It just dawned on me the biting succinctness of Superman’s episode titles. A Little Piece of Home and The Way of All Flesh transgress the confines of titular summations to add meaning to their respective stories. Stolen Memories is the best of the lot, a two word phrase that says more about Brainiac’s moral atrocities than any panoramic shot of Superman standing in the midst of a planet’s charred refuse. The being that has decimated worlds and civilizations is the only one privileged to their memories; the expansive perceptions and histories of the departed are to Brainiac quantifiable information. These cultures have none to carry on their legacy save an artificial agent.
Of course Superman is the exception to the rule, and whenever he is depicted as the Last Son of Krypton, his role takes on special Biblical significance. If Luthor is Superman’s arch-nemesis, then Brainiac belongs to Kal-El, the perennial Messiah figure of comic book superheroes. This is a person different from Clark Kent, the farm boy of pure values, and Superman, the bold icon of abstracted good. Kal-El is the loneliest of the three, the only one of his kind, and if Superman bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, then it is Kal-El who bears Krypton’s legacy on his.
If Stolen Memories isn’t a great episode—jerky character models and mechanical fight scenes abound—then it can at the very least be commended for sparking one of the great adversarial character dynamics. It is no great feat to pose two goliath figures of power against each other, insert a smidge of shots that basically convey longing and sadness, and then pepper the by-the-numbers screenplay with plentiful faux-dramatic lines that have all the blunt mythical implications of a climactic, over-saturated Star Wars exchange. But it is an adequate introduction to Brainiac the artificial intelligence, the series’ ambassador of science fiction horror.
The triad of Superman nemeses consists of Luthor, Brainiac, and the soon to be introduced Darkseid, and starting now and persisting all the way to the end of Justice League Unlimited, the DC Animated Universe will concern itself with the conflicting agendas between these three foes, each of whom offends a distinct part of Superman’s core person. The two common traits they all share are their vile opportunism and their underestimation of the others’ vile opportunistic impulses. In Stolen Memories already Brainiac and Luthor have forged a deal, the conditions of which Brainiac, and surprisingly not Luthor, has supplanted for his own ends.
Stolen Memories ends with the Fortress of Solitude in its infancy, at this point nestling the glowing orb that encloses the memories of Krypton. Not a single episode of Superman: the Animated Series passes without charting unknown regions of his theoretically infinite universe.
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