S:TAS reviews: Father's Day

For a work with its title, Father’s Day has very few things to say on the subject of paternity, aside from niftily segueing between two diametrically opposed father/son relationships. But as for the dynamics of fatherhood, most episodes of TNBA have more to say about what it entails—mentorship, mutual respect, emotional distance, etc.—than Father’s Day musters over the entire course of its blow-trading eternity.

One of the common misconceptions about fiction is that action always propels narrative. Of course that is true in most cases, but in Father’s Day, taking a card from Hollywood action movies, the action grinds the narrative to a halt and generates a stasis. As soon as Superman and Kalibak begin bare-knuckle brawling, the story seems to dissipate, the suspense dwindles, and it’s as if the rest of the world is interminably paused. Superman’s objective is to rescue his father from the rubble of a recently ravaged restaurant, Kalibak’s murderous intent preventing the task from getting done. The viewer’s expected reaction is to clench his armrest dreading that Superman might not reach his father in time, but as the fight persists, the effect is more like running on an activated treadmill in the hope of reaching the end and having to wait a good fifteen minutes before Superman finally decides to press the ‘off’ switch by hurling Kalibak into the sky.

Director Dan Riba can only keep the fight going by cutting corners via temporal and logical inconsistencies. Not only does Superman decide to walk to the site of Jonathan’s entrapment under the rubble after temporarily incapacitating his foe, but he also manages to take but two steps before Kalibak traverses a far greater distance to resume their trifling skirmish. Superman defeats Kalibak by flying the flightless fiend into the air, though it is never clear why he was unable to do this earlier. With the freelance writers drawing fruitless parallels between the two opponents at every juncture—their differing relationships with their fathers and opposing moral principles—the extended sequence reeks of a pretentious vanity, and the most grabbing of all the characters’ differences is their physical disparity—handsome upright Man of Steel and clunky, dwarfish ogre. Kalibak’s physical deformity, however, seems to be cruelly associated with his insecurities as an unloved son.

Father’s Day trumpets its importance as an integral piece of the Darkseid arc, though it depicts Darkseid at his least menacing by turning him into a parody of Darth Vader with forced mythical undertones. His strained, soliloquized “I have no son” and his arbitrary mandates posit him as a dictatorial profile as opposed to a character. In Apokalips…Now! he is the plausible embodiment of an abstract evil; in Father’s Day, he has too much in common with pop culture archetypes and too often shares the same physical space as his minions without any directorial effort to distinguish him. Darkseid’s ‘plan’ to kill Superman is silly in the key of a good Superfriends episode, and yet amazingly with greater plot holes circling around his own sincerity. If it is integral to kill Superman, why does he refuse to commit the deed himself at the end, using a nonsensical faux-profundity with phony gravitas, “Superman cannot be killed in one stroke,” to justify his reluctance?