Review: My Adventures with Superman “All’s Fair in Love and W.O.R.M.S.”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Jimmy goes to a speed date group to make Kara jealous, Lois helps Kara retaliate, Superman and the new and improved Hank Henshaw butt heads, and a mysterious figure arrives from another timeline.
OUR TAKE
This is the first time since I started watching this show that an episode was actually hard to watch. I understand that this is meant to be the fun and more comedic episode before the Superboy plot kicks off next week (and it looks like I guessed right about him at least being from the future, we’ll see what else I clocked there soon I’m sure), but all it ended up doing was exacerbating a lot of the things that started this season that I didn’t like and undercutting the stuff I have hopes to be good or at least somewhat interesting. First, there’s the thing with Jimmy and Kara. Again, I get his mindset that he doesn’t want to just jump into a relationship with her just because he’s the first one he met and she’s unacquainted with Earth still. That was understandable and arguably noble. But now he’s actively trying to make her jealous in order to…make himself more desirable? Make her not want to date him? This is getting to a point that it would be worrying if she DID choose him after all of that. Lois enabling Kara is almost as confounding, but at least it’s playing into her arc of being scared of her relationship with Clark moving too fast, even if she loves him and wants a future with him, which is also an understandable anxiety to have and will only be further wrinkled in hopefully interesting ways by Superboy’s arrival next week.
As for Clark himself, he finally gets to meet Hank Henshaw in his newly titled “Cyborg Superman” persona, and immediately I have issues with this. I do not mind adaptations taking liberties with the source material they pull from, but you need to substitute them with something of equal or greater value. In the comics, Hank Henshaw became Cyborg Superman because Superman was dead at the time and also he had a (misguided but again understandable) vendetta against Superman. Here, Hank’s views on Superman are rather oddly antagonistic and his severe injuries aren’t the fault of Superman AT ALL. He’s also used by Lex as a way to “replace” Superman, which was already going to be a challenge when he is designed to look exactly like him for no apparent reason. So this is going to backfire sooner rather than later, but I wish that it could provide some legitimate criticisms towards how Clark is handling things that he could learn and grow from instead of just being a bad guy who will likely just be proven bad and tossed aside once he’s defeated. Also of note is that there’s a moment while he’s confronting Superman and Silver Banshee (who Clark is WAY too patronizing to) that a piece of his artificial face comes off, showing his grotesque metal skeleton underneath. Between this and how this show’s Bizarro gets to be a baby faced extra buff Tarzan, I’m worried about what this show might accidentally be saying about having the redeemable bad guys look pretty while the serious bad guys look ugly. Hopefully I’m wrong there, and hopefully this show is headed towards a better run of episodes starting next week when Superboy touches down. Seriously, I’d like this show to have a long and well regarded life with at least a few more seasons.
