TNBA reviews: Sins of the Father

Already in Timm and company’s second entry in their new Bat-verse, many of the permutations and overhauls of the previous series are taking their toll. In fact, Sins of the Father is possibly the single episode of TNBA most populated by new problems, each of which is invariably tied to the new directive for faster paced Saturday morning packages, the move to Warner Bros. clearly imposing a commercial restraint for every censorship rule it lifted.

The first is that it is marketed as an origin story, and as the episode immediately following Holiday Knights it almost seems posed to immediately console many of the confused fans that saw the series debut in disbelief. As such, it is wholly devoted to serving its explanatory function without regard for artistic competence, as if the story of Tim Drake’s origin is a continuity roadblock that needs dealing with as soon as possible or paperwork that Rich Fogel is wearily completing as a prerequisite for writing better screenplays. And as this new series is a pre-ordered package of exactly twenty-six syndicated shows, the freedom to embark on multi-part storylines has significantly dwindled. It also defeats its own purpose of weeding out confusion that Batgirl’s affiliation with Batman raises as many questions about her as Tim Drake's origin answers about him.

Secondly, the animators’ rigid adherence to rigid models may mean that lips don’t slide out of place or that the characters don’t slosh around in motion, but it often does lead to robotic action and lopsided movements. If the angularity is intended as springboard for fluid animation and hyper-exaggeration—as admirably demonstrated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha’s animators in World’s Finest—then the team at Dong Yang failed to take notice and instead treated the model sheets as dictum. Unfortunately, Curt Geda’s direction and his team of storyboarders share much of the blame, who in their obvious detachment from the material fail to follow even the most basic rules of classical continuity, resulting in mismatched action and an inability to maintain scenic consistency from shot to shot.

Thirdly, as a story it cares more for types than characters. Tim Drake is a punk kid who wants revenge for his father’s death—an infantile fantasy that carries none of the metaphysical weight of Batman’s abstract vengeance that is more rooted in altruism than in self-gratification—Two-Face the arbitrary antagonist, Batgirl the peppy sidekick, and Batman at his most vacuous and cold-hearted. One of the few malignant side effects of the transition between series was Batman’s increasing apathy and smugness, and in Sins of the Father he is an unfeeling, monolithic machine who treats Tim like a background prop and can’t even spare an offhand moment of sympathy. Alfred picks up the slack in his efforts to console Tim, but even his paternal impulse is undermined by his less affective design.

As if compensating for this soullessness on the part of the rest of the production crew, Walker does try to enliven things through her music, an effort that unfortunately dismantles into reprisals of character themes that seem terribly out-of-place and unsuited to the moments they accompany, especially when she needs to find something schmaltzy to go with Tim’s unconvincing grief. This attempted sentimentality extends to the ending, in which Dick Grayson makes an impromptu visit to Wayne Manor.

Fans who complain about the growing Bat-Family, which is clearly sowing its seeds in these final few shots, seem to me zealously loyal to an image of Batman as a lone, stoic individual, a reductive mandate that fits Batman into a constrictive anti-hero, Clint Eastwood mold. I was always partial to the idea of a Batman gradually forming communal bonds and never felt that he should be barred from such relationships. However, this sudden, out-of-the-blue arrival of the old Robin met with awe and smiles and nudging foreshadowing stands as the most convincing evidence against such an enterprise should it be accompanied by unconditional, cornball camaraderie.

TNBA reviews: Holiday Knights

It is quite possible to start anywhere in Batman: the Animated Series, provided the episode you have selected is one of the remote few that hark back to a previous storyline, but even then it is far from a puzzling affair. Holiday Knights irritated so many fans because even though it kicked off a similar anthology series, it conflated several continuity mysteries and a visual overhaul with a most anthological structure of three unrelated vignettes, each rushed and whimsical, and yet intentionally posing questions to the viewer that it wryly refuses to answer.

Each segment serves a specific purpose, and the first mini-story about Harley’s and Ivy’s holiday shopping spree is the most flamboyant about the series’ new courage in going after even more extreme tonal departures from the usual dark nature of the show. Batman: the Animated Series featured many a screwball comedy, but rarely any so self-conscious as this. Harley and Ivy wink to the audience, make cheap gags in unlikely situations, and even star in a colorfully abstract fashion show montage set to a perky musical rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas. This opening segment, arguably the most Christmas-y of the bunch, also gallantly expresses the new design preferences for hard shapes over sinuous lines and shadows, possessing a chic angularity as out of a fifties Warner Bros. cartoon. The shot of a retro, symmetrical department store grounded behind the circular contrasts of falling snow is exemplary of this new geometric style.

If the Harley and Ivy romp is designed to communicate a more stylistic openness for The New Adventures of Batman, then the lesser story that follows sets out to confuse our perception of series-to-series continuity. B:TAS was serialized to the point that one may as well start in the middle, but certain characters had their own miniature arcs, which set aside episodes as diverse as Mudslide, Second Chance, and Avatar as direct continuations of previous installments. If there were any character whose fate was left dangling by the end of the series, it would be Clayface, who in Mudslide was presumably left to a watery grave. It is hard to conceive that Paul Dini would resurrect him for the new series’ debut without any intention of befuddling diehard fans and making a deliberate point to throw out continuity in the spirit of holiday fun. Regardless, this remains the weakest of the three, the high point being Harvey Bullock’s hilarious undercover position as a department store Santa, perhaps the closest thing in all three parts to a demonstration of the awkward marriage between holiday festivity and the dark subject matter we typically associate with Batman.

The third segment all but eradicates the colorful, comical attributes of the first two, ironic given this is Joker’s show. Where World’s Finest exploited the new Joker design to its manic extremities, the stiff on-model work here demonstrates where the new design fails, gambling away many of the character’s iconic features capable of enlivening the most poorly animated B:TAS shows for a desired cartooniness that doesn’t always pay off. If this final vignette serves any function, it is to shock the viewer by bluntly alluding to death and mass murder and having Batman suffer a bullet to the arm. Unable to reach the nuance of the best Joker spotlights, this third segment only seems concerned with its most basic operations, the first of which is the shock value, the second of which is the surprise of a new Robin, and neither of which quite pay off.

But the segments are somewhat unified; all of the events are related in the sense that they take place within close temporal approximations of each other, reinforcing a sense of networking wherein multiple heroes can be involved in different struggles in different parts of the city, though the impact of this multiplicity is undercut by structured sequence and tonal dissociation. Each one does, however, end with a familiar holiday tradition playing a part in the capture of each of villain—a Christmas tree, Santa decorations, and the New Years countdown bell—imposing an amusing pattern. When Batman holds his ritualistic New Years Day sit-down with Gordon in the coffee shop, the vignettes start retrospectively blending together into a single string of compounding, exhaustive threats, each just barely overcome. This ending at once expresses a weariness at events past and a celebratory look forward to things to come, marking Holiday Knights as the quintessential transition between Batman: the Animated Series and The New Adventures of Batman, whatever its faults.

S:TAS reviews: World's Finest

As the first major DCAU crossover, a sprawling three-part story with production values fit for a feature-length film, it’s no surprise that the episodes comprising World’s Finest were spliced together and marketed as a direct-to-video feature. As in any crossover, no hero can take dominance over the other, and so World’s Finest thrives on symmetries and character collisions and an undying spirit of one-upmanship. Only rarely giving way to dubious characterizations as a result of this preordained law of friction, World’s Finest stands as a testament to the complexity and stylistic immensity of the DC Animated Universe, accelerating its bloom into a colossal self-contained entity of intersecting narratives and interlocking characters.

The characteristically vivacious Superman opening bleeds into the now-crimson red sky of the redesigned Gotham City, its craggy skyline in canted frame before our viewpoint descends via dissolve into the city’s hazy, pitch-black underbelly. A shift from blaring, triumphant orchestration to intermittent rain and thunder is followed by another shift from a long shot overview to a more honed in shot of an unassuming antique shop nestled in the street-level blackness. As the shopkeeper closes up, Harley Quinn and the Joker, now revamped to look simplistically angular and more prone to garish cartoon poses and more flexible facial expressions, slip in and steal a jade dragon. We then cut to Batman and the police at the scene of the crime, trying to make heads or tails of Joker’s thievery.

This introduction to Batman and Gotham city, characterized by descent and mystery, segues into our introduction to Superman and Metropolis, now characterized by ascent and directness. Superman has to save Air Force One from terrorists in a grandiose scheme that couldn’t attract more attention if it tried, a crime that starkly contrasts with the puzzling and subdued thievery of Joker’s midnight escapade. Soon enough, Lex Luthor is abducted by Harley and the Joker, whose cartoon motions jut up against Luthor’s stone-faced sturdiness in a comical straight-on medium shot, and the major players are soon all introduced with ample contrasts divvied between each pair.

Lois Lane remains the pivot point, a character with no counterpart, who finds herself privy to moments of romantic insecurity and equally invested in both Superman and Batman as the story progresses. As S:TAS has developed, we have seen her and Superman’s bond subtly evolve, but this evolution is the accumulation of dropped hints and bits of foreshadowing as opposed to tangible marker points that trace a clear growth in the couple’s relationship. As Lois fumbles in an attempt to ask out the Man of Steel, she is presumably just as clouded on the issue of where they stand as we are, solidifying her as the most identifiable and perhaps most important character in the story. Throughout World’s Finest she becomes important to all of the other central characters, becoming the Joker’s bait and the object of Batman’s and Superman’s mutual affections while never diminishing into an objectified plot puppet. She retains her dignity through her unquenchable humanity, thanks in no small part to Dana Delaney’s impeccable voice acting and her exclusive privilege to the episode’s most naturalistic lines of dialogue (“Regale him with madcap tales of the nightlife in Smallville,” “burning, stinging iodine,” and her self-deprecating self-mutterings after she flubs her date attempt with Superman).

Batman and Superman, meanwhile, are subject to several mixes and matches with other characters and each other due to their dual identities. The first time Batman and Luthor meet they meet as business partners, Bruce Wayne of Wayne Enterprises and Lex Luthor of LexCorp engaged in a business venture, an encounter that adds a delicious dramatic irony to Batman’s eventual interrogation of Luthor in his high-rise apartment. Part of the story’s appeal is in studying how an outside organism transforms the status quo of his new environment; Batman has a transgressive disregard for legal boundaries that Superman could never possess out of care for his public image, making this interrogation scene the first time we have the pleasure of seeing Luthor truly afraid, his domain unexpectedly impeded upon by a being ironically more metaphysical than Superman. Additionally, out of costume, Bruce Wayne exacerbates Clark Kent, whom we see aggravated for the first time, through encroachment on his own territory on two fronts—his going out with Lois on Kent’s front and his vigilante exploits on Superman’s—a double-edged sword that neither identity can do anything about, as each character’s secret is at the other’s mercy. All throughout there are unexpected meetings between Batman and Superman, Clark and Bruce, and Bruce and Superman, each new encounter carrying with it its own surprising charms that engage our amusement while defamiliarizing our favorite heroes.

These character interactions are too numerous to list in detail or to do any justice to their particular delights, and the plot too capricious to trace point-by-point with any success. There are traceable patterns that persist throughout, however, that yield more dichotomous enjoyment and toy with the central theme of dualities between characters. For instance, as Superman and Batman grow more at ease with each other, due in no small part to Lois’s revelatory discovery that Batman is her boyfriend in disguise and the gradual evaporation of their knee-jerk biases and assumptions about each other, Joker’s and Luthor’s hatred for one another only escalates. While Batman and Superman are bound indefinitely by their heroism in spite of their differences, Joker and Luthor are hopelessly mismatched as anarchic force of insanity and uptight, methodical businessman. Their key differences are underlined in a few surprisingly thoughtful instances. For example, we know that Luthor is an entrepreneur with his company logo on just about everything who yet tries to sever all traceability to the crimes he pulls, marking him as duplicitous and hypocritical. Joker, while more brutal, is infinitely more honest about his entrepreneurship, stating that he likes “to personalize all my stuff” before taking to the skies in an enormous smiling aircraft that rains fire on the city of Metropolis.

With Batman’s and the Joker’s arrival in Metropolis, we are immediately privileged to sights so far veiled by Metropolis’ established schematic. As the series deals more in bold shapes and long shots and enormous spaces, there is rarely any room for idiosyncrasies. However, thanks to Batman’s gothic influence, we now travel to the clustered alleyway suburbs that house the Metropolis mob and a seedy strobe-lit nightclub called Rocker’s. Thanks to the spatial configurations of camera pans and zooms, each of these new environments has some proximity to an already familiar space; the mob sector on the city outskirts and Rocker’s close to Hobb’s Bay. Other new spaces include two restaurants, one on a 1920s style rooftop of sloping stained glass backdrops and stylized shadow play and another a ritzy, palatial suite encircled by golden archways.

The story is told with an adrenaline rush to accommodate all of the chance encounters and plot progression while still making time for show-stopping set pieces. Each part includes at least two high-octane action scenes, all bathed in some unlikelihood. Bruce Wayne’s bullet-dodging skills are daunting, not to mention all of the particulars of the third act’s cataclysmic hellfire. But it must be remembered that World’s Finest is foremost an adventure between two great heroes that has to be exciting before it can be a series of intelligent character studies, a thematically unified story, or an atmospheric visual tour-de-force.

Fortunately it is all these things and more, a fusion of seemingly incompatible elements that overlap into a succulent dish. Confounding ideas of heroism—both heroes’ approaches to doing right are selective, each concerning himself with areas that fall outside of the other’s radar, and both possess conflicting moral ideologies and equally self-important assumptions about the other—before unifying them, World’s Finest is euphoric on a gut level and uplifting on an ideological one. It ends with Clark Kent in silhouette looking out at Bruce Wayne’s plane bound for Gotham in the distance, capping World’s Finest with a bold, encapsulating image that concludes one story while looking ahead to many more to come.

S:TAS reviews: Ghost in the Machine

Ghost in the Machine is the richest S:TAS entry since A Little Piece of Home and in my mind the series’ greatest achievement, standing side by side with The Late Mr. Kent. A Little Piece of Home stands as its forerunner, forging connections between characters and charting out new architectural spaces and plot continuities. In both episodes, there is no main character, the idea being that Metropolis is too vast a universe to confine any stories set in its expanse to the focus, much less the point of view, of any one character.

But if A Little Piece of Home was something of a genre exercise, pitting Superman against Luthor in their first direct skirmish, mechanized T-Rex and all, then Ghost in the Machine is far more ambitious. It is a story told from all sides of a recent development, the disappearance of Luthor, and in the process it humanizes both Luthor and Mercy, peeling back their professionalism and corporate invulnerability to observe them in a state of urgent anxiety. Intersecting with the narrative is the source of the conflict, the return of Brainiac, which overcoats the mystery with a tone of gothic science fiction and the peripheral development of yet another character arc. Analyzing everything together yields a multifunctional artwork too immense to be reduced to any one of its myriad strands.

If any theme takes precedence it’s that of Mercy’s submission to Luthor, one elucidated less through dialogue than through behavior. To fault the climax, in which Luthor evacuates a collapsing basement storage facility and leaves Mercy to die, for explaining their dynamic in the most recycled and dramatic manner, is to ignore the fact that Mercy’s sycophantic relationship to Luthor is depicted in subtler terms at the beginning. Mercy takes the care to remove a miniscule hair from his suit before a demonstration only for him to selfishly ignore her concerns afterwards, stating aggravatingly that he would prefer to discover the problem (the failure of an electronic device intended to divert two sidewinder missiles away from a LexCorp demonstration) alone and firsthand. Her subservience to him is met at all moments with coldness, a clash that spills into the characters’ physical dispositions; Mercy’s eyes are constantly transfixed on Luthor, but she is lucky if he reciprocates with a glance.

This opening scene also corresponds to a broader, almost equally pertinent theme of the interchangeability between professional and intimate relationships. Luthor’s interest is in Mercy is borne of her worth to his and his company’s security. He sees her as no more than a bodyguard, but she views him as far more than an employer, and naturally Luthor’s status as corporate tycoon so easily dissolves into a more abstract image of indomitable power and stature, making her fascination with him that much harder to suppress. Luthor’s entrapment in the basement of LexCorp strips away his professional armor and untouchable status, humanizing him in the least flattering way by underlining his physical weakness and not in any way assuaging our view of him as a rotten person. This humanization not only paves the way for Luthor’s inevitable act of neglectful self-preservation—his having to act under harmful conditions in his state of vulnerability perhaps makes this the first time he has clearly expressed his opinion of Mercy’s value as a human being, which he has supposedly been able to mask for years by his guarded, stone-faced demeanor—but is also visually manifested in the descent from the streamlined, untouchable peak of LexCorp to the dank, unmonitored basement.

Lois and Clark are allotted a few interludes to let us in on their reaction to both the failure of Luthor’s magnetic device and his disappearance, which isn’t validated until Clark, in an act of headstrong initiative, charges into Luthor’s office without secretarial leeway. There is a sense of temporal continuity whenever one of their scenes pop up; the first time we see them driving back from Lex’s demonstration and the second time Clark is speaking to Lois over the phone from his apartment, ample evidence suggesting that it takes place the night of the previous scene. Though Lois and Clark do not get much screen time, one part of their exchange again emphasizes the blurred line between a professional and intimate relationship. Lois responds to Clark’s statement that Mercy only hovers around Luthor because it’s her job with “it’s no wonder you’re still single, Kent.” In having Lois amusedly recall this notion, screenwriter Rich Fogel is possibly alluding to Lois’s and Clark’s own relationship and its potential for becoming more than just a journalistic partnership.

Brainiac, meanwhile, is plausibly resurrected as having dwelt in the circuitry of LexCorp’s computers since the events of Stolen Memories, replacing our initial impression of him as congruent to that of his robotic personage with one of a more hauntingly ubiquitous, parasitic presence that defies physical limitations. As in Stolen Memories, Brainiac proves himself to be just as inextricably tied to Luthor as he is to Superman, all three of whom exist in adversarial relationships with each other. It is also fitting that Brainiac’s subplot is secondary to both Luthor’s and Mercy’s; our human interest gravitates towards their relationship instead of to the cold, unambiguous threat of Brainiac, who seems to provide the central conflict and little else. He serves the same function in almost all of his appearances, ever the silent predator in a perpetual state of concealment.

And so what of Mercy? She is left upon Luthor’s disappearance in a state of insecurity, as for possibly the first time she has failed in a job that means just as much to her financially as it does psychologically. A few words to Superman reveal that she was once a stray who lived on the streets before she was taken in by Luthor, an act that to her means beyond all doubt that he deeply cares for her. This seems like mere obligatory background info that doesn’t necessarily tell us more than we already know, but when it is merged with Luthor’s climactic moral choice, which is in itself seemingly contrived, we are left with a revised conception of Luthor, a man whose every philanthropic action is performed in his own self-interest and whose concern for others amounts to nothing, even when they have known him and believed otherwise for years. In the case of Mercy, whom we see during the aftermath in the driver’s seat of Luthor’s limo with a drooping face and who refuses to make eye contact with Superman, she still does believe it; her relationship to Luthor is just as unhealthy and abusive as Harley’s relationship to the Joker, both results of compulsive denial and obsessive dependence.

Ghost in the Machine is a juggling act between multiple subplots and multiple action scenes that manages to flesh out characters as they come to terms with themselves and their ever-changing relationships with others. From the concentricity of Ghost in the Machine, wherein a singular event is treated from a multitude of vantage points, we emerge with a newfound knowledge of all the characters, the rubble and debris that mark the catastrophic climax emblematic of what it took for us to get there.

S:TAS reviews: Brave New Metropolis

Characteristic of many entries in the DC Animated Universe, Brave New Metropolis is ambitious but shaky. There is little reason to believe that Superman would revamp his entire moral ideology in the face of a loved one’s death and embrace totalitarianism. As we see, this is not a radical new Superman; he is simply ignorant to the horrors he has wreaked on Metropolis, leading to further incredulities regarding both his ignorance and his inability to foresee Luthor’s underhandedness.

But these lapses in logic don’t particularly matter. We are not to question how premise A led to result B over however long a period of time. Brave New Metropolis is a thought experiment, and the basic justification for Superman’s behavior that he went crazy after Lois’s death, if anything, serves to adequately impart to the viewer how much Lois means to the Man of Steel, both in the warped hypothetical reality of the new dimension and in the accepted reality of S:TAS. What matters more than how Superman could relinquish his core morals and common sense is what the world would actually be like as a result.

Lois herself plays the stranger-in-a-strange-land protagonist who finds that her existence is pivotal to the state of Metropolis, and this self-investigation is perhaps the episode’s most overlooked quality. It comes so naturally that it takes a while to realize that this is, in effect, Lois’s first starring episode, and this is important because we find that this experience endows her with information about Superman that he himself doesn’t have; whether she knows what exactly to think about it, she now realizes that she means everything to Superman. That we are denied an exclusive look at her thoughts imbues her with some degree of dignified privacy, and also elicits our own curious responses as to what exactly will happen between the two characters.

Though pulsing with Gregorian chants and fierce confrontations and other easy indications of epic grandstanding, I find the actual meat of the episode’s conceit constrictive, overly convenient, and in places unforgivably sloppy. For example, when Lois finds herself in the gray, charred and filthy new Metropolis, what begins as economical storytelling devolves into a hardly probabilistic collision of coincidences. The Superman/Luthor bust, the shopkeeper closing early, the female announcer with the eerily pacifying voice on a distant monitor, and then Turpin in black garb coming to apprehend Lois are efficient instances that get across the central totalitarian image of the new Metropolis. However, that Lois conveniently finds herself within blocks of a break-in helmed by Jimmy Olsen among others, Superman not far behind, is woefully symptomatic of the sort of compressed storytelling that makes sure to relay essentials and rapidly propel the plot forward to the neglect of much-needed detailing beyond the basic prototypes.

So it turns out that Mercy Graves’ squadron only happens upon the resistance on the day that Lois Lane happens to pop up, and soon enough, Lois is face-to-face with Luthor, getting a rundown on what has happened to all the familiar faces (of all people who might occupy a vacant street, Angela Chen just happens to be the one), and impossibly scaling a city monument. All of the dialogue is equipped for only the barest exposition, and all of this rushed, headlong plot progression ends up reducing the new Metropolis to a city block, a holding cell, a monument, and the new LexCorp building. Meanwhile the ‘people’ of Metropolis seem confined to the twelve or so individuals that comprise the resistance movement. Everything boils down to a final confrontation in Lex’s office that attempts to resolve everything: Mercy gets encircled by the resistance, Superman saves the day, Luthor crashes into his monument in a spurt of poetic justice, the woman finds her baby, and Jimmy Olsen and gang stand with their hair flowing in the wind as they look to a better and brighter tomorrow.

For all its conceptual clout, Brave New Metropolis gets by on too many contrivances and easy answers to stand as an even remotely sharp exploration of fascism and all that it entails. But in positioning the run-of-the-mill dystopia as a hypothetical thought experiment hinging on a personal tragedy, it does succeed in giving the series’ two central characters a mythical urgency to their relationship and in providing Lois with a dignity all her own.

S:TAS reviews: Monkey Fun

When viewers complainingly refer to Prometheon as a soporific, plodding go-nowhere story, they should really be directing these criticisms towards the far more lumbering and aimless Monkey Fun. Prometheon pulled out all the stops in its slowly paced miniature epic, seasoning its stew with a tense oppositional dynamic between Superman and the xenophobic US military, animated tribute to a rightly idolized comic book artist, and deft, scope enlarging visual/auditory combinations. Monkey Fun doesn’t share half that episode’s sophistication.

Both episodes are based on simple premises, both essentially about giant monsters that pose a threat to the inhabitants of Metropolis, but while Prometheon is expansive, Monkey Fun is hopelessly reductive, ironic given its central character a monkey undergoing massive growth spurts. It begins with a flashback to Lois’s upbringing on a military base, where she and her little sister had grown attached to Titano, a monkey intended for space travel. In the flashback, her father takes Titano away and submits him to the space voyage, which goes haplessly wrong and leaves Lois sad at the fate of her monkey pal.

This flashback’s ultimate purpose is to hammer home that the means of defeating Titano lies in the past, when as a child it was calmed by a toy monkey that chimed the tune ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’ The ulterior motive it serves is to provide some insight into Lois’s past, a fruitless endeavor given that no information is provided that is not already inferable and that this then-tragic incident fails to register as a key moment in her life. When Superman finds Titano in the present, Lois can only express casual excitement, and her closing attitude to Titano is one of humanitarian affirmation rather than deeply rooted childhood affection.

Monkey Fun’s gambit is its title, which seeks to justify its endless meandering by rebilling it as a kind of wandering, adventure-seeking excitement. Titano’s rampages through Metropolis and the plethora of standoffs and screaming civilians aren’t really inserts intended to fill up space; they reflect the central figure’s animalistic curiosity and constitute a larger ambience. In essence, the lack of plot or point is supposed to be fun! If the episode achieved the kind of amusing atmosphere it advertises, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek Avery-like tale of a monkey’s unstoppable growth that whimsically pokes fun at the absurdities of one of comic book lore’s most trademarked storylines, then I would have been all for it. The episode we got instead is a tonal conundrum, shyly trying for sentimental character development, stakes-raising drama, and head-shaking comedy bits without cohesion.

The most Monkey Fun can boast is the occasional redemptive moment. For some it might be the brief look into Lois’s childhood, for others the well-crafted background designs of the Metropolis zoo, and for others yet the rare moment when the story approaches the fringes of the self-aware mode of absurdity it should have aimed for from the start. But as is implied by the term redemptive, these rare tidbits of interest only stand out because the rest of the show is a sterile mess.

S:TAS reviews: Solar Power

Target operates on the unlikelihood that an expert scientist would foster an unhealthy schoolboy crush and divert his expertise towards an irrational geeky revenge fantasy. Though the key element in a paranoid tale of systematic assassination, one that oscillated between finely tuned plot details and hilarious histrionic camp extravagance, Lytener served no function beyond that of an object of derision, which the self-flattering audience is expected to find endlessly pathetic. His closest kin so far in the DCAU (though several worthier candidates are to appear in Batman Beyond) is the toy-store owner in Beware the Gray Ghost, another maniacal dweeb driven to villainy by irrational obsession. The difference is that the toy-store owner, as a caricature of Bruce Timm, is both self-deprecating and intended as satire of the kind of mean-spirited cynicism that ever so slightly rears its ugly head in Target.

Robert Goodman delivers Lytener from the torment of Bader’s mockery and fashions a linear villain-of-the-week story flooded to the brim with pseudo-science and master plans and sneering super-villainy. Coming up after a sizeable handful of self-reflexive comedies, the classicism of Solar Power, dependent on all the archetypal English-class basics of the hero narrative—Superman at his weakest and Lytener, now going by Luminus, fully engaged to hi-tech villainy and a revenge scheme exempt from the pitiful romantic despair of his last—emerges triumphant as a playfully inventive slice of old-fashioned heroism prevailing in the face of insurmountable odds, a power-drained Superman going toe-to-toe with a manipulative light physicist.

It is precisely in deviating from comic book conventions that Goodman shrinks Solar Power down to the most elementary tenets of what it is to be heroic, as he attempted to do in Identity Crisis. Luminus has commissioned in space a network of refractory prisms that filters out all of the sun’s light except for the red beams, and without healthy sun radiation to fuel Superman’s unique Kryptonian cell structure, the Man of Steel is left in a disadvantageous position. That Luminus can wreak havoc from a distance cooped up in an invisible abandoned satellite station means that it is in Superman’s best interest to strategize carefully and tread cautiously, and such counter initiatives, usually dictated by narrative conventions, can be found in previous episodes like Prometheon and Blasts From the Past. Furthermore, it is often a writer’s ploy to have Superman show up decked out in Kryptonite protective wear or equipped with some other accoutrement before being disarmed and forced to rely on his wits and instincts. In Solar Power, he is in the middle of preliminary strategizing with Professor Hamilton when Lois and Jimmy are kidnapped, and unable to disregard his heroic impulses, he enters the arena unarmed and without a backup plan.

Once Superman enters the satellite station he finds himself stuck in a dreamlike traversal of evocative places, a Western saloon, murky train yard, and schooner set against a blazing red sky, each of which is a large-scale holographic construct. Each time Superman enters a new zone, it is a result of stumbling defeat instead of progressive action, and it is only when he thinks to make a circular incision in the sky itself that he takes control and makes his way to reality. Goodman and director Curt Geda spend the entire show making a point of Superman’s weakness and exhaustion, that when the first rays of the reinvigorating sun finally fall upon him, it is not without vicarious feeling on the part of the audience, who can finally take delight in Superman’s effortless and much-deserved victory.