S:TAS reviews: Prototype

A soap opera blueprint, Prototype is weak-minded science fiction that seems just as dependent on supercilious observance of one-time characters as Target, another Hilary Bader script. An excellent screenwriter responsible for the densest episode of Superman, A Little Piece of Home, she often eases into a satisfaction with rudimentary materials and tentative ideas that reduce characters to types and follow old formulas. If I gave the producers the benefit of the doubt, I would offer Prototype the one praise that its title bemusedly applies to the conditions of its making as well as to its leading character.

That character, Sergeant Corey Mills, is an all-American military hero with blond hair and blue eyes and who doesn’t get five seconds of screen time without his appendages being radically foreshortened to emphasize his dynamism. The story is about his neurological dependence on and addiction to his LexCorp manufactured robotic police suit. A broad assessment would be that Prototype is covertly about Luthor’s corporate monopoly on government and the dangers of capitalistic shortsightedness, but not only does that not account for its deficiency of commentary and overabundant fight scenes—this is one of the first time the viewer’s childish astonishment at action scenes is supposed to extend to military weaponry—but it also betrays Luthor’s typically cautious character by depicting him as wholly irresponsible. Prototype can also be said to be about police brutality, but only in that it shows an upright hero descending into self-absorbed power-hunger on the flimsiest of conceits that has nothing to say about how authority figures actually do come to abuse the law. Given that Mills steals the suit right under the noses of Turpin and Sawyer, one could say that it’s just as much about police laziness with equal validity.

Even as a run-of-the-mill story about an upstanding citizen who succumbs to power hunger and suffers accordingly, Bader feels content, like so many Disney producers do, to breeze right along and plunge Mills and his swooning wife into a trench of marital despair. Mills has but one introductory scene before he resorts to excessive violence, and we have to take on faith that he and his wife were in a dreamboat of a marriage before his reliance on the suit’s power begins tearing it apart. Character arcs are not suited for twenty-minute cartoons, because they stop looking like arcs and start looking more like elongated parabolas. Mills’ progression as a character hits its peak early on and the hyper-dramatic developments never subside afterwards. It doesn’t help that Xander Berkely, who voices Mills, gives an abysmal vocal performance, all but expected when assigned the role of a hollow man whose lust for a personified set of body armor ignites an agonizing fever pitch.

One of the few pleasures is an off-kilter, improvisational fight scene that drifts along with no clear purpose until Superman uses power plant wires to finally defeat Mills. A blast from Mills’ laser renders Superman temporarily blind, denoted by sharp, dissonant piano notes and out-of-place subjective slow motion. The storyboarding is surprisingly mobile for an episode so poorly animated, giving Superman leeway to backward somersault after an assault and makes the journey of the ever-relocating action feel fluid. Another of the small pleasures is the debut of John Henry Irons, an S:TAS mainstay.