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.