Superman TAS S02E09 Review: Forget-me-not

Superman, Season 2, Episode 9: Action Figures

Yeah, this is one of the weaker offerings in the seceond season. The second season had more space to fill, and unlike the first season -- which jumped from iconic Superman villain to the next in a relatively breakneck pace -- the second season could afford to tell more filler-y episodic stories. Except 'Action Figures' isn't actually that good. The base concept of the story, while not wholly original (it's been repeated several times over Batman: TAS) is interesting enough to carry 25 minutes, with an established villain befriending a bunch of innocent children and acting like a hero to them.

But the episode itself doesn't actually spend enough time building up Metallo's heel-face-turn. He basically randomly gets amnesia between the events of 'Way of All Flesh' and this one, having doing nothing but walk across the sea floor for the entirety of a year. An amnesiac Metallo finds himself taking orders from a bunch of kids that are fans of Superman, only to get his memory back and kind of dupe the kids and string them along. Whereas 'the Way of All Flesh' had a huge element of pathos where Metallo has to struggle int obeing turned into an unfeeling-yet-living machine, here he's reduced to nothing but a huge, roaring dick who cons the naive kids. At no point did Metallo's defection feel genuine, which means the episode ends up being reduced to a relatively bland series of scenes culminating in a relatively unsatisfying beat-em-up with a volcanic backdrop.

And to top it off, despite the kids (Bobby and Sarita, I had to look it up) insisting that Superman would save the bad guy no matter what, the Man of Steel himself... actually doesn't. He tosses Metallo's heart into the lava, leaves him behind while he scrambles madly for his life-support system (granted, he's saving Lois and the kids, but still) and at the end, other than a cursory glance at the remnants of the volcano's eruption without an attempt to even make sure that Metallo's dead and not trapped in the half-alive living hell state that he is in. Overall, it's a hugely missed opportunity where both Superman and Metallo feel more like caricatures than actual characters, with a bland, uninspiring plot. Pretty blah. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Metallo's fully-robotic mody here lacks the fleshy outer skin that he has in his first appearance in Superman: TAS and most subsequent appearances. In the comics, Metallo was depicted during the Golden and Silver Ages as almost exclusively being a fully-Terminator-esque robot.