a lot of Perry White that simply isn’t on the page. As for Jimmy, he’s the obvious weak link in the cast, because it’s evident the show never really knew what to do with him. In Season 1 the Michael Landes iteration was a little too cool for school and thus the program course corrected by casting the pervert kid from Serial Mom and Jimmy became, well, simple. We’ve had discussions offline about whether or not Justin Whalin’s Jimmy was “touched by the face of God”, so to speak.

But really the issue is there’s not enough of a supporting cast. Even if you’re doing a two-hander show as Lois & Clark is meant to be, you ought to populate their world. Who is Lois’ best friend? Her sister vanished after two or so appearances and they never hint at her having girlfriends. I guess Clark’s best bud is Jimmy, but there’s a real power and intelligence imbalance there–it’s like if your best friend was an organ grinder’s monkey. It’s for this reason that Season 1 is probably Lois & Clark at its best. Cat Grant may’ve been a crude and sexist caricature of a sexually liberated woman, but she was a straw that stirred the drink. Without her, without Lex, everything becomes a lot emptier. Subsequent seasons try out recurring characters, usually as romantic alternatives, but none of them stick. Dr. Klein is probably the most developed character not in the opening title sequence and we found out about his motorcycle gang and his perhaps inappropriate sexual liaison about three or four episodes before cancellation. You said earlier Metropolis felt bustling early on; by the end it felt like a ghost town.

I don’t know the culprit, either a cheapness inhibiting the ability to continue developing recurring characters or an outright disinterest in expanding the world much further than the people whose names are in the title. More characters means more potential character dynamics means more storytelling possibilities. The same applies to Superman’s rogues gallery or lack thereof. Most of his iconic villains are one-offs, leaving the likes of Tempus his most persistent foe outside of Lex. Which, fine, Lane Davies always brought his A-game to his performances, but it’s weird, right? Every time Lois & Clark feinted at worldbuilding, such as Intergang and the power shakeups within the organization, it pulled back.

Chris: Yeah, I’m with you for sure on that last part. I can understand why L&C didn’t have Peter Boyle money, they aren’t James Cameron. Also, Jesus, Titanic came out almost exactly six months after the last L&C aired. I know it’s unfair to compare an episode of television to what was, at the time, the most expensive most visually cutting edge film ever made, but imagine working for whatever rinky-dink, fifth rate, non-union Mexican equivalent of a Z grade FX house that did the L&C effects and going to see Titanic one day after work. I think I’d go home and slash my wrists. Working on L&C must be the FX equivalent of going out to Hollywood expecting to do a Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare adaptation and ending up being the guy who kills the women in snuff films.

But I digress.

I can understand why they couldn’t turn Peter Boyle into a recurring character, but they couldn’t pony up the dough for ten appearances by Bruce Campbell over a couple of years? They couldn’t have let the Hot Blond Who Acted Stupid But was Actually the Smartest Character in the Room just be a behind the scenes force who gets referenced a bunch and shows up sporadically? I’m not a guy who produced TV in the 90s so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that you could get a mileage out of taking a half dozen characters and slotting them into episodes every now and then to create the illusion of a rich supporting cast. Like your idea of Lois’s best friend, or a low level hood that’s comic relief and an informant like Turk in Daredevil, Pete Ross back in Smallville maybe. If everywhere they go there’s one character who pops up from time to time that the audience recognizes, and suddenly Metropolis seems much denser than it actually is.

But I actually think I might disagree with you about the first season being the best of the show, I think for me it might actually be the second. I pretty much agree with all your points about the expanded cast of season one, and that losing Lex and dumbing Jimmy down at least three shades were crippling blows that the show never quite recovered from, but I also think that there were some basic storytelling mistakes coupled with an almost schizophrenic inconsistency in that first season that caused it to veer widely in quality from episode to episode. Luthor was obviously the best villain the show had, and John Shea was one of the three best actors on the show, but making him the villain behind the scenes of so many episodes diminished him as a threat simply because he was always losing. The show itself seemed to be figuring that out as the season progressed, and Lex was used in more diverse ways. And if I were to think of my least favorite episodes I think a lot of them would come from that first season.

The thing about season two is it retained a lot of the zip of the first season while also being more consistent. That was the season that came closest to what we were talking about in terms of Metropolis having a thriving population. Tasha Yar showed up a handful of times, as did the above mentioned Peter Boyle, Bruce Campbell and Mindy the Smart Hot Blond. The Intergang formula also allowed for a reasonably healthy rotation of celebrity guest villains. They might only be in one episode a piece, but the idea that they were all working for the same mob roped them all together. Didn’t Robert Culp show up in a season two episode? And Raquel Welch (those aren’t buoys!)? And who could forget Robert Carradine as the Intergang tech dork who was immune to Mindy’s charms? And the romantic rivals were pretty lame, or Tony Baloney was anyway, but just the fact that they were both recurring for a while made things feel little more connected.

Ronnie: I’ll go to the mat for Mayson Drake, at least in theory. The idea of a character who liked Clark but disliked Superman is keeping in the classic superhero secret identity dilemma–see Gwen Stacy hating Spider-Man who is, unbeknownst to her, her boyfriend Peter Parker–and her job as district attorney gave her fairly organic reasons for being in an episode’s plot. I won’t argue the plot was well done or that the character had dimensions to her, but it was a nice idea. Lois’ potential beau I don’t even remember his name and I refuse to look it up. I think they could’ve done better in the romantic rivals department if their intention was for them to enter a serious relationship by the start of Season 3.

You may be right about Season 2 being a better refinement of the ostensible platonic ideal of the show. Part of my hedging comes from me not seeing those seasons in a long time and having no interest in revisiting them to confirm or fail to confirm my priors. Really, the difference between the two comes down to Lex Luthor and how much you value him. If you think the show lost a pivotal element once John Shea exited, you’re apt to go to bat for Season 1. That’s me. You seem to be of the opinion that while John Shea and Lex were great, the show mishandled the role by having him continually foiled in his plans. The powers that be agreed with you on that last point, albeit that Lex being a regular cast member diminished Superman because he wasn’t able to lock Lex up within 45 minutes. A good writing team could have found a way for Lex to be in all or most episodes without making him a repetitive presence or a diminished one. Smallville may have its problems, such as it “not being good”, but the Luthor plotlines are among the strongest of that series. Perhaps one approach would slow rolling his evil reveal or gradually depict his fall from grace like in the aforementioned Smallville. His departure left a hole the show never could bother to fill. In his stead were a cavalcade of mostly forgettable foes, some of whom were comic book characters as interpreted by people with as cursory knowledge of comic books as Ben Shapiro has of the vagina.

I suppose we could get into how the Superman aspect of the show ranges from “crappy” to “embarrassing”. Yet there’s a reason it’s titled Lois & Clark; the focus is on Clark Kent, not Superman. Clark Kent is the real identity; any time the show delved into his Kryptonian side it was usually pretty lousy. So how about this as a closer: best episode of the series and worst episode of the series? I think both will be difficult to pin down and for differing reasons.

Chris: So one of the few unambiguously good things you can say about L&C is that each season has its own distinct theme as it regards the relationship at the heart of the show. Season One was about L&C getting to know one another, figuring out their dynamics as coworkers then friends then as potential lovers. Season two is about the leap from friendship to romance and the difference in intimacy the two states require. Three is about a committed relationship and the ups and downs of being a part of a duo and four is about settling into a lifetime commitment. With that in mind, I want to look at the best and worst episodes of each season and then declare a winner from each of the top fours.

Season one is, I think, the easiest to parse on that level because it was the most creative and wildly uneven, which is pretty common with first seasons insofar as they’re the rubber meets the road moment when you get something up on its feet and see what you’ve got as opposed to what you think you had. L&C had a famously turbulent development and first season in that respect, so much so that much talent (behind and in front of the camera) left the show after it wrapped, and everything was retooled from then on.

My choice for best episode is a bit of a cheat because it’s a two parter, but this is all silly arbitrary shit that we make up on the fly so honestly who cares, and it’s the last two episodes of the season, “Barbarians at the Planet” and “House of Luthor”. That little arc is the closest we ever came to the peak of what Lois & Clark could have been and the only other time besides the pilot where the show managed to convey epic scope. They used so many characters! Oh sure, Cat had already been shit-canned, but we get Lex and his henchman, Jonathan and Martha, Richard Belzer’s recurring character shows up. I think that one snitch who ate a lot made an appearance! Remember Jack? The scrappy Dickensian rag-a-muffin crossed with a sassy 90s kid they brought in to out Jimmy Jimmy? Remember how trash he was from jump? They actually managed to find something useful for him to do. I think there’s another Earth out there in the multiverse somewhere where series creator Debra Joy Levine maintains control of L&C past that first season and the show manages to find its footing without losing it’s larger cast of characters and slightly more adult edge.

On the other hand, my least favorite episode from season one is “Pheromone My Lovely”, which wrestles with that adult edge and is the closest I think I’ve ever seen to seeing a show suffer an existential breakdown. Lois & Clark, as we’ve said many times, was a show that was conceived as a sexy night time dramedy about love in the big city that was retooled at the last minute as a G rated r-word fest for families who thought Ned Flanders was a mite too edgy. “Pheromone” manages to deconstruct that tension by introducing Morgan Fairchild as a scientist and ex-lover of Lex’s who sprays the Planet staff with a love potion that doesn’t make people horny so much as, like, I dunno, stupid and handsy? Like Perry falls in love with the Mexican cleaning lady and so he dresses up like Elvis, pinches her butt a few times and tries to serenade her. Lois decides to try and seduce Clark by putting on the least sexy belly dancer outfit that you or I or anyone else has ever seen and attempting to do the dance of the seven veils. It’s loathsome, but also a perfect encapsulation of what happens when you want to make a show about sex that can’t ever talk about sex. Also, Cat Grant spends the entire episode fucking a copy machine repairman in a supply closet and at the end of the episode is like “who got sprayed with a whatnow?” Because Lois & Clark tried to be a show where the female lead put on an ankle length dress and a fucking face covering to seduce the male lead, and the slutty coworker rawdogs a stranger in a closet at work for several consecutive days and everyone just rolls their eyes and goes “That’s our Cat!”.

Season two’s highpoint is clearly Lex’s only appearance “The Phoenix”, which both brings him back to life and closes the door on his status as a businessman and love interest for Lois. It’s one of the few episodes of L&C that manages to pull off any sense of cinematic atmosphere, it actually looks good and has a breakneck pace that, coupled with the alarm the cast gets to show at the knowledge of his return, gives the show an urgent menace that it was never able to recapture. It also has a genuinely touching conclusion where Lex realizes that Lois never loved him and never would, and gives himself up as a result. Most of Lois & Clark exists somewhere between a B- and a C, with occasional bumps to B or B+ and occasional dips to C- and even D (I don’t know if anything they did would warrant an F for no other reason that something has to be, like, morally offensive to warrant an F. It has to be committed. And nothing on L&C is committed enough to get that kind of reaction), “The Phoenix” is the only episode that would crack the A barrier for me.

And the worst? I dunno, like I said above, season two is too professional to really make any terrible episodes the way the other seasons do, but there were plenty of irritating missteps. “Chi of Steel” for instance, isn’t afraid to deploy racial stereotypes in ways that, uh, suck. But I think the episode I liked the least was probably “Bolt From the Blue” wherein Superman’s powers are transferred to loser nobody William Wallace Webster Walldecker, played by Leslie Jordan who had already played a completely different loser nobody in an episode in season one, who immediately turns prick that starts charging people for his services and tries to rape Lois. It’s not a terrible episode of television so much as a confusingly inept one that can be summed up by its decision to use the same actor twice to play two different characters and make one of his key characteristics his attraction to Lois Lane despite the fact that the actor’s whole persona was rooted in his being a small, effete, southern homosexual. The world is filled with gay actors who can play straight ladykillers; Mathew Bomer, I’m looking in your direction. Leslie Jordan just isn’t that guy. It would be weird enough for that to have been his only appearance on the show, but him having already appeared as a different character the season before makes his casting positively Lynchian (side note, I’m extremely proud of how many David Lynch references I was able to fit into articles about a Superman TV show.)

The best of season three is another multiparter, and it’s I think widely loathed by a lot of people, but those people are wrong. I’m speaking of course of Lois and Clark’s first attempt to get married which is thwarted by Lex Luthor kidnapping Lois and replacing her with a clone eating frog who’s a piece of shit but then grows a soul and dies helping Superman while the real Lois gets conked on the head and wakes up thinking she’s Wanda Detroit, the protagonist of a novel that she’d been working on for the last year or so, which is news to the characters in the show as well as the viewing audience in general. It’s a five episode arc that’s fucking berserk, careening from plot twist to plot twist with maniacal abandon. I understand why it wouldn’t be to everybody’s taste, but I was mesmerized not just by how much happened but how good Teri Hatcher and John Shea were in the midst of narrative anarchy. Hatcher plays four distinct versions of Lois over the course of the arc. She’s herself, her clone, Wanda Detroit, and finally a tabula rasa kind of amnesiac who doesn’t seem to know anything about anything. And she does a really good job with all of them, the clone especially, who goes from being a selfish, petulant woman-child to an honest to god tragic figure who is desperate to stay alive. It’s kind of astonishing. Shea doesn’t get quite as much to play, but he manages to pull just a little bit of humanity out of Luthor right before he dies. It’s genuinely good stuff.

The worst of season three is unquestionably “Home Is Where the Hurt Is” aka the one where Sam Lane comes to Metropolis to reconnect with his daughter and ex-wife and also to introduce everyone to his new wife, a robot woman named Baby Gunderson he specifically built to have sex with. If I start to parse how confusing and upsetting the entire concept of a robot built for sex named Baby is, this article will never end, to say nothing of how she’s used in the plot. So I’ll just say Jesus one more time and move along.

Season four’s high point is probably the two-parter “Meet John Doe” and “Lois and Clarks”. It’s not a coincidence that their best work tends to involve multi-episode arcs, or that superhero TV ended up focusing on those kinds of long stories almost exclusively in the 21st Century. It just gives the plots and characters more time to breathe. “MJD” and “LaC” combine for a brisk, ridiculous story that features returning characters President-Fred-Willard-No-I-Won’t-Look-Up-the-Characters-Name, an alternate “weiner” version of Clark that we met in a two parter from season two or three (not looking that one up either) and Tempus, the time traveling ham who somehow became Superman’s primary antagonist after Lex left the show. L&C worked best in the end as a hang out show, and the “MJD” “LaC” one-two punch is one of the last times we get to just kill time with all these clowns. I had a similarly good time with the three part Luthors-Other-Secret-Kid-Because-There-Were-Two arc, but those didn’t have President Willard drinking alone in a bar on the night he lost his re-election bid.

And the worst of season four is also my choice for worst of the whole series, episodes 03 & 04 “Swear to God, This Time We’re Not Kidding” and “Soul Mates”. I don’t want to relitigate these two pieces of shit or even think about them more than I absolutely have to, and we have a two hundred thousand word article that covers both these monstrosities if you want a deep dive so I’ll just say that I’m reasonably certain that there’s a character in “StG” that’s supposed to be Superman editor Mike Carlin and SM is about how L&C have an insane curse on their souls that says their having sex will immediately trigger the extinction of all life on Earth.

That’s it, Ronnie. I’m done. I’m satisfied that Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was indeed a bad show and I regret all the time I spent watching, thinking and writing about it. That said, the end product is a series that I’ve enjoyed going back to and rereading over the years and will no doubt continue to revisit in the future. With that in mind, I guess it’s time for me to move on to our next  extended waste of time and energy, the beloved ABC smash Prey, starring TV’s Debra Messing as a doctor lady with fabulous hair who hunts down super apes. Or something. See you there.

Ronnie: It took me quite a bit of time to come up with my lists because it required remembering episodes of Lois & Clark; suffice it to say my brain is mostly Shield quotes and cartoon theme songs, so you can imagine the difficulty involved. For Season 1 I’m going to say the best episode, though this may be a cheat, is the pilot. It sets everything up competently and you could argue it suggests a better show than what we ultimately received. What we ultimately received was the likes of “Fly Hard”, my choice for worst episode of Season 1. It’s the one where they do Die Hard but with Jimmy Olsen, hence the name.

The problem with doing these, centrally, is that Lois & Clark is consistently underwhelming. The variance is, like, from B- to C-, so it’s rare there’s an outright disaster but similarly unlikely is an episode you’d recommend without a number of caveats. An episode has to be particularly good or particularly bad, right? In this vein I choose “Tempus Fugitive” for Season 2 on account of it introducing H.G. Wells and Tempus, two of the no doubt most perplexing members of Lois & Clark’s recurring cast. “Chi of Steel” is my choice for worst, Chris, because the racism overwhelms everything else to the point that it’s memorable. Memorable Lois & Clarks merit being called out.

“Memorable” aptly describes the Irish Dr. Doom conceived of in “When Irish Eyes Are Killing”, my worst of Season 3. I took some time deliberating on which Season 3 to choose for my best and wound up on “Super Mann”. You know, the one about Nazi supersoldiers waking up and trying to turn Metropolis into the Fourth Reich. I chalk up this decision to current events bringing our descent into fascism into sharp focus and Lois & Clark’s full throated defense of liberal democracy looks pretty good to me nowadays in an environment where companies are falling over themselves to pledge fealty to the president-elect.

Onto Season 4. “Twas the Night Before Mxymas” is absurd and adheres to the spirit of the holidays, and might actually be a show I’d recommend without burying it in qualifiers. I’m gonna give the ‘worst of’ to “Battleground Earth”; it might not strictly be the worst of that year, but it represents the New Krypton arc that is absolute death.

I think that pretty well covers it, Chris. Any final thoughts?

Chris: I actually don’t really think so? I’m going to go to my grave believing that we spent more time thinking and writing about Lois & Clark than anyone else on Earth. Oh I know that the show itself was in production for four years and working on it was a “Full Time Job” for the vast majority of the cast and crew, but I’m sticking to my guns. For one thing, you can’t tell me that the vast majority of those scripts weren’t written in a blind panic the morning of the day they were due. If each episode of Lois & Clark clocks in at around forty two minutes, then I’d put money down that the average script was written in around thirty eight. Try reading a script sometime, then try reading it out loud. Takes longer, right? And it can be even faster to type than it can to read. A really outstanding typist can type up to a hundred and twenty words a minute, and sure, those people are usually transcribing what other people have said or written, but that can’t too different from chopping up and sniffing up a bunch of caffeine pills cut with Pixie Sticks and spewing out whatever nonsense pops into your head. That’s a kind of transcription too, when you think about it.

Ronnie: I think that’s a good place to leave things. Fret not, readers, because this is not the end of Chris and my collaboration. Let’s just say it involves a man of the night who can hear the frequency of evil.

Tune in next week for Deliver The Profile Guest Shots.

But we’ve pretty much figured all that out now, and Ronnie wants us to write about this Debra Messing psychic-alien-serial-killing-chimp show that ABC replaced L&C with. At least I think that’s what it’s about, I haven’t watched it yet. So let’s just grit our teeth (teeths?) and get these last two episodes done and we can move on and never speak of any of this again.

Dr. Klein has so little dignity that being kidnapped by toys isn’t a low point for him.

Here’s a weird thing about “Toy Story”: it’s about an angry toy maker who takes his frustrations out on the world with boobytrapped toys. That sounds familiar, right? Because it sounds like the beloved (dimly recalled, six of one) Superman rogue Toyman? The same Toyman who appeared in season 2 episode 9 (and L&C high point) “Seasons Greedings?” Remember that one? Dean Cain wrote it? George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley, Amen) is a bitter toy maker who creates toy rats that turn people into dickheads? Remember? Remember Louise Jefferson (Isabel Sanford, no relation to Fred) was his secretary and love interest? He’s back! I mean, he isn’t, because it’s a different character with a different name played by a different actor, but it’s basically the same motivation and plot, and that has to count for something! This time the salty toy maker is named Harold Kripstly instead of Mr. Schott, and he’s played by Grant Shaud instead of Sherman Hemsley, so instead of being the angry little black guy from The Jeffersons, they got the nervous little white guy from Murphy Brown. It’s a little confusing at first, but if you just shut your eyes and jam your fingers in your ears every time Kripstly is on screen you can get through it okay.

I’m not sure that they knew that Kripstly was a different character played by a different actor though? Because at one point Lois says that he (Kripstly) had designed the most popular toy from two christmases ago? Which would mean that was the same christmas from “Seasons” when Mr. Schott made the wildly successful hate-rat? Are they somehow the same people? Is this a kind of Lost Highway situation? It had only come out a few months before “Toy Story” aired. Maybe someone got inspired. Or maybe did everyone just forget about “Seasons Greedings”? Maybe they wanted to do a follow-up but didn’t want to go to the trouble of rewatching the damn thing because they figured they all remembered the gist of it so they just kinda went with that. I dunno. It’s weird though, because Dean Cain wrote two episodes of Lois & Clark, and they both got sequels/remakes in season four. Cain also wrote the Lex-Luthor-Secret-Son episode in season three that they pretty much erase, expand and repeat in season four. The two completely separate secret kids thing I was willing to let slide because Lex was a billionaire dog who probably had secret kids stashed all over the world just in case he needed an organ or something. But two bitter, vengeful famous toymakers? Was somebody angry at Dean Cain and decided to try and out-do him in the writing department or something?

Ronnie: I find it highly believable that the writers would straight up forget they already did a Toyman episode, or at the very least they had so little respect for the viewers that they’d try to pass off Toyman as an entirely new character for the Lois & Clark universe. I like to think had Season 5 actually happened they’d do that for others, such as Metallo and Prankster. This one pales in comparison to “Seasons Greedings” and not only due to a lack of George Jefferson. See, it’s all part of Lois & Clark clumsily building up the “Lois and Clark want kids” storyline. There’s a few asides between Lois and Ma Kent about how you’ll know when you know it’s time to have kids, as if Ma Kent’s circumstances weren’t wildly different from literally everyone else on the planet’s when it came to conception. Typically the adaptations go with the Kents being able to conceive and resigning themselves to it until they come across a baby in a spaceship. I’ve seen the movie Orphan; that is not how most people adopt. Then I guess at the end Lois is ready for kids because she and Superman saved some kids from Toyman II? I understand the premise that a case involving kids would compel Lois to believe she’s ready to take the leap, but it’s pretty sloppily done.

Just kill him. Do it. It’d be daring. “The episode sucked, but the recurring doctor dude got murdered!”

Speaking of sloppily done, let’s address the long simmering subplot of Perry White’s love life. I don’t remember exactly when they got divorced, but Perry’s marriage had been on the rocks for a season or two, with a couple references here and there about him having to move out, sleeping at work, etc. But like pretty much every subplot on Lois & Clark, it’s half-assed and you wouldn’t be wrong for forgetting it altogether. Jimmy decides to help Perry get laid by putting out a personals ad on his behalf, which could’ve led to some mild hilarity as Jimmy misrepresents Perry; that doesn’t happen. At best we get Perry accidentally reading an m4m entry, because it’s 1997, it’s like a month after Ellen came out, gays are a land of contrasts. One woman does respond to his ad and it turns out to be Bob Newhart’s wife on Newhart, also coincidentally Perry’s ex-wife Alice. (She had been an unseen Vera/Maris type until now.) I bet you’re thinking “wow, they got Mary Frann? I bet they gave her a lot to work with!”. Well, you’re wrong. She’s in the last maybe 2 minutes and she’ll never be seen again. What a waste of stunt casting. “What a waste” can be used to describe this episode generally, despite it featuring Dr. Klein being kidnapped by an army of toys. (Toy Story came out less than two years prior, though this does predate Small Soldiers.)

This whole episode puts too much emphasis on the elderly getting laid. There’s Perry and then there’s also the Kents celebrating their anniversary, with them not wanting to stay at the Kents so they can celebrate “privately” if you know what I mean, wink wink nudge nudge say no more. The thing is, with Superman’s superhearing, he’ll be able to hear them fuck whether they’re in the next room or at the Hilton. It makes no difference! This show has course corrected the horniness too much in my opinion. Season 4 Cat Grant would be that Chris Elliott Action Family joke where Chris’ eldest daughter decides to go nude on her date.

HYPNOTOAD

Chris: So I was reading about that show Prey that we’re going to do next on the wikis and they said that Prey was greenlit after L&C’s promised fifth season was canceled and ABC was scrambling to fill its time slot. And it’s a truth widely acknowledged that anything you read on the internet has to be true, so that puts the whole “did the people working on L&C know it was gonna be canceled” question to bed. The introduction of Alice and all the kid stuff leads me to think that they were less spinning their wheels and more building towards a future that someone had assured them was going to happen. Whoops. But it also works nicely as a farewell to Perry. I assume he’s in the next and final episode (update from the future: he is not), but yeah, pretty much the only thing we know about Perry’s life outside of work is that his kid is a piece of shit and his wife hates his rotten guts. Well, Perry got to make peace with his kid in whatever episode that was that he made peace with his son in, and now things are on the mend with Alice. Perry White is a delightful character in the comics and it’s a crime how little Lane Smith was given to do on the show, but I liked him just because I like Perry and I like Smith, so I’m glad he got some closure and didn’t end the show as a bitter, middle-aged divorcee.

And I too was puzzled by the behavior of the Kent’s in this episode. Why leave your empty nest home in Smallville Kansas and go see your son and daughter-in-law if all you want is to be left alone to satisfy your godless urges? It’s like they went all the way out of their way to make it clear that they wanted to be left alone so as to get to fuckin. It reminds me of that Simpsons where Homer becomes a teacher and he knocks on Flander’s door just so he could say “Can’t talk now, I have a class to teach!” and run off as soon as Ned opened the door. But, you know, sicker. And look, I’m no kink-shamer (that’s almost certainly not true, I’m very repressed), but if the Kents are into making the people around them uncomfortable by insinuating that they’re ruining their chances for sex, that’s their business. But maybe make some friends and keep your kid out of it? Like, remember that guy who drew Martha in the nude way back in season one? Or possibly two? Remember Jonathan thought Martha was stepping out on him but they “just had a cup of coffee” and it was obvious that the guy was going to be gay but someone at ABC got ahold of the script and was like “I don’t know what network you think you’re at or what year you think this is”? So instead he’s just a weirdo who wanted to draw an old lady in the nude? He seems like a freak, go bother that guy.

I feel like you’d have these misgivings earlier on in the child trafficking operation.

Ronnie: It’s hard to believe Toyman isn’t a pedophile, because otherwise his plan sounds like hell on earth. I like kids well enough, but the situation presented by Toyman is that he’s basically running a Chuck E. Cheese’s that never closes. He doesn’t seem to have any co-conspirators except the one, so guess who clears up all the mess? That’ll be on him. Toyman is a tough character to adapt on account of how stupid he is and how ill-matched he is in comparison to Superman. The comics have vacillated between throwback to the Silver Age to grim child killer. By those standards this Toyman is pretty anodyne, but he’s still not great. As depicted the character is whiny and entitled. Harold Kripstly isn’t a good enough actor to deal with the flaws in the writing.

Odds & Ends

-Eat ‘Em Up Burger should be a real chain.
-Hey! Remember that time Superman was blinded and at one point he fell out of a third story window, got up off the street as if it was perfectly normal to do that and hailed a cab? How great was that? I was reminded of it while looking up season two episodes to find “Seasons Greedings.”
-Dr. Klein is in fine form. Not only is he introduced to a truth serum that causes him to blurt out information regardless of desire, at one point he manages to combine a Dr. Demento reference with a reference to Arsenio Hall’s talk show. Robot Chicken could never.
-Welcome back Seinfeld alum counter! I see you’re making appearances in both of our last two episodes! First up is Wendy, the nice lady that helped Kripstly take care of all the children he kidnapped until he murdered her is played by Stacy Travis, who played Elaine’s cousin who constantly talked about their Grandma Mema and thought Jerry was effeminate because he didn’t like to eat red meat in “The Wink”.

Chris: It’d be kind of funny if we just stopped here, right? I’m not saying it would be belly-laugh-wiping-tears-from-your-eyes funny, but the idea of doing all this work and coming this far and then walking away at the very last moment has a certain nihilistic charm. And it would speak to the gloomy, incomplete thought that “The Family Hour” unknowingly closes the book of Lois & Clark on. As we recently definitively learned, L&C wrapped up its fourth season secure in the knowledge that ABC had picked it up for at least one more and so ended the year on a cliffhanger that ties up the themes of the season while also opening the door for what would come next. That was their thing. Season two ended with Clark’s proposal and Lois revealing she knew he was Superman, and season three ended with the bullshit looming threat of Clark having to leave Earth forever to establish a new Krypton and marry Mallory Keaton. So at the end of season four L&C definitively learn they can’t biologically reproduce thereby strangling the hope of genetic offspring in the crib, and are also gifted a baby from… someone.

In all other respects “The Family Hour” is a B- Lois & Clark insofar as it’s a bunch of nonsense that simultaneously addresses what the once-promised fifth season would have covered while also not actually having much of anything of consequence actually happen. Take the whole fertility subplot, a significant portion of the back half of the season was devoted to Lois and Clark alternately stressing over and getting excited by the prospect of having kids. The whole story culminates with the indefatigable Dr. Klein walking a confused Superman towards a porn filmed room, possibly (probably) to manually masturbate him into a cup. Well it turns out he and Lois can’t make a baby, so that was a big waste of time. There’s also a scene where they meet with an adoption agent who (quite correctly) informs them that, while Clark is a solid citizen, Lois is a Superman obsessed danger junky who comes within a hair’s breadth of dying on a weekly basis and as such is not a great candidate for adoption. But who fucking cares because some stranger plops a baby down in their living room and renders any need for going through official channels moot.

And then there’s the matter of Lois’s parents. Lois’s father Sam, as you will no doubt recall, is a world renowned cybernetics expert and pervert who once operated on Superman on the same trip where he introduced his ex-wife, daughter and future in-laws to his new girlfriend who was also a robot he built specifically for sex. When Klein gives L&C the bad news they decide to place their dreams of fertility in his weird, sweaty, presumably super-hairy palms. But to that they first have to reveal to him the secret of Clark’s dual identity. This newfound trust, along with a fervent wish to mend fences with the woman he once scorned for a homemade fuck appliance, inspires Sam to put aside his work on something called breasts-in-a-can and a thing that makes women forget they’ve been raped that has extremely upsetting implications and throws himself into the task of building himself a grandkid. Not only does he not find a way to conceive, but he also has his mind wiped by the Rape-B-Gone machine, thereby erasing his (and Lois’s moms) awareness of his son-in-laws secret. See what I mean about nothing of consequence happening? They can’t make a baby, can’t adopt a baby, and Lois’s parents forget Clark was Superman.The baby they end up with doesn’t appear to have anything to do with anything. You could have started the episode there and nothing would have to be filled in.

This is just what special effects looked like in the 90s.

Ronnie: There is information out there on the ever reliable Internet suggesting the baby on the doorstep would turn out to be Kryptonian royalty in danger from something, so he needs parents who get into danger every week. I have to imagine Season 5 would put Lois & Clark on a further downward trajectory. Quick, name five shows that improved or plateaued in quality after introducing a(nother) kid. The impulse to do some bullshit soap opera aging so the kid could drive plotlines would be irresistible. True enough, an interview with an exec producer on Season 4 states the boy would “grow at an abnormal rate, turning into a preteen in a matter of months”. So imagine we had the show as is but they added a smart alecky kid who the show tries to convince you is adorable and not obnoxious. So yeah, I’m glad it got cancelled in favor of Debra Messing hunting down Homo Dominant. I’m sure it sucks, but the pilot was directed by Tobe Hooper. He used to be a somebody!

Speaking of “used to be a somebody”, Harry Anderson looks like a porno parody of Frasier Crane and/or Ken Griffey Jr. after taking the nerve tonic as Dr. Klaus “Fathead” Mensa. He’s using 90%+ of his brain, as evidenced by how big his cranium is. The makeup is not great. The character is not great! He formed a cult that believed mindpower could do anything, so during his prison stint he thought so hard his head swelled into him being able to telekinetically move objects, such as a prison gate or a car or an exercise bike. The show namechecks Uri Geller the fraud and inspiration for Pokemon Kadabra as an example of what Harry Anderson’s doing. Eventually he kidnaps Superman’s parents and in-laws after learning his secret identity. In terms of final villains it’s not very good, especially because his powers and knowledge of Superman’s identity are resolved by him wearing a headset of Sam Lane’s invention called “The Bummer Be Gone”. Everybody else who needs to forget Superman’s secret identity is conveniently hit by the crappy special effects of the helmet too, meaning Lois’ parents learning was pretty worthless, although it was fun to see Lois’ mom just not getting it until the last possible moment.

“This has to be the saddest action sequence setup you’ve ever done.” “It’s been 87 weeks of shit, I’ll tell you…”

I like how the series ends, with a baby in the bassinet, flanked by a letter saying “Lois and Clark, this child belongs to you” and a Superman blanket. The parents come into the room to see their children holding a baby with no explanation. While you can explain things to the Kents, what about the Lanes? Are they going to learn about the secret identity all over again? If not, I wish we would’ve gotten the ass pull explanation to justify them staying in the dark vis-a-vis Clark’s secret. I also want to know what Lois and Clark think; this all occurs in the last 3 minutes so there’s no time for an actual reaction. But they have to wonder where the baby is from and how the fuck they’re going to explain to everyone (well, Jimmy and Perry I guess) why they suddenly have a newborn in their midst. When the Kents “adopted” Clark it was at least rural Kansas 30 or so years ago, a place where you can hide a kid in a farm or whatever indefinitely. Different case in Metropolis I would think.

In-laws are the living end, aren’t they, folks?

Chris: Okay, first of all, Lois & Clark already had a smart alecky kid who the show tried to convince us is adorable and not obnoxious. His name was Jimmy Olsen. Put some respect on his grating name. Second of all… I got nothing, really. I mean, what else is there to say? Like the vast majority of television shows Lois and Clark went out like Tommy Devito in Goodfellas, one to the back of the head that they never saw coming. So what we’re left with is less a finale and more of a real time exploration of why the show was never really able to get it together. I don’t want to get too into autopsy territory, that’s for next time, but suffice to say Lois & Clark was a show that tried to mash kiddy adventures together with adult themes,B- stunt casting and ten cent store special effects that was never able to coalesce into anything even remotely consistent for more than an episode or two. “The Family Hour” manages to check off all those boxes in characteristically disappointing fashion while also generating just enough charm to make me a little sad that we never got to find out what came next. But only a very, very, very little.

Speaking of disappointing, Harry Anderson. Man. Best known for his portrayal of Pulitzer prize winning humorist Dave Barry in the sitcom Dave’s World, as well as being a world famous traveling magician, Anderson is the kind of charismatic TV star who should be able to come in and give the show some extra wattage just by being himself. That’s not what happened. I can see the appeal of making the highly verbal Anderson a kind of fast talking Dick Tracy style gangster/freak, but they forgot to let him talk fast and instead you get more of a slurry, Frankenstein-got-stung-by-a-bee-on-his-head deal. It’s suboptimal. Instead of the charming conman who’d always one step ahead, Mensa is a lumbering, mumbling, doofus who gets outsmarted by a gaggle of retirees. He looks like he doesn’t want to be there and I can’t say I blame him. On the other hand, Hatcher is as committed as ever, selling the shit out of Lois’s devastation at learning she and Clark can’t conceive, as well as her shock at being declared unfit to adopt. I keep wanting to go broader and talk about the show as a whole, but there’s a whole other article coming about that, so I’ll just close by saying that Hatcher was wire-to-wire excellent and I’m relieved I never have to hear Dean Cain talk about “making love” to her again.

Better episode if the baby is the baby from It’s Alive. Start tearing out some throats!

Ronnie: Dick Tracy villain, that’s exactly what he is, right down to the insulting nickname that also serves as an apt description. The show never got around to having a good rogues gallery, partially because of network TV vagaries and partially because of incompetence. The show clearly floundered once John Shea left and didn’t come up with a backup plan. I think this is a pretty good place to leave it; I don’t think there’s anything to say we can’t say in our wrap up column. I’ll just say I watched Repo Man recently and it’s really swell. Harry Dean Stanton is a treasure.

Odds & Ends

-The county adoption agency gives scores to prospective parents; Clark received a 97 (out of 100) whereas Lois got a 19.
-Mensa is, of course, the world famous nerd club that only admits people with “genius” IQs and is ironically the type of broad, obvious reference that would seem clever to the mouth breathers who would have seen L&C to its bitter end. Also, my father went to a mensa meeting once, and never went back because it was a little too dorky for him. My father was a philosophy major who was captain of his high school debate and chess teams, made fun of my mother for liking Tchaikofsky because he was too common, and regularly, willingly attends renaissance festivals. Also, the man’s a stone cold idiot. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that IQ has anything to do with anything.

Then comes the twist: everything you know is wrong! Leslie Luckaby is an actor Mr. Smith found bussing tables. That means, yes, the twist is that Mr. Smith is actually Lex Luthor II. My first thought is “why isn’t the deformed Lex Jr. Australian?”. With this revelation for the audience’s benefit we get a strange psychodrama that I imagine is replicated in real life with Judd Apatow and Paul Rudd. See, while Mr. Smith may be the real Lex Jr., the surface world would never accept an ugly man with loads of money, so Leslie has to act in Jr.’s place, fuck the woman Jr. wants to fuck, star in tedious 140 minute comedies largely based on Jr.’s life. They rig up a spying device on Lois that isn’t used for nefarious sexual purposes, though they do watch her sleep.

“No longer will this be Luthor Tower. From now on, this building will be known as…Luthor Tower.”

I like Jimmy’s reaction to his boss LL revealing himself to being another LL. “Whatever his name is, he sure knows how to work a crowd.” Jimmy is who I picture when I think of the 2024 undecided voter, a vacuous simpleton who cums in his pants. The Smith/Leslie interplay is the most compelling part of the show, and the acting from both is pretty stellar despite the preposterous sides they’ve been given. Less compelling is when Smith uses the listening device to force Lois on a date with Leslie, with the threat of outing Clark if she doesn’t comply. The device can also cause pain for some reason. It all devolves into Smith deciding to rule from an abandoned subway station with Lois as his queen. Blah blah blah bomb, blah blah blah force field, blah blah blah Leslie sacrifices himself to stop Lex II. Back to the status quo. Better yet, Dr. Klein is dutifully working on the “can Superman Species II chicks?” question. Over to you, Chris.

Chris: So, okay, Dr. Klein, wow. Where to begin? You know how many people say that the objectively awful 1998 film The Wedding Singer is extremely hilarious despite it lacking the traditional comedy tropes of “funny situations”, or “jokes” and instead contend that its insistence that anything that happened in the 1980s is side spitting because their-clothes-are-different-from-my-clothes? It has one moment that actually is funny. After she leaves him at the altar, Sandler’s fiance and woman who played a maid/prostitute in the third-to-last episode of Seinfeld tells him all the reasons she didn’t actually want to marry him. When she finishes a humiliated, disheveled, and just generally ruined Sandler glares at her and screams “those are all things that it would have been useful to know yesterday!” I couldn’t help relating to Sandler as I watched the character of Dr. Klein blossom over the last two episodes.

What a monster. I’m surprised he wasn’t lynched on sight!

Klein has appeared in thirteen previous episodes over the last two seasons and was a charming enough but flat and anonymous presence. Then, starting with the previous episode we’ve learned in rapid succession that Dr. Bernard Klein is a middle aged man who is an avid golfer and also belongs to an outlaw motorcycle club, possibly he’s a Sons of Anarchy, I don’t think we saw the back of his leather jacket to confirm that. He’s also visibly deeply sexually frustrated due (in his words) to every moment of his time in the last five years having been devoted to Lois, Clark, and Superman. All of it. The last five years. This despite the fact that Klein had only been introduced the year before and Superman himself has only been in Metropolis for a little over four. This suggests that Klein is either A. not great at time management, or B. along with (probably) being a gun running, drug dealing, Son of Anarchy, Dr. Klein is a Tenet of some kind.

But back to his sex life. Dr Klein says he hasn’t had sex in five years and he first appears in the episode heading out of his lab, golf bag in hand, stupid hat sitting on his bald head, on his way to an airport where a flight will whisk him off to an island somewhere and into the arms of a beauteeful lady who he’s been courting for some time. About that woman: her name is Carolyn, she’s a colleague of Klein’s whose acquaintance he first made when they both attended the same chemical weapons symposium. Also she’s 25 and thinks he’s “a god” (Klein insists to Superman that those were her exact words). I don’t know what’s more disturbing, that Klein was trawling for pussy at a fucking chemical weapons symposium, or that he was able to successfully pick up a woman less than half his age there. I hope that symposium wasn’t five years ago and the last time he was able to get got. That’s some dark shit.

Dr. Klein should be in a different outfit every episode, like that running gag in the Clerks cartoon about the mayor always being on the way to or from a costume party.

Finally, as you may recall, Supes approached Doc Klein a few episodes ago about if it would be possible for him to reproduce. The doc was understandably grossed out (or at least I was grossed out for both of us) and promised to look into it. Well, in this ep he tells the Man of Steel that everything was looking good and that he only needed to do one more thing for them to determine if he could put a baby in someone. Though it’s never specifically stated, the implication that Klein needs a sperm sample is extremely obvious. Klein tells Superman that he needs a “sample” and that there was a room down the hall with “some magazines” (kids, ask your nastiest uncle) where he could be alone. When Superman fails to understand what Klein is trying to say, Klein guides him off screen towards the room, presumably to jerk him off. Putting aside the fact that Superman is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of masturbation, why does a scientist have an entire room complete with dirty magazines in his lab dedicated to rubbing one out? Who is this man? What is his story? And why weren’t we told some of it fucking yesterday when it could have made a difference.

Ronnie: See, you get it, the “it” being “The Wedding Singer sucks kangaroo dick”. I think the problem with the episode writ large is that it has echoes of previous episodes. This isn’t the first time Lois Lane has been held hostage underground, this isn’t the first time Lois Lane is to be forcefully wed to someone, this is not the first time the villain has died with some vague attempt at redemption. It’s not so much that this episode is terrible but it’s overly familiar. We’ve seen this song and dance before, so why waste time on it when there’s less than a month’s worth of shows left?

Re: Klein, I just want to say–and I think I’ve discussed this with you on Messenger–that I think it’s funny that the show introduced Emil Hamilton, basically made him unusable, and then introduced another Emil Hamilton in everything but name. Right? Klein is Hamilton from the comics, the absent minded, kinda quirky scientist pal of Superman’s. I find him a welcome presence whenever he appears. He really is the extent of the recurring cast, because I can’t think of anyone outside the main cast that appeared in 10 or more episodes over multiple seasons.

Chris: Here’s what really perplexes me about Sandler: his reputation in Hollywood is spotless. Like, you’ll never hear a bad word about him. The only person he’s ever really publicly fallen out with is Rob Schneider which makes him look even better. The same people keep working with him again and again and again, he’s gotta be a big part of the reason that Kevin Nealon (who I happen to like) isn’t on skid row somewhere, wearing a big patchy coat and warming his hands over an oil-drum fire. And he apparently loves his wife and kids. I have no reason to think he’s a bad person. But then I look at his movies, and they don’t seem like the work of a nice guy. It would be one thing if the movies were just bad. Plenty of nice people make bad movies. It’s that they’re gross. And I don’t mean gross like poops and boogers and whatnot. I mean they’re lazy, visually ugly, angry, and they contain ethnic stereotyping that, uh, isn’t great. It would be one thing if those movies were way in his past, like products of the 90s, where we could write them off to immaturity. This is shit from the last ten years. Remember that Ridiculous Six movie that I didn’t watch and don’t actually know much of anything about?

But the real thing that always catches my eye is the way women are often portrayed, or, more specifically, how they’re portrayed in relation to Sandler. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on standard Hollywood practices like glamour imbalances. If Salma Hayek is okay pretending to be married to a schlub, then it’s okay with me. What I’m talking about has more to do with the broader patterns of how his romantic comedies often played out. Remember Blended? The third Sandler/Barrymore romcom? Remember how it opened with the two of them on a blind date at fucking Hooters, and we’re supposed to think it’s crass and gross until we find out that his recently deceased wife used to work there and then we’re supposed to think… what? I gotta be honest, I think it’s much creepier that he took her to his late wife’s job on a date than if he just went to a shitty boob shack. That’s crazy behavior. And what are the servers supposed to think about the widowed husband of their dead (presumably) friend bringing dates there and making them serve her? It’s super fucked up. And I could go on, like the first (and maybe only?) thing we learn about his wife was that she was basically a pin-up.

“I’ve frozen her to death before, so this should work…”

And remember that subplot about how he has daughters who he doesn’t buy clothes for because he owns a sporting goods store and can just give them whatever sweat pants and jerseys that kind of fit them? I know we’re supposed to see him as charmingly eccentric, and that the movie shows his journey from grieving, stunted man-child, to fully engaged father and romantic partner, but man, if letting your teenage daughter pick out her own clothes and simply brushing your teeth before a date are your idea of growth, good luck. And not every Sandler movie is like that, I know, not even the Happy Madison ones he has so much control over. But enough are. If the recurring themes of the work you produce includes themes such as “people with different accents sound funny” and “women should go to the trouble to look like Salma Hayek and be open and loving while I play a furious/depressed character who doesn’t have a grasp of basic hygiene”, I gotta question your worldview.

I just, I just don’t know how he can keep going back to those plot-points over and over without noticing how angry and unpleasant they are. And I dunno, maybe they’re not like that anymore. I don’t devour each and every movie he appears in, and the ones I’ve seen recently (those two Murder Mystery movies and the Hotel Transylvania series) are perfectly fine. And there’s all the non Happy Madison shit, your Uncut Gems or Netflix Movie I Haven’t Watched Yet Where He’s a Basketball Scout, those are usually pretty solid flicks. But man, he did it for so long that I just struggle is all.

Odds & Ends

-The first few times I went to my in-laws’ house I noticed that there were a bunch of mugs with strange but familiar symbols on their sides on top of one of the bookshelves. I didn’t think much of it and for some reason assumed that they were Star Trek related and that the symbols were of the Klingon high command. Probably because my stepfather had a Trek coffee mug where a Bird of Prey appeared on the outside whenever someone poured hot liquid into it. Then, years later, I was sitting in their living room and it occurred to me that Desi’s dad wasn’t a Star Trek fan and took a closer look at the mugs. My friends, those weren’t Klingon high command symbols, they were radiation symbols. Because my father-in-law who’d worked for the defense department had picked the mugs up at various chemical weapons symposiums just like the ones our Dr. Klein was trying to smash at. He passed away last month, my father-in-law, not Doctor Klein who isn’t a real person and thus doesn’t ever actually die. He was a good man and we all miss him.

Ronnie: Ooh, a skinesode! That could be anything from an episode dealing with impersonation (you’re under someone else’s skin) or softcore pornography. Despite the sexual references that have been increasing this season, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is firmly the former. Woody Samms is a criminal on the run from a mob contract put out by Little Tony, so he body switches in order to go out on the town. This is established when his daughter comes back to his room only to find a chimp counting money and her dad’s body chimping around. Now, a chimp counting money–that’s basically my platonic ideal of television. You put that on for 45 minutes and I’m captivated. Unfortunately, the chimpnanigans end with this scene, but the show makes up for it by being insane. See, Woody needs to get to Little Tony, and when you’ve got body switching powers every problem looks like it can be solved by body switching, so he figures becoming a reporter is a way to do it. We’ve had guys with Superman’s powers, but we haven’t had a guy literally become Superman. Pulling out all the stops for Season 4.

You’ll be counting money like this chimp is if you put a chimp in your movie or TV show. Alas, we’re probably past the days of using real ones for our entertainment. Thanks a lot, societal progress!

Not only is “other asshole gets Superman powers” a tried and true story idea, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” gives Dean Cain the opportunity to stretch his wings, playing his character out of character purposefully. Usually shows give these chances to the principal cast when they’ve run out of ideas, so if you’re wondering why the third to last episode of the series is this, that might be why. Woody soon figures out Clark is Superman in a pretty entertaining sequence. He first starts experiencing all the requisite powers–superhearing, superstrength, vision powers–but then it culminates in him ripping open his shirt. Again, they’re lucky this isn’t on Cinemax, because the chances of inadvertent shirt ripping are much higher so Clark’s secret identity would be outed in all sorts of salacious situations. Meanwhile, Tim Thomerson (Jack Deth in the Trancers quintology) gets to wander around and go “Lois?” every so often. Not a fair trade off in my opinion, but Cain’s the star here. His first encounter with her ends with him arrested. Samms’ daughter (played by the daughter in Step by Step!) provides the voice of reason, saying “Clark Kent didn’t do anything to you. You can’t just take his body”. Appealing to a career criminal’s sense of decency doesn’t seem to work, and things complicate when the body switch starts crapping out and Lex’s Indian henchman (remember him? He’s back!) explains that to finalize the body switching he has to kill Clark in Woody’s body.

Fortunately a series of contrivances put the daughter in danger, he has to relinquish control of the Superman body to save her, the effect drains his energy, yadda yadda yadda. The important part is that as Woody is dying, a dog licks his hand (his hand holding the magic body switchin’ stone) and it’s VERY heavily implied that while Woody the human dies, Woody the dog lives on. It raises the question: what happens after this episode? Is Becky obliged to take care of his dog father for as long as the dog father shall live? Because that’s a pretty shitty thing to do, as a dad, to force your kid to take care of an animal just on the off chance it houses the consciousness of their parent. That’s not saying anything of the stress of being a dog man. Despite the popular book series by Dav Pilkey, I imagine it’s rough. Get it?

He’s fucked if anyone rips open his shirt, which is proof that Superman just wouldn’t work on Earth-Cinemax.

Chris: First things first, if you ever want an encapsulation of how it was that Lois & Clark fumbled the bag, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is the go to example. How do you open with a monkey counting money and then never go back to it? I mean, I understand in story terms how they resolved that particular scene, I’m speaking more generally, or even existentially. You’ve got a smart monkey, you’ve got Superman, you know about Beppo the Super Monkey (because everyone knows about Beppo the Super Monkey), do I have to draw you a fucking picture? I can see how maybe you don’t go through all the trouble to introduce a literal super powered kryptonian monkey who stowed away on little Kal-El’s ship and then scampered away after they crash landed on earth but before the Kent’s found Kal. But you better by god body swap Superman with a monkey and somehow let him keep his powers! I don’t even understand how this is a conversation!

That aside, yes, this episode was suitably nutty. Remember way back in season one when Clark had to go undercover as a tough guy in order to help bust an arson scheme? It’s the one where Lois had to dress up as a chicken because the writers hated Teri Hatcher (I assume). We both talked about how stilted and unconvincing Cain was as Clark-Pretending-to-be-Badass, well, this is more Clark-is-a-Good-for-Nothing-Louse and he pulls it off with a fair amount of aplomb. I specifically liked the scene where he’s trying to get Lois into bed while waving off an escalating crisis they hear about over their police scanner. The way he goes from not caring (what about the shooting?) to faux-sympathy (oh yeah, that’s, uh, that’s a terrible shame) to dismissive (sounds like the police have it under control) and then finally grudgingly willing to help all while vibrating with horniness is complex and smooth in a way that makes me wonder why Cain couldn’t be that good more often.

The rest of the episode is standard stuff, but as we keep pointing out: “standard” is pretty fucking high quality for a show like Lois & Clark. And then the possessed dog gag swoops in and allows it to go out on a high note. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Woody body-swaps with the dog, it closes with a freeze-frame close up of the dog staring into the camera with glowing red eyes. It’s a spectacular ending that leaves us with so many more questions than answers. Is this supposed to be a good thing? Because it seems like the last thing Woody does in life after redeeming himself is to murder a dog. Accidentally, but still. And why are the dog’s eyes glowing? The monkey’s eyes didn’t glow when he’s swapped out (I’m assuming the monkey is a he because Woody possessing a lady monkey would be totally gay), nor did Clark’s. There’s only two episodes left, and I have to assume they’re about the demon-dog rising to the top of Metropolis’s criminal underworld and a spectacular final battle royale with the Man of Steel that leaves Metropolis a smoldering ruin. I for one can’t wait to see it.

Ronnie: Chris, when you’re right you’re right. They had the chimp already, so presumably they had the chimp for the day if they had him at all. Let’s not get into the ethics of whether using chimps for our entertainment and just conclude that more chimp equals better episode. Again, I’m surprised late Season 4 Lois & Clark even sprang for one when the scene didn’t require its inclusion. The scene could’ve established the guy can switch bodies some other way. The choice was made to include a chimp and they could’ve done more with it, so that’s a shame. Regardless, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” has a lot going for it: Dean Cain being allowed to flex his acting range, there’s magic involved, the aforementioned chimp, and an attempt at emotional resonance with the father/daughter relationship. Now, that resonance doesn’t work, but it’s attempted. I’d almost argue Woody learns a lesson from all this body switching, but it’s reliant on the notion that this episode was followed by, and exists in the continuity of, 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd. You were a little too old for it, I think, Chris, but it was a Nickelodeon program about a shitty kid (voiced by Seth Green in Season 1, the brother from Wonder Years in subsequent seasons) who’s transformed into a dog and in order to undo the transformation he must perform 100 deeds. That means it would’ve had to last 100 episodes for him to clear his debt; the show lasted 40. That means poor Eddie stayed a dog and given dog lifespan expectancy he is long dead.

I like the premise that everyone’s kiss is unique, like a snowflake, and can be identified as such.

Chris: So I read years ago that Paul Newman, IMO the greatest movie star/salad dressing magnate of all time, said that the first fifteen pages are the most important part of any screenplay, and the last fifteen minutes are the most important part of any movie. His reasoning being that a script has to grab its reader as quickly as possible in order to keep their interest, and that audiences tend to decide how they feel about a movie by how it ends. I think the cash counting monkey opening of “I’ve got you” and the glowing red-eyed little dog ending are an example of a variation on that idea. Basically if you start and end strong, you can cram a bunch of junk into the middle and people will swallow it. I think that reasoning can work for a movie or even a couple of episodes of television, but we’re coming to the end of Lois & Clark, and I can’t help but feel like it’s an object lesson in how that philosophy doesn’t work over the entirety of a show.

When we started this fool’s errand I was struck by how much I enjoyed the shaggy weirdness of large chunks of the first season. It had its share of garbage of course, but on the whole I liked it more than I didn’t. I think when we wrap this whole sorry affair up next time, we’ll find that the fourth season has the longest string of Not Terrible Episodes since that first season and maybe even of the entire run. We can use the final post-mortem entry of Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie to run the numbers, but no matter what we find, I think we can both agree that once the two actually got married, the show hit a groove that it managed to ride all the way to the end of the line. Or, I guess to the antepenultimate point of the line, we’ll have to see how the last two episodes fare before we have the whole picture. Lois & Clark ran for eighty eight episodes, and when we began this series, we managed to get out one piece covering two episodes a week for the entire first season and much of the second. If we had managed to stay on course we would have been done in twenty seven weeks, plus the interstitials about other super shows. It’s been three years. You’ve come this far with us, may as well run out the clock with us too.

Odds & Ends

-This might be one of the most sparse episodes of the series, in that only 2 of the 6 main cast appear. I get the Kents, but no Perry or Jimmy? Makes it feel unpopulated.
-There’s a moment where Woody as Clark does a vocal impersonation of Asabi. I like to imagine Dean Cain pitched that himself.
-Joe Piscopo voiced a dog in the 2002 Nickelodeon show 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd, which sounds right, you know?
-Did you know that Peter David himself has sole screenwriting credit for Trancers 4: Jack of Swords, and Trancers 5: Sudden Death? What’s that? You’d never heard of the Trancers movies before this article and have no idea who Peter David is? How I envy you. He’s a comics creator so of course he has a GoFundMe you should contribute to: https://www.gofundme.com/f/peter-david-fund?viewupdates=1&rcid=r01-171961476171-600fd54435a011ef&utm_medium=email&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_email%2B1137-update-supporters-v5b