Superman TAS S02E11 Review: In Which Superman Fights A Pirate

Superman: The Animated Series,  Season 2, Episode 11: Solar Power

This episode's just kind of bad, yeah? Like, it tries its best to not be boring, jumping from one fancy setting to the next, but unlike the bland-but-ultimately-functional "Action Figures", or the hilariously fun romp that is "Double Dose", "Solar Power" is just kind of messy. Again, the concept of this episode is fundamentally okay. Luminus, that crappy super-stalker inventor from a couple episodes back, returns to fight Superman. And to do so, he hijacks (and/or is hired by) Luthor's satellites to transform the sun's light into red and depower Superman. 

Which is a pretty cool concept, and would make Luminus feel so much more dangerous than most of Superman's villains thus far... if he wasn't so crap! Even under a red sun Superman still has enough power to fly around and punch stuff, and despite having laser blasts and light clone replication powers, Luminus doesn't seem anywhere close to defeating Superman at all. Sure, he makes Superman bleed, but it's really hard to take him seriously when he spends 90% of his screentime just taunting Superman and not actually fighting or doing anything. Hell, his master plan involves waiting for Lois and Jimmy to stumble into his invisible base with unlocked doors!

The final confrontation is also insanely bizarre. Okay, so Luminus sets up a weird death trap in his superhero base. He's taking a page out of the Batman-villain playbook, but I'll bite. The fact that the death trap transforms first from a Wild West setting to train tracks and then to a pirate fight, with the handwave of 'hey, hard light hurts Superman!' is just kind of weird, as is the sudden revelation that Superman can just... cut the wall of the little holographic battle room? It's probably supposed to give the final battle a bit more flair, but it ends up cluttering the episode. Add that to the fact that Luminus himself is pretty pathetic, and Luthor's teased greater involvement just trickles away after the one scene he has, and this episode's just mostly disappointment. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• "Look up in the sky!" "It's a bird!" is, obviously, a reference to the classic Superman introduction of "it's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!" ever since the Golden Age era.