Review: My Adventures with Superman “The Death of Superman”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Hank Henshaw threatens the citizens of Metropolis to lure out Superman for a fight, while Jon reveals the terrible future he comes from and hopes to prevent.
OUR TAKE
I must provide a small correction to my prediction I made in the review of the previous episode. It looks like we DO see Superman die after all! It’s just in a brief, single frame flashback (to the future, ironically) that’s no more than a couple seconds long. Well, there’s also a DIFFERENT way he “dies”, but we’ll get to that. However, let that set the stage for all of the many ways that this episode falls flat on its face in just about everything it tries to do well. First off, this whole storyline with Hank and Jon went by WAY TOO DAMN FAST. Jon’s barely been in the show more than a handful of episodes, and Cyborg Hank not that much more. Hell, REGULAR Hank hasn’t been around much more, which illustrates another reason this arc falls apart. This version of Hank Henshaw is paper thin in terms of characterization. We met him last season already with some apparent previous friendship with Lois and having a weird stick up his ass about Superman being an alien that isn’t elaborated on beyond general xenophobia. But even now, when he’s taken on the visual identity of the guy he had a problem with, what we see as his driving force is something like he thought he was “the future” but Superman, somehow, took that away from him. Not that we have any goddamn idea what that means, even now, so all his wailing and whinging just makes him look like a raving lunatic who I can’t wait to be shut up, instead of someone that perhaps Clark or Lois could try to reach out to and find the humanity within.
What DOES ultimately stop him is, strangely enough, Jon telling him that he was sent from the future to stop him, which seems to take all the wind out of his sails. I can imagine that it would be quite humbling to be told you screwed up SO BAD that a time traveler had to come stop you, so maybe that’s it, but it sure doesn’t make the weird road we took to get here much better. Speaking of Jon, he’s our other big loose board for people to fall through. Not just because he’s come and gone so fast as I mentioned, but also because his whole plot just feels like the ongoing problem of this series to simply use references to popular anime as the main reason to do anything, regardless of how poorly planned out that is. Do you get that Jon is basically Future Trunks in DBZ coming back to fight the Androids? It’s just like in one of my Japanese animes! At least there was some small relevance to stuff going on with these characters, like Lois’ anxiety about the future, but all that was basically brushed aside for this huge fight and I’m guessing we’re done with her feeling that anymore now that she’s confirmed to get married to Clark and have a kid with him, which…seems like a weird message to send about Time Travel. “Don’t worry about the infinite options for your future, Lois, because all you need to know is that you become a mom eventually!”
Which brings me to my last point: THIS IS ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH THE SEASON. Were they that scared about not getting renewed that they couldn’t let the season end with a powerless Clark? I guess that’s the “death” of Superman here, Clark saying he “can’t be Superman anymore, but considering, again, that this is only the halfway point, does anyone really expect him to not get his powers back within the next few episodes? Where’s the tension? Apparently not in the next episode since we’re back to wacky shenanigans again! The few potentially interesting points I can take from this is that it looks like they’re doing more set up to possibly give Clark more of his “electric blue” Superman powers (story about that incidentally being one I got as a kid around the same time I got the Death of Superman comic that this is very loosely based on), but as neat as that idea sounds, I’m basically done with just being intrigued by small hints like that. There’s five episodes left in this season, maybe in the whole show, so I really hope they can make these next few weeks actually mean something. Please. I beg of you.
