Thursday 10 August 2017

Superman TAS S01E13 Review: Jekyll & Hyde

Superman: The Animated Series, Season 1, Episode 13: Two's A Crowd


So I really had wished last episode was the final episode of this season, ending with a very packed episode with Kanto's introduction heralding Darkseid's larger role in the second season. This episode does have Parasite's return, but it's such a strangely underwhelming episode. The Parasite finds himself mind-jacked by this other douchebag, Earl Graver, who turns out to have such a huge ego that he pushes Parasite's personality, Rudy Jones, out of the equation. For no real reason, too -- we're supposed to take the 'bigger ego' thing as adequate explanation. Earl Graver himself is weirdly handled in my opinion, with how much of his bomb plan being planned from the start and how much was improvised once he body-jumped into the Parasite isn't clear.

Add that to the fact that there were just huge swathes of the episode, like Superman and Maggie's underwater adventure in the derelict ship, feeling like obvious padding in an episode that's struggling for content. A lot of the actual Superman/Parasite battle ends up being underwhelming (we even get a silly fakeout-death for the Parasite), there's the random deus ex infinite-bottomless-hole to cover the bomb, and even the Parasite himself ends up suffering from a significant portion of badass decay because Rudy ends up reverting to his pre-Parasite doormat personality.

Oh well, at least Parasite got his cable TV, so this all ended well for someone.

Speaking of ending well, I've been really, really enjoying myself reviewing Superman: The Animated Series. It's a neat enough break from the highly serialized nature of Justice League Unlimited, a series that I had a ton of fun reviewing but was still hugely tiring to write for, considering I have so many things to talk about every episode. I'll try and go through season two of Superman: The Animated Series... not this month, no. Because next week... we're finally, finally starting our much-demanded Young Justice first season review as part of the 'pre-Justice-League-movie' hype train thing that I'm doing. Very excited about Young Justice, it's a series that I truly have forgotten how good it was.

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