The DCAU has always existed in a vague contemporary vacuum. There is plenty to ground it in the modern world, but it also encompasses odd anachronisms, futuristic technology and retro architecture, microchips and black-and-white TV sets. Livewire is the first brazen attempt to appeal to modern culture; the producers wear their intentions on their sleeves by nature that Livewire, the titular villain, is an original creation, the S:TAS equivalent to Harley Quinn. However, she is a far less complex and enjoyable character, a trash-talking controversial shock jock with an axe to grind and a public to rally.
Since the mid-nineties, when this episode first aired, shock jocks have become a relentlessly skewered pop culture phenomena; because they are the bottom of the barrel of popular culture, many television shows have taken it upon themselves to paint negative pictures of these polarizing provocateurs, even though they are usually every bit as part of the commercialized dumbing down of American culture as their easy satirical target. Even in the mid-nineties, these anathemas could hardly count as interesting, relevant subjects for assault, and in Superman: the Animated Series, which has proven itself capable of lightly commenting on more universal social and political ills, this flash-in-the-pan, clear-cut critique of media mouthpieces who savor the attention feels maddeningly out of place.
If there is anything exciting about the elongated first act that depicts media personality Leslie Willis spending her morning on the airwaves digging into Superman and creating a rift between the public in the process, it is the image of a Metropolis unified by media. Willis’s hate rant pervades the entire city, and we get a glimpse of how it affects various bystanders, whether they reside on the wharf or operate a crane atop a skyscraper. Until the usual mechanistic disaster that calls Superman from, of all things, an on-air interview with Willis, we have a rare look at a city of divvied up into sectors, further divided, ironically, by media, the universal leveler and the only uniform entity that spans across the entire city. Furthermore, though it is pedantically conveyed, we are finally introduced to the notion that there is a wide-reaching populist contempt for Superman. We have already seen such hatred and xenophobia within the context of corporate America (Luthor) and the US government (General Hardcastle); now we finally have a much-delayed overview of the outcry among the common people.
The first act concludes with Willis getting electrocuted at a show held during a thunderstorm and miraculously gaining the power to harness electrical energy, though of course the parameters of her powers are shakily defined. The background paintings of Metropolis’s equivalent to Central Park doused by rain and lit by lightning are impressionistically rich with the subdued palette of an overcast late evening. This first-act climax (and as far as I’m concerned that of the entire episode) is dazzlingly animated, both Superman’s and Willis’s electrocutions a swirl of wispy lightning that emits a bright fluorescent blue monochrome, the jumpy, flickering flashes of electricity energizing the scene with kinetic shadows and the overall feeling of elemental chaos.
Unfortunately, her subsequent plan and eventual demise are utterly contrived, the action suddenly becoming a series of dryly animated long-shot sequences instead of the intense close proximity of the first-act action. The second and third acts run together as the show devolves into an endless series of scuffles. The breadth of Metropolis exhibited in the first act becomes constricted to a Times Square district and a few spare interiors. A promising first act that was just prepared to extend its ideas of media ubiquity and do away with the grating shock jock routine fizzles out into a glob of villain-of-the-week tepidity.
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