Plot summary: A stone colossus crashes to earth and begins rampaging, leaving Superman scrambling to think of ways to stop it from flattening Metropolis.
Notes and Trivia
Episode: 16 (S2.E3)
Original Air Date: September 12th, 1997
Directed: Nobuo Tomizawa (1)
Written: Stan Berkowitz (3) (story & teleplay) & Alan Burnett (4) (story)
Animation: TMS-Kyokuichi Corporation (6)
Music: Michael McCuistion (5)
The episode almost certainly draws inspiration from Issue 5 of New Gods, which depicts a giant stone-like creature strapped to an asteroid in… The Promethean Galaxy. Bruce Timm talked about The Fourth World saga being a treasure trove of semi-forgotten characters and concepts, chiefly Darkseid, so I’m 99.9% sure this was on purpose.
The creature is never actually referred to as The Prometheon at any point.
Doomsday has often been affixed to an asteroid and launched into space as a method to deal with his indestructible nature.
Recap
An asteroid is hours away from hitting Metropolis and killing 10 million people. General Hardcastle is irritated for his men to be the reserve unit for Superman, berating The Man of Steel throughout.
The mission takes a momentary backseat though, as Supes discovers a colossal stone-like creature strapped to the asteroid. It has a faint heartbeat and is transmitting some kind of binary signal.
Hardcastle and Professor Hamilton bicker about saving it from impending destruction, so Superman offers to simply push the asteroid into a different orbit to buy more time to study the alien.
Unfortunately exposure to sunlight wakes the creature and it begins to break loose, so Hardcastle detonates the charges. However all this does is break it free, sending it into a rapid descent towards Metropolis.
Superman is able to make it crash into the ocean, but ends up having to save both a cruise ship and a submarine from its mindless rampage, unable to halt its advance whatsoever.
Hamilton finally translates the code it has been transmitting, learning it is an artificial being intended for heavy labour on an alien world… but it had an unquenchable need to absorb heat, hence exile and a warning message.
Hardcastle ignores this and feeds it more heat in the form of heavy artillery and missiles, but relents when Superman has to save him from a helicopter swatted out of the sky.
After killing the power to the city Superman is able to lure the creature out to sea again, where Hamilton dumps large quantities of chemicals that flash freeze the water and the Prometheon with it.
Best Performance
Charles Napier is perfectly cast as General Hardcastle. He’s a grumpy military man who is cocky when he thinks he’s winning and sour when he’s losing. He distrusts Superman because he’s not American. It’s not a terribly inventive character but sometimes you need some cliches to help a narrative work, and that’s the case here.
Frank Welker specialises in animal noises, so of course he’s great at the inhuman struggles and snarls of The Prometheon, however brief. Victor Brandt is always pretty solid as Hamilton but he’s always third or fourth best in a given episode. This might be his best work so far but he’s still not quite there.
Episode Ranking
‘Superman is so boring, there’s nothing that can believably challenge him.’ Okay, bet. How about a fucking kaiju? There is something satisfying to seeing a creature so enormous in scale in just about any medium, in this case completely dwarfing Superman, who buzzes around it like an insect. He can punch it at high speed and slightly bother it; he can be too fast and make it stumble lunging for him; but he can’t actually hurt it aaaaat all. And once it gets hold of him he’s essentially powerless and it almost takes him down with it.
Thus once again he has to use his brains to win the day, with a shockingly compelling third act sequence that featured our heroes cutting the power to a giant city and then Superman using his heat vision to turn a steel beam into a glowing torch to attract the monster. The visuals worked really nicely here, and I liked the touch of him having to heat it back up after it cooled down a bit, as well as later having to use the beam like a lever to pry open the creature’s fist to free himself. They even tossed in the complication of the moon and Supes getting grabbed so his options were limited for generating a larger heat source, electing to blow up an (empty) boat to draw attention. It’s logical and it progresses sequentially so that science can win the day, with Hamilton theorising a plan earlier on, demonstrating it with the chemicals from an ice pack, and then pulling it off on a much larger scale. Just really solid fundamental scripting.
The lack of resolution as to what they DID with this giant frozen creature just offshore of Metropolis(?) is a little unsatisfying. Though the MCU got away with similar for several years, I guess. Did they strap the thing to a new asteroid and punt it back into space to massacre another planet one day? Did they find a way to murder it permanently and dispose of the corpse? Inquiring minds need to know! Actually I guess a lot of this is consistent with the end of a kaiju movie, so maybe it’s just as much of an homage as everything else.
There were lots of nice little touches to accompany the simple but effective monster antics, including the lack of sound in space (though they forgot about that pretty quickly), a cutaway to Lois for some light comic relief, putting faces to those in danger in both the yacht and the submarine, and the general deployment of Hardcastle and his troops. A recurring theme in Godzilla movies is the stubborn ineptitude of the government and armed forces, a metaphor that can sometimes get lost. Hardcastle fills that role here, and they get a lot of fun bickering between him, Superman and Hamilton, with Supes all but saying ‘I told you so’ near the end. Seeing The Prometheon shrug off tanks, missiles and helicopters just helps sell what a threat it is, and why even Superman can’t brute force this thing.
So what’s lacking? Well, I do like there to be some kind of exchange of views or character clash between hero and villain, and that’s not possible here. That’s not automatically a bad thing as it comes across as more of a force of nature beyond comprehension, and they’re able to make Hardcastle the surrogate antagonist. Lois only having a single line is disappointing, and to not see Lex at all even more so. It would have been nice to get a little bit more supporting character work. But these are minor criticisms, honestly.
Individual placement may fall to whether you think doing something simple but executing it well is better than trying something ambitious but not 100% nailing it.
- Fun and Games
- The Last Son of Krypton
- Stolen Memories
- The Prometheon (NEW ENTRY)
- Tools of the Trade
- The Main Man
- Blasts from the Past
- The Way of All Flesh
- My Girl
- A Little Piece of Home
- Feeding Time
- Two’s a Crowd
Rogues Roundup
The Prometheon (Frank Welker) (first appearance)
Pros: It’s a rampaging kaiju. Cool creature design. Strapping it to a meteor is very Eva.
Cons: It doesn’t have a personality. It simply wants to absorb heat and move on. I weirdly found it kinda cute when it tried to moonbathe near the end, I guess?
So it finds itself around the same place on the list as others with little to no personality. Darkseid packed plenty of character into 10 seconds, but that can’t count yet. Mercy Graves barely talks and while she did kick a dude across a room, that’s not the same as being a giant monster stomping through the city. Earl Garver kinda sucked. So it clears those three. Jax-Ur is very lucky that Mala was plenty of fun in her debut episode mostly without him, or I’d place it above them too.
- Toyman
- Lex Luthor
- Brainiac
- Metallo
- Lobo
- The Preserver
- Parasite
- Bruno Mannheim (and Intergang!)
- Kanto
- Mala & Jax-Ur
- The Prometheon (NEW ENTRY)
- Earl Garver
- Mercy Graves
- Darkseid
The Matt Signal 
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