Review: Supermansion “My Cousin Kitty”

Do you want the truth? You CAT handle the truth!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Years ago, Rex and Devizo battle it out a rural area, home to a trailer lady and her cat. When the battle crushes a mouse the cat was about to pounce on, she jumps in the way of the fight, taking a blast from Devizo’s evo-ray and becoming…Cooch. Seeing the potential in her as a hero (but not fond of her given name), Rex invites her back to the mansion to begin a new life, leaving her former owner behind. In the present, that owner, Claudette, goes to a mint julep loving lawyer to sue Rex for custody.

The new additions to the League of Freedom seem to pull their weight and then some, as the crime problem in Storm City is all but gone, but Rex is still wary of Devizo’s seeming turn to good to the point he’s neglecting taking care of Cooch’s feline needs…no, NOT LIKE THAT! But it’s fitting enough time for the lawsuit to come in. There only legal hope is Robobot, who’s just downed a gallon’s worth of downloaded legal dramas, but they end up on the ropes when things don’t follow the formula he’s used to. Realizing the prosecution’s entire case is based on Cooch being considered stolen property, Devizo tricks the lawyer into calling her to the stand to admit she’s a cat, then calls for a mistrial when noting to the judge that property can’t give testimony. As thanks for the help and apologize for judging him poorly, Rex grants him his previously established request of making his own League of Freedom.

In the B-plot, Black Saturn gets invited on a podcast where he’ll be asked to reveal the origin of his name. Knowing it’s connected to his most secret shame, he and Courtney plan write up a much cooler one, but Groaner jumps on this and his newfound thirst for the torment to expose this and humiliate his nemesis with the help of a Sudafed crazed Robo-Dino. The search takes them to Saturn’s home and his apathetic mother, where it’s revealed his name came from only having a crappy car growing up. Groaner goes to pull the trigger on this dirt but finds himself conflicted when Saturn outright praises him on the podcast.

OUR TAKE

It’s a fair assessment to say Cooch is not the most complex character in this show. She is dumb, is constantly horny, and is a cat. Her main role in the first season was to have a growing romantic relationship with Brad, and then solely as comedic relief in the second. So, it’s no surprise that, while this episode seems to make this trial centering on Cooch’s identity and personhood its main focus, it’s not really about Cooch, but more a set up for many jokes to happen all at once. Some are decent to good like Robobot being out of his depth thanks to his wrong genre savy-ness, some start out fine and then wear thin fast like the opposing lawyer’s obsession with mint juleps, and others are disastrous bombs such as Claudette being attracted to American Ranger and him having to shamefully seduce her. This last one adds nothing, made me genuinely uncomfortable, and any commentary it might have about however this might look if it was the other way around completely backfires. And amongst all of this, Cooch and her own feelings about this matter are lost in the shuffle. She is definitely a pet, but she’s also a person now, and yet nothing about this makes her think for even a second about what she is or what she wants to be. I imagine it might be hard to sell that kind of story for a character whose design can be summed up as “trailer trash at a furry convention”, but I feel like they could’ve at least come close to pulling it off if they wanted to.

What the trial DOES manage to move forward is Rex’s evolving feelings about Devizo as well as give us a better idea of where this season might be headed in its latter half. Devizo is written to just unpredictable enough that he actually loops around to being pretty damn predictable. If a situation has him frame as scheming against Rex, he’s actually helping, and if a scene is making him look like he’s genuinely changed, he’s actually scheming. Chris Pine does a fine job playing him as the Bugs to Rex’s Daffy, but the writing is clearly not willing to push this beyond this adequate level of manipulating. What saves it, at least for now, is the idea of this newly expanded League branching into a side group. This sort of thing is fairly common for established super teams in comics to do, like the Justice League, Avengers, or Teen Titans, so as a comics fan, it’s at least interesting to see this trope get played within this show. I have a really bad guess, but it won’t be long before we see where this all heads, so I look forward to that.

The Saturn and Groaner arc is a surprising stand out this episode, going at a much quicker pace than I’d figure they would be given how things have gone in previous seasons. I guess making out at that Halloween party really made their dynamic unstable. The whole hero-villain relationship was oversimplified from the start in a way that not even actual mainstream comics follow now, but this season has really had the goals of both sides jumping around. First, Groaner simply wants to move on while Saturn wants their antagonism back, then Groaner is jealous and wants to be a villain again, and now he can’t commit because he actually feels something for Saturn. I almost wish that this had been their arc in Season 1, much like how I think this whole Cooch trial might’ve worked better as her first focus episode in that season too. You might say I’m overthinking all of this, but you can’t ask me to not overthink when a portion of the episode was about using the actual law to explain the legal status of an evolved cat lady.

Overall, this was somehow both an overdue waste of potential AND an astonishing surpassing of expectations, and I’m suddenly much more intrigued what this season holds for us than I was at the beginning. Next time it’s more not-Tony Stark and his own knockoff super team with some focus on Robobot, which could end up being marginally better than I could possibly expect. Let’s try to keep up the trend!

Score
7/10