Ronnie: I believe this marks the last of long form storytelling from Lois & Clark, as the Leslie Luckaby ‘saga’ ends here. Oh, right, I should probably offer some context. Lois & Clark stopped spinning its wheels long enough to approach competence and it’s weird. Last time we left our heroes, they found out their new boss was Lex Luthor’s son, while he found out Clark Kent is Superman. Immediately the show addresses my concern, that John Shea isn’t old enough to father Patrick Cassidy. “Who knows how old Lex was? The guy was a master of deception.” Was he? I don’t recall him deceiving people often. He usually was just, uh, Lex Luthor. Mr. Smith, the deformed guy, takes charge in the evil partnership, foreshadowing/telegraphing a twist. He tells Leslie that Superman will become a LexCorp employee while Leslie marries Lois Lane. There is a distressingly high number of villains in this series whose endgame is nuptials.
Then comes the twist: everything you know is wrong! Leslie Luckaby is an actor Mr. Smith found bussing tables. That means, yes, the twist is that Mr. Smith is actually Lex Luthor II. My first thought is “why isn’t the deformed Lex Jr. Australian?”. With this revelation for the audience’s benefit we get a strange psychodrama that I imagine is replicated in real life with Judd Apatow and Paul Rudd. See, while Mr. Smith may be the real Lex Jr., the surface world would never accept an ugly man with loads of money, so Leslie has to act in Jr.’s place, fuck the woman Jr. wants to fuck, star in tedious 140 minute comedies largely based on Jr.’s life. They rig up a spying device on Lois that isn’t used for nefarious sexual purposes, though they do watch her sleep.
“No longer will this be Luthor Tower. From now on, this building will be known as…Luthor Tower.”
I like Jimmy’s reaction to his boss LL revealing himself to being another LL. “Whatever his name is, he sure knows how to work a crowd.” Jimmy is who I picture when I think of the 2024 undecided voter, a vacuous simpleton who cums in his pants. The Smith/Leslie interplay is the most compelling part of the show, and the acting from both is pretty stellar despite the preposterous sides they’ve been given. Less compelling is when Smith uses the listening device to force Lois on a date with Leslie, with the threat of outing Clark if she doesn’t comply. The device can also cause pain for some reason. It all devolves into Smith deciding to rule from an abandoned subway station with Lois as his queen. Blah blah blah bomb, blah blah blah force field, blah blah blah Leslie sacrifices himself to stop Lex II. Back to the status quo. Better yet, Dr. Klein is dutifully working on the “can Superman Species II chicks?” question. Over to you, Chris.
Chris: So, okay, Dr. Klein, wow. Where to begin? You know how many people say that the objectively awful 1998 film The Wedding Singer is extremely hilarious despite it lacking the traditional comedy tropes of “funny situations”, or “jokes” and instead contend that its insistence that anything that happened in the 1980s is side spitting because their-clothes-are-different-from-my-clothes? It has one moment that actually is funny. After she leaves him at the altar, Sandler’s fiance and woman who played a maid/prostitute in the third-to-last episode of Seinfeld tells him all the reasons she didn’t actually want to marry him. When she finishes a humiliated, disheveled, and just generally ruined Sandler glares at her and screams “those are all things that it would have been useful to know yesterday!” I couldn’t help relating to Sandler as I watched the character of Dr. Klein blossom over the last two episodes.
What a monster. I’m surprised he wasn’t lynched on sight!
Klein has appeared in thirteen previous episodes over the last two seasons and was a charming enough but flat and anonymous presence. Then, starting with the previous episode we’ve learned in rapid succession that Dr. Bernard Klein is a middle aged man who is an avid golfer and also belongs to an outlaw motorcycle club, possibly he’s a Sons of Anarchy, I don’t think we saw the back of his leather jacket to confirm that. He’s also visibly deeply sexually frustrated due (in his words) to every moment of his time in the last five years having been devoted to Lois, Clark, and Superman. All of it. The last five years. This despite the fact that Klein had only been introduced the year before and Superman himself has only been in Metropolis for a little over four. This suggests that Klein is either A. not great at time management, or B. along with (probably) being a gun running, drug dealing, Son of Anarchy, Dr. Klein is a Tenet of some kind.
But back to his sex life. Dr Klein says he hasn’t had sex in five years and he first appears in the episode heading out of his lab, golf bag in hand, stupid hat sitting on his bald head, on his way to an airport where a flight will whisk him off to an island somewhere and into the arms of a beauteeful lady who he’s been courting for some time. About that woman: her name is Carolyn, she’s a colleague of Klein’s whose acquaintance he first made when they both attended the same chemical weapons symposium. Also she’s 25 and thinks he’s “a god” (Klein insists to Superman that those were her exact words). I don’t know what’s more disturbing, that Klein was trawling for pussy at a fucking chemical weapons symposium, or that he was able to successfully pick up a woman less than half his age there. I hope that symposium wasn’t five years ago and the last time he was able to get got. That’s some dark shit.
Dr. Klein should be in a different outfit every episode, like that running gag in the Clerks cartoon about the mayor always being on the way to or from a costume party.
Finally, as you may recall, Supes approached Doc Klein a few episodes ago about if it would be possible for him to reproduce. The doc was understandably grossed out (or at least I was grossed out for both of us) and promised to look into it. Well, in this ep he tells the Man of Steel that everything was looking good and that he only needed to do one more thing for them to determine if he could put a baby in someone. Though it’s never specifically stated, the implication that Klein needs a sperm sample is extremely obvious. Klein tells Superman that he needs a “sample” and that there was a room down the hall with “some magazines” (kids, ask your nastiest uncle) where he could be alone. When Superman fails to understand what Klein is trying to say, Klein guides him off screen towards the room, presumably to jerk him off. Putting aside the fact that Superman is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of masturbation, why does a scientist have an entire room complete with dirty magazines in his lab dedicated to rubbing one out? Who is this man? What is his story? And why weren’t we told some of it fucking yesterday when it could have made a difference.
Ronnie: See, you get it, the “it” being “The Wedding Singer sucks kangaroo dick”. I think the problem with the episode writ large is that it has echoes of previous episodes. This isn’t the first time Lois Lane has been held hostage underground, this isn’t the first time Lois Lane is to be forcefully wed to someone, this is not the first time the villain has died with some vague attempt at redemption. It’s not so much that this episode is terrible but it’s overly familiar. We’ve seen this song and dance before, so why waste time on it when there’s less than a month’s worth of shows left?
Re: Klein, I just want to say–and I think I’ve discussed this with you on Messenger–that I think it’s funny that the show introduced Emil Hamilton, basically made him unusable, and then introduced another Emil Hamilton in everything but name. Right? Klein is Hamilton from the comics, the absent minded, kinda quirky scientist pal of Superman’s. I find him a welcome presence whenever he appears. He really is the extent of the recurring cast, because I can’t think of anyone outside the main cast that appeared in 10 or more episodes over multiple seasons.
Chris: Here’s what really perplexes me about Sandler: his reputation in Hollywood is spotless. Like, you’ll never hear a bad word about him. The only person he’s ever really publicly fallen out with is Rob Schneider which makes him look even better. The same people keep working with him again and again and again, he’s gotta be a big part of the reason that Kevin Nealon (who I happen to like) isn’t on skid row somewhere, wearing a big patchy coat and warming his hands over an oil-drum fire. And he apparently loves his wife and kids. I have no reason to think he’s a bad person. But then I look at his movies, and they don’t seem like the work of a nice guy. It would be one thing if the movies were just bad. Plenty of nice people make bad movies. It’s that they’re gross. And I don’t mean gross like poops and boogers and whatnot. I mean they’re lazy, visually ugly, angry, and they contain ethnic stereotyping that, uh, isn’t great. It would be one thing if those movies were way in his past, like products of the 90s, where we could write them off to immaturity. This is shit from the last ten years. Remember that Ridiculous Six movie that I didn’t watch and don’t actually know much of anything about?
But the real thing that always catches my eye is the way women are often portrayed, or, more specifically, how they’re portrayed in relation to Sandler. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on standard Hollywood practices like glamour imbalances. If Salma Hayek is okay pretending to be married to a schlub, then it’s okay with me. What I’m talking about has more to do with the broader patterns of how his romantic comedies often played out. Remember Blended? The third Sandler/Barrymore romcom? Remember how it opened with the two of them on a blind date at fucking Hooters, and we’re supposed to think it’s crass and gross until we find out that his recently deceased wife used to work there and then we’re supposed to think… what? I gotta be honest, I think it’s much creepier that he took her to his late wife’s job on a date than if he just went to a shitty boob shack. That’s crazy behavior. And what are the servers supposed to think about the widowed husband of their dead (presumably) friend bringing dates there and making them serve her? It’s super fucked up. And I could go on, like the first (and maybe only?) thing we learn about his wife was that she was basically a pin-up.
“I’ve frozen her to death before, so this should work…”
And remember that subplot about how he has daughters who he doesn’t buy clothes for because he owns a sporting goods store and can just give them whatever sweat pants and jerseys that kind of fit them? I know we’re supposed to see him as charmingly eccentric, and that the movie shows his journey from grieving, stunted man-child, to fully engaged father and romantic partner, but man, if letting your teenage daughter pick out her own clothes and simply brushing your teeth before a date are your idea of growth, good luck. And not every Sandler movie is like that, I know, not even the Happy Madison ones he has so much control over. But enough are. If the recurring themes of the work you produce includes themes such as “people with different accents sound funny” and “women should go to the trouble to look like Salma Hayek and be open and loving while I play a furious/depressed character who doesn’t have a grasp of basic hygiene”, I gotta question your worldview.
I just, I just don’t know how he can keep going back to those plot-points over and over without noticing how angry and unpleasant they are. And I dunno, maybe they’re not like that anymore. I don’t devour each and every movie he appears in, and the ones I’ve seen recently (those two Murder Mystery movies and the Hotel Transylvania series) are perfectly fine. And there’s all the non Happy Madison shit, your Uncut Gems or Netflix Movie I Haven’t Watched Yet Where He’s a Basketball Scout, those are usually pretty solid flicks. But man, he did it for so long that I just struggle is all.
Odds & Ends
-The first few times I went to my in-laws’ house I noticed that there were a bunch of mugs with strange but familiar symbols on their sides on top of one of the bookshelves. I didn’t think much of it and for some reason assumed that they were Star Trek related and that the symbols were of the Klingon high command. Probably because my stepfather had a Trek coffee mug where a Bird of Prey appeared on the outside whenever someone poured hot liquid into it. Then, years later, I was sitting in their living room and it occurred to me that Desi’s dad wasn’t a Star Trek fan and took a closer look at the mugs. My friends, those weren’t Klingon high command symbols, they were radiation symbols. Because my father-in-law who’d worked for the defense department had picked the mugs up at various chemical weapons symposiums just like the ones our Dr. Klein was trying to smash at. He passed away last month, my father-in-law, not Doctor Klein who isn’t a real person and thus doesn’t ever actually die. He was a good man and we all miss him.
Ronnie: Ooh, a skinesode! That could be anything from an episode dealing with impersonation (you’re under someone else’s skin) or softcore pornography. Despite the sexual references that have been increasing this season, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is firmly the former. Woody Samms is a criminal on the run from a mob contract put out by Little Tony, so he body switches in order to go out on the town. This is established when his daughter comes back to his room only to find a chimp counting money and her dad’s body chimping around. Now, a chimp counting money–that’s basically my platonic ideal of television. You put that on for 45 minutes and I’m captivated. Unfortunately, the chimpnanigans end with this scene, but the show makes up for it by being insane. See, Woody needs to get to Little Tony, and when you’ve got body switching powers every problem looks like it can be solved by body switching, so he figures becoming a reporter is a way to do it. We’ve had guys with Superman’s powers, but we haven’t had a guy literally become Superman. Pulling out all the stops for Season 4.
You’ll be counting money like this chimp is if you put a chimp in your movie or TV show. Alas, we’re probably past the days of using real ones for our entertainment. Thanks a lot, societal progress!
Not only is “other asshole gets Superman powers” a tried and true story idea, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” gives Dean Cain the opportunity to stretch his wings, playing his character out of character purposefully. Usually shows give these chances to the principal cast when they’ve run out of ideas, so if you’re wondering why the third to last episode of the series is this, that might be why. Woody soon figures out Clark is Superman in a pretty entertaining sequence. He first starts experiencing all the requisite powers–superhearing, superstrength, vision powers–but then it culminates in him ripping open his shirt. Again, they’re lucky this isn’t on Cinemax, because the chances of inadvertent shirt ripping are much higher so Clark’s secret identity would be outed in all sorts of salacious situations. Meanwhile, Tim Thomerson (Jack Deth in the Trancers quintology) gets to wander around and go “Lois?” every so often. Not a fair trade off in my opinion, but Cain’s the star here. His first encounter with her ends with him arrested. Samms’ daughter (played by the daughter in Step by Step!) provides the voice of reason, saying “Clark Kent didn’t do anything to you. You can’t just take his body”. Appealing to a career criminal’s sense of decency doesn’t seem to work, and things complicate when the body switch starts crapping out and Lex’s Indian henchman (remember him? He’s back!) explains that to finalize the body switching he has to kill Clark in Woody’s body.
Fortunately a series of contrivances put the daughter in danger, he has to relinquish control of the Superman body to save her, the effect drains his energy, yadda yadda yadda. The important part is that as Woody is dying, a dog licks his hand (his hand holding the magic body switchin’ stone) and it’s VERY heavily implied that while Woody the human dies, Woody the dog lives on. It raises the question: what happens after this episode? Is Becky obliged to take care of his dog father for as long as the dog father shall live? Because that’s a pretty shitty thing to do, as a dad, to force your kid to take care of an animal just on the off chance it houses the consciousness of their parent. That’s not saying anything of the stress of being a dog man. Despite the popular book series by Dav Pilkey, I imagine it’s rough. Get it?
He’s fucked if anyone rips open his shirt, which is proof that Superman just wouldn’t work on Earth-Cinemax.
Chris: First things first, if you ever want an encapsulation of how it was that Lois & Clark fumbled the bag, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is the go to example. How do you open with a monkey counting money and then never go back to it? I mean, I understand in story terms how they resolved that particular scene, I’m speaking more generally, or even existentially. You’ve got a smart monkey, you’ve got Superman, you know about Beppo the Super Monkey (because everyone knows about Beppo the Super Monkey), do I have to draw you a fucking picture? I can see how maybe you don’t go through all the trouble to introduce a literal super powered kryptonian monkey who stowed away on little Kal-El’s ship and then scampered away after they crash landed on earth but before the Kent’s found Kal. But you better by god body swap Superman with a monkey and somehow let him keep his powers! I don’t even understand how this is a conversation!
That aside, yes, this episode was suitably nutty. Remember way back in season one when Clark had to go undercover as a tough guy in order to help bust an arson scheme? It’s the one where Lois had to dress up as a chicken because the writers hated Teri Hatcher (I assume). We both talked about how stilted and unconvincing Cain was as Clark-Pretending-to-be-Badass, well, this is more Clark-is-a-Good-for-Nothing-Louse and he pulls it off with a fair amount of aplomb. I specifically liked the scene where he’s trying to get Lois into bed while waving off an escalating crisis they hear about over their police scanner. The way he goes from not caring (what about the shooting?) to faux-sympathy (oh yeah, that’s, uh, that’s a terrible shame) to dismissive (sounds like the police have it under control) and then finally grudgingly willing to help all while vibrating with horniness is complex and smooth in a way that makes me wonder why Cain couldn’t be that good more often.
The rest of the episode is standard stuff, but as we keep pointing out: “standard” is pretty fucking high quality for a show like Lois & Clark. And then the possessed dog gag swoops in and allows it to go out on a high note. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Woody body-swaps with the dog, it closes with a freeze-frame close up of the dog staring into the camera with glowing red eyes. It’s a spectacular ending that leaves us with so many more questions than answers. Is this supposed to be a good thing? Because it seems like the last thing Woody does in life after redeeming himself is to murder a dog. Accidentally, but still. And why are the dog’s eyes glowing? The monkey’s eyes didn’t glow when he’s swapped out (I’m assuming the monkey is a he because Woody possessing a lady monkey would be totally gay), nor did Clark’s. There’s only two episodes left, and I have to assume they’re about the demon-dog rising to the top of Metropolis’s criminal underworld and a spectacular final battle royale with the Man of Steel that leaves Metropolis a smoldering ruin. I for one can’t wait to see it.
Ronnie: Chris, when you’re right you’re right. They had the chimp already, so presumably they had the chimp for the day if they had him at all. Let’s not get into the ethics of whether using chimps for our entertainment and just conclude that more chimp equals better episode. Again, I’m surprised late Season 4 Lois & Clark even sprang for one when the scene didn’t require its inclusion. The scene could’ve established the guy can switch bodies some other way. The choice was made to include a chimp and they could’ve done more with it, so that’s a shame. Regardless, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” has a lot going for it: Dean Cain being allowed to flex his acting range, there’s magic involved, the aforementioned chimp, and an attempt at emotional resonance with the father/daughter relationship. Now, that resonance doesn’t work, but it’s attempted. I’d almost argue Woody learns a lesson from all this body switching, but it’s reliant on the notion that this episode was followed by, and exists in the continuity of, 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd. You were a little too old for it, I think, Chris, but it was a Nickelodeon program about a shitty kid (voiced by Seth Green in Season 1, the brother from Wonder Years in subsequent seasons) who’s transformed into a dog and in order to undo the transformation he must perform 100 deeds. That means it would’ve had to last 100 episodes for him to clear his debt; the show lasted 40. That means poor Eddie stayed a dog and given dog lifespan expectancy he is long dead.
I like the premise that everyone’s kiss is unique, like a snowflake, and can be identified as such.
Chris: So I read years ago that Paul Newman, IMO the greatest movie star/salad dressing magnate of all time, said that the first fifteen pages are the most important part of any screenplay, and the last fifteen minutes are the most important part of any movie. His reasoning being that a script has to grab its reader as quickly as possible in order to keep their interest, and that audiences tend to decide how they feel about a movie by how it ends. I think the cash counting monkey opening of “I’ve got you” and the glowing red-eyed little dog ending are an example of a variation on that idea. Basically if you start and end strong, you can cram a bunch of junk into the middle and people will swallow it. I think that reasoning can work for a movie or even a couple of episodes of television, but we’re coming to the end of Lois & Clark, and I can’t help but feel like it’s an object lesson in how that philosophy doesn’t work over the entirety of a show.
When we started this fool’s errand I was struck by how much I enjoyed the shaggy weirdness of large chunks of the first season. It had its share of garbage of course, but on the whole I liked it more than I didn’t. I think when we wrap this whole sorry affair up next time, we’ll find that the fourth season has the longest string of Not Terrible Episodes since that first season and maybe even of the entire run. We can use the final post-mortem entry of Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie to run the numbers, but no matter what we find, I think we can both agree that once the two actually got married, the show hit a groove that it managed to ride all the way to the end of the line. Or, I guess to the antepenultimate point of the line, we’ll have to see how the last two episodes fare before we have the whole picture. Lois & Clark ran for eighty eight episodes, and when we began this series, we managed to get out one piece covering two episodes a week for the entire first season and much of the second. If we had managed to stay on course we would have been done in twenty seven weeks, plus the interstitials about other super shows. It’s been three years. You’ve come this far with us, may as well run out the clock with us too.
Odds & Ends
-This might be one of the most sparse episodes of the series, in that only 2 of the 6 main cast appear. I get the Kents, but no Perry or Jimmy? Makes it feel unpopulated.
-There’s a moment where Woody as Clark does a vocal impersonation of Asabi. I like to imagine Dean Cain pitched that himself.
-Joe Piscopo voiced a dog in the 2002 Nickelodeon show 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd, which sounds right, you know?
-Did you know that Peter David himself has sole screenwriting credit for Trancers 4: Jack of Swords, and Trancers 5: Sudden Death? What’s that? You’d never heard of the Trancers movies before this article and have no idea who Peter David is? How I envy you. He’s a comics creator so of course he has a GoFundMe you should contribute to: https://www.gofundme.com/f/peter-david-fund?viewupdates=1&rcid=r01-171961476171-600fd54435a011ef&utm_medium=email&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_email%2B1137-update-supporters-v5b
Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie: “Voice From The Past”/”I’ve Got You Under My Skin”
Ronnie: I believe this marks the last of long form storytelling from Lois & Clark, as the Leslie Luckaby ‘saga’ ends here. Oh, right, I should probably offer some context. Lois & Clark stopped spinning its wheels long enough to approach competence and it’s weird. Last time we left our heroes, they found out their new boss was Lex Luthor’s son, while he found out Clark Kent is Superman. Immediately the show addresses my concern, that John Shea isn’t old enough to father Patrick Cassidy. “Who knows how old Lex was? The guy was a master of deception.” Was he? I don’t recall him deceiving people often. He usually was just, uh, Lex Luthor. Mr. Smith, the deformed guy, takes charge in the evil partnership, foreshadowing/telegraphing a twist. He tells Leslie that Superman will become a LexCorp employee while Leslie marries Lois Lane. There is a distressingly high number of villains in this series whose endgame is nuptials.
Then comes the twist: everything you know is wrong! Leslie Luckaby is an actor Mr. Smith found bussing tables. That means, yes, the twist is that Mr. Smith is actually Lex Luthor II. My first thought is “why isn’t the deformed Lex Jr. Australian?”. With this revelation for the audience’s benefit we get a strange psychodrama that I imagine is replicated in real life with Judd Apatow and Paul Rudd. See, while Mr. Smith may be the real Lex Jr., the surface world would never accept an ugly man with loads of money, so Leslie has to act in Jr.’s place, fuck the woman Jr. wants to fuck, star in tedious 140 minute comedies largely based on Jr.’s life. They rig up a spying device on Lois that isn’t used for nefarious sexual purposes, though they do watch her sleep.
“No longer will this be Luthor Tower. From now on, this building will be known as…Luthor Tower.”
I like Jimmy’s reaction to his boss LL revealing himself to being another LL. “Whatever his name is, he sure knows how to work a crowd.” Jimmy is who I picture when I think of the 2024 undecided voter, a vacuous simpleton who cums in his pants. The Smith/Leslie interplay is the most compelling part of the show, and the acting from both is pretty stellar despite the preposterous sides they’ve been given. Less compelling is when Smith uses the listening device to force Lois on a date with Leslie, with the threat of outing Clark if she doesn’t comply. The device can also cause pain for some reason. It all devolves into Smith deciding to rule from an abandoned subway station with Lois as his queen. Blah blah blah bomb, blah blah blah force field, blah blah blah Leslie sacrifices himself to stop Lex II. Back to the status quo. Better yet, Dr. Klein is dutifully working on the “can Superman Species II chicks?” question. Over to you, Chris.
Chris: So, okay, Dr. Klein, wow. Where to begin? You know how many people say that the objectively awful 1998 film The Wedding Singer is extremely hilarious despite it lacking the traditional comedy tropes of “funny situations”, or “jokes” and instead contend that its insistence that anything that happened in the 1980s is side spitting because their-clothes-are-different-from-my-clothes? It has one moment that actually is funny. After she leaves him at the altar, Sandler’s fiance and woman who played a maid/prostitute in the third-to-last episode of Seinfeld tells him all the reasons she didn’t actually want to marry him. When she finishes a humiliated, disheveled, and just generally ruined Sandler glares at her and screams “those are all things that it would have been useful to know yesterday!” I couldn’t help relating to Sandler as I watched the character of Dr. Klein blossom over the last two episodes.
What a monster. I’m surprised he wasn’t lynched on sight!
Klein has appeared in thirteen previous episodes over the last two seasons and was a charming enough but flat and anonymous presence. Then, starting with the previous episode we’ve learned in rapid succession that Dr. Bernard Klein is a middle aged man who is an avid golfer and also belongs to an outlaw motorcycle club, possibly he’s a Sons of Anarchy, I don’t think we saw the back of his leather jacket to confirm that. He’s also visibly deeply sexually frustrated due (in his words) to every moment of his time in the last five years having been devoted to Lois, Clark, and Superman. All of it. The last five years. This despite the fact that Klein had only been introduced the year before and Superman himself has only been in Metropolis for a little over four. This suggests that Klein is either A. not great at time management, or B. along with (probably) being a gun running, drug dealing, Son of Anarchy, Dr. Klein is a Tenet of some kind.
But back to his sex life. Dr Klein says he hasn’t had sex in five years and he first appears in the episode heading out of his lab, golf bag in hand, stupid hat sitting on his bald head, on his way to an airport where a flight will whisk him off to an island somewhere and into the arms of a beauteeful lady who he’s been courting for some time. About that woman: her name is Carolyn, she’s a colleague of Klein’s whose acquaintance he first made when they both attended the same chemical weapons symposium. Also she’s 25 and thinks he’s “a god” (Klein insists to Superman that those were her exact words). I don’t know what’s more disturbing, that Klein was trawling for pussy at a fucking chemical weapons symposium, or that he was able to successfully pick up a woman less than half his age there. I hope that symposium wasn’t five years ago and the last time he was able to get got. That’s some dark shit.
Dr. Klein should be in a different outfit every episode, like that running gag in the Clerks cartoon about the mayor always being on the way to or from a costume party.
Finally, as you may recall, Supes approached Doc Klein a few episodes ago about if it would be possible for him to reproduce. The doc was understandably grossed out (or at least I was grossed out for both of us) and promised to look into it. Well, in this ep he tells the Man of Steel that everything was looking good and that he only needed to do one more thing for them to determine if he could put a baby in someone. Though it’s never specifically stated, the implication that Klein needs a sperm sample is extremely obvious. Klein tells Superman that he needs a “sample” and that there was a room down the hall with “some magazines” (kids, ask your nastiest uncle) where he could be alone. When Superman fails to understand what Klein is trying to say, Klein guides him off screen towards the room, presumably to jerk him off. Putting aside the fact that Superman is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of masturbation, why does a scientist have an entire room complete with dirty magazines in his lab dedicated to rubbing one out? Who is this man? What is his story? And why weren’t we told some of it fucking yesterday when it could have made a difference.
Ronnie: See, you get it, the “it” being “The Wedding Singer sucks kangaroo dick”. I think the problem with the episode writ large is that it has echoes of previous episodes. This isn’t the first time Lois Lane has been held hostage underground, this isn’t the first time Lois Lane is to be forcefully wed to someone, this is not the first time the villain has died with some vague attempt at redemption. It’s not so much that this episode is terrible but it’s overly familiar. We’ve seen this song and dance before, so why waste time on it when there’s less than a month’s worth of shows left?
Re: Klein, I just want to say–and I think I’ve discussed this with you on Messenger–that I think it’s funny that the show introduced Emil Hamilton, basically made him unusable, and then introduced another Emil Hamilton in everything but name. Right? Klein is Hamilton from the comics, the absent minded, kinda quirky scientist pal of Superman’s. I find him a welcome presence whenever he appears. He really is the extent of the recurring cast, because I can’t think of anyone outside the main cast that appeared in 10 or more episodes over multiple seasons.
Chris: Here’s what really perplexes me about Sandler: his reputation in Hollywood is spotless. Like, you’ll never hear a bad word about him. The only person he’s ever really publicly fallen out with is Rob Schneider which makes him look even better. The same people keep working with him again and again and again, he’s gotta be a big part of the reason that Kevin Nealon (who I happen to like) isn’t on skid row somewhere, wearing a big patchy coat and warming his hands over an oil-drum fire. And he apparently loves his wife and kids. I have no reason to think he’s a bad person. But then I look at his movies, and they don’t seem like the work of a nice guy. It would be one thing if the movies were just bad. Plenty of nice people make bad movies. It’s that they’re gross. And I don’t mean gross like poops and boogers and whatnot. I mean they’re lazy, visually ugly, angry, and they contain ethnic stereotyping that, uh, isn’t great. It would be one thing if those movies were way in his past, like products of the 90s, where we could write them off to immaturity. This is shit from the last ten years. Remember that Ridiculous Six movie that I didn’t watch and don’t actually know much of anything about?
But the real thing that always catches my eye is the way women are often portrayed, or, more specifically, how they’re portrayed in relation to Sandler. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on standard Hollywood practices like glamour imbalances. If Salma Hayek is okay pretending to be married to a schlub, then it’s okay with me. What I’m talking about has more to do with the broader patterns of how his romantic comedies often played out. Remember Blended? The third Sandler/Barrymore romcom? Remember how it opened with the two of them on a blind date at fucking Hooters, and we’re supposed to think it’s crass and gross until we find out that his recently deceased wife used to work there and then we’re supposed to think… what? I gotta be honest, I think it’s much creepier that he took her to his late wife’s job on a date than if he just went to a shitty boob shack. That’s crazy behavior. And what are the servers supposed to think about the widowed husband of their dead (presumably) friend bringing dates there and making them serve her? It’s super fucked up. And I could go on, like the first (and maybe only?) thing we learn about his wife was that she was basically a pin-up.
“I’ve frozen her to death before, so this should work…”
And remember that subplot about how he has daughters who he doesn’t buy clothes for because he owns a sporting goods store and can just give them whatever sweat pants and jerseys that kind of fit them? I know we’re supposed to see him as charmingly eccentric, and that the movie shows his journey from grieving, stunted man-child, to fully engaged father and romantic partner, but man, if letting your teenage daughter pick out her own clothes and simply brushing your teeth before a date are your idea of growth, good luck. And not every Sandler movie is like that, I know, not even the Happy Madison ones he has so much control over. But enough are. If the recurring themes of the work you produce includes themes such as “people with different accents sound funny” and “women should go to the trouble to look like Salma Hayek and be open and loving while I play a furious/depressed character who doesn’t have a grasp of basic hygiene”, I gotta question your worldview.
I just, I just don’t know how he can keep going back to those plot-points over and over without noticing how angry and unpleasant they are. And I dunno, maybe they’re not like that anymore. I don’t devour each and every movie he appears in, and the ones I’ve seen recently (those two Murder Mystery movies and the Hotel Transylvania series) are perfectly fine. And there’s all the non Happy Madison shit, your Uncut Gems or Netflix Movie I Haven’t Watched Yet Where He’s a Basketball Scout, those are usually pretty solid flicks. But man, he did it for so long that I just struggle is all.
Odds & Ends
-The first few times I went to my in-laws’ house I noticed that there were a bunch of mugs with strange but familiar symbols on their sides on top of one of the bookshelves. I didn’t think much of it and for some reason assumed that they were Star Trek related and that the symbols were of the Klingon high command. Probably because my stepfather had a Trek coffee mug where a Bird of Prey appeared on the outside whenever someone poured hot liquid into it. Then, years later, I was sitting in their living room and it occurred to me that Desi’s dad wasn’t a Star Trek fan and took a closer look at the mugs. My friends, those weren’t Klingon high command symbols, they were radiation symbols. Because my father-in-law who’d worked for the defense department had picked the mugs up at various chemical weapons symposiums just like the ones our Dr. Klein was trying to smash at. He passed away last month, my father-in-law, not Doctor Klein who isn’t a real person and thus doesn’t ever actually die. He was a good man and we all miss him.
Ronnie: Ooh, a skinesode! That could be anything from an episode dealing with impersonation (you’re under someone else’s skin) or softcore pornography. Despite the sexual references that have been increasing this season, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is firmly the former. Woody Samms is a criminal on the run from a mob contract put out by Little Tony, so he body switches in order to go out on the town. This is established when his daughter comes back to his room only to find a chimp counting money and her dad’s body chimping around. Now, a chimp counting money–that’s basically my platonic ideal of television. You put that on for 45 minutes and I’m captivated. Unfortunately, the chimpnanigans end with this scene, but the show makes up for it by being insane. See, Woody needs to get to Little Tony, and when you’ve got body switching powers every problem looks like it can be solved by body switching, so he figures becoming a reporter is a way to do it. We’ve had guys with Superman’s powers, but we haven’t had a guy literally become Superman. Pulling out all the stops for Season 4.
You’ll be counting money like this chimp is if you put a chimp in your movie or TV show. Alas, we’re probably past the days of using real ones for our entertainment. Thanks a lot, societal progress!
Not only is “other asshole gets Superman powers” a tried and true story idea, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” gives Dean Cain the opportunity to stretch his wings, playing his character out of character purposefully. Usually shows give these chances to the principal cast when they’ve run out of ideas, so if you’re wondering why the third to last episode of the series is this, that might be why. Woody soon figures out Clark is Superman in a pretty entertaining sequence. He first starts experiencing all the requisite powers–superhearing, superstrength, vision powers–but then it culminates in him ripping open his shirt. Again, they’re lucky this isn’t on Cinemax, because the chances of inadvertent shirt ripping are much higher so Clark’s secret identity would be outed in all sorts of salacious situations. Meanwhile, Tim Thomerson (Jack Deth in the Trancers quintology) gets to wander around and go “Lois?” every so often. Not a fair trade off in my opinion, but Cain’s the star here. His first encounter with her ends with him arrested. Samms’ daughter (played by the daughter in Step by Step!) provides the voice of reason, saying “Clark Kent didn’t do anything to you. You can’t just take his body”. Appealing to a career criminal’s sense of decency doesn’t seem to work, and things complicate when the body switch starts crapping out and Lex’s Indian henchman (remember him? He’s back!) explains that to finalize the body switching he has to kill Clark in Woody’s body.
Fortunately a series of contrivances put the daughter in danger, he has to relinquish control of the Superman body to save her, the effect drains his energy, yadda yadda yadda. The important part is that as Woody is dying, a dog licks his hand (his hand holding the magic body switchin’ stone) and it’s VERY heavily implied that while Woody the human dies, Woody the dog lives on. It raises the question: what happens after this episode? Is Becky obliged to take care of his dog father for as long as the dog father shall live? Because that’s a pretty shitty thing to do, as a dad, to force your kid to take care of an animal just on the off chance it houses the consciousness of their parent. That’s not saying anything of the stress of being a dog man. Despite the popular book series by Dav Pilkey, I imagine it’s rough. Get it?
He’s fucked if anyone rips open his shirt, which is proof that Superman just wouldn’t work on Earth-Cinemax.
Chris: First things first, if you ever want an encapsulation of how it was that Lois & Clark fumbled the bag, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is the go to example. How do you open with a monkey counting money and then never go back to it? I mean, I understand in story terms how they resolved that particular scene, I’m speaking more generally, or even existentially. You’ve got a smart monkey, you’ve got Superman, you know about Beppo the Super Monkey (because everyone knows about Beppo the Super Monkey), do I have to draw you a fucking picture? I can see how maybe you don’t go through all the trouble to introduce a literal super powered kryptonian monkey who stowed away on little Kal-El’s ship and then scampered away after they crash landed on earth but before the Kent’s found Kal. But you better by god body swap Superman with a monkey and somehow let him keep his powers! I don’t even understand how this is a conversation!
That aside, yes, this episode was suitably nutty. Remember way back in season one when Clark had to go undercover as a tough guy in order to help bust an arson scheme? It’s the one where Lois had to dress up as a chicken because the writers hated Teri Hatcher (I assume). We both talked about how stilted and unconvincing Cain was as Clark-Pretending-to-be-Badass, well, this is more Clark-is-a-Good-for-Nothing-Louse and he pulls it off with a fair amount of aplomb. I specifically liked the scene where he’s trying to get Lois into bed while waving off an escalating crisis they hear about over their police scanner. The way he goes from not caring (what about the shooting?) to faux-sympathy (oh yeah, that’s, uh, that’s a terrible shame) to dismissive (sounds like the police have it under control) and then finally grudgingly willing to help all while vibrating with horniness is complex and smooth in a way that makes me wonder why Cain couldn’t be that good more often.
The rest of the episode is standard stuff, but as we keep pointing out: “standard” is pretty fucking high quality for a show like Lois & Clark. And then the possessed dog gag swoops in and allows it to go out on a high note. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Woody body-swaps with the dog, it closes with a freeze-frame close up of the dog staring into the camera with glowing red eyes. It’s a spectacular ending that leaves us with so many more questions than answers. Is this supposed to be a good thing? Because it seems like the last thing Woody does in life after redeeming himself is to murder a dog. Accidentally, but still. And why are the dog’s eyes glowing? The monkey’s eyes didn’t glow when he’s swapped out (I’m assuming the monkey is a he because Woody possessing a lady monkey would be totally gay), nor did Clark’s. There’s only two episodes left, and I have to assume they’re about the demon-dog rising to the top of Metropolis’s criminal underworld and a spectacular final battle royale with the Man of Steel that leaves Metropolis a smoldering ruin. I for one can’t wait to see it.
Ronnie: Chris, when you’re right you’re right. They had the chimp already, so presumably they had the chimp for the day if they had him at all. Let’s not get into the ethics of whether using chimps for our entertainment and just conclude that more chimp equals better episode. Again, I’m surprised late Season 4 Lois & Clark even sprang for one when the scene didn’t require its inclusion. The scene could’ve established the guy can switch bodies some other way. The choice was made to include a chimp and they could’ve done more with it, so that’s a shame. Regardless, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” has a lot going for it: Dean Cain being allowed to flex his acting range, there’s magic involved, the aforementioned chimp, and an attempt at emotional resonance with the father/daughter relationship. Now, that resonance doesn’t work, but it’s attempted. I’d almost argue Woody learns a lesson from all this body switching, but it’s reliant on the notion that this episode was followed by, and exists in the continuity of, 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd. You were a little too old for it, I think, Chris, but it was a Nickelodeon program about a shitty kid (voiced by Seth Green in Season 1, the brother from Wonder Years in subsequent seasons) who’s transformed into a dog and in order to undo the transformation he must perform 100 deeds. That means it would’ve had to last 100 episodes for him to clear his debt; the show lasted 40. That means poor Eddie stayed a dog and given dog lifespan expectancy he is long dead.
I like the premise that everyone’s kiss is unique, like a snowflake, and can be identified as such.
Chris: So I read years ago that Paul Newman, IMO the greatest movie star/salad dressing magnate of all time, said that the first fifteen pages are the most important part of any screenplay, and the last fifteen minutes are the most important part of any movie. His reasoning being that a script has to grab its reader as quickly as possible in order to keep their interest, and that audiences tend to decide how they feel about a movie by how it ends. I think the cash counting monkey opening of “I’ve got you” and the glowing red-eyed little dog ending are an example of a variation on that idea. Basically if you start and end strong, you can cram a bunch of junk into the middle and people will swallow it. I think that reasoning can work for a movie or even a couple of episodes of television, but we’re coming to the end of Lois & Clark, and I can’t help but feel like it’s an object lesson in how that philosophy doesn’t work over the entirety of a show.
When we started this fool’s errand I was struck by how much I enjoyed the shaggy weirdness of large chunks of the first season. It had its share of garbage of course, but on the whole I liked it more than I didn’t. I think when we wrap this whole sorry affair up next time, we’ll find that the fourth season has the longest string of Not Terrible Episodes since that first season and maybe even of the entire run. We can use the final post-mortem entry of Lois & Clark & Chris & Ronnie to run the numbers, but no matter what we find, I think we can both agree that once the two actually got married, the show hit a groove that it managed to ride all the way to the end of the line. Or, I guess to the antepenultimate point of the line, we’ll have to see how the last two episodes fare before we have the whole picture. Lois & Clark ran for eighty eight episodes, and when we began this series, we managed to get out one piece covering two episodes a week for the entire first season and much of the second. If we had managed to stay on course we would have been done in twenty seven weeks, plus the interstitials about other super shows. It’s been three years. You’ve come this far with us, may as well run out the clock with us too.
Odds & Ends
-This might be one of the most sparse episodes of the series, in that only 2 of the 6 main cast appear. I get the Kents, but no Perry or Jimmy? Makes it feel unpopulated.
-There’s a moment where Woody as Clark does a vocal impersonation of Asabi. I like to imagine Dean Cain pitched that himself.
-Joe Piscopo voiced a dog in the 2002 Nickelodeon show 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd, which sounds right, you know?
-Did you know that Peter David himself has sole screenwriting credit for Trancers 4: Jack of Swords, and Trancers 5: Sudden Death? What’s that? You’d never heard of the Trancers movies before this article and have no idea who Peter David is? How I envy you. He’s a comics creator so of course he has a GoFundMe you should contribute to: https://www.gofundme.com/f/peter-david-fund?viewupdates=1&rcid=r01-171961476171-600fd54435a011ef&utm_medium=email&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_email%2B1137-update-supporters-v5b
Ronnie Gardocki
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