Ronnie: At Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie, we take our responsibility to the reader seriously. That means no breaks, except that one we did around Thanksgiving. But other than that, we’re like the postal service, rain, sleet, or snow, we’ll deliver you some hot takes on old television. This time out we’re doing a distressing pair of episodes, “Vatman” and “Fly Hard”. “Vatman” is of particular interest to me because it’s Lois & Clark’s attempt at the Bizarro Superman storyline. Whereas the bizarro concept has been fruitful in the likes of Sealab 2021 and Seinfeld, most Bizarro stories aren’t that great. I blame the confusing manner of speech for the character. Does he say “hello” when he leaves or does he say “badbye”? What about the double negative? There’s also the problem that Bizarro is broadly characterized as “Superman if he was in the movie I Am Sam” but we’ll get to that aspect in a moment. Premise of the episode is Superman is saving the day all over the place, when Clark is merely watching the TV of Superman doing these heroic deeds. What’s up with that?

Here’s where Clark’s general ignorance of his past pays off. It lets him credibly wonder to his parents that maybe he had a twin brother who didn’t get scooped up by the Kents and spent 25 years eating fish heads. Alas, the answer is simple: Lex clone. He took some of Superman’s hair and cloned a man based off it. Bizarro or Vatman or whatever doesn’t say the opposite of what he means–instead there’s a more disturbing characterization at play. Dean Cain plays Vatman as a child in a man’s body, and sometimes that borders on uncomfortable. Wait, did I say sometimes? I meant all the time. When Dean Cain is piggybacking on Lex Luthor…let’s just say it’s a sight you don’t get out of your head easily, and I don’t have alcohol to help with that anymore.

This took up approximately 90% of the budget as well as the budget for the next episode.

You can see where this is going: Superman coaxes Vatman into questioning what he’s been told about, well, everything, and he’s also conveniently dying because the cloning process is imperfect. Would it have killed them to give him a chalky white visage even when he was near death? So dies Vatman the way he lived: stupidly. I’m told actors love these “change ‘em up” stories in which they’re asked to play an alternate characterization of their character for obvious reasons: it breaks up the week to week monotony of being in the same role. Dean Cain can flex different acting muscles as Vatman that he can’t as Superman. Sure, those muscles are limited and reminiscent of the weird cult movie The Baby, but the point stands nonetheless. I think Cain’s having more fun with this than I am. How about you, Chris?

Chris: Yeah, I too share your general apathy towards Bizarro as a character. He’s generally more trouble than he’s worth and as a rule I tend to roll my eyes when he shows up. Even the great All Star Superman series issues devoted to Bizarro are more miss than hit. That said, there are a few iterations of him that I’ve enjoyed. There was a terrific miniseries back in 2016 where he and Jimmy go on a road trip together for some reason, and of course Christoper Reeves’ take on the character in Superman III is the only really redeeming aspect of that entire film. Okay, the opening sequence is clever too. But I think I’m actually going to have to add Dean Cain’s version to my short list of bearable Bizarros too. I know, I’m just as surprised as you are.

They’re all laughing because they know they got Season 2 options and Landes didn’t.

Part of the frustration of Bizarro is that he’s kind of anything you want him to be, a well meaning idiot, a malevolent bully, a giant baby, you never know what you’re going to get. The upside of that ambiguity is that writers are free to shape him however they want for the story. What worked for me about this version of Bizarro was the way the writers made him more tragically misguided and immature than backwards or evil. This Bizarro isn’t grotesque looking or grammatically confused, he’s just raised wrong. The show’s so centered on how Clark’s moral code is deeply rooted in his upbringing and relationship with his parents, it makes sense that they would position his opposite as someone with a similarly strong relationship with a toxic parent. In this case that’d Lex Luthor. This version of Superman is still interested in doing good things, but for credit and attention, as opposed to the common good. And, of course, always with an eye towards how altruism can lead to power down the road.

Cain does a good job threading the needle between making his Bizarro petulant and obnoxious without ever seeing particularly hateful or irredeemable. He’s a big kid who wants to do good and make his father happy. The problem is that his father has instilled in him an Objectivist definition of what “good” is and making him happy involves eventually killing Superman. Cain does a strong job demonstrating how his misguided, adolescent shittiness begins to chafe up against a growing awareness of what actual goodness is and how confusing that kind of realization can be. Compared to what a bad job he did playing Clark as a tough guy in that episode where he went undercover with the mob, it’s practically revelatory. I’m not saying the guy should have taken home an Emmy or anything, but I was a little impressed.

Again, Lex cloned a naked Dean Cain who calls him daddy. It’s not even subtext.

Ronnie: Despite my reservations about Bizarro’s characterization resembling certain cult movies I may have seen, I will admit Dean Cain did a good job of portraying two separate characters who happened to look the same. We don’t praise Dean Cain a lot in these columns and for good cause. He’s a limited actor with abhorrent political beliefs whose flagrant display of said beliefs has reduced him to Hallmark dreck and the God’s Not Dead series. Oh yeah, and he wastes everyone’s time with that Bigfoot crap. What was my point? Oh right: Cain doesn’t get his due in these articles. Well, I’m giving it to him now. He’s good in “Vatman”.

You know who doesn’t do a good job this time out? The special effects team. I think we’ve been easy on them because it was 27 years ago and it’s not exactly fruitful to go “this looks like shit” over and over again. But this was one of the few occasions I thought, gee, this looked pretty bad. There’s a moment in which Superman transitions into Clark Kent with the transition occurring behind something and the production decides to blur the Superman stuntman’s face rather than composite Dean Cain’s face onto the body. All of the Superman flying sequences are terrible. Maybe they used up all the money having two Dean Cains at once, but it’s not good. You can really tell this is not meant to be an action show. I daresay The Flash featured substantially better effects.

Chris: Yeah, no, the effects in “Vatman” are for the most part remarkably bad. If the goal of Superman The Movie was to make you believe a man could fly, the goal of these late season L&C’s seemed to be to make you believe Terry Gilliam was still doing animation using the same techniques and budget as a BBC sketch comedy show from the late 1960’s. I’m willing to cut them slack for this episode specifically because the split screen twinning effects looked pretty solid and couldn’t have been cheap, but it’s kind of remarkable how truly hacky the majority of the effects work looked. And we’re not expecting miracles either, in spring 1994 The X-Files was just getting on its feet and Star Trek: The Next Generation was in the process of closing up shop. Neither one of those shows had world beater budgets but they had wit and energy, they were clearly made by people who cared about what they were doing. Lois & Clark is a show about fucking Superman and his sequences look like afterthoughts crammed in at the last minute.

“Oh, what a feeling/When we’re walking on the ceiling”

And speaking of afterthoughts, I guess it’s time we get to the sad business of saying goodbye to Cat Grant. “Vatman” isn’t her very last appearance, that’s next week, but I think her appearance here serves as a fitting monument to her potential as a character, as well as it’s grim reality. Early in the season writers seemed to be setting Cat up as, if not a credible threat to Lois for Clarks affections, than at least a worthy antagonist. Cat was a little older than Lois, and more a product of the coked out 80’s than the grungy 90’s. She was a party girl who didn’t mind using her body to get a story, the polar opposite of the driven, serious, repressed Lois. She was never a great, or even good character, but in a couple of early episodes you also got a sense that maybe there was more to her that would be revealed down the line. She suggested to Clark in one episode that her party girl image was just that, an image designed to get ahead in a man’s world. In others she hinted at the cunning and sadness at the core of an aging socialite, still putting herself out there, even as her chances of actually finding someone were diminishing by the day.

But those hints were as far as she ever got, as the show increasingly marginalized and humiliated her. She almost never got any real plot of her own, unless repeatedly fucking a stranger in the copy room while the actual plot plays out counts. If Cat was set up to be the embodiment of the 80’s Madonna Material Girl then the only conclusion I can come to is the writers really fucking hated Madonna, because Cat was nothing more than a bubble headed moron who existed to be slut shamed and debased. The closest she comes to any kind of arc is starting as the kind of person who would try and trick a man with amnesia into fucking her, and then almost having to fuck a different man because she lost a bet to him regarding their shared heritage. That’s gotta have some kind of effect on a person, right?

Ronnie: I would’ve liked to have seen her reappear down the line, maybe as a successful gossip personality in Coast City, and we see the toxic environment the Daily Planet was and the effect it had on her. She wasn’t the problem, the Planet was! I’m working on a theory that the Daily Planet is corrosive, not unlike the protagonists of Seinfeld or the Gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’d be nice to give Cat Grant a happy ending. Hell, throw in the first Jimmy Olsen too. He matured away from the Planet and no longer propositions women with sex bets. Another thing: “Jimmy Olsen” is an identity that refers to any cub reporter working at the newspaper. Fuck the “James Bond is a codename”, I’m going with “Jimmy Olsen is a codename”.

Overall, “Vatman” is pretty much what I picture when I think of “Lois & Clark does Bizarro”. The effects are awful, the fidelity to the comics is scant, but it does its own spin that fits the universe of stories it’s telling. Deborah Joy LeVine wrote the episode so I have to imagine it’s more in her view of what the series should be. Then again, she also is credited with writing “Pheromone, My Lovely” so who knows what’s what at this point. I’d still put it in the upper echelons of Lois & Clark Thus Far.

Odds & Ends

-Seinfeld alum tracker: Cynthia Ettinger, welcome to the show! She was the Scientologist George upset in “The Parking Garage”. Fun fact: in the unaired version of the Smallville pilot, she was Martha Kent instead of Annette O’Toole.
-I like the little detail that Clark walks on the ceiling when he’s stressed.
-“He’s dying…like the frogs.” Try dramatically saying anything and adding “…like the frogs”.
-The big guest casting is Michael McKean. He’s best playing deluded and/or sleazy, so portraying a scientist is a waste of his talents. If you want to see how to use him in a guest basis, see his Morris Fletcher appearances in The X-Files and The Lone Gunmen.
-Perry’s subplot, where he makes everyone think he’s going to kill himself but instead goes bungee jumping off a bridge is just bizarre. Fitting for an episode with Bizarro then, huh? Well, not really.

Chris: “Fly Hard” in an interesting test of relative value. Are the virtues of four separate elements of an episode, greater than, less than, or equal to the one element that fucking sucks? In this episode of Lois & Clark the majority of the cast is hanging out at the Daily Planet on a Saturday night when armed brigands burst in and force everyone into Perry’s office while they tear the place apart, in search of rumored riches hidden in the building decades earlier. The hostages include Perry and Jimmy, Clark and Jack (the useless dink from “Foundling”), and Lex and Lois. The leader of the thieves has a detonator that he claims will activate a nuclear weapon if Superman shows, so Clark is forced to try and save the day without defaulting to his alter ego or revealing that same alter ego to his friends, coworkers and worst enemy. That whole plot is intercut with black and white flashback sequences set in the building during prohibition, shedding light on the legend of the hidden riches, as well as hinting at who may ultimately be behind the break-in.

That’s a foundation for a pretty solid episode of television. You’ve got nearly the entire cast all in one place together (Clark’s parents aren’t featured this week, obviously, and Cat gets shuffled off stage early on, because fuck her, right?), which is cool, because as we’ve said, they all work really well together. The early part of the episode is particularly fun, when they’re all just kinda hanging out together. Jimmy is helping Perry clean out his office, Clark is finishing up his taxes before heading to a movie with Jack, and Lois drug Lex into the office while the two of them are on a date, to tweak a story. It’s great just watching them all just bounce off one another, bitching and killing time. And once the action picks up the story does a good job of frustrating Clark’s attempts to save the day. His covert superhero work keeps getting undermined and trampled by his cohorts’ inept attempts to save the day themselves. Add to that a reasonably entertaining shaggy dog plot involving Jimmy’s futile attempts to get help and some charming flashbacks.

The funny thing is now Bruce Willis has a closer career to Michael Landes’ than Landes did to Willis when this was made.

So those are the four good points: the hangout vibe, Clark being stymied by the people he’s trying to save, the flat conclusion of the Jimmy digression, and the noirish flashbacks. In the other corner we have just this: the fucking Die Hard homages which just shut all the way the fuck up Lois & Clark. They suck. They fucking suck and I hate them. Putting aside the fact that the episode is called “Fly Hard” (a title I’m embarrassed to even type), the execution of that element of the plot is as awkward and forced as any we’ve seen so far. First of all, the thieves are about as cool and menacing as a community theater acting troupe. You can’t do a Die Hard pastiche and make the villains boring, they can be terrible but they have to be interesting. The only thief that pops in the slightest is the one lady who looks like a beta version of Trinity, and that’s only because it made me wonder if I was watching the secret origin of the Wachowskis’ entire aesthetic.Then there’s the entire Jimmy subplot of him crawling around the ducts of the Daily Planet making wisecracks to himself. There’s even a little moment where he does an impression of Perry inviting him to come help at the office on Saturday. LIke I said, the ending is satisfying, but the journey is excruciating.

It’s all so stupid and unnecessary because they call attention to themselves in bad ways and the episode flat didn’t need them. It’s not like Die Hard invented the “thieves break into a place and take hostages” plot, they could have just been regular degular thieves stealing some shit and it would have been a thousand times better because the viewer wouldn’t have been cringing through the hamfisted references. And it’s all compounded by the fact that Die Hard was six years old at the time the episode aired. It’s not like all anyone could talk about was Die Hard in the spring of 1994. The trope was so well known that the genre of Die Hard rip-offs was about to be rejuvenated by Speed two months later. Think about that. There was a movie that was a sensation and became a popular genre and then the genre was played out but was about to come back and that’s when Lois & Clark struck. It’s genuinely baffling.

Thoughts?

Ronnie: This is otherwise known as “the black and white one”. See, another thing Smallville would go on to rip off (Season 6, “Noir”…check it out, or really, don’t). Apparently Lois & Clark is the Rosetta stone I’ve been searching for all these years. It’s also known as the Die Hard ripoff, which is problematic for reasons enumerated in this article already. I just find it funny that the very start of this series of articles was set off by an extended digression into Moonlighting and the Bruce Willis vehicle they decide to ape is the one they have no business doing.

There are some good moments here, like the camaraderie among the main cast that you mentioned. I liked Clark using his knowledge of other cultures to MacGyver a solution for Lex’s bullet wound. It involves teabags and part of an orange! Sure, it’s cover for his heat vision, but what if it’s not? The twist that the night watchman is in on it is pretty good and a bridge between the unnecessary but amusing black & white sequences and the present. But then you get shit like Jack. I don’t care to look at his earlier appearances, but at least in this one he’s got a single earring, and it enrages me like it enraged Homer when Bart got one at the mall. He’s never helpful, he shits on everyone, he’s full of C+ sarcastic remarks. He’s why everyone hates teenagers, so if that was his goal as a character he succeeded.

“It’s astonishing but somehow we made the show even whiter.”

RIP Cat Grant. “If I’m still alive on Monday morning, she won’t be” Lois says of her. If she hadn’t shown up again in a tag at the end that would’ve been a fitting ending for her: the implication that Lois murdered a colleague and we never hear about it again. Tracy Scoggins got done dirty, I’ll say it here and now. They never gave her a consistent character to work with and then dumped her unceremoniously before the season was over. At least she showed up in the final Babylon 5 season and secured the potentially lucrative “sci-fi convention bag”. (Ask Nicholas Brendon: thanks to conventions, he’s swimming in back and penis reconstructive surgery scrilla!) Michael Landes is not long for the world either, but he got to do a dated Die Hard parody. What did Cat get to do, besides be the butt (BUTT!) of more sex jokes? Also, the guys she’s hooking up with are, frankly, mongoloids. They’re descendants of a race of David Lettermans.

“What’s So Funny?: The Cat Grant Story”

Chris: Way back in the “Vatman” portion of the article, about fifty thousand words ago or so, I mentioned that I thought Cat’s appearance in that episode was the perfect place to say goodbye to her. Then I never explained why. Professional at work, folks. Let’s jump in the Wayback Machine and see if we can’t fix that. So, Lois is in the office when Superman (or is it?) appears and whisks her off to parts unknown for a serious one-on-one, prompting Cat to wistfully muse that some girls have all the luck. Then, not one minute later, Clark appears and reveals that it wasn’t Superman who flew off with Lois, it was the imposter! He dashes off to save the day, leaving Cat to hopefully wonder if maybe the Bizarro Superman will kill Lois. It was, I thought, a fitting farewell to an underused, poorly realized character who existed to forever be in the shadow of the protagonist. Absorbing loss after loss like Lois Lane’s own personal Washington Generals, Cat was just there to look confused while getting dunked on, again and again.

I liked the idea of leaving her wishing for Lois’s death because it felt like her little moment of actualizing a little revenge against the cruel nature of her existence. She alone understood just how unfair the system was, and how stacked the deck was in Lois’s favor. But then, one episode later, we have Lois threatening to kill Cat, because Cat was too busy trying to get laid to recognize that her friends were in mortal danger. Apparently Cat is such a slut that she keeps lingerie in a file cabinet at work? I guess it’s kind of like how addicts hide drugs in weird places around their houses in case of an emergency. Cat probably has a thong and bustier in a ziplock bag floating in the toilet tank too. Because you never know. The point is, even her bittersweet yearning and quiet rebellion had to negated by psycho-sexual idiocy the very next week, lest we mistakenly leave her with anything like dignity. And let’s also just take a moment to recognize that the final two appearances of two of the three women on the show ended with one wishing death on the other. Girl power everyone!

Ronnie: I don’t think audacity is the right word, because who’s being precious with fucking Lois & Clark, but I still can’t get over the laziness that is the ‘homage’ to Die Hard. I think of another show that cropped up around this time, The X-Files, and how they properly ripped off/homaged the likes of The Thing and JFK. That’s how you do it! This isn’t how you do it, and you certainly don’t do it in an episode that also has a black-and-white ode to Prohibition era crime. I maintain they had the main cast double as the flashback cast out of cheapness and not because it was particularly illuminating.

“Sparkle sparkle!”

Chris: So that’s it for Cat. Soon, Landes will join her, and Jimmy will go from an eager, dull-witted, twenty-something to a chipper, ignorant teen. I barely remember any of the second season because I haven’t revisited it since it first aired, but I can’t help but think that in concluding the first season we’re also witnessing the closing of the door on the more mature adult Superman show that was advertised and never really delivered in the fall of 1993. I’m not going to go back over the production and scheduling issues that plagued L&C pretty much from jump, but I do want to take a moment and reflect back on what was being set up in “Pilot”. Remember Lucy? Remember how Jimmy asked her out? Remember when Cat had an apartment filled with books and a sweatshirt from an ivy league school and they suggested that her bubble head behavior was a persona she took on to do her job writing a gossip column? Remember how none of it was particularly convincing but it felt like, with a little work, they could all grow into interesting, three-dimensional characters? I guess none of that ever happened! Tune in next week as we bring the first season to a close and say goodbye to series regular John Shea along with Michael Landes and the Deborah Joy Levine era of Lois & Clark with the two-part finale “Barbarians At the Planet” and “The House of Luthor”. Join us, won’t you?

Odds & Ends

-Perry’s collection of junk is itself an Odds & Ends section. He has something Gerald Ford tripped on at the 76 GOP National Convention, a cutout of Elvira, a foam dome helmet from Super Bowl XX. Jimmy’s job situation at the Planet is nebulous enough that “spring cleaning” is considered one of his duties.
-Fake Trinity was in two episodes of Night Man, whereas the gang leader was in 168 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. He’s cashing those Prodigy voice checks!
-”What about Jimmy? Jimmy could save us.” “Jimmy couldn’t save baseball cards.”
-”that mess Geraldo got into one time” definitely dates the episode to early 90s.