Review: Supermansion “Masters of Lex”

Look, there are at least a hundred equally funny Lex puns you could throw in here.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rex stops a mugger making off with a purse and goes to pummel him, but it’s revealed he’s an addict who Rex intends to help. Before this can happen, anti-hero Max Penalizer (?) arrives to lay the smack on the addict, much to Rex’s objections, and even woos the purse’s owner.

Things aren’t much better at the mansion, as the housemates fall into their more minor subplots. Robobot is throwing some harsh honesty at the residents, but is directed by Ranger to try telling assuring lies to make people feel better, which soon spirals out of control into a lizard themed cult, Courtney is having a hard time getting the message to Saturn that he needs to leave under duress by Groaner before admitting he wants to be Saturn’s nemesis again, and the animal villains and Johnny Rabdo begin trying and failing to court Cooch.

But more importantly, Lex (with her fresh new character development haircut) is going on a date with Max Penalizer, shocking both Rex and Devizo, who team up to try and sabotage their night. This being a “parent hates the boyfriend but have a rebellious daughter” kind of episode, this very quickly backfires, but the more interesting stuff is focused around Rex and Devizo finding themselves on the same side for the first time in awhile that wasn’t about the end of the world. Lex eventually finds out Max is a butt anyway, but we need a fight, so a misunderstanding with a police report leads them to believe he’s a domestic abuser. When they get home, Lex admits she was acting out and they reconcile.

OUR TAKE

Well, we’re a third through this abbreviated season and we have one of THESE tired plots. As said, the only real point of interest is the bonding between Rex and Devizo and their roles as Lex’s two dads, seeing how their connections to her are the main thing they share now. Rex takes the role of aggressive protective dad and Devizo as the reverse psychology dad. It’s shallow, but it’s the most character stuff we get out of it. It would’ve been nice to see some flashbacks from Devizo’s perspective of raising Lex as a teenager to give us some insight on why she feels the need to rebel now in her adult life, or what she might see in Max beyond some bad boy to make her dads mad, but I’ve long come to accept this is not the show for that. Though they haven’t been one to shy away from flashbacks in general, as seen in last week’s premiere, so that’s a bit odd.

The other subplots, however, are just the most obvious type of padding and really highlight how cluttered the cast is now. I know this is a comedy, but that doesn’t mean you pull a comedic situation out of a hat and just assign characters to it at random. The romancing of Cooch is just something to give the tagalong villains something to do, the Robobot telling the truth stuff seemed to be TRYING to say something about honesty versus lies and their respective consequences but just says “screw it” by the end, and the Groaner/Saturn/Courtney stuff MIGHT be going somewhere long term since Groaner and Saturn’s relationship is one of the more longer running plot threads in the series so far, but it’s hard to say what to make of it just yet.

Despite the shortened length, it’s still pretty hard to tell where this season is going, which I don’t remember being a problem in the first two. Season 1 seemed to be about the League trying to stay relevant to society, and Season 2 was…the same thing, possibly? Putting the heroes and former villains in a house together have plenty of comedic and character potential, but we only really have three potentially interesting bad guys in Devizo, Groaner, and Lex. They’re certainly getting sufficient focus so far, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a trajectory going forward. But hey, at least it might be short enough we won’t notice. Four episodes to go, and next week’s a Cooch episode. Yaaaaaay…?