Chris: Hello and welcome to another edition of Treading Water and Chris and Ronnie. I’m sorry, I meant to say Lois and Clark and Chris and Ronnie, but this week it might as well be the same thing as our series of hard-hitting articles discussing the occasionally remembered ABC nighttime soap Lois & Clark hits the moment when the show begins repeating itself in order to hold the inevitable off just a little longer. Our first episode “Resurrection” deals with the immediate fallout of the death of DA and kinda-sorta Clark love interest Mayson Drake in a car bomb. It turns out her murder is totally unrelated to the Intergang shenanigans of the previous week’s episode and was actually the result of her investigation into former Star Labs Scientist Stanley Gables and a pill he invented that could credibly simulate death. He fakes the deaths of some criminals so they can all do crime together without anyone suspecting them. He’s boring and his plot is boring, but his sidekick is played by the great Curtis Armstrong, beloved by some for appearing in Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer as well as Lois & Clark template Moonlighting. He’s probably best known, though, as Booger from the beloved 80s teen rape-revenge comedy Revenge of the Nerds. Armstrong’s presence is one of the few bright spots in what’s mostly a slog of an episode.

“Oh, I don’t know. I told them her death takes place in the shadow of new life. She’s not really dead if we find a way to remember her.”

And speaking of slog. What began as a love triangle between Superman/Clark, Lois and Billionaire Philanthropist/Criminal Mastermind Lex Luthor morphed into a love triangle between Lois, Superman/Clark and Sultry DA/Superman Disapprover Mayson Drake has now rotated Lois back into the pivot position between Superman/Clark and Roguish DEA Agent/Spicy Meat-A-Ball Daniel Scardino. I hate him. It was perfectly understandable for Lois and Clark to both have competing love interests throughout the show, that’s a totally legitimate source of conflict and drama. Specifically, Lex and Mayson were both interesting characters who reflected different aspects of the main characters’ personalities. Lex was glamorous and driven in ways that Lois was and Clark wasn’t. And Mayson’s strong moral ethics and genuine interest in Clark as opposed to Superman set her apart from Lois in ways that Clark would naturally gravitate towards. Plus, Lex and Mayson were both total foxes. Scardino on the other hand is a stock Cop-Who-Plays-By-His-Own-Rules type who’s a forced third act obstacle and looks like Dan Cortes if he were ten percent puffier and got a blow-out. Fuck him.

Scardino is on the case because one of Gables’ Dead-But-Not-Really goons is a former IRA bomber named Sean Macarthy who once blew up Scardino’s partner/girlfriend. Italians and the Irish are naturally antagonistic in that Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow we’re not so different you and I way that’s fun to mix and match. Sometimes it’s an Italian cop chasing a crazy IRA bomber, and sometimes an Irish cop chases down a greasy mafiosi. L&C obviously went with door number one, which isn’t a huge surprise as we were hitting the Irish pretty hard there for a while in the early/mid 90s. Remember Patriot Games and Blown Away? Ronnie, I know you remember Blown Away because you brought it up in our last article. Unless you were referencing the Corey Haim/Feldman Nicole Eggert movie of the same name. That Blown Away came out a year before the Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones version and its IMDB page has a still from the film where Nicole Eggert is sitting seductively in the nude while covering her naughty bits with an enormous plush ducky. Actually, we might want to check this movie out.

 

Imagine Tommy Lee Jones or Jeff Bridges pulling this off. Seriously, imagine it. It’d probably be funny.

Ronnie: I was mostly bored by this episode and at one point actively frustrated by it; that my HBO MAX kept acting up was a mere coincidence. Booger Armstrong notwithstanding, this is a pretty regular episode of Lois & Clark that shouldn’t be because of the extraordinary circumstances. If you’re going to kill a recurring character, make it count both to the viewers and the surviving characters. I loathe to praise Smallville, but there were short and long-term ramifications to killing off Jonathan Kent. Now imagine how much less his death would mean were he killed because of a counterfeit blue jeans operation. The plot du jour isn’t as stupid as that but it’s pretty close; someone’s manufacturing resurrection pills to simulate death beyond a reasonable doubt. Much like that time Superman solved death, it feels like this is an earth shattering revelation that has no purchase outside of this episode. This is in service of a virus plot that to call half-baked would be a stretch. Haven’t we had enough plagues and viruses in this series?

This squandered Mayson Drake’s death, giving undue importance to a plotline that didn’t need or deserve it. Like, they could’ve done the episode without the hook of opening with the funeral of a beloved-ish character. It seems in poor taste, as well, to use this episode as a jumping off point for a love interest for Lois. I’m sure we’ll speak more about Scardino but my first impression is that he sucks. He’s being positioned as a bad boy–Clark remarks he has the most probations out of anyone in the DEA–but that’s a byproduct of being so fucking good at his job. Jim Pirri is a nobody actor best known for being in shows by notorious pedophile Dan Schneider, so you’ve gotta consider the company he keeps. Hopefully he won’t compel Clark to try to out-bad boy him; we see in the show what happens when he tries to dress like that and it’s abominable.

I like when to carry out their journalistic duties they have to don vaguely unconvincing costumes.

Chris: It’s funny you mention Bad Boy Clark because there is a feint in that direction when Clark and Lois briefly go undercover to try and tease information out of an incarcerated inmate who they suspect is involved in the larger plot. The inmate is Big Buster Williams and Lois visits him dressed up as a kind of Gangsters Moll or maybe just a whore, because laying eyes on a sexy dame who talks like Judy Holliday is the kind of thing to get a man to spill his guts in a crowded prison rec-room I guess. I dunno, obviously it’s an excuse to dress Teri Hatcher up like an extra in a Whitesnake video and do a funny voice. It’s fine, she pulls it off because she’s good at what she does. But Clark is also there, in a t-shirt, leather jacket and sunglasses posing as Hatcher’s brother or maybe pimp or possibly both. (Obviously an homage to 90s Superboy’s super dated get up.) He has two lines tops in this scene, because he’s okay at best at what he does. It’s actually remarkable that a man as large and powerful looking as Dean Cain appears to be utterly incapable of projecting any kind of menace. It makes me wonder how good all those Scott Peterson movies he starred in actually were.

I mentioned it at the top of the article but this is really the first episode of Lois & Clark where I feel like the show was actively stalling. Even in that crazy first season I never felt like they were stalling. Like, they flailed a lot. They flailed like it was going out of style, but you never got the sense that they were doing something just to hold off from doing the thing everyone knew was coming. “Resurrection” and Tony Baloney are just some random shit that fell out of the sky in order to push off Superman’s reckoning with Intergang and Lois and Clark finally falling into bed. What makes it particularly irritating is how it really didn’t need to be so thin and half-assed. Why couldn’t the boring angry scientist guy have been working for Intergang? Then at least it would have felt like the plot was continuing the momentum of the previous episode. Or, since last week’s episode “Lucy Leon” literally ended with the To Be Continued chyron, why couldn’t Mason have dropped some ominous hints in that episode about this other case she was also working on so the continuity between episodes could have felt more unified. “Leon” and “Resurrection” aired a week apart, they had to have known where they were going when they filmed the first episode. That they could so carelessly just throw such a dramatic cliffhanger away is baffling.

Utter trash.

Ronnie: ‘Stalling’ seems like the watch word for this episode, which is crazy for one that solves a recurring character’s murder. Yet wheel spinning “Resurrection” is and it could’ve been more entertaining than it is. There’s an instructive scene in which Lois flat out asks Clark where they stand, as it’s been a week since they went out and kissed. I’m sure viewers at the time had the same question. The answer Clark gives is the George Costanza “cover your mouth and say some syllables” method of obfuscation. But why has all momentum stopped in their relationship, such as it is? Mayson Drake getting got is only one piece of it. The rest can be chalked up to the writers not seeming to want to commit to the characters dating or being in a relationship, because that requires the characters to interact differently, and modifying the writing standard takes, like, work and shit. You know how hard work is, especially if you’re in a writers room where you can only order food after a certain juncture? It’s Hell. So I can see why “Resurrection” brought things “back to one” out of expediency and cowardice. Doesn’t make for good TV, though.

I don’t have much else to say about “Resurrection”. I suppose it’s a novelty that I was disappointed by an episode of this series. Finally there were ramifications for shit–correct me if I’m wrong, this is the first recurring character to die–and Lois & Clark just botches it.

Odds & Ends

-Seinfeld Alumni Counter: 1. Danny Woodburn, Mickey himself, makes an appearance as Big Buster Williams, the inmate Lois  and Clark interview in prison.
-My brain is so fucked up and bereft of actual relevant information that I immediately pegged the sketch artist actor for thre man who played Bernie Ploger in the “Tinselwood” episode of Eagleheart.

Chris: “Tempus Fugitive”, on the other hand, while never really being a good episode of television, is better than “Resurrection” and it’s a lot more fun. Or maybe it is good, I dunno. It’s ratty looking in the way L&C often is, and it’s super silly, but it knows it’s silly and manages to fit a little human feeling into the proceedings. It’s got the feel of any number of sub-TNG syndicated sci-fi shows that aired on various UHF stations (If you don’t know, just hop on Google, I don’t want to get into it) on weekend afternoons. As an example of major network prime time programming it’s borderline disgraceful, but I also still liked watching it? Like I said, I dunno. You know how you sometimes watch a TV show and it’s blindingly obvious the writer had no idea what to make that week’s episode about and panic-wrote something the night before it was due? And because the writer had no idea what to write about they basically jiggered a plot together based on whatever movies were sitting on top of their VCR at the time? I can say with confidence that “Tempus Fugitive” writers Jack Weinstein and Lee Huston (Jesus, there were two of them) were big Back to the Future fans. And not just the first one, they dug the whole trilogy. One of them also started a Terminator rewatch but got interrupted and had to stop the tape before it really got going.

In “Tempus Fugitive” Lois and Clark find themselves pulled into a cross time caper by none other than H.G. “The Time Machine” Wells (played with a British accent and Bob Newhart style nervous laugh by Bernie Lomax) to catch a criminal from the future bent on stopping Superman’s birth. It turns out Wells didn’t just write about time machines, he built them too. And for some reason he’s found himself stuck in 1995 Metropolis with a time machine that’s out of gas and a murderous psychopath from the future. The time machine runs on gold, and he needs Superman to get him some gold, and since he was just in the future he knows that Superman is really Clark Kent because eventually Earth becomes a utopia that models itself on the philosophies of The Man of Steel. So he goes to Clark for help and Clark is forced to believe him because Wells knows his secret identity. That all makes sense, you know, as much as any of this ever does, what I don’t remember is why ever came to Metropolis to begin with or why he brought future man and bad seed Tempus with him.

Our first and probably last foray to Metropolis’ Red Light District.

See, Tempus hates how boring The Future is so when he arrives in 95 Metropolis and immediately witnesses a violent crime he’s thrilled. Determined to erase the paradise he lived in from existence, he steals a gun from a gun store (in a scene so reminiscent of Schwarzenegger and Dick Miller’s scene in Terminator that L&C should have cut Cameron and Harlan Ellison a check, just to be safe) kidnaps Wells and hijacks the time machine. His goal is to travel back to 1966 and Clark’s arrival on Earth so he can kill him as a baby, but Wells fucks with the controls at the last minute so they actually go back to 1866 instead, thereby buying time for Superman to find a way to stop them. Or something. You see what I mean though about Terminator and the BttF trilogy, we don’t just have time travel, we’re using the same three eras and trying to fuck with the timeline to stop the birth of mankind/s eventual savior. On the one hand it’s unforgivably hacky to shamelessly mash together two such popular and modern franchises that way; on the other hand, comics have a proud history of just that kind of blatant plagiarism. I’m reminded of how the last Claremont/Byrne X-Men issue is nakedly just hey I saw Alien, let’s do that this month. It’s another episode that taps into that elusive “charm” zone where nothing that happens is particularly well executed but I found myself enjoying it anyway. I dunno, what did you think Ronnie?       

Ronnie: I’ve been anticipating/dreading this episode ever since I did some reading about Lois & Clark and found out H.G. Wells was a supporting cast member. I figured this could either be a lot of fun or a waste of time; it turns out  “Tempus Fugitive” is more of the former. It requires a large buy-in, granted. You have to accept that H.G. Wells is a time traveler as well as an author and Stalin defender and that the future is guided by Superman’s moral precepts. You have to accept a motherfucker who looks like Ewan McGregor wearing a tin foil tunic. I think what drew me to the episode was Tempus/Lane Davies’ performance. Lois & Clark occasionally features performances above or outside its register and Davies commits to the absurdity with relish. Tempus loves crime the way you or I may love a woman or a big screen television with a more than adequate subwoofer. Doing the whole “this is what you hu-mans call a ‘mugging’” is self-evidently stupid but Davies makes it work. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found out he appears in five more episodes!

What in the heck is a “Pumps and a Bump” contest? Is it an MC Hammer karaoke contest?

Tempus’ ultimate goal is to kill Superman as a baby, so there’ll be no utopia in the future, “just a lot of sex and violence…and me!”. Through some sabotage, Wells and Tempus end up in 1866 Smallville and Lois and Clark end up in the intended 1966 Smallville. So we’re meant to believe Clark is 29 on this show? Christ, I feel old, and I’m not even old old like Chris is. For some reason Jesse James is in Smallville, played by Don Swayze, and look, maybe I overestimated my affinity for “Tempus Fugitive”. It’s not great, and there are shades of “uninspired Star Trek” all over the place, right down to the shitty sets. It’s also a good half an hour of Clark poorly gaslighting Lois about why he believed H.G. Wells in the first place, spinning lies about “oh, I think Superman was here once” in 1966 Smallville. But then you’ve got K Callan and Eddie Jones appearing as their own descendants and fuck it, who cares, give that episode the $10,000.

Inevitably this becomes the first time Lois learns Clark’s secret identity, though she unlearns it by the end of the adventure. The method is pretty great; Tempus continually calls her an idiot and then dons glasses, saying “I’m Clark Kent”, taking them off and saying “I’m Superman”. This is dangerous footing the show is on because by acknowledging how flimsy the secret identity conceit is you’re letting the audience know you know it’s stupid too, and I’m usually in favor of faking the funk. It’s low hanging fruit to attack the flimsiness of Superman’s disguise, you know? But the glee with which Tempus tears down Lois makes it worth it. I also like how the first time they broach the secret identity is an episode about traveling to the Old West and H.G. Wells being kidnapped by an aluminum foil costumed man. Imagine trying to describe this episode to anyone. Lois’ reaction to Clark is well played by Hatcher, and Cain has a line that really commits to the John Byrne interpretation of the character: “Superman is what I can do. Clark is who I am.” You sure wouldn’t get that dialogue in the Silver Age.

Chris: I’m glad you got such a kick out of the episode. It was a grower for me, mostly because the more time we spent with Tempus the more I got into his character. When they were just doing a low rent BttF/Terminator pastiche I was pretty checked out, but by the end, when Tempus is openly mocking Lois and asking Superman why he chose to wear such uncomfortable fabrics I was fully on board. There wasn’t any one moment that won me over, it was, as you alluded to, the character’s unceasing bombasity in the face of such a cheesy production that won me over. It was as if Tempus actor Lane Davies got a look at the sets and realized the only thing that will make this work is if I coat every inch of this place in ham grease, and god damnit he was right. Davies has a kind of scratchy look and baritone voice that simultaneously oozes pretension and punctures it at the same time. You’re not sure at first if he’s in on the joke, which makes it even better when you realize he is. He walked so Matt Berry could run, is what I’m trying to say.

Move over, “cellar door”!

But what I liked the most was the way Tempus was used to move the overarching story of L&C forward in a charming and unexpected way. The whole notion of Person A Discovers Person B’s Secret and Accepts Them Only For Everything To Be Set Back is as old a trope as comics. Or, at the very least, they did it fifteen years earlier in Superman II. I think it was the winking at the audience (also certainly as old as Marvel Comics) that you fear that actually made this one work for me. Because you get to laugh at Tempus calling Lois galactically stupid but you also get the scene where Lois asks Wells if everyone in the future really just laughs at her. As an audience member you get the schadenfreude of seeing Lois get roasted for missing what was in front of her face, and makes you feel a little guilty about that same pleasure.  Plus, it gives Hatcher a chance to play the vulnerable side of Lois in a slightly different shade than we usually see because she’s so confident in her intellect. There’s a hint at the end of the episode that maybe Lois has retained a shadow of her lost realization, or she’s looking a little closer at Clark anyway. It manages to be satisfying in ways that “Resurrection” botched, while being just as goofy.

Ronnie: Tempus is oddly enough the MVP of the episode, leaving H.G. Wells sort of an afterthought. I thought “Terry Kiser as H.G. Wells” would evoke something, but he’s sort of like wallpaper. He’s a plot device, nothing more. Maybe he’ll grow on me in later appearances. (Wells is going to return despite erasing everyone’s memories of the episode’s events.) What else is there to say about the episode? Is it just me or is it weird that in an episode centered on Perry White’s birthday–that’s the big event at the Planet that Wells interrupts–Lane Smith doesn’t appear? It makes for some awkward staging. I guess they wanted to give him a week off, but why not give him one scene so everyone doesn’t have to go “there’s Perry!” and look offscreen. It speaks to how cheap the show feels at times, that the episode with Perry’s birthday doesn’t have Perry in it.

“Hey, it’s me from the past!”
“Hey, it’s me from the future!”

I like how Wells deals with Tempus, throwing him in an 1866 Smallville asylum. He’ll claim to be from the future and everyone will think he’s crazy. This makes me wonder: are all self-proclaimed time travelers telling the truth, and they’re all imprisoned against their will by that bastard H.G. Wells? I’d like to see this elaborated upon. On the other hand, assuming Tempus can escape, isn’t this giving him what he wants? Tempus’ whole thing is he hates the utopia and wants to live in a world rife with crime. Well, the Old West has plenty of crime. Maybe in his next appearance they’ll have to go back to the Old West and contend with the fact that they left a guy who could seriously fuck up the timeline there. He could team up with Don Swayze! The possibilities are only limited by how stingy the producers are and how low the allocated budget is.

Next time on Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie: Jimmy gets arrested for murder…again (the last time was in “Lucky Leon”, remember) and–oh wait a minute. They’re introducing Peter Boyle’s son, who is played by Bruce Campbell? OH HELL YEAH. Chris and I have talked about how I’m usually tasked with introducing the dogs but finally luck shines upon me. So until next time…

Odds & Ends

-Seinfeld alum tracker: 1. Lane Davies was George’s prospective boss in “The Pie”, who George thought would care about his suit wooshing.
-When Tempus puts on sunglasses it’s a music sting I can only describe as “Not Good to the Bone”.
-This episode has Welles posit that 1995 Metropolis is a violent hell-hole and, I’m sorry, you can’t make that case when the cities primary villains include a guy who distributed mind controlling plush rats to children at Christmas and a guy who calls himself The Prankster.
-Tempus sees a poster for The Penetrator, a movie that is not pornography but is so poorly artistically rendered the whole thing looks like a melted Duke Nukem.
-”Are you out of your mind?” “No, my century!”
-Tempus: I come from a world without crime!
Me to Desi: I dunno, that future man outfit looks like a crime against fashion.
We high five