Double Dose is possibly the sleekest that Superman: the Animated Series has ever looked. The colors are appropriately bold, the backdrops often muddled and damp and allowing the cobalt and aqua that consumes Livewire’s body dance and flicker on the screen, as well as the striking intermingling of darkened primary colors that overlay Superman's costume and Parasite's hulking purple mass that takes possession of the frame space whenever he becomes the focus. But Livewire is the centerpiece, and here she manipulates her powers with more finesse than in her debut, and instead of garish globs of untempered electrical energy, she fires concentrated musket balls of dazzling light that careen across the screen, slow down, and then impact with a seismic jolt. Every action has its own acrobatic flair, as the animators dissolve every object in motion into streaks of pigment and fashion each new pose with extreme foreshortening.
Perhaps most important is Livewire’s design. She looks the same as in Livewire, but she is no longer weighted down by blocky movements and ugly framing. We get more close-ups of her face, now fastidiously accentuated with seductive grins and playful glances. She exaggeratedly swings her hips as she walks and arches her shoulders when she stands. This is important because the entire plot of Double Dose, however shapeless, is unified by associations between sexual desire and power hunger. From the opening scene, in which Livewire garners a young janitor’s sympathy and persuades him to let her listen to his Walkman and extracts its electricity, writer Hilary Bader slowly molds a story about how sex is a stand-in for any representation of power or dominance, and this metaphor gets played up in a multitude of amusing ways.
Livewire’s absorbing the Walkman’s electricity is a precursor to Parasite’s desire to absorb her power, and each of these power transfers is obtained by a different mode of sexual exploitation. Livewire uses her femininity to seduce her prey, and this attribute is highlighted even when her subjects are unwilling to relent, as when she plants a kiss on Dan Turpin’s mouth. Parasite’s power hunger and the means by which he satiates it are, by contrast, strictly masculine. He has no penchant for cunning and depends instead on brute force to get what he wants. For all of the harm Livewire inflicts, the power she absorbs comes straight from electronic devices and so she does not rob anyone of what is intrinsically his. Parasite’s abilities depend directly on depleting the powers of others, and his lust for Livewire’s energy and third-act betrayal becomes symbolic of the dynamics of rape.
Bader does not extend her analogy to generate any worthwhile discussion or even afterthoughts about sexual dominance in contemporary society, but it’s probably for the better. Unencumbered by the cautionary tightrope of social commentary, Bader lets her premise expand into unexpected moments of risqué humor, dirty asides at their subtlest and the equivalent of visual puns at their most barefaced. By the latter I am chiefly referring to Superman’s arrival at the power plant where the duo are wreaking havoc. Inspired by Lois’s poncho, he shows up equipped with insulated rubber coating that looks like skintight see-through latex, and the immediate mental reaction of more jaded viewers is that he is dressed as a giant condom, a reaction supported by Livewire’s sarcastic comments (“Well what do you know? The Boy Scout brought protection.”) and sure to elicit many a guffaw.
For all it’s jumbled incoherency, Double Dose at its best has the feel of a suggestive romantic comedy out of Hollywood’s Golden Age, made possible only through censorship loopholes and several hefty dollops of innuendo, and made immeasurably more delightful in how it toys with its confinement.
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