Ronnie: This is an intriguing pairing of episodes because of their commonality: namely, they both bring back a foe from a previous episode, thereby establishing continuity. Me, I’m thinking “continuity” on Night Man is just an excuse to reuse footage, but let’s try to keep an open mind. First up is Joran aka Chrome in “Chrome II”. You know what Joran needed? A Harley Quinn to his Joker. He receives one with Rachel, a lightning victim who has the power of suggestion. This is illustrated when she convinces a man to rob some jewels and then throw himself five stories to his death. Rachel understandably asks why Joran doesn’t kill her and take her power for his own. “Nothing” says Joran, noting he has a desire for companionship. Aw, he misses casual sex.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force has better graphics than this show.
Meanwhile, our dipshit heroes are fake going to Aspen. Who else is there but none other than Night Man’s two stabs at female reporter characters, Jennifer Parks (Alexandra Hedison) and Elaine Barnes (Robyn Bliley). To remind you readers and Chris, Jennifer was the reporter in the first Chrome episode and Elaine was investigating Night Man in the extradimensional beast show. Jennifer is brunette and Elaine is blonde. Rachel enters the vicinity to make Johnny fall in love with her and become a snobby, judgmental prick. He disparages servers as “wage slaves” and calls Raleigh a “nerdy scientist” who can’t do sports.
I would argue setting the episode in the mountains was a mistake because they could not even pretend to shoot in the mountains, therefore resulting in what may be the CD Rom-iest Night Man yet. They all look “like that” to a degree, but it’s never been so pronounced. Johnny continues to piss off everyone in his life, including the jazz legend he was psyched to play with. Joran kills him to steal his jazz talent and frames Johnny for the crime. This lasts all of two minutes, because Night Man saved the guy. Wait, so if jazz legend Woody Gillis wasn’t killed, did Joran not copy his talent? Indeed, when it’s time for Chrome to perform he’s like John Germaine after trying to eat Elaine’s pussy. The crowd starts booing and throwing shit, which struck me as odd. This is Aspen, not Philadelphia.
In any event, the hero and villain have it out at Devil’s Run, a car full of supporting characters is put in jeopardy, and Jodie Foster’s wife fails to get her big scoop of Chrome murdering a guy, or something like that. Chrome falls to his death; this could easily be retconned but this is his final appearance on the series. So his Sylar abilities, apparently they work on powered and nonpowered people alike? If he killed Margaret Atwood, he’d gain her writing skill? Man, I dunno. This show is playing pretty fast and loose with what we know in the universe of Night Man. It’s my fault for having literally any expectations.
Predator vision in MY Night Man?
Chris: Remember that one Simpsons where when Homer accidentally blows up the church Marge says it’s the worst thing he’s ever done and Homer says she says that so often the words have lost all meaning? Well, for what it’s worth, “Chrome II” is the worst episode of Nightman I’ve ever seen. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it, how can you not enjoy a show where one of the heroes sucker punches a woman a foot shorter than him in the face? But its fundamental technical ineptitude continues to astound. It’s wall-to-wall terrible green screen of course, and there’s plenty of out of focus shots, but those are almost stylistic choices now, like dutch angles on the old Batman show, or long takes in Alfonso Cuarón films. But there were times when the matting was so poor that the character in the frame was standing perfectly still like they were shot with a stationary camera and the background was shaking and jittery as if it were filmed handheld for a Bourne movie. And the editing, lord the editing. I didn’t expect the production to move all the way to a mountain and film the actors actually standing on snowy peaks or doing elaborate stunts, but the cutting between close ups of characters on sets and wide shots of stock footage slash doubles doing stunts or just standing around was literally laughable.
I did like that Joran’s plot to humiliate and kill Johnny involved maneuvering him into winning a trophy, then having it stripped from him and given to Joran in front of a crowd of people. He wanted Johnny to think he’d won a contest, then lose at the last minute and be embarrassed in front of his peers. It’s like something an angry 12 year old would come up with. But I don’t think if you get arrested for a crime after winning an award, that they strip you of that award and give it to the runner up. Like, if Chris Rock had pressed charges against Will Smith for slapping him at the Oscars the Academy wouldn’t take his Academy Award back and give it to Andrew Garfield instead. And I loved that Joran didn’t even bother to practice playing the trumpet before going on stage and that the show lampshaded it by having Rachel pointing it out beforehand. Joran was just so confident in his plan that I guess he didn’t notice that he didn’t actually absorb any Jazzman Abilities. Also very 12 years old. But more than anything else I loved that they kept calling it a trophy, as opposed to a statue or award or something. There’s just something so childish and immature about the word trophy; it makes you think of little league instead of the majors (even though the winner of the World Series gets a trophy). And when Johnny chases Joran through the auditorium after the whole evil plan has been exposed (somehow), he’s still holding onto the fucking thing. I thought he was going to beat him to death with it or something. A+.
Chrome: How about some SNOW, MAN? Night Man: We discussed this, and I said no.
“Chrome II” is also one of those stories where everything is wrapped up at the end because the villain dies and the show is over, as opposed to any kind of logical narrative resolution or conclusion. Over the course of the episode, Johnny makes a complete ass out of himself in front of his fans and peers, alienates everyone who cares about him and is arrested for murder. He’s exonerated for the murder thing but shouldn’t everyone still hate his guts? Are the citizens of the Night Man Universe comfortable enough with the supernatural that Johnny could just write up a press release explaining that his brain was hacked and loused up by Alotta Fagina and that’s why he was being such a dick to everyone? Like when REM guitarist Peter Buck freaked out on a plane and peed on a flight attendant (or something) but then he got a doctor’s note explaining he’d had a bad reaction to allergy medicine and it made him temporarily insane? Is it like that?
Ronnie: Chrome isn’t a very good villain, is he? Sure, he’s smarmy, and he has expansive powers, but those alone do not make for a suitable antagonist. Let’s look at classic comic book villains. The best ones are a subversion of the hero. For example, you’ve got the Joker’s chaos to contrast the rigid order Batman seeks to uphold. With Superman and Lex Luthor you’ve got the ultimate immigrant versus the ultimate self-made man. Spiders and goblins are natural enemies. The Reverse-Flash runs in reverse, which is the opposite of running forward, which is what The Flash does. Night Man and Chrome don’t share anything, because the opposite of sensing evil is not stealing powers. In demeanor, the cool San Franciscan does not oppose Eurotrash, except maybe in a club setting. That’s where it should’ve gone: the Eurotrash jazzman encroaches on the traditional SF jazz musician, but the show passes up this opportunity. There’s no real personal connection between the two, it’s not like Johnny killed Chrome’s parents or vice versa. That’s why Season 2 Kieran Keyes makes for an adequate opponent to Night Man: he [SPOILERS!!!!] kills Johnny’s dad. I guess it makes sense that Joran didn’t appear after this episode: he was all out of material by his second episode. It would take another season for Nighty to find his real nemesis.
This episode is notable for another reason because it’s an “on location” show. Now, I know what you’re thinking: with copious amounts of greenscreen, can’t any show be an on location one? Well, yes and no. It’s true Night Man employs green screen a lot, even in (or especially!) situations where it looks “ridiculous” and “awful”. But for the most part the show’s action stays in Bay City/San Francisco in familiar surroundings. The House of Soul is a big location, even getting an episode named after it. It makes sense after watching “Chrome II”, because the results are not good for the skiing trip. CD-Rom remains the best description for the show’s visuals. Night Man’s grasp on reality is already shaky at best, so you don’t need going on the road to push that.
Chris: I completely agree with your theory about Joran being a weak antagonist for Night Man because there’s nothing linking the two characters. It reminds me in that regard, of the previous Night Woman episode and more broadly about the basic foundational flaw that the show seems incapable of overcoming. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot wrong with Night Man. It’s comically inept on just about every conceivable level. But lots of shows are comically inept. I think what sets Night Man apart from your average dumbass low-rent shitshow is how essentially random and incoherent it seems to be on, like, a molecular level. Nothing connects with anything else in any way. Part of what made it fun to talk about Lois & Clark or SVU is that the shows had distinct points of view that they handled badly. Night Man is just a void. Say what you will about SVU’s hateful reactionary heart, at least it’s an ethos.
Joran would be more intimidating if instead of flashlight eyes he had cat eyes. He still wouldn’t be intimidating, but he’d be more intimidating.
I have never read a single issue of Night Man, and if there’s anything like a just and loving God I never will. But I have read a lot of Youngblood,(a fact that undermines the whole possibility of a just and loving God question), maybe all of it leading up to the current incarnation? Youngblood is, of course, a historically terrible comic book for many reasons but what doesn’t get enough attention is how truly unhinged the plotting is. Every issue is breathlessly paced and filled with radical twists and dramatic splash pages, but it’s never in service of anything because whatever everyone is going on about is abandoned or forgotten or revamped two issues later. It’s a weird, hyper, garish, stuttering mess on top of being, you know, Rob Liefeld doing drawings (or breakdowns of drawings that some inker will never get paid for actually finishing). So in that respect, I wouldn’t be surprised if Night Man is actually more indebted to Youngblood than its actual source material. I could, of course, be totally off base but it’s hard to imagine Steve Englehart putting together anything as incompetent as this.
Odds & Ends
-I like how it’s announced that Woody Gillis is not performing due to “unforeseen circumstances”. Um, he was murdered. I think “not being alive” is more than unforeseen circumstances.
-Joran performer Shane Brolly has better things in his future, if you consider “playing the scenery chewing Starscream character in the Underworld movies” to be better. Len Wiseman is arguably a better director than Robert Munic, aka the director of this episode and the guy who created Benjamin Bratt’s The Cleaner.
-We’re calling him Night Man now, even though it’s not really been established in-universe that he’s called that. Look, it’s either that or “the asshole with the laser eye”, so.
-”Chrome II” is Michael Weston’s acting debut. You may remember him as Cuddy’s boyfriend on House or Benson’s shitty half-brother on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In this episode he plays Rudy (presumably the same character as the football guy), proving that not everyone involved in this show was consigned to the dustbin of history.
1X18: “BAD TO THE BONE”
Ronnie: “Bad To The Bone” begins with a recap of E. Haskell Bridges’ first appearance earlier in the season. I find it insulting that the people behind Night Man think we need to be reminded of a great character who appeared in such an iconic episode. He transformed into Donald Trump! Anyway, a woman has car trouble and Johnny helps her out because heroes don’t stop being heroes when they take off the cape. I like how this whole episode presupposes that Johnny’s life is an episode of a Cinemax show, and that he blunders into sex on a regular basis. Instead of giving head to a saxophonist, however, this woman winds up dead. Is Johnny a murderer? That’d be more interesting, but no. E. Haskell Bridges has decided to take revenge on his three most hated people by framing Domino for a string of murders.
Our hero!
This feels like a redux of the time the district attorney thought he killed the woman that overdosed in his apartment. (Also he was literally accused of murder LAST EPISODE.) There are two things I like about “Bad to the Bone”, and the title is not one of them. The first is that they bothered to bring back Bridges’ girlfriend Samantha. Same actress and everything. Two is that Havana Syndrome is real, and Bridges is using it on Johnny to distract him while Bridges commits murder with Johnny’s face. Whenever Bridges wants to impersonate his foe, Johnny suffers a migraine. It gets so bad he must go to Patrick Macnee, who I guess is his primary care physician. Let it be known this all ends in a Night Man vs. Night Man fight that may take the cake for the worst looking scene in the series. I understand the gravity of making such a statement but I stand by it.
Chris: “Bad to the Bone” has one of my favorite (or maybe least favorite, it’s actually hard to remember anymore) plot devices in superhero storytelling, namely: guy decides to impersonate the superhero’s alter-ego and ends up discovering his secret identity. See the bad guy (who’s evil name is Space Face? That can’t be right.) is mad at Johnny’s pop and Lt. Dann because they busted him a million years ago so he decided to ruin them by framing Johnny for murder. Or something. Is he mad at Johnny for what happened in the previous episode? Because obviously Night Man stopped him but Space Face didn’t know Johnny was Night Man, and we know that because when Raleigh starts talking to Nü Johnny about the suit he’s surprised and delighted. And it gave Matt McColm an opportunity to play someone impersonating Johnny, so he gets to do someone doing an impression of himself, which he was remarkably less terrible at than one would think.
I also liked how his girlfriend teased S.F. (I’m not going to keep writing that fucking name out) about how much handsomer he was as Johnny and how it really started to get under his skin. Other than that though, there really isn’t too much to say about this one. S.F. is another thin antagonist who doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, does a bunch of stuff to make Johnny look like an asshole and then dies, somehow exonerating him. It’s a carbon copy of “Chrome II” in that respect. It even ends with the villain plunging to his death again. But I also think S.F. might have plunged to his death in his previous appearance? So maybe this will be his thing moving forward. Kind of like I wanted each season of the Punisher TV show to be about Frank discovering more people who conspired to murder his family. Hey, now that the show is part of the MCU, how do they jibe the fact that whatsisbucket fromThe Bear is Microchip and Ben Grimm? I guess because Grimm is from a different dimension it wouldn’t be weird that they look exactly the same? Maybe during Doomsday, Ben will run into Micro and freak out. Maybe he could, like, crack up and go berserk and then Hulk would have to fight him.
Purple Dumbass vs. Purple Dumbass: Requiem
Because they have to have a Hulk/Thing fight, right? That’s guaranteed. So the twist could be that it’s Ben who’s out of his mind and Bruce who has to calm him down. Because, you know, he’s Smart Hulk now. Or he was, I guess they could always regress him, but that seems like a step back for the character. Do you think they’ll put She Hulk in the movies? Seems like a long-shot, to me. Matt was in the last Spidey movie and Frank is in the next one. Kamala was in The Marvels (which is underrated) and they snuck Kate Bishop into the post credit scene. I think Riri is at least in the next Black Panther, but She Hulk, Moon Knight and Echo feel extraneous. And who knows, it might all really come crashing down after whatever Avengers movie follows Doomsday. You gotta think they’re planning some kind of wrap-up if things don’t work out. But no matter what happens with Marvel, people are gonna bitch about whatever the most popular genre of film is because that’s what people do and they’ll never stop making Spider-Man movies. So I guess we have that to look forward to.
Ronnie: Yeah, Space Face is no good. Names like the Chameleon and False Face are taken, but you’ve got to come up with something better than that. But I guess Night Man isn’t that inspired as it is. What would be a better name for the character, I wonder. Insomnia Man? Jazz Man? Laser Eye Guy could work. I’m just spitballing here; I’m no Steve Englehart. Anyway, I think “Bad to the Bone” is slightly better than “Chrome II” if only because there’s a simplicity to Space Face’s motivation: he wants to get back at the guys who sent him to prison. Chrome, by contrast, wants to become an apex superpowered individual while also showing up Night Man and embarrassing him. To me the victor is clear: Space Face, forever in spite of the name.
This whole episode is about blackouts. Johnny’s rotten with them, thanks to the Havana Syndrome device Space Face and girlfriend carry around. Can you do something against your morals and ethics while in a blackout. The answer doesn’t matter, of course, because what’s at hand is Space Face framing Johnny for murder. Fortunately, Mr. Face’s girlfriend takes pity on Johnny, not only because she has the hots for him. It’s all very psychosexual, very De Palma, the relationship between E. Haskell Bridges, Samantha, and Johnny Domino. Her sympathy for Johnny is what unravels the whole plan. That and Face’s Night Man costume running out of battery early because it was so drained from carrying Raleigh. Raleigh’s a thin guy, so I don’t see why it’d crap out the costume so shortly unless Night Man’s like a Sega Game Gear and goes through batteries like, well, a Sega Game Gear. The important thing is that the Night Man vs. Night Man face/off (why wasn’t “Face/Off” the episode title?) looks awful.
It goes to show how ramshackle the police department is in Bay City/San Francisco that the official story behind the murders is thus: E. Haskell Bridges, who was last seen plummeting to his death in the ocean, conspired with his girlfriend to use a lil headache box to incapacitate Johnny while Bridges impersonated him and murdered people while using Johnny’s face. Lt. Dann lays out all the implausibility and yet Johnny responds with the equivalent of “what’re you gonna do about it”. Jazz musicians run roughshod over this city’s justice system, and it will be cold comfort to the victims’ families that some phantom impersonator was behind everything. A phantom impersonator they have no proof except for Johnny’s word was even alive at the time.
If this magazine doesn’t actually exist I’m going to be very upset.
Chris: I think it’s interesting(ish) how Night Man spends as much time as he does cleaning up other people’s problems. Space Face doesn’t actually wish him any specific harm so much as he wants to hurt Johnny in an effort to get back at his dad and friend(?). It’s in the same vein as how he got put into an electricity coma a few episodes ago so Night Woman (no relation) could have it out with the slob that pushed her out of a building and also make eyes at Lt. Dann, the same Lt. Dann who Space Face had beef with. Is this a Big Trouble in Little China deal where you realize over the course of the story that the gallant side-kick is the real hero of the story and the main character is the goofus tag-along? Was the show originally titled Lt. Dann Man before being radically renamed and retooled after a disastrous test screening? It would explain both the shoddy, haphazard world building and what a sour-puss Lt. Dann is.
One characteristic that both television and comics (really most forms of narrative storytelling) have in common is that the stories tend to work better when the protagonist and antagonist are literally or thematically linked. Like how Professor Xavier and Magneto are ideologically opposed to one another while also wanting the same ultimate outcome. Or how Cigarette Smoking Man was Mulder’s dad, and also the sperm donor that the aliens used to impregnate Scully thereby also making him the dad of Mulder’s girlfriend’s kid. I think. It was something like that. Anyway, the point is you want your villain to represent some dark part or fear of the hero, like the idea that you could lose your moral compass in the pursuit of a noble goal, or that the people who have authority over you aren’t actually interested in your well being. Night Man doesn’t have anyone like that because Night Man doesn’t stand for anything in particular. He doesn’t have goals or ambition or go on patrol or anything like that, he just does jazz at the jazz club until trouble walks through his field of vision. He doesn’t even have a jazz nemesis who’s into polka or, I dunno, atonal 20th century classical composers. Whatever the opposite of jazz is.
Much like Tom Welling on Smallville, Matt McColm comes alive (relatively) every time he’s asked to play someone other than Johnny Domino. It goes to show how inert the character is that the actor is straitjacketed by how boring and not written he is.
And nobody’s really mad at him either. There aren’t any crippled/bald freaks who wrongly blame him for whatever terrible accident caused their wretched disfigurement and or hair loss. There also haven’t been any by-the-book cops hell bent on taking him down because he may only be trying to help but he’s still by god breaking the law. Hell, you’d think someone somewhere would be upset about the number of people he’s executed, but if there is, we haven’t heard about it. We’re more than halfway through the first season and I still don’t feel like the protagonist really matters at all.
Odds & Ends
-Do you think the new Star Trek will be good? Daley and Goldstein are interesting hires. They’re kinda simultaneously solid pop culture craftsmen and postmodern weirdos. I liked Game Night and Dungeons and Dragons, maybe they’ll do something fun.
-On the other hand, it’ll probably be woke, by which I mean women and black people will get lines of dialogue. You never saw that in classic Trek.
-In one scene Bridges sows suspicion by pretending to be a drummer who saw Johnny with the victim. He focuses on how cool the Prowler is, which is either the show taking a shot at people who think that the car is cool or it’s mandated propaganda that comes as part of being able to use the vehicle. You know, for every 3 or 4 scripts they have to include a positive reference about it, that sort of deal.
-Matt McColm’s migraine acting is pretty funny.
Night Man Nights: “Chrome II”/”Bad to the Bone”
1X17: “CHROME II”
Ronnie: This is an intriguing pairing of episodes because of their commonality: namely, they both bring back a foe from a previous episode, thereby establishing continuity. Me, I’m thinking “continuity” on Night Man is just an excuse to reuse footage, but let’s try to keep an open mind. First up is Joran aka Chrome in “Chrome II”. You know what Joran needed? A Harley Quinn to his Joker. He receives one with Rachel, a lightning victim who has the power of suggestion. This is illustrated when she convinces a man to rob some jewels and then throw himself five stories to his death. Rachel understandably asks why Joran doesn’t kill her and take her power for his own. “Nothing” says Joran, noting he has a desire for companionship. Aw, he misses casual sex.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force has better graphics than this show.
Meanwhile, our dipshit heroes are fake going to Aspen. Who else is there but none other than Night Man’s two stabs at female reporter characters, Jennifer Parks (Alexandra Hedison) and Elaine Barnes (Robyn Bliley). To remind you readers and Chris, Jennifer was the reporter in the first Chrome episode and Elaine was investigating Night Man in the extradimensional beast show. Jennifer is brunette and Elaine is blonde. Rachel enters the vicinity to make Johnny fall in love with her and become a snobby, judgmental prick. He disparages servers as “wage slaves” and calls Raleigh a “nerdy scientist” who can’t do sports.
I would argue setting the episode in the mountains was a mistake because they could not even pretend to shoot in the mountains, therefore resulting in what may be the CD Rom-iest Night Man yet. They all look “like that” to a degree, but it’s never been so pronounced. Johnny continues to piss off everyone in his life, including the jazz legend he was psyched to play with. Joran kills him to steal his jazz talent and frames Johnny for the crime. This lasts all of two minutes, because Night Man saved the guy. Wait, so if jazz legend Woody Gillis wasn’t killed, did Joran not copy his talent? Indeed, when it’s time for Chrome to perform he’s like John Germaine after trying to eat Elaine’s pussy. The crowd starts booing and throwing shit, which struck me as odd. This is Aspen, not Philadelphia.
In any event, the hero and villain have it out at Devil’s Run, a car full of supporting characters is put in jeopardy, and Jodie Foster’s wife fails to get her big scoop of Chrome murdering a guy, or something like that. Chrome falls to his death; this could easily be retconned but this is his final appearance on the series. So his Sylar abilities, apparently they work on powered and nonpowered people alike? If he killed Margaret Atwood, he’d gain her writing skill? Man, I dunno. This show is playing pretty fast and loose with what we know in the universe of Night Man. It’s my fault for having literally any expectations.
Predator vision in MY Night Man?
Chris: Remember that one Simpsons where when Homer accidentally blows up the church Marge says it’s the worst thing he’s ever done and Homer says she says that so often the words have lost all meaning? Well, for what it’s worth, “Chrome II” is the worst episode of Nightman I’ve ever seen. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it, how can you not enjoy a show where one of the heroes sucker punches a woman a foot shorter than him in the face? But its fundamental technical ineptitude continues to astound. It’s wall-to-wall terrible green screen of course, and there’s plenty of out of focus shots, but those are almost stylistic choices now, like dutch angles on the old Batman show, or long takes in Alfonso Cuarón films. But there were times when the matting was so poor that the character in the frame was standing perfectly still like they were shot with a stationary camera and the background was shaking and jittery as if it were filmed handheld for a Bourne movie. And the editing, lord the editing. I didn’t expect the production to move all the way to a mountain and film the actors actually standing on snowy peaks or doing elaborate stunts, but the cutting between close ups of characters on sets and wide shots of stock footage slash doubles doing stunts or just standing around was literally laughable.
I did like that Joran’s plot to humiliate and kill Johnny involved maneuvering him into winning a trophy, then having it stripped from him and given to Joran in front of a crowd of people. He wanted Johnny to think he’d won a contest, then lose at the last minute and be embarrassed in front of his peers. It’s like something an angry 12 year old would come up with. But I don’t think if you get arrested for a crime after winning an award, that they strip you of that award and give it to the runner up. Like, if Chris Rock had pressed charges against Will Smith for slapping him at the Oscars the Academy wouldn’t take his Academy Award back and give it to Andrew Garfield instead. And I loved that Joran didn’t even bother to practice playing the trumpet before going on stage and that the show lampshaded it by having Rachel pointing it out beforehand. Joran was just so confident in his plan that I guess he didn’t notice that he didn’t actually absorb any Jazzman Abilities. Also very 12 years old. But more than anything else I loved that they kept calling it a trophy, as opposed to a statue or award or something. There’s just something so childish and immature about the word trophy; it makes you think of little league instead of the majors (even though the winner of the World Series gets a trophy). And when Johnny chases Joran through the auditorium after the whole evil plan has been exposed (somehow), he’s still holding onto the fucking thing. I thought he was going to beat him to death with it or something. A+.
Chrome: How about some SNOW, MAN?
Night Man: We discussed this, and I said no.
“Chrome II” is also one of those stories where everything is wrapped up at the end because the villain dies and the show is over, as opposed to any kind of logical narrative resolution or conclusion. Over the course of the episode, Johnny makes a complete ass out of himself in front of his fans and peers, alienates everyone who cares about him and is arrested for murder. He’s exonerated for the murder thing but shouldn’t everyone still hate his guts? Are the citizens of the Night Man Universe comfortable enough with the supernatural that Johnny could just write up a press release explaining that his brain was hacked and loused up by Alotta Fagina and that’s why he was being such a dick to everyone? Like when REM guitarist Peter Buck freaked out on a plane and peed on a flight attendant (or something) but then he got a doctor’s note explaining he’d had a bad reaction to allergy medicine and it made him temporarily insane? Is it like that?
Ronnie: Chrome isn’t a very good villain, is he? Sure, he’s smarmy, and he has expansive powers, but those alone do not make for a suitable antagonist. Let’s look at classic comic book villains. The best ones are a subversion of the hero. For example, you’ve got the Joker’s chaos to contrast the rigid order Batman seeks to uphold. With Superman and Lex Luthor you’ve got the ultimate immigrant versus the ultimate self-made man. Spiders and goblins are natural enemies. The Reverse-Flash runs in reverse, which is the opposite of running forward, which is what The Flash does. Night Man and Chrome don’t share anything, because the opposite of sensing evil is not stealing powers. In demeanor, the cool San Franciscan does not oppose Eurotrash, except maybe in a club setting. That’s where it should’ve gone: the Eurotrash jazzman encroaches on the traditional SF jazz musician, but the show passes up this opportunity. There’s no real personal connection between the two, it’s not like Johnny killed Chrome’s parents or vice versa. That’s why Season 2 Kieran Keyes makes for an adequate opponent to Night Man: he [SPOILERS!!!!] kills Johnny’s dad. I guess it makes sense that Joran didn’t appear after this episode: he was all out of material by his second episode. It would take another season for Nighty to find his real nemesis.
This episode is notable for another reason because it’s an “on location” show. Now, I know what you’re thinking: with copious amounts of greenscreen, can’t any show be an on location one? Well, yes and no. It’s true Night Man employs green screen a lot, even in (or especially!) situations where it looks “ridiculous” and “awful”. But for the most part the show’s action stays in Bay City/San Francisco in familiar surroundings. The House of Soul is a big location, even getting an episode named after it. It makes sense after watching “Chrome II”, because the results are not good for the skiing trip. CD-Rom remains the best description for the show’s visuals. Night Man’s grasp on reality is already shaky at best, so you don’t need going on the road to push that.
Chris: I completely agree with your theory about Joran being a weak antagonist for Night Man because there’s nothing linking the two characters. It reminds me in that regard, of the previous Night Woman episode and more broadly about the basic foundational flaw that the show seems incapable of overcoming. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot wrong with Night Man. It’s comically inept on just about every conceivable level. But lots of shows are comically inept. I think what sets Night Man apart from your average dumbass low-rent shitshow is how essentially random and incoherent it seems to be on, like, a molecular level. Nothing connects with anything else in any way. Part of what made it fun to talk about Lois & Clark or SVU is that the shows had distinct points of view that they handled badly. Night Man is just a void. Say what you will about SVU’s hateful reactionary heart, at least it’s an ethos.
Joran would be more intimidating if instead of flashlight eyes he had cat eyes. He still wouldn’t be intimidating, but he’d be more intimidating.
I have never read a single issue of Night Man, and if there’s anything like a just and loving God I never will. But I have read a lot of Youngblood,(a fact that undermines the whole possibility of a just and loving God question), maybe all of it leading up to the current incarnation? Youngblood is, of course, a historically terrible comic book for many reasons but what doesn’t get enough attention is how truly unhinged the plotting is. Every issue is breathlessly paced and filled with radical twists and dramatic splash pages, but it’s never in service of anything because whatever everyone is going on about is abandoned or forgotten or revamped two issues later. It’s a weird, hyper, garish, stuttering mess on top of being, you know, Rob Liefeld doing drawings (or breakdowns of drawings that some inker will never get paid for actually finishing). So in that respect, I wouldn’t be surprised if Night Man is actually more indebted to Youngblood than its actual source material. I could, of course, be totally off base but it’s hard to imagine Steve Englehart putting together anything as incompetent as this.
Odds & Ends
-I like how it’s announced that Woody Gillis is not performing due to “unforeseen circumstances”. Um, he was murdered. I think “not being alive” is more than unforeseen circumstances.
-Joran performer Shane Brolly has better things in his future, if you consider “playing the scenery chewing Starscream character in the Underworld movies” to be better. Len Wiseman is arguably a better director than Robert Munic, aka the director of this episode and the guy who created Benjamin Bratt’s The Cleaner.
-We’re calling him Night Man now, even though it’s not really been established in-universe that he’s called that. Look, it’s either that or “the asshole with the laser eye”, so.
-”Chrome II” is Michael Weston’s acting debut. You may remember him as Cuddy’s boyfriend on House or Benson’s shitty half-brother on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In this episode he plays Rudy (presumably the same character as the football guy), proving that not everyone involved in this show was consigned to the dustbin of history.
1X18: “BAD TO THE BONE”
Ronnie: “Bad To The Bone” begins with a recap of E. Haskell Bridges’ first appearance earlier in the season. I find it insulting that the people behind Night Man think we need to be reminded of a great character who appeared in such an iconic episode. He transformed into Donald Trump! Anyway, a woman has car trouble and Johnny helps her out because heroes don’t stop being heroes when they take off the cape. I like how this whole episode presupposes that Johnny’s life is an episode of a Cinemax show, and that he blunders into sex on a regular basis. Instead of giving head to a saxophonist, however, this woman winds up dead. Is Johnny a murderer? That’d be more interesting, but no. E. Haskell Bridges has decided to take revenge on his three most hated people by framing Domino for a string of murders.
Our hero!
This feels like a redux of the time the district attorney thought he killed the woman that overdosed in his apartment. (Also he was literally accused of murder LAST EPISODE.) There are two things I like about “Bad to the Bone”, and the title is not one of them. The first is that they bothered to bring back Bridges’ girlfriend Samantha. Same actress and everything. Two is that Havana Syndrome is real, and Bridges is using it on Johnny to distract him while Bridges commits murder with Johnny’s face. Whenever Bridges wants to impersonate his foe, Johnny suffers a migraine. It gets so bad he must go to Patrick Macnee, who I guess is his primary care physician. Let it be known this all ends in a Night Man vs. Night Man fight that may take the cake for the worst looking scene in the series. I understand the gravity of making such a statement but I stand by it.
Chris: “Bad to the Bone” has one of my favorite (or maybe least favorite, it’s actually hard to remember anymore) plot devices in superhero storytelling, namely: guy decides to impersonate the superhero’s alter-ego and ends up discovering his secret identity. See the bad guy (who’s evil name is Space Face? That can’t be right.) is mad at Johnny’s pop and Lt. Dann because they busted him a million years ago so he decided to ruin them by framing Johnny for murder. Or something. Is he mad at Johnny for what happened in the previous episode? Because obviously Night Man stopped him but Space Face didn’t know Johnny was Night Man, and we know that because when Raleigh starts talking to Nü Johnny about the suit he’s surprised and delighted. And it gave Matt McColm an opportunity to play someone impersonating Johnny, so he gets to do someone doing an impression of himself, which he was remarkably less terrible at than one would think.
I also liked how his girlfriend teased S.F. (I’m not going to keep writing that fucking name out) about how much handsomer he was as Johnny and how it really started to get under his skin. Other than that though, there really isn’t too much to say about this one. S.F. is another thin antagonist who doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, does a bunch of stuff to make Johnny look like an asshole and then dies, somehow exonerating him. It’s a carbon copy of “Chrome II” in that respect. It even ends with the villain plunging to his death again. But I also think S.F. might have plunged to his death in his previous appearance? So maybe this will be his thing moving forward. Kind of like I wanted each season of the Punisher TV show to be about Frank discovering more people who conspired to murder his family. Hey, now that the show is part of the MCU, how do they jibe the fact that whatsisbucket fromThe Bear is Microchip and Ben Grimm? I guess because Grimm is from a different dimension it wouldn’t be weird that they look exactly the same? Maybe during Doomsday, Ben will run into Micro and freak out. Maybe he could, like, crack up and go berserk and then Hulk would have to fight him.
Purple Dumbass vs. Purple Dumbass: Requiem
Because they have to have a Hulk/Thing fight, right? That’s guaranteed. So the twist could be that it’s Ben who’s out of his mind and Bruce who has to calm him down. Because, you know, he’s Smart Hulk now. Or he was, I guess they could always regress him, but that seems like a step back for the character. Do you think they’ll put She Hulk in the movies? Seems like a long-shot, to me. Matt was in the last Spidey movie and Frank is in the next one. Kamala was in The Marvels (which is underrated) and they snuck Kate Bishop into the post credit scene. I think Riri is at least in the next Black Panther, but She Hulk, Moon Knight and Echo feel extraneous. And who knows, it might all really come crashing down after whatever Avengers movie follows Doomsday. You gotta think they’re planning some kind of wrap-up if things don’t work out. But no matter what happens with Marvel, people are gonna bitch about whatever the most popular genre of film is because that’s what people do and they’ll never stop making Spider-Man movies. So I guess we have that to look forward to.
Ronnie: Yeah, Space Face is no good. Names like the Chameleon and False Face are taken, but you’ve got to come up with something better than that. But I guess Night Man isn’t that inspired as it is. What would be a better name for the character, I wonder. Insomnia Man? Jazz Man? Laser Eye Guy could work. I’m just spitballing here; I’m no Steve Englehart. Anyway, I think “Bad to the Bone” is slightly better than “Chrome II” if only because there’s a simplicity to Space Face’s motivation: he wants to get back at the guys who sent him to prison. Chrome, by contrast, wants to become an apex superpowered individual while also showing up Night Man and embarrassing him. To me the victor is clear: Space Face, forever in spite of the name.
This whole episode is about blackouts. Johnny’s rotten with them, thanks to the Havana Syndrome device Space Face and girlfriend carry around. Can you do something against your morals and ethics while in a blackout. The answer doesn’t matter, of course, because what’s at hand is Space Face framing Johnny for murder. Fortunately, Mr. Face’s girlfriend takes pity on Johnny, not only because she has the hots for him. It’s all very psychosexual, very De Palma, the relationship between E. Haskell Bridges, Samantha, and Johnny Domino. Her sympathy for Johnny is what unravels the whole plan. That and Face’s Night Man costume running out of battery early because it was so drained from carrying Raleigh. Raleigh’s a thin guy, so I don’t see why it’d crap out the costume so shortly unless Night Man’s like a Sega Game Gear and goes through batteries like, well, a Sega Game Gear. The important thing is that the Night Man vs. Night Man face/off (why wasn’t “Face/Off” the episode title?) looks awful.
It goes to show how ramshackle the police department is in Bay City/San Francisco that the official story behind the murders is thus: E. Haskell Bridges, who was last seen plummeting to his death in the ocean, conspired with his girlfriend to use a lil headache box to incapacitate Johnny while Bridges impersonated him and murdered people while using Johnny’s face. Lt. Dann lays out all the implausibility and yet Johnny responds with the equivalent of “what’re you gonna do about it”. Jazz musicians run roughshod over this city’s justice system, and it will be cold comfort to the victims’ families that some phantom impersonator was behind everything. A phantom impersonator they have no proof except for Johnny’s word was even alive at the time.
If this magazine doesn’t actually exist I’m going to be very upset.
Chris: I think it’s interesting(ish) how Night Man spends as much time as he does cleaning up other people’s problems. Space Face doesn’t actually wish him any specific harm so much as he wants to hurt Johnny in an effort to get back at his dad and friend(?). It’s in the same vein as how he got put into an electricity coma a few episodes ago so Night Woman (no relation) could have it out with the slob that pushed her out of a building and also make eyes at Lt. Dann, the same Lt. Dann who Space Face had beef with. Is this a Big Trouble in Little China deal where you realize over the course of the story that the gallant side-kick is the real hero of the story and the main character is the goofus tag-along? Was the show originally titled Lt. Dann Man before being radically renamed and retooled after a disastrous test screening? It would explain both the shoddy, haphazard world building and what a sour-puss Lt. Dann is.
One characteristic that both television and comics (really most forms of narrative storytelling) have in common is that the stories tend to work better when the protagonist and antagonist are literally or thematically linked. Like how Professor Xavier and Magneto are ideologically opposed to one another while also wanting the same ultimate outcome. Or how Cigarette Smoking Man was Mulder’s dad, and also the sperm donor that the aliens used to impregnate Scully thereby also making him the dad of Mulder’s girlfriend’s kid. I think. It was something like that. Anyway, the point is you want your villain to represent some dark part or fear of the hero, like the idea that you could lose your moral compass in the pursuit of a noble goal, or that the people who have authority over you aren’t actually interested in your well being. Night Man doesn’t have anyone like that because Night Man doesn’t stand for anything in particular. He doesn’t have goals or ambition or go on patrol or anything like that, he just does jazz at the jazz club until trouble walks through his field of vision. He doesn’t even have a jazz nemesis who’s into polka or, I dunno, atonal 20th century classical composers. Whatever the opposite of jazz is.
Much like Tom Welling on Smallville, Matt McColm comes alive (relatively) every time he’s asked to play someone other than Johnny Domino. It goes to show how inert the character is that the actor is straitjacketed by how boring and not written he is.
And nobody’s really mad at him either. There aren’t any crippled/bald freaks who wrongly blame him for whatever terrible accident caused their wretched disfigurement and or hair loss. There also haven’t been any by-the-book cops hell bent on taking him down because he may only be trying to help but he’s still by god breaking the law. Hell, you’d think someone somewhere would be upset about the number of people he’s executed, but if there is, we haven’t heard about it. We’re more than halfway through the first season and I still don’t feel like the protagonist really matters at all.
Odds & Ends
-Do you think the new Star Trek will be good? Daley and Goldstein are interesting hires. They’re kinda simultaneously solid pop culture craftsmen and postmodern weirdos. I liked Game Night and Dungeons and Dragons, maybe they’ll do something fun.
-On the other hand, it’ll probably be woke, by which I mean women and black people will get lines of dialogue. You never saw that in classic Trek.
-In one scene Bridges sows suspicion by pretending to be a drummer who saw Johnny with the victim. He focuses on how cool the Prowler is, which is either the show taking a shot at people who think that the car is cool or it’s mandated propaganda that comes as part of being able to use the vehicle. You know, for every 3 or 4 scripts they have to include a positive reference about it, that sort of deal.
-Matt McColm’s migraine acting is pretty funny.
Ronnie Gardocki