Superman TAS S01E08 Review: The Return of Brainiac

Superman, the Animated Series, Season 1, Episode 8: Stolen Memories

Brainiac returns! And his episode is... okay? It's not bad, it's just kinda disappointing that after the chilling buildup we got for him in the pilot he ends up feeling not that threatening. The implied team-up between Luthor and Brainiac (which, of course, will happen down the line but not now) ends up amounting to not much, and Luthor keeping Brainiac's arrival hidden from the general populace also ends up being nothing but being a plot device to make Brainiac aware of Superman.

And while Luthor's paranoia and his anti-alien "keep your enemies closer" bit is cool since he does end up bringing Brainiac's ship down with his barrage of missiles while still profiting a fair bit from the information and technology from Brainiac... it also felt rather off. It does give Luthor some nice bit where he's a manipulator and an opportunist who will ally himself with Superman when it suits him, and not the mwa-ha-ha evil mastermind, but at the same time he's kind of dry in this episode. 

Brainiac, of course, is revealed to have been destroying planets after downloading all the information that he can from their worlds (so all the planets he goes to have wi-fi, then) due to a weird logic of 'information is more valuable if less people exist' which is honestly a bit silly and the big revelation of Brainiac's motivations are reduced to like two or three lines. Where Brainiac was cruel yet understandable in the pilot where he's concerned about self-preservation of himself and Krypton's knowledge, and his earlier appearances here where he tries to be reasonable with talks about being the 'Twin Sons of Krypton', at the end he's just flat and cartoonishly evil and wants to blow up the Earth through some crazy logic, and that makes him slightly less interesting. 

It doesn't help that the fight against Brainiac's forces -- the weird legless robot mooks and the tentacles -- are both rather boring, but the weakest part of the episode has to be how Superman finds out the revelation of Brainiac's intentions. He dreams about it. Yes, it might come from a delayed reaction to touching the orbs (thereby bringing into question as to why Brainiac didn't doctor said orbs to avoid such a thing if the game plan is to bring Superman to his side) but it's still a silly revelation when a different way could've been done instead. Have Superman investigate the Jor-El recording. Have Superman search for more information as to how Krypton was destroyed. Have Superman question Brainiac and find holes in his story. Instead we got a dream.

So while Brainiac's big episode ended up being kind of underwhelming, at least like Parasite and Metallo before him Brainiac's far from gone permanently, having uploaded himself into LexCorp's systems, so hopefully between Superman and Justice League we get a couple of good Brainiac episodes. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Brainiac, in the comics, instead of collecting orbs of data of every planet he's been through, shrinks down one of the biggest cities into a bottle city to retain the 'culture' instead, with Krypton's representative being the Bottled City of Kandor. 
• Brainiac's role of a sentient Krypton program that contains a whole lot of Kryptonian knowledge and tries to get Kal-El to side with him isn't part of Brainiac's original characterization, but resembles the Eradicator, a different Superman antagonist-slash-sometimes-ally. 
• Superman putting the huge repository of Kryptonian knowledge on a remote Antarctic ice mountain-cave is, of course, a reference to the upcoming Fortress of Solitude, Superman's iconic base.