TNBA reviews: Mean Seasons

Revenge narratives are the meat and potatoes of superhero cartoons, and Mean Seasons is yet another tale of a self-appointed victim out to wrong her victimizers to add to the batch. The best of such tales paint sympathetic profiles for ostensible lunatics, while the worst find security in dehumanization, in the process following banal action-adventure formulas. However, on a scale that has as its extremities apathy and intimacy, Mean Seasons simply doesn’t make sense. It dabbles in conventions and furnishes unconvincing character motivations for its narrative springboards, while at the same time faintly speaking up on the behalf of the antagonist, a once aspiring model who was chewed up and spit out by youth-obsessed executives.

Judging Mean Seasons on the merits of its plot, terms like ‘adequate’ and ‘middle-of-the-road’ may come to mind. As a character exploration it’s often unsuccessful at reconciling psychology with artifice. Aside from some deft visual metaphors and an effectively pitiable ending, Calendar Girl’s enduring image is of a hyperactive, cliché-waving cartoon, ever finding an opening for a verbal affront to the shallowness of the entertainment industry. As a story of revenge, it’s simply too confused and contradictory to register as either a success or a failure. This explains why its real successes are almost all a matter of peripheral subtext or comic suggestions, many of which undermine the story but almost always for the better.

One would expect Mean Seasons’s indictment of popular culture and all the superficialities that govern it would have its firmest basis in the pathos ignited by the industry’s mistreatment of Paige Monroe. Heart of Ice and Appointment in Crime Alley take similar approaches in their respective condemnations of corporate greed, and various other episodes rely on the personal vendettas of the unjustly maligned to garner our hatred for organized crime and political corruption. Given that Calendar Girl is mostly a plot vehicle, however, the episode’s assault on media executives and fashion shows and the like is, in actuality, strictly anti-pathos, if anything scathingly and hilariously satirical.

From GWB’s television broadcasting expo with its programming lineup of shows about modeling school and a skateboarding cop to a Jurassic Park reference that eventually develops into a drawn-out action sequence, screenwriter Hilary Bader freely lifts what she pleases from the then-contemporary lexicon of pop culture, all of it intended to expose some form of hypocrisy that has taken root in the businesses that dictate our cultural consumption, not the least of which, of course, is Hollywood. Calendar Girl’s goons, meanwhile, come across as some kind of feminist revisionism of camp, replacing uniformed women in skimpy outfits, as seen in Cold Comfort and The Ultimate Thrill, with equally subservient muscle-bound hunks.

Brimming with satirical digs, film references, and gags of the eye-winking variety, Mean Seasons compensates for its dramatic shortcomings with a penchant for abrasive thematic details. While some claim the main plot to be incompetently silly, the infectious silliness that oozes into cracks of the story is anything but incompetent; in fact Mean Seasons’ pervasive comic absurdity, manifest in these aforementioned details, is calculated for a certain rhetorical and deconstructive effect that it pulls off without a hitch.

S:TAS reviews: Where's There's Smoke

For all of their virtues, Apokalips…Now! and Little Girl Lost seem to have put a near-permanent end to the Metropolis of A Little Piece of Home and Ghost in the Machine.Superman’s instantaneous traversals of space and the surfeit of citywide disasters often appear to diminish the stature of the city, which in the process takes on the dimensions of a playground. In some episodes, however, Clark Kent’s investigative reporting competes with the usual superheroics for our attention, and in the process Metropolis expands into an uncharted sea of underhanded deals, political oversights, mob mobilizations, and so forth.

Where There’s Smoke marks the end of these pulpy thrill-rides, and from start to finish it’s ridden with suggestive dialogue and comedic tidbits and moody ellipses. Volcana, the pyro-kinetic who is the episode’s putative villain, drips sensuality with the same ardency that she commands her powers and harks back to the femme fatales of Hollywood lore. Harvey Cohen sustains the innuendo with dollops of steamy big band jazz that accompany select scenes, maintaining just the right air of playful seduction. This character undercoating, together with Clark Kent’s suspicions as he wanders the deadly streets of nighttime Metropolis, provides a film noir gloss that, in its implicit paranoia of surreptitious operations and dealings in the dark, poses as a perfect setup for the episode’s eventual transition to hi-tech, politicized science fiction.

It turns out that there is a third party, a renegade offshoot of the government that took Volcana from an institute where she was learning how to control her powers, and that forced her to carry out orders against her will. Suddenly, we have left the hazy mysteries and black-and-white moral polarities of film noir and have now entered a head-on engagement with political conspiracy that expresses forthright skepticism of the nationwide political infrastructure that finds itself at odds with Superman’s basic humanist ideology. Unlike in similar episodes in which we find ourselves sympathizing with a so-called villain because of his or her suffering at the hands of a third party, Where There’s Smoke presents as the culprit neither a corporation nor the mob, but a faction of the government.

At the same time that Where’s There’s Smoke points forward to Justice League Unlimited in its interest in government conspiracies and other forms of corruption, it also keeps one leg firmly grounded in parody and pastiche. Even more impressive is that it blends its parody with its political agenda to fashion a pretty bold critique of the Marvel Comics universe, a target that would again crop up in Batman Beyond’s Heroes. The paranormal institute that housed Volcana as a child standing in for the Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters, Hilary Bader argues in her screenplay that such a place would be inevitably soiled by government regulations and interference. While this is being explained between Clark Kent and the doctor, Bader even throws in a brief exchange that comments both on the ignorance and misguided hatred of the American public and on the deception perpetuated by government higher-ups.

Furthermore, Kurt, the leader of the organization, has a counterpart in S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury. Yet while the latter is unmistakably noble and a chief example of the companionship that exists between superheroes and the government, the former is a manipulative egomaniac who stands firmly at odds with Superman’s ideological coda. While the aforementioned Heroes does a more thorough job of dismantling the tacit laws that govern the Marvel Comics universe, Where There’s Smoke remains a joy in its skeptical polemic against two of that universe’s heroic strongholds.

Most of the episodes that follow Where There’s Smoke involve interplanetary excursions, enormous superpower brawls, and other such explosive and fantastical material. Where There’s Smoke is the series’ last deliberate genre piece as well as the last appearance of Metropolis as a fully developed character in its own right. Though often overlooked, it deserves our deepest attention for marking the end of an era in the DC Animated Universe and for doing so with intelligence and pizzazz.