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.
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