Chris:.The lights are starting to dim here at the Lois and Clark and Chris and Ronnie office as we prepare both for the biggest, most commercial, and therefore best holiday of the year, and begin winding down our coverage of the first season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. The show enters its final third with today’s episodes and it’s easy to get the sense that the writers are starting to tie up what few narrative loose ends there are so that everyone can be in their places for the big finish. Episode sixteen “Foundling” is an opportunity to finally get Superman’s origin story out of the way, as well as move Lex Luthor back to his natural position as the primary antagonist in Superman’s life. It’s pretty successful on both fronts, though it’s far from a smooth ride; this is Lois & Clark we’re talking about.
There’s a paradox at the center of the decision to hide Clark’s origin from the audience as well as Clark himself in that it’s at once a novel way to approach a well worn story and also novel specifically because it strings out a question that presumably every person watching the show would already know the answer to. I would like to meet the person who, in 1994, a) wasn’t fully aware of Superman’s origin story and b) was willing to sit through fifteen episodes of L&C before learning what it was. That’s a lot of mediocre television building up what’s really a fairly straightforward story. It’s not entirely without precedent as John Byrne’s Man of Steel series waited until the last issue to do Supes’ origin, but that was after five issues that summarized fifteen years of Clark’s life and set up an enormous supporting cast. The pilot of L&C covered all that, then just farted around for another fourteen episodes before getting to it. There were a couple of interesting dramatic beats along the way regarding his status on Earth and mining his anxiety about his true purpose, but like I said, we all knew where it was going, so it’s a relief to get there already.
That said, the execution of the story was pretty good. Again, for Lois & Clark. See when Jonathan and Martha found Clark’s crashed ship all those years ago there was also this mysterious softball sized globe in a box. It remained an inert, mysterious keepsake that he’d carried around ever since until one day he was messing around with it and just started, suddenly Clark is having visions of his Kryptonian father Jor-El explaining how and why he came to send his only son to Earth. Jor-El opens his little intergalactic missive by announcing that this is the first of five times he will appear to explain himself. It’s a device that’s at once an effective pressure on Clark to maximize his time with his long dead birth father and an irritating contrivance, because why in the world would Jor-El build in such a ridiculous limitation into what’s a combination will, love letter, and record of the end of an entire civilization to his only child?
Anyway, it just so happens that pretty much right after Clark gets his magic doodad to start working, his apartment is broken into and the darn thing is stolen. What are the odds, right? And that’s where shit gets rocky. It turns out the thief is a smart mouthed teenage street-rat/hunk named Jack who’s living in an abandoned building on the wrong side of the tracks with his useless little brother Denny. Denny is sick or crippled or something, it’s not really clear but he’s enfeebled and sometimes he coughs and it’s Jack’s responsibility to keep them above water, which he does via burglary. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Jack is amongst the most obnoxious characters we’ve come across so far, but he’s also far from the low point of the episode. For that we would have to talk about the Cat Grant/Jimmy Olson B plot, which I’ll leave, along with the episode high point, to my partner Ronnie to unpack. Take it away Ronnie!
“So…this globe…what is it?”
Ronnie: Well, first I’ll say that “The Foundling” (or just “Foundling”, the title varies depending on the source) doesn’t fuck around. It does the equivalent of “Jerry, it’s Frank Costanza, Mr. Steinbrenner’s here, George is dead, call me back” by having Clark wake up at night, fiddle with the globe from episode 2 and witness a majestic exposition dump by David Warner. I’m Jor-El, you’re Kal-El, here’s Lara, your planet blew up, see ya later! As I watched Clark explain how many questions he had about his past, I thought to myself “it sure would’ve been great to explore some of this shit on the show rather than have him fight cyborg boxers”. A Superman who doesn’t know his origin is a twist, and at this point in the adaptation game I’m all about seeing what choices are made and aren’t made by the creative team. Instead Lois & Clark ignored all of that and then hired Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze’s David Warner to appear as a hologram FAQ for his son. Like you, I found the “five times” limitation irritating. It’d be funny if even the super advanced Krypton had hard drive space limitations and, well, it was either five videos or seven videos with worse AV quality.
This definitely goes in my Top 5 Episodes So Far, less because of the whole and more because of little scenes. For instance, I did relate to Clark’s immediate inclination when he runs into trouble is to call his parents. That’s something that’s aged the best on this show. There’s also a nice scene between Perry and Lois wherein Perry lampshades his tendency to relate everything back to Elvis Presley stories, almost as if the writing has become self-aware. And, as always, I loved the lunacy that is Lex Luthor, what with his priceless pieces of artwork that pale in comparison to a globe that plays David Warner. “Better than cable,” Tony Jay muses. He and John Shea are so above the material it’s not even funny. They deserve to be villains in a better show.
Don’t worry, David Warner is no stranger to cheap sets.
The less said about the bizarre Cat/Jimmy sex bet, the better. You can really tell both of these characters (well, the first version of Jimmy) are not long for the show. I mean, Jimmy bets Cat that they’re related after reading an anecdote in a magazine that 90% of Metropolis’ citizens that have lived there for the past three generations are related. If Jimmy finds out he and Cat are related, they have sex. If they’re not related, Jimmy has to redecorate Cat’s condo. Let me repeat: if they are related, they have sex. Not only is this not appropriate for Sunday evening television against Jonathan Brandis and a talking dolphin, it’s not appropriate for anything anywhere at any time. It may not be Lois & Clark at its worst, but it’s close: the strange mishmash of tones that fails at sexy, funny, interesting, etc. Yet again, someone in-show and behind the scenes should’ve been fired.
Chris: Yes, the Luthor subplot was the highlight of the episode and perhaps the entire series up to this point. We learn that over the years he’s been accumulating “lost” and “unknown” masterpieces such as Venus De Milo’s missing arms, the “full body” Mona Lisa and the other Van Gogh self portrait consisting of a lush painting of an ear laying on a chair. There were so many things I loved about this little gallery. I loved that there was a picture of the Venus De Milo behind the arms, presumably so Lex can fix his eye line so it looks to him like a complete sculpture. I love that props must have run out of money before they were able to get around to making the arms, so they appear to be constructed out of pvc piping and surgical gloves. And I love, love, love the idea that Vincent Van Gogh took the time to put his severed ear on a chair, carefully place the chair in a room where the light was best, and proceeded to render it in oil on canvas.
It’s still remarkable to me that the show can be so adept at certain characterizations (Lex, Clark and his parents, Lois and Perry) and so hamfisted and flailing with others. There was a thing we did in TV and movies where people would make bets and the stakes involved one of the gamblers having to fuck the other if they lost. That kind of thing is fine if the people are romantically involved or mutually attracted to one another, but these plots always hinged on the fact that one of the characters (usually the woman) was in no way attracted to the other. I guess it’s funny because the woman is nervous that she’s going to be sexually extorted by the man which causes her to stammer and bug her eyes out? Or something? It’s just one of those things that was apparently hilarious for the longest and then a switch was thrown and we realized it was actually monstrous. And Jack, oh Jack. I guess he’s supposed to be a sort of Relief Jimmy? Like, they realized Landes wasn’t getting it done so they brought in a fresh arm from the pen to close out the season. But while he threw heat it was all over the place and he ended up hitting a few batters and there was almost a brawl. You can tell he’s meant to be charmingly rough edged, but he comes off belligerent and hateful. And there’s more to come.
Get ready to hate this folks.
To your point about how well realized and genuine Clark’s relationship is with his parents I want to point out how struck I was by the ending of the episode. After thwarting Lex and retrieving his magic globe, Clark assures Lois (who’s learned about it’s existence over the course of the episode) that it’s been hidden away in a very safe space. The safe space he’s referring to is then revealed to be his childhood treehouse back in Smallville, complete with a sign on the door labeling it his “Fortress of Solitude.” It’s a really charming inversion of the traditional Fortress located far away from humanity in the side of a remote mountain somewhere or at one of the poles. The original idea was basically that Superman would need a secluded space all his own, away from humanity, to be his most relaxed and contemplative self. But in L&C, that comfort and security doesn’t come from isolation, rock and ice, it instead comes from the life around him. It comes from his family and community, from the grass and trees and memories of what made him the man he became. It’s such a nice image, it’s almost a shame they couldn’t save it for the end of the entire season.
Ronnie: We don’t really talk a lot about the behind the scenes turmoil the series underwent, but this episode made me wonder: did they know John Shea and by virtue Lex Luthor was not long for this world when they were making this one? Because Lex learning about Krypton, him learning that Superman has a secret identity, him learning all those things kicks things up a notch to the point that a long running feud between the two appears unsustainable. It reminds me of when Lex finally “broke bad” by killing his father in Season 7 of Smallville; that too presaged the actor’s exit. For those not in the know (and why would you), Shea fell out with the production because he didn’t like making the commute to LA. I might have to eat my words based on how abruptly Shea leaves at the end of the season, but it appears to me as though they’re setting it up for a climactic showdown between him and the Man of Steel. What that looks like on a show that routinely first shows Superman 38 minutes into a 46 minute episode I have no idea.
Odds & Ends
-Belzer Watch: Richard Belzer returns as the inspector (guess Metropolis is like San Francisco) who investigates Clark’s apartment’s break-in. The Belz was double dipping as an inspector in four episodes of Lois & Clark in 1994 and several episodes of the poorly rated but critically acclaimed Homicide: Life on the Street. Belzer also appeared in the pilot to Human Target (the FIRST attempt at making that a show) and appeared on The Flash (the FIRST attempt at making that a show). I looked all this shit up so you’re going to hear about it, all right?
-In one scene Teri Hatcher balances a pencil on her upper lip. I’m curious if that was scripted or something she did out of boredom between takes.
-Has it always been that Lois gets a cubicle whereas Clark has a desk? It struck me as strange this viewing.
-Putting the ‘odd’ in ‘odds & ends’, Lois speculating Clark wrote love letters to Lula Mae is definitely a pull.
-The director for “Foundling” is the father of notorious sex criminal and Whitney co-star Chris D’Elia.
-The great Robert Costanzo, the voice of Harvey Bullock himself, guests as Lois’ underworld connection. His daughter and Lois were tennis doubles partners in college!
-When looking up Seinfeld connections (sadly there are none), I did find out the woman who portrays Lara (aka Superman’s mom) was one of the dates the Delta boys took to the black bar in Animal House. She’s married to Eric Roberts now. What a life she’s led.
Ronnie: Okay, we can’t NOT start by talking about the cold open of “The Rival”. What the fuck is with these things? Not only are they heavily focused on Clark playing sports–baseball, golf, now basketball–and not only do they regularly feature celebrities (in this instance, Bo Jackson), this one is a reference to a marketing campaign “Bo Knows” that existed in the early 90s. Being considerably younger than Chris, I had no idea what the fuck was going on until I looked everything up on Wikipedia. Even then, questions lingered. Why was Bo Jackson in Metropolis? Why did he challenge Clark? Is this in the universe of the Bo Knows commercials, Lois & Clark, or both? It’s like tuning in to an episode of Matlock and The Noid is there. I’m still baffled.
Ronnie after watching the cold open..
“The Rival” is about Lois’ professional and romantic rival, Linda King (Nancy Everhard, Kate Mara’s mom in Urban Legends: Bloody Mary), who works for a rival newspaper (the Star, a reference to the paper Superman worked for in the Golden Age of comics) that is beating Daily Planet bloody at the circulation game. Her boss is the late, great Dean Stockwell. Stockwell wants to destroy the Planet because then he’ll “control over 80% of what the American people read”. I think that’s being pretty generous, especially as on a blackboard earlier the Planet numbers were five figures at best. Stockwell’s full of idiosyncrasies, like claiming his idol is Charles Foster Kane “even though he was only a movie character”. Did he, uh, not see how Citizen Kane ended?
This episode brings Lois to the forefront in a way she’s seldom been throughout the season, and I think for that reason it makes for one of the stronger episodes of Season 1. Sure, Dean Stockwell’s plan is nonsense and the third act devolves into a dumb kidnapping, but amidst that is Lois contending with a fellow female professional who also may have eyes for Clark. She thus must solidify her place in Metropolis and sort out exactly what kind of feelings she has for Clark. I also thought the ending, while insane, was kinda funny. Who gets rich off selling movie rights anyway?
She’s supposed to be working yet her computer screen has the Classifieds on it. Which is it, Lane?
Chris: Cain was an athlete at Princeton (seriously, what happened?) and signed with the Buffalo Bills after graduating, but blew his knee out in training camp; my assumption is that a lot of the cold opens are a result of that early association and whatever connections he made at the time. Not that he looked terribly comfortable dribbling a basketball either though. More importantly, we’re okay with how that game went? Because I thought it was pretty bush league myself. Let’s break it down. Clark is dribbling by himself on the court when the ball goes off his foot and rolls to early 90s legend Bo Jackson. Bo challenges Clark to a game, Clark agrees and Bo proceeds to give him that work. He makes shot after shot, dispensing variations on his catchphrase all the while, “Bo knows lay-ups”, “Bo knows dunks” etc. So far so fair, right? Here’s where things go wrong. Bo gets a clean look from beyond the arc and takes a long three that’s about to go in, when Clark floats up and catches the ball just as it’s about to go through the hoop. It’s a flagrant example of goaltending, as clear and obvious as any I’ve ever seen. But of course Bo doesn’t say anything, because he’s just realized he’s playing a fucking god who could melt his face off and fly away without a second thought. All he can do is mutter “Bo don’t know that” and limp away, reminded once again how little power he actually has over his own life. It’s a fucking disgrace.
Moving on, I also thought it was a pretty solid episode and an interesting example of why I wanted to look at this show in the first place. Because I think if they were doing this plot today it would be stretched over the course of a season, right? Or at least a half a dozen episodes. You’d take an episode just to set up the Star and maybe introduce Linda King, although her introduction might even get shuffled back an episode. Either way, you wouldn’t learn why Lois hated her for at least an episode, then there’d be another to show how Linda is interested in Clark and how that stresses his relationship with Lois. They’d probably break up their partnership at the end of that episode (let’s say that’s the fourth one) and then there’d be a whole episode where you think he’s actually gone to work for the Star where Lois is fucking losing her mind with jealousy and panic that maybe reveals he’s in cahoots with Perry at the very end. Then there’d be a whole episode about his being a double agent and Lois trying to come to terms with how emotionally invested she’s become in Clark while they argue about how complicit Linda is in the Star’s chicanery. Finally Linda would see the light and the three of them would work to bring the Star down. What did I just map out there, six episodes? Seven? L&C burned through all that in forty five minutes.
This episode aired twenty seven years ago. In some ways, twenty seven years is a long time, but if we went back another twenty seven years from 94 (when “Rival” aired), back to 1967, I don’t think things would actually be all that different. TV wise anyway. DVD, DVR and streaming changed everything about how television is created and consumed. Serialization became the rule and attention spans changed because it was understood that an audience would need to watch every episode of a show in order to understand what was happening in any given episode. That just wasn’t really a thing back in 94, or if it was, it was still in its infancy. So you’d occasionally get episodes like last week’s “Foundling” that paid off a couple dangling threads from a handful of episodes earlier in the season, but more often than not you got breathless one-and-dones like “Rival” that set up a problem you’d never heard of before and cleared it up to make room for next week’s all-new problem, all in under an hour. It’s kind of amazing if you think about it.
Bo KNOWS how to lend his name to an inferior product.
Ronnie: It’s really the likes of The X-Files and Twin Peaks that made serialized television a thing outside of soap operas, and even in the former’s case the “important do not miss episodes” were interspersed with one and dones that could be essentially viewed in any order or not at all. So yes, it is kinda amazing, Chris, how television habits have changed and how television has changed with them. I’m sure people have talked about this before, but have they talked about it through the prism of Lois & Clark? That’s why we’re unique, brother.
Dean Stockwell’s performance reminds me of Newman’s line “when you control the mail…you control INFORMATION!” writ large. He deserved to be a recurring foe for the cast, and unethical/crooked newspaperman in a show nominally about a newspaper wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. You spoke at length at how things would’ve been done differently now, but I want to speak on how things should’ve been done then. The Star should’ve been a recurring antagonist, an anti-Planet that shows journalism at its worst, thereby establishing why the Planet is the best at what they do. You can get Stockwell for an arc and it gives the show something to do beyond its stop/start fascination with Lex Luthor. Maybe “newspaper conflict” may have been a slog, but is it worse than some of what we got?
Chris: Oh yeah, one hundred percent. If The Star had been a recurring antagonist they could have cut some of the Evil Magician style dead weight and added some heft to some of the other plots they kept around. Like, remember the episode where Lois and Clark had to pretend to be married so they could be in the Honeymoon Suite of that hotel? What if instead of trying to burn some bullshit, nobody politician, they were tracking Stockwell and the douchebag with the ear cuff? And what if that was where they had the confrontation about Linda that would lead to her talking about losing her story and crush back in college. The awkward intimacy of the specific job requirement would have given the whole thing a nice extra layer of intensity.
Perry points to cover stories such as this one as reasons why the Daily Planet’s sales have gone down. I’m inclined to agree with him. Pie graphs are a death sentence.
But I confess, I’d probably miss some of the manic intensity this sort of lightning plotting tends to inspire. And to your earlier point this episode does give Hatcher a chance to go hog wild and she makes the most of it. I think my favorite scene was when Lois barges into Clark’s apartment, sure that he’s hiding Linda in there somewhere and tears the joint up at about a hundred twenty miles an hour. There’s a single shot where she charges into his bedroom, bends over to look under the bed, leaps up on it, stomps on the mattress in a paranoid rage, then jumps down all in heels and spitting dialogue, that was a low key tour-de-force of physical comedy. Clark is just standing in the background wide-eyed, and I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be Clark amazed at what an ass Lois is being, or Cain just amazed by how funny Hatcher is.
Ronnie: Hatcher deserves praise for this episode because it shows what a multifaceted performer she can be. I mean, she’s not Viola Davis, but only Viola Davis is Viola Davis, right? Hatcher is more than capable at comedy and drama, and to boot she doesn’t have the political beliefs of a toilet. I daresay she’s shown growth over the season. Dean Cain’s still definitely more at home at playing Clark Kent, but Superman is a tough gig for anyone, and look at what happened to the two who did it best. I’m not saying there’s a curse but I’m not saying there’s not not a curse, you know? Anyway, this wraps up this week. Next week we’ve got a humdinger as Lois & Clark introduces Bizarro, or at least their version of it. We also get to see Cat Grant’s final appearance. Godspeed, you misbegotten victim of retooling.
Odds & Ends
-A is it all that bad to be released from a show that calls for you to be constantly humiliated and shamed? On the other hand, I guess work’s work, and I bet a lot of the people on the production were nice.
-Upon hearing about a hotel fire where a woman was trapped on a ledge and couldn’t be reached by firemen, Perry and Jimmy enthusiastically high five. I remain confused as to why this relationship wasn’t better utilized.
-In reality, Heisman Trophy Winner Bo Jackson was one of the most dynamic superstars of his era, and was the only athlete ever to be an All Star in both the NFL and MLB. But he suffered a freak hip injury in a 1991 play-off game that severely limited his abilites thereafter. But again, that’s our reality. Who’s to say that in the Lois & Clark universe, Jackson didn’t suffer that catastrophic injury years later, after a petty and vengeful Superman, still furious over a pickup basketball game, tracked Jackson to where he was playing and used his heat vision to destroy his hip? I wouldn’t put it past him.
-Linda King goes half in but doesn’t commit to the full alliterative L name tradition of Lex Luthor, Lois Lane and Lana Lang, does that make it better or worse?
-After stopping the assassination of an ambassador, Superman mushes the bullets into a ball which he proceeds to shoot into a nearby trash can. Anyone on set that didn’t suggest Superman.turn to the ambassador and say “Superman knows jump shots” should have been written up.
Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie: “Foundling”/”The Rival”
Chris:.The lights are starting to dim here at the Lois and Clark and Chris and Ronnie office as we prepare both for the biggest, most commercial, and therefore best holiday of the year, and begin winding down our coverage of the first season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. The show enters its final third with today’s episodes and it’s easy to get the sense that the writers are starting to tie up what few narrative loose ends there are so that everyone can be in their places for the big finish. Episode sixteen “Foundling” is an opportunity to finally get Superman’s origin story out of the way, as well as move Lex Luthor back to his natural position as the primary antagonist in Superman’s life. It’s pretty successful on both fronts, though it’s far from a smooth ride; this is Lois & Clark we’re talking about.
There’s a paradox at the center of the decision to hide Clark’s origin from the audience as well as Clark himself in that it’s at once a novel way to approach a well worn story and also novel specifically because it strings out a question that presumably every person watching the show would already know the answer to. I would like to meet the person who, in 1994, a) wasn’t fully aware of Superman’s origin story and b) was willing to sit through fifteen episodes of L&C before learning what it was. That’s a lot of mediocre television building up what’s really a fairly straightforward story. It’s not entirely without precedent as John Byrne’s Man of Steel series waited until the last issue to do Supes’ origin, but that was after five issues that summarized fifteen years of Clark’s life and set up an enormous supporting cast. The pilot of L&C covered all that, then just farted around for another fourteen episodes before getting to it. There were a couple of interesting dramatic beats along the way regarding his status on Earth and mining his anxiety about his true purpose, but like I said, we all knew where it was going, so it’s a relief to get there already.
That said, the execution of the story was pretty good. Again, for Lois & Clark. See when Jonathan and Martha found Clark’s crashed ship all those years ago there was also this mysterious softball sized globe in a box. It remained an inert, mysterious keepsake that he’d carried around ever since until one day he was messing around with it and just started, suddenly Clark is having visions of his Kryptonian father Jor-El explaining how and why he came to send his only son to Earth. Jor-El opens his little intergalactic missive by announcing that this is the first of five times he will appear to explain himself. It’s a device that’s at once an effective pressure on Clark to maximize his time with his long dead birth father and an irritating contrivance, because why in the world would Jor-El build in such a ridiculous limitation into what’s a combination will, love letter, and record of the end of an entire civilization to his only child?
Anyway, it just so happens that pretty much right after Clark gets his magic doodad to start working, his apartment is broken into and the darn thing is stolen. What are the odds, right? And that’s where shit gets rocky. It turns out the thief is a smart mouthed teenage street-rat/hunk named Jack who’s living in an abandoned building on the wrong side of the tracks with his useless little brother Denny. Denny is sick or crippled or something, it’s not really clear but he’s enfeebled and sometimes he coughs and it’s Jack’s responsibility to keep them above water, which he does via burglary. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Jack is amongst the most obnoxious characters we’ve come across so far, but he’s also far from the low point of the episode. For that we would have to talk about the Cat Grant/Jimmy Olson B plot, which I’ll leave, along with the episode high point, to my partner Ronnie to unpack. Take it away Ronnie!
“So…this globe…what is it?”
Ronnie: Well, first I’ll say that “The Foundling” (or just “Foundling”, the title varies depending on the source) doesn’t fuck around. It does the equivalent of “Jerry, it’s Frank Costanza, Mr. Steinbrenner’s here, George is dead, call me back” by having Clark wake up at night, fiddle with the globe from episode 2 and witness a majestic exposition dump by David Warner. I’m Jor-El, you’re Kal-El, here’s Lara, your planet blew up, see ya later! As I watched Clark explain how many questions he had about his past, I thought to myself “it sure would’ve been great to explore some of this shit on the show rather than have him fight cyborg boxers”. A Superman who doesn’t know his origin is a twist, and at this point in the adaptation game I’m all about seeing what choices are made and aren’t made by the creative team. Instead Lois & Clark ignored all of that and then hired Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze’s David Warner to appear as a hologram FAQ for his son. Like you, I found the “five times” limitation irritating. It’d be funny if even the super advanced Krypton had hard drive space limitations and, well, it was either five videos or seven videos with worse AV quality.
This definitely goes in my Top 5 Episodes So Far, less because of the whole and more because of little scenes. For instance, I did relate to Clark’s immediate inclination when he runs into trouble is to call his parents. That’s something that’s aged the best on this show. There’s also a nice scene between Perry and Lois wherein Perry lampshades his tendency to relate everything back to Elvis Presley stories, almost as if the writing has become self-aware. And, as always, I loved the lunacy that is Lex Luthor, what with his priceless pieces of artwork that pale in comparison to a globe that plays David Warner. “Better than cable,” Tony Jay muses. He and John Shea are so above the material it’s not even funny. They deserve to be villains in a better show.
Don’t worry, David Warner is no stranger to cheap sets.
The less said about the bizarre Cat/Jimmy sex bet, the better. You can really tell both of these characters (well, the first version of Jimmy) are not long for the show. I mean, Jimmy bets Cat that they’re related after reading an anecdote in a magazine that 90% of Metropolis’ citizens that have lived there for the past three generations are related. If Jimmy finds out he and Cat are related, they have sex. If they’re not related, Jimmy has to redecorate Cat’s condo. Let me repeat: if they are related, they have sex. Not only is this not appropriate for Sunday evening television against Jonathan Brandis and a talking dolphin, it’s not appropriate for anything anywhere at any time. It may not be Lois & Clark at its worst, but it’s close: the strange mishmash of tones that fails at sexy, funny, interesting, etc. Yet again, someone in-show and behind the scenes should’ve been fired.
Chris: Yes, the Luthor subplot was the highlight of the episode and perhaps the entire series up to this point. We learn that over the years he’s been accumulating “lost” and “unknown” masterpieces such as Venus De Milo’s missing arms, the “full body” Mona Lisa and the other Van Gogh self portrait consisting of a lush painting of an ear laying on a chair. There were so many things I loved about this little gallery. I loved that there was a picture of the Venus De Milo behind the arms, presumably so Lex can fix his eye line so it looks to him like a complete sculpture. I love that props must have run out of money before they were able to get around to making the arms, so they appear to be constructed out of pvc piping and surgical gloves. And I love, love, love the idea that Vincent Van Gogh took the time to put his severed ear on a chair, carefully place the chair in a room where the light was best, and proceeded to render it in oil on canvas.
It’s still remarkable to me that the show can be so adept at certain characterizations (Lex, Clark and his parents, Lois and Perry) and so hamfisted and flailing with others. There was a thing we did in TV and movies where people would make bets and the stakes involved one of the gamblers having to fuck the other if they lost. That kind of thing is fine if the people are romantically involved or mutually attracted to one another, but these plots always hinged on the fact that one of the characters (usually the woman) was in no way attracted to the other. I guess it’s funny because the woman is nervous that she’s going to be sexually extorted by the man which causes her to stammer and bug her eyes out? Or something? It’s just one of those things that was apparently hilarious for the longest and then a switch was thrown and we realized it was actually monstrous. And Jack, oh Jack. I guess he’s supposed to be a sort of Relief Jimmy? Like, they realized Landes wasn’t getting it done so they brought in a fresh arm from the pen to close out the season. But while he threw heat it was all over the place and he ended up hitting a few batters and there was almost a brawl. You can tell he’s meant to be charmingly rough edged, but he comes off belligerent and hateful. And there’s more to come.
Get ready to hate this folks.
To your point about how well realized and genuine Clark’s relationship is with his parents I want to point out how struck I was by the ending of the episode. After thwarting Lex and retrieving his magic globe, Clark assures Lois (who’s learned about it’s existence over the course of the episode) that it’s been hidden away in a very safe space. The safe space he’s referring to is then revealed to be his childhood treehouse back in Smallville, complete with a sign on the door labeling it his “Fortress of Solitude.” It’s a really charming inversion of the traditional Fortress located far away from humanity in the side of a remote mountain somewhere or at one of the poles. The original idea was basically that Superman would need a secluded space all his own, away from humanity, to be his most relaxed and contemplative self. But in L&C, that comfort and security doesn’t come from isolation, rock and ice, it instead comes from the life around him. It comes from his family and community, from the grass and trees and memories of what made him the man he became. It’s such a nice image, it’s almost a shame they couldn’t save it for the end of the entire season.
Ronnie: We don’t really talk a lot about the behind the scenes turmoil the series underwent, but this episode made me wonder: did they know John Shea and by virtue Lex Luthor was not long for this world when they were making this one? Because Lex learning about Krypton, him learning that Superman has a secret identity, him learning all those things kicks things up a notch to the point that a long running feud between the two appears unsustainable. It reminds me of when Lex finally “broke bad” by killing his father in Season 7 of Smallville; that too presaged the actor’s exit. For those not in the know (and why would you), Shea fell out with the production because he didn’t like making the commute to LA. I might have to eat my words based on how abruptly Shea leaves at the end of the season, but it appears to me as though they’re setting it up for a climactic showdown between him and the Man of Steel. What that looks like on a show that routinely first shows Superman 38 minutes into a 46 minute episode I have no idea.
Odds & Ends
-Belzer Watch: Richard Belzer returns as the inspector (guess Metropolis is like San Francisco) who investigates Clark’s apartment’s break-in. The Belz was double dipping as an inspector in four episodes of Lois & Clark in 1994 and several episodes of the poorly rated but critically acclaimed Homicide: Life on the Street. Belzer also appeared in the pilot to Human Target (the FIRST attempt at making that a show) and appeared on The Flash (the FIRST attempt at making that a show). I looked all this shit up so you’re going to hear about it, all right?
-In one scene Teri Hatcher balances a pencil on her upper lip. I’m curious if that was scripted or something she did out of boredom between takes.
-Has it always been that Lois gets a cubicle whereas Clark has a desk? It struck me as strange this viewing.
-Putting the ‘odd’ in ‘odds & ends’, Lois speculating Clark wrote love letters to Lula Mae is definitely a pull.
-The director for “Foundling” is the father of notorious sex criminal and Whitney co-star Chris D’Elia.
-The great Robert Costanzo, the voice of Harvey Bullock himself, guests as Lois’ underworld connection. His daughter and Lois were tennis doubles partners in college!
-When looking up Seinfeld connections (sadly there are none), I did find out the woman who portrays Lara (aka Superman’s mom) was one of the dates the Delta boys took to the black bar in Animal House. She’s married to Eric Roberts now. What a life she’s led.
Ronnie: Okay, we can’t NOT start by talking about the cold open of “The Rival”. What the fuck is with these things? Not only are they heavily focused on Clark playing sports–baseball, golf, now basketball–and not only do they regularly feature celebrities (in this instance, Bo Jackson), this one is a reference to a marketing campaign “Bo Knows” that existed in the early 90s. Being considerably younger than Chris, I had no idea what the fuck was going on until I looked everything up on Wikipedia. Even then, questions lingered. Why was Bo Jackson in Metropolis? Why did he challenge Clark? Is this in the universe of the Bo Knows commercials, Lois & Clark, or both? It’s like tuning in to an episode of Matlock and The Noid is there. I’m still baffled.
Ronnie after watching the cold open..
“The Rival” is about Lois’ professional and romantic rival, Linda King (Nancy Everhard, Kate Mara’s mom in Urban Legends: Bloody Mary), who works for a rival newspaper (the Star, a reference to the paper Superman worked for in the Golden Age of comics) that is beating Daily Planet bloody at the circulation game. Her boss is the late, great Dean Stockwell. Stockwell wants to destroy the Planet because then he’ll “control over 80% of what the American people read”. I think that’s being pretty generous, especially as on a blackboard earlier the Planet numbers were five figures at best. Stockwell’s full of idiosyncrasies, like claiming his idol is Charles Foster Kane “even though he was only a movie character”. Did he, uh, not see how Citizen Kane ended?
This episode brings Lois to the forefront in a way she’s seldom been throughout the season, and I think for that reason it makes for one of the stronger episodes of Season 1. Sure, Dean Stockwell’s plan is nonsense and the third act devolves into a dumb kidnapping, but amidst that is Lois contending with a fellow female professional who also may have eyes for Clark. She thus must solidify her place in Metropolis and sort out exactly what kind of feelings she has for Clark. I also thought the ending, while insane, was kinda funny. Who gets rich off selling movie rights anyway?
She’s supposed to be working yet her computer screen has the Classifieds on it. Which is it, Lane?
Chris: Cain was an athlete at Princeton (seriously, what happened?) and signed with the Buffalo Bills after graduating, but blew his knee out in training camp; my assumption is that a lot of the cold opens are a result of that early association and whatever connections he made at the time. Not that he looked terribly comfortable dribbling a basketball either though. More importantly, we’re okay with how that game went? Because I thought it was pretty bush league myself. Let’s break it down. Clark is dribbling by himself on the court when the ball goes off his foot and rolls to early 90s legend Bo Jackson. Bo challenges Clark to a game, Clark agrees and Bo proceeds to give him that work. He makes shot after shot, dispensing variations on his catchphrase all the while, “Bo knows lay-ups”, “Bo knows dunks” etc. So far so fair, right? Here’s where things go wrong. Bo gets a clean look from beyond the arc and takes a long three that’s about to go in, when Clark floats up and catches the ball just as it’s about to go through the hoop. It’s a flagrant example of goaltending, as clear and obvious as any I’ve ever seen. But of course Bo doesn’t say anything, because he’s just realized he’s playing a fucking god who could melt his face off and fly away without a second thought. All he can do is mutter “Bo don’t know that” and limp away, reminded once again how little power he actually has over his own life. It’s a fucking disgrace.
Moving on, I also thought it was a pretty solid episode and an interesting example of why I wanted to look at this show in the first place. Because I think if they were doing this plot today it would be stretched over the course of a season, right? Or at least a half a dozen episodes. You’d take an episode just to set up the Star and maybe introduce Linda King, although her introduction might even get shuffled back an episode. Either way, you wouldn’t learn why Lois hated her for at least an episode, then there’d be another to show how Linda is interested in Clark and how that stresses his relationship with Lois. They’d probably break up their partnership at the end of that episode (let’s say that’s the fourth one) and then there’d be a whole episode where you think he’s actually gone to work for the Star where Lois is fucking losing her mind with jealousy and panic that maybe reveals he’s in cahoots with Perry at the very end. Then there’d be a whole episode about his being a double agent and Lois trying to come to terms with how emotionally invested she’s become in Clark while they argue about how complicit Linda is in the Star’s chicanery. Finally Linda would see the light and the three of them would work to bring the Star down. What did I just map out there, six episodes? Seven? L&C burned through all that in forty five minutes.
This episode aired twenty seven years ago. In some ways, twenty seven years is a long time, but if we went back another twenty seven years from 94 (when “Rival” aired), back to 1967, I don’t think things would actually be all that different. TV wise anyway. DVD, DVR and streaming changed everything about how television is created and consumed. Serialization became the rule and attention spans changed because it was understood that an audience would need to watch every episode of a show in order to understand what was happening in any given episode. That just wasn’t really a thing back in 94, or if it was, it was still in its infancy. So you’d occasionally get episodes like last week’s “Foundling” that paid off a couple dangling threads from a handful of episodes earlier in the season, but more often than not you got breathless one-and-dones like “Rival” that set up a problem you’d never heard of before and cleared it up to make room for next week’s all-new problem, all in under an hour. It’s kind of amazing if you think about it.
Bo KNOWS how to lend his name to an inferior product.
Ronnie: It’s really the likes of The X-Files and Twin Peaks that made serialized television a thing outside of soap operas, and even in the former’s case the “important do not miss episodes” were interspersed with one and dones that could be essentially viewed in any order or not at all. So yes, it is kinda amazing, Chris, how television habits have changed and how television has changed with them. I’m sure people have talked about this before, but have they talked about it through the prism of Lois & Clark? That’s why we’re unique, brother.
Dean Stockwell’s performance reminds me of Newman’s line “when you control the mail…you control INFORMATION!” writ large. He deserved to be a recurring foe for the cast, and unethical/crooked newspaperman in a show nominally about a newspaper wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. You spoke at length at how things would’ve been done differently now, but I want to speak on how things should’ve been done then. The Star should’ve been a recurring antagonist, an anti-Planet that shows journalism at its worst, thereby establishing why the Planet is the best at what they do. You can get Stockwell for an arc and it gives the show something to do beyond its stop/start fascination with Lex Luthor. Maybe “newspaper conflict” may have been a slog, but is it worse than some of what we got?
Chris: Oh yeah, one hundred percent. If The Star had been a recurring antagonist they could have cut some of the Evil Magician style dead weight and added some heft to some of the other plots they kept around. Like, remember the episode where Lois and Clark had to pretend to be married so they could be in the Honeymoon Suite of that hotel? What if instead of trying to burn some bullshit, nobody politician, they were tracking Stockwell and the douchebag with the ear cuff? And what if that was where they had the confrontation about Linda that would lead to her talking about losing her story and crush back in college. The awkward intimacy of the specific job requirement would have given the whole thing a nice extra layer of intensity.
Perry points to cover stories such as this one as reasons why the Daily Planet’s sales have gone down. I’m inclined to agree with him. Pie graphs are a death sentence.
But I confess, I’d probably miss some of the manic intensity this sort of lightning plotting tends to inspire. And to your earlier point this episode does give Hatcher a chance to go hog wild and she makes the most of it. I think my favorite scene was when Lois barges into Clark’s apartment, sure that he’s hiding Linda in there somewhere and tears the joint up at about a hundred twenty miles an hour. There’s a single shot where she charges into his bedroom, bends over to look under the bed, leaps up on it, stomps on the mattress in a paranoid rage, then jumps down all in heels and spitting dialogue, that was a low key tour-de-force of physical comedy. Clark is just standing in the background wide-eyed, and I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be Clark amazed at what an ass Lois is being, or Cain just amazed by how funny Hatcher is.
Ronnie: Hatcher deserves praise for this episode because it shows what a multifaceted performer she can be. I mean, she’s not Viola Davis, but only Viola Davis is Viola Davis, right? Hatcher is more than capable at comedy and drama, and to boot she doesn’t have the political beliefs of a toilet. I daresay she’s shown growth over the season. Dean Cain’s still definitely more at home at playing Clark Kent, but Superman is a tough gig for anyone, and look at what happened to the two who did it best. I’m not saying there’s a curse but I’m not saying there’s not not a curse, you know? Anyway, this wraps up this week. Next week we’ve got a humdinger as Lois & Clark introduces Bizarro, or at least their version of it. We also get to see Cat Grant’s final appearance. Godspeed, you misbegotten victim of retooling.
Odds & Ends
-A is it all that bad to be released from a show that calls for you to be constantly humiliated and shamed? On the other hand, I guess work’s work, and I bet a lot of the people on the production were nice.
-Upon hearing about a hotel fire where a woman was trapped on a ledge and couldn’t be reached by firemen, Perry and Jimmy enthusiastically high five. I remain confused as to why this relationship wasn’t better utilized.
-In reality, Heisman Trophy Winner Bo Jackson was one of the most dynamic superstars of his era, and was the only athlete ever to be an All Star in both the NFL and MLB. But he suffered a freak hip injury in a 1991 play-off game that severely limited his abilites thereafter. But again, that’s our reality. Who’s to say that in the Lois & Clark universe, Jackson didn’t suffer that catastrophic injury years later, after a petty and vengeful Superman, still furious over a pickup basketball game, tracked Jackson to where he was playing and used his heat vision to destroy his hip? I wouldn’t put it past him.
-Linda King goes half in but doesn’t commit to the full alliterative L name tradition of Lex Luthor, Lois Lane and Lana Lang, does that make it better or worse?
-After stopping the assassination of an ambassador, Superman mushes the bullets into a ball which he proceeds to shoot into a nearby trash can. Anyone on set that didn’t suggest Superman.turn to the ambassador and say “Superman knows jump shots” should have been written up.
Ronnie Gardocki
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