Review: My Adventures with Superman “Most Eligible Superman”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Clark gets pulled into a Bachelor contest as Superman and has to pretend to be single to protect his secret identity. Meanwhile, Jimmy feels guilty about how he may have contributed to Lex’s influence against Superman and runs into a strange girl who is definitely not Clark’s alien cousin.

OUR TAKE

We’re finally here: the halfway point of the season and the official introduction of Kara Zor-El, AKA the eventual Supergirl! And it IS…okay? Kinda bad? A bit of a mess? It’s a lot of things, but let’s focus on Kara’s intro first. Like the fact that I totally called that she was the totally armored thing that came to the planet at the end of last episode! Or rather, I connected the dots once it was clear that Kara was the only Kryptonian left, but also because “huge armored foe with no face turns out to be cute girl” is a cliche within a cliche at this point, even more than “alien girl acts like a caveman while naive sweet human boy gives a tour around town”. And on top of that, neither of her reveals, her showing up on Earth or showing she has the armor form, are treated with any sort of importance by the animation. They just…happen. Even if I (and everyone else who has seen the trailers for this season) knows ahead of time that this girl is Kara, I kinda expect the animators and storyboarders to care about making these introduction scenes feel impactful, you know? I wouldn’t go as far to say that they don’t care or anything, but…maybe they could’ve cared more?

The main plot revolves around, as mentioned, Clark and Lois’ already cracking relationship tested by Clark needing to pretend to be single, even at Lois’ instruction. This leads to Lois feeling insecure about being with Clark, compounded by her feeling hurt by her dad disappearing and probably going to be compounded more once she and Clark have a conversation him sending a beacon to Kara despite her concerns, which leads to them seemingly breaking up. The comparison I am seeing around is to the hate towards Amber in Invincible, even though her concerns were completely valid. Lois’ insecurity is valid as well, though a bit more…shallow? I get that it’s Kat Grant of all people pushing her buttons on that, but the situation feels very contrived to get to that breaking point between them. Honestly that’s kind of my general problem with this show as a whole. It gets its source material very well, but the way it portrays it is practically a skeleton of the emotional and character beats it wants to hit, whether it’s Kara going berserk on Clark because he didn’t immediately recognize her (someone he’s never met) or Hank Henshaw saying “Earth is for Earthlings”, which is probably the most flavorless racism I’ve ever seen. Anyway, next week Clark’s in space with Kara, so maybe it’ll improve? The show’s been renewed for at least one more season, which will be the first they’ll be making where they can consider the feedback from the first two, so like the Man of Steel, I have some hope.