Chris: Didn’t we already do this? I could have sworn… Last season, right? The VR one? Am I making this up? Am I having a stroke? I smell toast, do you smell toast? What year is it? Hello, hi, and welcome to what I hope is another edition of Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie, the only series that even remembers that there was a TV show on in the mid 90’s about Superman, by the only two guys dumb enough to spend time writing about it. Today, assuming it is today, we’re talking about episodes seventeen and eighteen of the fourth season, “Faster Than a Speeding Vixen” and “Shadow of a Doubt.” Unless it’s last year and we’re talking about season three’s “Virtually Destroyed.” In which case I’m not really actually sure of anything. I’m not sure I’m sitting here writing this, and I’m not sure you’re out there reading it. If I’m being honest, I’m pretty sure you aren’t out there either way, why would anyone read this? Is this all just an elaborate fantasy that I’ve built to escape an uncertain and terrifying future? Are you a figment of my imagination? Am I a figment of yours? If I am, can you maybe make me a little thinner and cooler?
Arms crossed resignation seems to be a good reaction to Season 4 of Lois & Clark.
“Vixen” opens with a strong hint that what we are watching is indeed from the fourth season as the first thing we see is Lois and Clark laying half-dressed on their kitchen floor. In season three, as you may recall, our heroes were barely allowed to hold hands for fear of a suggestion of impropriety despite being, you know, self-sufficient adults in their early 30’s who were dating and considering marriage. Which they of course did, in one of the most baffling episodes of television I’ve ever seen, and it’s pretty much been a non-stop Fuck-O-Rama ever since. I’m actually starting to miss when they’d just give each other kuniks while baby talking one another. Kunik, by the way, is the word Inuit’s use to describe what we once called Eskimo Kisses. It’s okay, I can use that word because I saw the Looney Tunes where Bugs dresses up like a woman and smacks an Inuit in the face with a fish in order to help a baby penguin get to the north pole.
Anywho, once they manage to pause humping for a goddamned second and finish breakfast, L&C head to the old Daily Planet only to discover that it’s been sold once again. What’s that you say? You didn’t know The Daily Planet was for sale? Well neither did Lois or Clark, and if Clark doesn’t know about something, that means Superman doesn’t know about it. You think you deserve to know something Superman doesn’t? You think you’re better than him? The fucking cheek on you. The new owner of the paper is a heretofore unseen character named Leslie Luckaby who hails from Australia and doesn’t have an accent because he went to school in the states or something. Why they didn’t make Leslie American or hire someone who can do an Australian accent is a mystery for the ages. Well, the thing about the accent is, he’s presumably from Australia because he’s L&C’s version of Lex Luthor II, Lex’s illegitimate son who appeared to take over LexCorp after Lex’s death in a fiery helicopter crash. This of course means that (drum roll) Leslie is also Lex’s illegitimate son from Australia! But wait! You may be saying to yourself. Didn’t they already do a Lex’s secret kid episode back in season three? Wasn’t that the whole deal with your opening paragraph?
Yes. Yes they did. Yes it was.
Some shows illustrate a ticking biological clock by way of dancing CGI baby. Others illustrate it by way of..pope holding baby dolls? Man, I don’t know.
Ronnie: Lex posing as his Australian son…I don’t want to say it was a low point, but it definitely speaks to something being in the water at DC Comics in the 90s. That decade also brought us Warrior Guy Gardner and the Dr. Fate with face tattoos. But first things first: protection! Or the lack thereof. After fucking, our titular couple realize neither of them used protection, or “precaution” as they call it. So put “baby” on the possible plotlines list. Patrick Cassidy, brother of Shaun and uncle of the chick who played not-Black Canary on Arrow, has bought the Daily Planet and a superheroine named Vixen (no relation to the DC Comics superhero of same name) is stopping crimes before Superman can. She’s also disposing of threats permanently. This seems like Lois & Clark’s version of Maxima maybe? She has a sort of flirtatious relationship with Superman. There’s a scene wherein the cast misinterprets their relationship, with Perry giving the double thumbs up to the prospect of Superman and Vixen fucking.
While this is going on, a new baddie creatively named Mr. Smith is killing CEOs in order to consolidate power. Who is Mr. Smith? He’s this disfigured guy living in the sewers whose makeup looks like it was done by the people who did Ron Perlman’s in Beauty and the Beast. He’s got a bonsai tree he tends to that, get this, is a metaphor for him: resilient despite an ugly appearance. Clever, Lois & Clark. I sorta wish we weren’t still introducing new baddies at this point, where we’d have a rotating cast of villains to choose from, each picked for their suitability for the story they want to tell. Oh well. This is what we’re given. Vixen could’ve been something but she dies in the end and she doesn’t even really die because she’s a dang robot. Lois & Clark and deflating resolutions: two great tastes that go well together.
Prospects can’t be that bad for him. It was the 90s! We loved freaks. Bill Maher was hosting Politically Incorrect by now.
Chris: Did I ever tell you that my dad let me cut school and go into the city to get a copy of Superman #75 back when it came out? That was in November of 1992, and I hadn’t been 14 for even a month yet. I don’t remember why I didn’t just go to my local comic shop, maybe it was a little far for me to walk in that weather or maybe the one in Philly opened earlier or maybe I just thought it would be cooler to do it that way. Either way I have a very distinct memory of waiting in line outside the store listening to Automatic for the People because it was 1992 and that was the law. What made it even cooler was the store was on South Street, the street for freaks and weirdos in Philadelphia (actually mostly tourists, but I was 14, what the fuck did I know?). There’s even a song about South Street by The Orlons, a Philly Soul band (Yeah, Hall & Oates weren’t the only ones. Read a book. Jesus). That’s where tourists went to get overpriced cheesesteaks, where the Tower Records that carried bootleg Japanese laserdiscs of Twin Peaks was, and the Zipperhead that Rodney Anonymous was walking to when he met the Punk Rock Girl from the song of the same name.
Every time I’d been to South Street it had been nighttime; the sidewalks and road were always packed with people, all the businesses were lit up, and music blared out from a half dozen different shops, restaurants and bars. Back then and at that age it felt like the center of the alternative universe. Standing outside a store on a quiet, empty street famous for its nightlife on a chilly, gray November morning when I should have been in school was a truly surreal and vaguely transgressive experience. I bring this up to explain part of why I have such a fondness for the Lex Luthor II era of Superman, with all its gonzo weirdness. It was the shit I cared about right as the world was opening up before me. I’m pretty sure we’ve already mentioned that Lex II was also having regular sex with Supergirl then too. But don’t worry, Supergirl wasn’t actually Supergirl, she was an androgynous alien shapeshifter who took the form of Supergirl as a tribute to Superman (if you want to honor someone, make yourself look as much like a beloved relative who died in that person’s arms and start fucking his nemesis), so it wasn’t weird or anything. The other reason I bring it up is because it was my turn to write and I’d completely run out of things to say about this episode. Back to you.
Imagine if he sounded like Crocodile Dundee. Always declaring what’s a knife, putting shrimp on the barbie, engaging in homophobia that seemed all right then but is hard to defend now. It’d be great, wouldn’t it?
Ronnie: The “no kill” thing is odd to bring up in the context of Lois & Clark, only because there are so few situations in which killing would be an attractive and/or necessary proposition. For the most part Superman on Lois & Clark faces bank robbers or guys who used to be in The A-Team, not world ending threats. There’s no Zod here. That’s where killing comes in; like, “why doesn’t Batman kill” comes after the Joker commits a huge atrocity, not when he drenches someone with the squirting flower on his lapel. Superman’s quarry on this show is so underpowered comparatively that the obvious reason Superman doesn’t kill is he has no reason to do so. I just think it’s interesting that here and now they’re interrogating Superman’s policy of not killing unless there’s no other option (and there’s always an option for the purposes of this show) and they’re doing it with an American Gladiator.
Of interest too is the mutated effort at adapting the Lex poses as his own son storyline that was recent in the comics, to which the program chucks the central conceit but keeps some of the background details, such as the Australianness but not the accent. He’s pretending to be this charming guy, and it does raise the question of what happened to James Earl Jones. Remember? He was the owner of the Daily Planet in I wanna say Season 1. Maybe he killed him and took his company. Talk about a hostile takeover, right? It’s pretty late in the game to be introducing a son of Lex, especially one whose age makes it concerning that Lex is the father. I mean, upon researching this John Shea is 15 years older than Cain and Hatcher, but still. John Shea: 1949. Patrick Cassidy: 1962. Could Lex have knocked up a lady at the age of 13? Not impossible but pretty unlikely. Anyway, we already had those two brothers obsessed with Lex. There’s already been a successor plotline, so doing it again pitches it as some sort of revenge cycle. It’s the robots going after Thundercleese and immediately getting killed each day on The Brak Show. Obscure pull, you say? You bet your bippy!
Odds & Ends
-Leslie Luckaby explains away his lack of Australian accent by claiming he watched too many American movies as a child.
-Vixen is portrayed by American Gladiator “Ice”, who appeared in two episodes of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.
-Paul F Tompkins does a long bit about working at a novelty hat shop called Hats in the Belfry on one of his albums, that place was on South Street too. I bought at least two jester caps from there in the 90’s.
Chris: So I’m looking back at the first half of this season and the last half of the previous one. Last season followed up the moronic non-wedding with the delightfully unhinged Wanda Detroit Saga, but that fell right off a cliff when Lois somehow got double-amnesia(?), forgetting who she was again and the psychiatrist at whatever clinic she was at falling in love with her and trying to get her to run away with him. Once that cleared up, the last two episodes of the season dealt with the narrative black hole that was the whole New Krypton arc, an ill-conceived attempt at widescreen sci-fi scope by a show with a weekly budget commensurate with the amount of quarters I would scam off my high school friends to get fries and a soda everyday at lunch over the same period of time. Somehow, that albatross finished off season three and managed to take up the first two episodes of season four. They followed that up with the actual wedding, an episode where Delta Burke is the antagonist that needs to be seen in order to be believed; and then there was the Honeymoon episode, wherein H.G. Welles informs the newlyweds that due to an ancient curse, consummating their wedding would somehow lead to the heat death of the universe.
Advantage of shadow antagonist: very cheap on the budget.
That run of eight episodes constitute the worst stretch of Lois and Clark, which is saying something. There’s one ep right before the New Krypton bullshit where L&C go to her high school reunion and Clark gets shrunk and needs to perform super deeds wearing a ken-doll scuba suit and mask because he can’t fit into his costume anymore. That was pretty decent. But the rest is pure, uncut, ass. I bring all this up because the fourteen episodes that follow the entertainment crater that is the honeymoon episode, are probably the strongest run that the show managed to put together. Don’t get me wrong, none of them are great, but none of them are terrible either. There was the two parter where Lois got framed and sent to the hoosegow, the one where they try to make friends with another couple who turn out to be international assassins. Lois gets a temporary promotion to editor in chief in one, and it puts a strain on her relationship with Clark because they’re not partners any more and she has to kill one of his stories. The Christmas episode with Mxyzptlk running a Groundhog Day on Clark was pretty clever, and then there was the one where Downtown Julie Brown gets a candid snap of L&C making out while Clark is still in his super-duds. Like I said, nothing in there is terrific, but they all had zip and purpose and had to do with addressing issues that married couples face.
And the Lex’s son arc is pretty decent too. Yeah, they did it before, but still. It’s well thought out, nicely paced, the guy playing Lex Jr seems to be having a good time. The whole thing has a little pep in it’s step and I gotta wonder, for what seems like the millionth time, what the actual fuck was going on at the end of season three and beginning of season four? I understand that they had to wait for the wedding to happen in the comics before they could do it on the show (side bar: can you imagine current Marvel editor-in-chief and guy-who-pretended-to-be-Japanese-to-get-writing-work C.B. Cebulski trying to dictate terms like that to Kevin Feige? I bet he doesn’t even have Feige’s assistant’s phone number), but a lot of these ideas work just as well with an engaged couple as they do with a married one. What if the wedding had been postponed because Lois got locked up instead of amnesia? Like there’s some Wanda Detroit related shenanigan that needs to be cleared up and she’s behind bars and she’s not sure what happened because she was concussed and it’s a big dramatic mystery? And what if they went on a conventional honeymoon and made friends with the assassins there? The point is you can inch the characters forward while holding off on Big Events. Maybe if they hadn’t spent so much time treading water while they waited for the comics L&C to make it happen, the show wouldn’t have been dead in the water by the time it did happen. What a stupid fucking show. Even when it’s not terrible it’s aggravating as fuck.
How death by shadow occurs.
Ronnie: Yes it is. This may not be the most dire period for the show–I concur with Chris that it was that stretch of Season 3–this still isn’t great, by which I mean great by the show’s standards. That’d be at some juncture in Season 1 when it was possible this was going somewhere. Enough about that; onto the task at hand. “Shadow of a Doubt” is part 2 of a 3 part epic that pits our heroes against the machinations of Lex Luthor Jr. It begins with Superman failing to stop a murder that was apparently committed by Vixen. The murdered doctor had been getting money from a “Caribbean Imports” in the Cayman Islands, a narrative shorthand for corruption. Leslie arranges for Lois and Clark to attend the Journalistdrome in Atlantic City but calls Clark off so he can interview Michael Massee, who as you know is on death row for killing Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow. This allows Leslie to surprise Lois in her hotel room and make some veiled sexual threats at her. It becomes a bullshit test of the relationship because something something keeping secrets. Look, we know they’re not going to actually have a relationship crisis so why bother? We’re almost at the end here, people!
Which makes it so vexing this is a perfectly decent episode, albeit sort of a low grade X-Files. See, the guy killing everybody is a shadowmonster, and it brings to mind the one where Tony Shalhoub’s shadow is inadvertently killing people. (“Soft Light” was the first episode written by Battle Creek’s Vince Gilligan, turns out.) I like how very little information is given about the shadowmonster, besides that his name is Hanson. Like the band of boys with long hair so the joke was that they looked like girls? No origin story, no individual motivation, just hey here’s a guy and he’s made of shadows, deal with it. I appreciate the audacity. Hanson the shadowmonster is eventually murdered by Clark using his heat vision to reflect light off a chandelier, but remember it was a last resort or something so it’s okay. Hanson the shadowmonster is thought to be in the employ of a guy, but that guy is the fall guy for Leslie Luckaby and his aide de camp Mr. Smith. By the end of the episode Lois and Clark know he’s Lex’s son and Leslie and Smith know, via a John Shea voice recording, that Superman and Clark Kent are one and the same. Yes, Virginia, it’s a three part story!
I would stab a baby to see Kurt Sutter take a crack at a Lab Rats MC FX series starring Dr. Klein. Season 4 revealing he’s in a motorcycle gang almost makes me wish for a Season 5 that could properly explore the rough and tumble outlaw lifestyle of STAR Labs geeks.
Again, it’s absurd they’re still trying this late in the game. I know they had the expectation of Season 5, but still. This would actually be a pretty good status quo for the series: Lex’s son knows Clark’s secret identity, Lois and Clark know he knows and that he is the Luthor prodigal son, Lex’s son owns the Daily Planet and therefore can turn the screws at their job, he also has the hots for Lois so there’s a love triangle thing going on, and he’s got a rogues gallery of shadowmen and disfigured weirdos to throw Superman’s way. Given the story ends with the next episode this won’t happen, but there’s worse paths they could’ve taken. Superman sorely needs a recurring foe and Tempus, while entertaining, doesn’t quite fit the bill. Why not Lex Jr.? Patrick Cassidy does an all right job in the show even if he’s not at all convincing as an Australian.
Chris: Right? This is what I’m saying. Lois & Clark seems to have figured itself out just as it became unsalvageable. This is lively, this is interesting, this is even a little bit unpredictable. I really like how they’ve been experimenting with multi-episode stories, it’s harder to predict what’s coming when there isn’t a ticking clock counting down the minutes until the story expires. Sometimes an adventure takes a single episode, sometimes it takes two, sometimes it takes three. That sort of elasticity gives the show a little tension and depth because they can throttle the story faster and slower depending on what it needs. L&C doing actual journalism to connect the dots between Leslie and Lex has actual narrative weight because it takes a little time for the whole thing to come together. You can build a little tension when you don’t have to crack the case by the end of the second act break. One of the reasons I suggested doing this ridiculous column to you is I wanted to see what comic book tv was like before comic book tv was a thing. I wanted to watch something that struggled with form and tone because there wasn’t an E-Z template for season long superhero television like there is today. And I think, and long last, the show has found its groove. At the very end. Hooray?
Pretty funny body outline, admittedly.
The up-side to all this is I’m looking at the episodes to come with more optimism than I have in a long long while. If season three wasn’t already famous (in the loser community) for being a long wet fart, it would have become readily apparent the moment Clark married a frog eating clone. Clones are never a sign that your story is going well (Who actually likes Attack of the Clones, and don’t say you, because I’ll know you’re lying!). And that half-assedness attached itself to the rest of the show like a valet’s BO to the interior of a Saab. It infected everyone that came in contact with it. But the showrunners must have finally gone ahead and washed their show in tomato sauce and/or abandoned it in an alley in order to buy a new show that looked exactly like the old one because the stink is finally gone. I’m not saying I want to binge the last six episodes of the show or anything, but I’m not expecting to watch it with my hands covering my eyes anymore either. And maybe when we’re done I’ll even miss it a little? No. Obviously not. Don’t be so fucking stupid.
Ronnie: I don’t often bring up my podcast–no, not the Criminal Minds one, the other one–but I think it’s appropriate to mention this episode reminds me of a moment in the Timothy Zahn Thrawn book trilogy in which Han Solo had to fight a shadowmonster and he defeated him in a beer fire. I bring it up because it’d be a much better conclusion than “Shadow Of A Doubt”. Like I said, it’s a fine episode, but it’d be better than fine if Superman doused the guy in liquor and set him on fire and that’s how he shuffles off the mortal coil. Superman trickshotting his heat vision off a chandelier just doesn’t compare. I’ve sort of exhausted all I want to say about this episode other than I’m perversely looking forward to how they resolve all of this, including the subplot about Dr. Klein helping Superman figure out if he can have children. If tradition holds, it’ll be equal parts stupid, insane and underwhelming. Tune in next time for the penultimate installment of Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie. Yes, we’re dragging ourselves to the finish line no matter what.
Odds & Ends
-”And John Shea as the voice of Lex Luthor” is an inherently amusing credit.
-”Lois, we don’t know how many sons Lex had” is great dialogue, expertly delivered by Dean Cain.
Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie: “Faster Than A Speeding Vixen”/”Shadow Of A Doubt”
Chris: Didn’t we already do this? I could have sworn… Last season, right? The VR one? Am I making this up? Am I having a stroke? I smell toast, do you smell toast? What year is it? Hello, hi, and welcome to what I hope is another edition of Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie, the only series that even remembers that there was a TV show on in the mid 90’s about Superman, by the only two guys dumb enough to spend time writing about it. Today, assuming it is today, we’re talking about episodes seventeen and eighteen of the fourth season, “Faster Than a Speeding Vixen” and “Shadow of a Doubt.” Unless it’s last year and we’re talking about season three’s “Virtually Destroyed.” In which case I’m not really actually sure of anything. I’m not sure I’m sitting here writing this, and I’m not sure you’re out there reading it. If I’m being honest, I’m pretty sure you aren’t out there either way, why would anyone read this? Is this all just an elaborate fantasy that I’ve built to escape an uncertain and terrifying future? Are you a figment of my imagination? Am I a figment of yours? If I am, can you maybe make me a little thinner and cooler?
Arms crossed resignation seems to be a good reaction to Season 4 of Lois & Clark.
“Vixen” opens with a strong hint that what we are watching is indeed from the fourth season as the first thing we see is Lois and Clark laying half-dressed on their kitchen floor. In season three, as you may recall, our heroes were barely allowed to hold hands for fear of a suggestion of impropriety despite being, you know, self-sufficient adults in their early 30’s who were dating and considering marriage. Which they of course did, in one of the most baffling episodes of television I’ve ever seen, and it’s pretty much been a non-stop Fuck-O-Rama ever since. I’m actually starting to miss when they’d just give each other kuniks while baby talking one another. Kunik, by the way, is the word Inuit’s use to describe what we once called Eskimo Kisses. It’s okay, I can use that word because I saw the Looney Tunes where Bugs dresses up like a woman and smacks an Inuit in the face with a fish in order to help a baby penguin get to the north pole.
Anywho, once they manage to pause humping for a goddamned second and finish breakfast, L&C head to the old Daily Planet only to discover that it’s been sold once again. What’s that you say? You didn’t know The Daily Planet was for sale? Well neither did Lois or Clark, and if Clark doesn’t know about something, that means Superman doesn’t know about it. You think you deserve to know something Superman doesn’t? You think you’re better than him? The fucking cheek on you. The new owner of the paper is a heretofore unseen character named Leslie Luckaby who hails from Australia and doesn’t have an accent because he went to school in the states or something. Why they didn’t make Leslie American or hire someone who can do an Australian accent is a mystery for the ages. Well, the thing about the accent is, he’s presumably from Australia because he’s L&C’s version of Lex Luthor II, Lex’s illegitimate son who appeared to take over LexCorp after Lex’s death in a fiery helicopter crash. This of course means that (drum roll) Leslie is also Lex’s illegitimate son from Australia! But wait! You may be saying to yourself. Didn’t they already do a Lex’s secret kid episode back in season three? Wasn’t that the whole deal with your opening paragraph?
Yes. Yes they did. Yes it was.
Some shows illustrate a ticking biological clock by way of dancing CGI baby. Others illustrate it by way of..pope holding baby dolls? Man, I don’t know.
Ronnie: Lex posing as his Australian son…I don’t want to say it was a low point, but it definitely speaks to something being in the water at DC Comics in the 90s. That decade also brought us Warrior Guy Gardner and the Dr. Fate with face tattoos. But first things first: protection! Or the lack thereof. After fucking, our titular couple realize neither of them used protection, or “precaution” as they call it. So put “baby” on the possible plotlines list. Patrick Cassidy, brother of Shaun and uncle of the chick who played not-Black Canary on Arrow, has bought the Daily Planet and a superheroine named Vixen (no relation to the DC Comics superhero of same name) is stopping crimes before Superman can. She’s also disposing of threats permanently. This seems like Lois & Clark’s version of Maxima maybe? She has a sort of flirtatious relationship with Superman. There’s a scene wherein the cast misinterprets their relationship, with Perry giving the double thumbs up to the prospect of Superman and Vixen fucking.
While this is going on, a new baddie creatively named Mr. Smith is killing CEOs in order to consolidate power. Who is Mr. Smith? He’s this disfigured guy living in the sewers whose makeup looks like it was done by the people who did Ron Perlman’s in Beauty and the Beast. He’s got a bonsai tree he tends to that, get this, is a metaphor for him: resilient despite an ugly appearance. Clever, Lois & Clark. I sorta wish we weren’t still introducing new baddies at this point, where we’d have a rotating cast of villains to choose from, each picked for their suitability for the story they want to tell. Oh well. This is what we’re given. Vixen could’ve been something but she dies in the end and she doesn’t even really die because she’s a dang robot. Lois & Clark and deflating resolutions: two great tastes that go well together.
Prospects can’t be that bad for him. It was the 90s! We loved freaks. Bill Maher was hosting Politically Incorrect by now.
Chris: Did I ever tell you that my dad let me cut school and go into the city to get a copy of Superman #75 back when it came out? That was in November of 1992, and I hadn’t been 14 for even a month yet. I don’t remember why I didn’t just go to my local comic shop, maybe it was a little far for me to walk in that weather or maybe the one in Philly opened earlier or maybe I just thought it would be cooler to do it that way. Either way I have a very distinct memory of waiting in line outside the store listening to Automatic for the People because it was 1992 and that was the law. What made it even cooler was the store was on South Street, the street for freaks and weirdos in Philadelphia (actually mostly tourists, but I was 14, what the fuck did I know?). There’s even a song about South Street by The Orlons, a Philly Soul band (Yeah, Hall & Oates weren’t the only ones. Read a book. Jesus). That’s where tourists went to get overpriced cheesesteaks, where the Tower Records that carried bootleg Japanese laserdiscs of Twin Peaks was, and the Zipperhead that Rodney Anonymous was walking to when he met the Punk Rock Girl from the song of the same name.
Every time I’d been to South Street it had been nighttime; the sidewalks and road were always packed with people, all the businesses were lit up, and music blared out from a half dozen different shops, restaurants and bars. Back then and at that age it felt like the center of the alternative universe. Standing outside a store on a quiet, empty street famous for its nightlife on a chilly, gray November morning when I should have been in school was a truly surreal and vaguely transgressive experience. I bring this up to explain part of why I have such a fondness for the Lex Luthor II era of Superman, with all its gonzo weirdness. It was the shit I cared about right as the world was opening up before me. I’m pretty sure we’ve already mentioned that Lex II was also having regular sex with Supergirl then too. But don’t worry, Supergirl wasn’t actually Supergirl, she was an androgynous alien shapeshifter who took the form of Supergirl as a tribute to Superman (if you want to honor someone, make yourself look as much like a beloved relative who died in that person’s arms and start fucking his nemesis), so it wasn’t weird or anything. The other reason I bring it up is because it was my turn to write and I’d completely run out of things to say about this episode. Back to you.
Imagine if he sounded like Crocodile Dundee. Always declaring what’s a knife, putting shrimp on the barbie, engaging in homophobia that seemed all right then but is hard to defend now. It’d be great, wouldn’t it?
Ronnie: The “no kill” thing is odd to bring up in the context of Lois & Clark, only because there are so few situations in which killing would be an attractive and/or necessary proposition. For the most part Superman on Lois & Clark faces bank robbers or guys who used to be in The A-Team, not world ending threats. There’s no Zod here. That’s where killing comes in; like, “why doesn’t Batman kill” comes after the Joker commits a huge atrocity, not when he drenches someone with the squirting flower on his lapel. Superman’s quarry on this show is so underpowered comparatively that the obvious reason Superman doesn’t kill is he has no reason to do so. I just think it’s interesting that here and now they’re interrogating Superman’s policy of not killing unless there’s no other option (and there’s always an option for the purposes of this show) and they’re doing it with an American Gladiator.
Of interest too is the mutated effort at adapting the Lex poses as his own son storyline that was recent in the comics, to which the program chucks the central conceit but keeps some of the background details, such as the Australianness but not the accent. He’s pretending to be this charming guy, and it does raise the question of what happened to James Earl Jones. Remember? He was the owner of the Daily Planet in I wanna say Season 1. Maybe he killed him and took his company. Talk about a hostile takeover, right? It’s pretty late in the game to be introducing a son of Lex, especially one whose age makes it concerning that Lex is the father. I mean, upon researching this John Shea is 15 years older than Cain and Hatcher, but still. John Shea: 1949. Patrick Cassidy: 1962. Could Lex have knocked up a lady at the age of 13? Not impossible but pretty unlikely. Anyway, we already had those two brothers obsessed with Lex. There’s already been a successor plotline, so doing it again pitches it as some sort of revenge cycle. It’s the robots going after Thundercleese and immediately getting killed each day on The Brak Show. Obscure pull, you say? You bet your bippy!
Odds & Ends
-Leslie Luckaby explains away his lack of Australian accent by claiming he watched too many American movies as a child.
-Vixen is portrayed by American Gladiator “Ice”, who appeared in two episodes of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.
-Paul F Tompkins does a long bit about working at a novelty hat shop called Hats in the Belfry on one of his albums, that place was on South Street too. I bought at least two jester caps from there in the 90’s.
Chris: So I’m looking back at the first half of this season and the last half of the previous one. Last season followed up the moronic non-wedding with the delightfully unhinged Wanda Detroit Saga, but that fell right off a cliff when Lois somehow got double-amnesia(?), forgetting who she was again and the psychiatrist at whatever clinic she was at falling in love with her and trying to get her to run away with him. Once that cleared up, the last two episodes of the season dealt with the narrative black hole that was the whole New Krypton arc, an ill-conceived attempt at widescreen sci-fi scope by a show with a weekly budget commensurate with the amount of quarters I would scam off my high school friends to get fries and a soda everyday at lunch over the same period of time. Somehow, that albatross finished off season three and managed to take up the first two episodes of season four. They followed that up with the actual wedding, an episode where Delta Burke is the antagonist that needs to be seen in order to be believed; and then there was the Honeymoon episode, wherein H.G. Welles informs the newlyweds that due to an ancient curse, consummating their wedding would somehow lead to the heat death of the universe.
Advantage of shadow antagonist: very cheap on the budget.
That run of eight episodes constitute the worst stretch of Lois and Clark, which is saying something. There’s one ep right before the New Krypton bullshit where L&C go to her high school reunion and Clark gets shrunk and needs to perform super deeds wearing a ken-doll scuba suit and mask because he can’t fit into his costume anymore. That was pretty decent. But the rest is pure, uncut, ass. I bring all this up because the fourteen episodes that follow the entertainment crater that is the honeymoon episode, are probably the strongest run that the show managed to put together. Don’t get me wrong, none of them are great, but none of them are terrible either. There was the two parter where Lois got framed and sent to the hoosegow, the one where they try to make friends with another couple who turn out to be international assassins. Lois gets a temporary promotion to editor in chief in one, and it puts a strain on her relationship with Clark because they’re not partners any more and she has to kill one of his stories. The Christmas episode with Mxyzptlk running a Groundhog Day on Clark was pretty clever, and then there was the one where Downtown Julie Brown gets a candid snap of L&C making out while Clark is still in his super-duds. Like I said, nothing in there is terrific, but they all had zip and purpose and had to do with addressing issues that married couples face.
And the Lex’s son arc is pretty decent too. Yeah, they did it before, but still. It’s well thought out, nicely paced, the guy playing Lex Jr seems to be having a good time. The whole thing has a little pep in it’s step and I gotta wonder, for what seems like the millionth time, what the actual fuck was going on at the end of season three and beginning of season four? I understand that they had to wait for the wedding to happen in the comics before they could do it on the show (side bar: can you imagine current Marvel editor-in-chief and guy-who-pretended-to-be-Japanese-to-get-writing-work C.B. Cebulski trying to dictate terms like that to Kevin Feige? I bet he doesn’t even have Feige’s assistant’s phone number), but a lot of these ideas work just as well with an engaged couple as they do with a married one. What if the wedding had been postponed because Lois got locked up instead of amnesia? Like there’s some Wanda Detroit related shenanigan that needs to be cleared up and she’s behind bars and she’s not sure what happened because she was concussed and it’s a big dramatic mystery? And what if they went on a conventional honeymoon and made friends with the assassins there? The point is you can inch the characters forward while holding off on Big Events. Maybe if they hadn’t spent so much time treading water while they waited for the comics L&C to make it happen, the show wouldn’t have been dead in the water by the time it did happen. What a stupid fucking show. Even when it’s not terrible it’s aggravating as fuck.
How death by shadow occurs.
Ronnie: Yes it is. This may not be the most dire period for the show–I concur with Chris that it was that stretch of Season 3–this still isn’t great, by which I mean great by the show’s standards. That’d be at some juncture in Season 1 when it was possible this was going somewhere. Enough about that; onto the task at hand. “Shadow of a Doubt” is part 2 of a 3 part epic that pits our heroes against the machinations of Lex Luthor Jr. It begins with Superman failing to stop a murder that was apparently committed by Vixen. The murdered doctor had been getting money from a “Caribbean Imports” in the Cayman Islands, a narrative shorthand for corruption. Leslie arranges for Lois and Clark to attend the Journalistdrome in Atlantic City but calls Clark off so he can interview Michael Massee, who as you know is on death row for killing Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow. This allows Leslie to surprise Lois in her hotel room and make some veiled sexual threats at her. It becomes a bullshit test of the relationship because something something keeping secrets. Look, we know they’re not going to actually have a relationship crisis so why bother? We’re almost at the end here, people!
Which makes it so vexing this is a perfectly decent episode, albeit sort of a low grade X-Files. See, the guy killing everybody is a shadowmonster, and it brings to mind the one where Tony Shalhoub’s shadow is inadvertently killing people. (“Soft Light” was the first episode written by Battle Creek’s Vince Gilligan, turns out.) I like how very little information is given about the shadowmonster, besides that his name is Hanson. Like the band of boys with long hair so the joke was that they looked like girls? No origin story, no individual motivation, just hey here’s a guy and he’s made of shadows, deal with it. I appreciate the audacity. Hanson the shadowmonster is eventually murdered by Clark using his heat vision to reflect light off a chandelier, but remember it was a last resort or something so it’s okay. Hanson the shadowmonster is thought to be in the employ of a guy, but that guy is the fall guy for Leslie Luckaby and his aide de camp Mr. Smith. By the end of the episode Lois and Clark know he’s Lex’s son and Leslie and Smith know, via a John Shea voice recording, that Superman and Clark Kent are one and the same. Yes, Virginia, it’s a three part story!
I would stab a baby to see Kurt Sutter take a crack at a Lab Rats MC FX series starring Dr. Klein. Season 4 revealing he’s in a motorcycle gang almost makes me wish for a Season 5 that could properly explore the rough and tumble outlaw lifestyle of STAR Labs geeks.
Again, it’s absurd they’re still trying this late in the game. I know they had the expectation of Season 5, but still. This would actually be a pretty good status quo for the series: Lex’s son knows Clark’s secret identity, Lois and Clark know he knows and that he is the Luthor prodigal son, Lex’s son owns the Daily Planet and therefore can turn the screws at their job, he also has the hots for Lois so there’s a love triangle thing going on, and he’s got a rogues gallery of shadowmen and disfigured weirdos to throw Superman’s way. Given the story ends with the next episode this won’t happen, but there’s worse paths they could’ve taken. Superman sorely needs a recurring foe and Tempus, while entertaining, doesn’t quite fit the bill. Why not Lex Jr.? Patrick Cassidy does an all right job in the show even if he’s not at all convincing as an Australian.
Chris: Right? This is what I’m saying. Lois & Clark seems to have figured itself out just as it became unsalvageable. This is lively, this is interesting, this is even a little bit unpredictable. I really like how they’ve been experimenting with multi-episode stories, it’s harder to predict what’s coming when there isn’t a ticking clock counting down the minutes until the story expires. Sometimes an adventure takes a single episode, sometimes it takes two, sometimes it takes three. That sort of elasticity gives the show a little tension and depth because they can throttle the story faster and slower depending on what it needs. L&C doing actual journalism to connect the dots between Leslie and Lex has actual narrative weight because it takes a little time for the whole thing to come together. You can build a little tension when you don’t have to crack the case by the end of the second act break. One of the reasons I suggested doing this ridiculous column to you is I wanted to see what comic book tv was like before comic book tv was a thing. I wanted to watch something that struggled with form and tone because there wasn’t an E-Z template for season long superhero television like there is today. And I think, and long last, the show has found its groove. At the very end. Hooray?
Pretty funny body outline, admittedly.
The up-side to all this is I’m looking at the episodes to come with more optimism than I have in a long long while. If season three wasn’t already famous (in the loser community) for being a long wet fart, it would have become readily apparent the moment Clark married a frog eating clone. Clones are never a sign that your story is going well (Who actually likes Attack of the Clones, and don’t say you, because I’ll know you’re lying!). And that half-assedness attached itself to the rest of the show like a valet’s BO to the interior of a Saab. It infected everyone that came in contact with it. But the showrunners must have finally gone ahead and washed their show in tomato sauce and/or abandoned it in an alley in order to buy a new show that looked exactly like the old one because the stink is finally gone. I’m not saying I want to binge the last six episodes of the show or anything, but I’m not expecting to watch it with my hands covering my eyes anymore either. And maybe when we’re done I’ll even miss it a little? No. Obviously not. Don’t be so fucking stupid.
Ronnie: I don’t often bring up my podcast–no, not the Criminal Minds one, the other one–but I think it’s appropriate to mention this episode reminds me of a moment in the Timothy Zahn Thrawn book trilogy in which Han Solo had to fight a shadowmonster and he defeated him in a beer fire. I bring it up because it’d be a much better conclusion than “Shadow Of A Doubt”. Like I said, it’s a fine episode, but it’d be better than fine if Superman doused the guy in liquor and set him on fire and that’s how he shuffles off the mortal coil. Superman trickshotting his heat vision off a chandelier just doesn’t compare. I’ve sort of exhausted all I want to say about this episode other than I’m perversely looking forward to how they resolve all of this, including the subplot about Dr. Klein helping Superman figure out if he can have children. If tradition holds, it’ll be equal parts stupid, insane and underwhelming. Tune in next time for the penultimate installment of Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie. Yes, we’re dragging ourselves to the finish line no matter what.
Odds & Ends
-”And John Shea as the voice of Lex Luthor” is an inherently amusing credit.
-”Lois, we don’t know how many sons Lex had” is great dialogue, expertly delivered by Dean Cain.
Ronnie Gardocki
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