Superman: The Animated Series, Season 2, Episode 5: Livewire
Another day, another villain-of-the-week episode. Of course, they're learning and they know what makes a villain memorable -- personality. You can have your monocled kryptonian warlords, your pasty-faced alien zookeepers and your soulless rock golems, but nothing beats personality and motivation. And Livewire? She certainly has both in spades. Livewire is a Grade-A bitch throughout the episode, both before and after her transformation... she just has enough power to back up her previously-only-vocal jackassery. Throughout the episode I found Livewire wholly unlikeable and grating, and that's certainly the intended audience reaction. They went a bit too far in the 'god, what a cunt' direction and dialed it down a little in Livewire's subsequent appearances, but it's certainly effective to make me root against Livewire. She's entertaining in her annoyingness, and really well-done as a villain in that regard, especially since you consider that Livewire is the first real original character from this show that they trust to carry an entire episode on her own.
We never really get an explanation to why Leslie Willis is such a bitch and why she hates Superman so much that she clogs up the airwaves with it. Lois identifies Leslie as a 'shock jock', a term probably unfamiliar to kids nowadays -- it's like internet trolling where you rile up a controversial topic and fight strongly for its sake just to get reactions and ratings... except you do it live on air. We get a pretty eye-rolling but still effective bit as Leslie lists all the reasons why Superman sucks (the 'everything comes easily to Superman so he's boring' bit is a neat bit of meta-commentary too) while Superman, outside her building, is actively proving every single one of her reasons wrong. It's a bit on-the-nose, though I don't particularly mind.
Leslie is then transformed into Livewire in a freak lightning storm because she insists on holding her concert in a thunderstorm (those are the most pathetic policemen I've ever seen), and of course she gets electrocuted and obtains superpowers. She experiments with her powers, and creates her own new persona as Livewire and starts rampaging through town, transforming herself 'into the media'. It's a bit iffy what her main plans are. There are no ransoms, no grand plan to do anything beyond making every TV, radio and fax machine show her face... but then you can't really understand the motivations of shock jocks and internet trolls beyond being a huge attention whore, and, again, it certainly works wonders to make Livewire feel like someone who deserves a punch in the face. The voice acting is pretty well-done, too, working well in making her unlikable but certainly not unwatchable.
The episode also has a lot of fun with Livewire's electrokinesis, with the sccene where she creates her own supervillain costume being a classic, and the alternating skin/skull segment as she gets washed away by the dam's water is a neat visual, but the final battle is a bit underwhelming. Still, it's otherwise a pretty fun episode with a pretty fun villain that I just love to hate.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Livewire, like Harley Quinn, is a character created for the cartoon and later adapted into the mainstream comics.
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