Plot summary: Lex Luthor wants to give the cops advanced battle suits that put them on Superman’s level, but his test pilot begins to exhibit hyper-aggression.
Notes and Trivia
Episode: 34 (S2.E21)
Original Air Date: October 11th, 1997
Directed: Curt Geda (9)
Written: Hilary J Bader (7)
Animation: Koko Enterprise Co., LTD & Dong Yang Animation Co., LTD. (20)
Music: Harvey Cohen (6)
We continue to add to the cast of DC heroes this season with the debut of John Henry Irons who will later become Steel. Sorry, spoilers I guess!
Superman’s second time rescuing Lex Luthor from a shark.
Recap
Lex Luthor shows off a new battle suit designed to turn the cops into mini-Supermen. Flight, durability, strength, lasers, explosives, night vision, the whole deal.
His chosen test ‘pilot’ Sergeant Corey Mills proudly shows off the horrifying proposed future, before tearing off to help fight a fire nearby with Maggie Sawyer’s reluctant consent.
Superman and Mills work together to save a lot of lives, and while Mills is a tiny bit of a dick about it after, he earns a hero’s reception from the survivors and the press.
Unfortunately LexCorp engineer John Henry Irons is extremely concerned about the viability of the suit, particularly the psychological effects. Lex tells him to fall in line but he quits instead.
Mills’ antics go in a distinctive police brutality direction almost immediately, scaring his wife. He also opts to shave his head bald, scaring his wife. He also cancels their vacation, scaring his wife.
Taking the suit for a midnight stroll, Mills violently destroys a chop shop operation, forcing Superman to defend the criminals from him. Maggie Sawyer catches them fighting and places Mills on medical leave.
Reacting exactly how you’d think, Mills steals the suit and then seeks help from Lex… who instead briefly wrecks his shit with a jamming device. Unfortunately the device breaks and Mills turns on his ‘creator’.
Superman arrives to save his nemesis and he and Mills brawl all over the LexCorp building and out into the city, with Mills temporarily blinding The Man of Steel.
Fighting underground, Superman grabs high voltage wires, knowing he can withstand the shock but Mills can’t, and then rips the suit off to finish the job.
Irons confirms Mills will make a full recovery. Superman tells him the suit was a good idea and he’d appreciate some help from time to time if the side effects could be fixed, giving Irons an idea…
Best Performance
Clancy Brown isn’t even trying when he delivers a zinger to Lois so spicy that it even makes Clark smirk. That’s how good he is! He’s also great at casually talking shit to Irons and Mills at different points, with his stone cold delivery of “there’s some garbage that needs to be… disposed of.” Doesn’t even scratch the surface of Brown’s aptitude for this role, but he still wins this category comfortably.
Xander Berkeley has his moments as Mills when he’s leaning into the pure rage, but he can be atrocious when trying to sell it emotionally. Michael Dorn (Irons) doesn’t talk enough to be in with a real shot but I did enjoy him getting to do a less dour character.
Episode Ranking
Superman and Mills working well together was a nice surprise, as this kind of episode normally goes straight to the whole ‘they just can’t get along!’ thing, but both are initially nice to each other and when Superman corrects Mills’ idea he doesn’t bitch about it. It’s a reasonably exciting sequence too, with some outside the box thinking to save people and combining their powers.
However the suit is 100% of the fun here (and about 50% of the dialogue!) Every single time a villain is able to go toe to toe with Superman I talk about it like a rare little treat, but honestly at this point more of his foes do this than don’t… but it still feels quaint. The suit is well designed will a fun array of weaponry, and Mills fucking slamming Supes’ face directly into metal and denting it kind of rules. Likewise shooting Clark riiiiiight in the damn eyes with his lasers point blank. The two minutes or so of blind fighting is done far more effectively than that entire BTAS episode about Bruce having to do the same. I liked the subversion of expectations of Clark listening for Mills’ position, hurling something at him… and completely whiffing… only for it to land on him on the way down. No clue if that was intended to come across as a happy accident or 4D Chess, but the result was still funny. Finally the self-electrocution was a great piece of Superman writing.
Unfortunately I can’t get too carried away, as it’s a painfully generic story that isn’t told all that well from a pathos perspective. Mills’ wife spells out the core conceit of him becoming addicted to the suit as he goes from 0-100 pretty quickly. I appreciate they gave him one legit heroic save first, albeit with the over-aggressive handshake with Superman at the end, but the very next time we see him he’s beating the shit out of bank robbers and adopts a skinhead look. It may have been nice to see this personality change happen a little more gradually… but he barely has a personality to observe changes in. You’ve also got lazy stuff like Superman talking to Irons without any introduction between the two, presumably because they didn’t have time to write such a meeting scene. He gives some exposition about the jamming device to send Superman in Lex’s direction… but one of the main points of Superman is his powers mean he’s rarely unsure where trouble is happening. He also never ends up providing a backup option or secret weapon to use against Mill, which you’d think would be the obvious way to go. Superman just locks in and beats the shit out of him. Irons feels like he should be WAY more pivotal in this story than he is, like they said ‘Oh yeah we’re going to tease Steel and put Irons in the episode as Superman’s pal’ but then forgot to actually write all of that and had to scramble. If you know who he is that’s all well and good, but you should never leave it to your audience to fill in the gaps and make a character cool and important for you.
It was nice that Maggie Sawyer got a couple of short scenes without Turpin being joined at her hip. She’s still no Jim Gordon (I guess Turpin would be the Bullock?) but I’ll take a scene here and there with the supporting cast. More Jimmy Olsen please!
Overall it’s not awful by any means, but the script definitely needed another pass. There’s plenty of visual flare and some of the cooler action scenes in the series to date, but the characterisation is way short of what the DCAU is capable of. I’m placing it just below ‘Solar Power‘, which it has a lot in common with, but that episode nails the things this one is weaker on while matching it on the fights front.
- Brave New Metropolis
- World’s Finest
- Livewire
- Double Dose
- Fun and Games
- Father’s Day
- The Hand of Fate
- The Last Son of Krypton
- Ghost in the Machine
- Stolen Memories
- Action Figures
- The Prometheon
- Tools of the Trade
- The Main Man
- Mxzypixilated
- Blasts from the Past
- Target
- The Way of All Flesh
- Solar Power
- Protoype (NEW ENTRY)
- My Girl
- A Little Piece of Home
- Feeding Time
- Speed Demons
- Two’s a Crowd
- Identity Crisis
- Monkey Fun
- Bizarro’s World
Rogues Roundup
Lex Luthor (Clancy Brown) (fifteenth appearance)
Giving Lex a pet shark pushes him into full Bond Villain territory and I love it, even if it does end up being Chekhov’s Murder Fish as Mills smashes the glass and sets it on Luthor.
Tricking Mills into trusting and then knocking him out with the jamming device is pretty fucking cold, but also a necessary moment for Lex to remind us he’s the theoretical top of the food chain. They could easily have had him take Mills in as his private enforcer, but this not only makes him look cool but underlines he’s PR-savvy as he knows he can’t sanction a renegade psycho and maintain his generally positive image.
That’s one of the strengths of this character: That they can carve out little moments to make him cool as fuck without him having to be the focal point of the episode.
Corey Mills (Xander Berkeley) (first appearance)
I mean… give a cop a deadly weapon… am I right? Mills is extremely one-note. He seems a little full of himself in a harmless way before the suit corrupts him, but honestly that can only be inferred from him winking at his wife, which is arguably just cute. What I’m saying is this is barely a character and they skip steps to tell a generic story with him. Suit dangerous! Man go bad! Oh no!
Berkeley doesn’t help anything by voicing him pretty poorly, with his worst reading being “Nooo! The suit is mine!”
I can’t put him right at the bottom because they do get some pretty solid asskickery out of him, but you also can’t go any higher than this if you’re not actually a person.
- Livewire
- Darkseid
- Lex Luthor (–)
- The Joker
- Toyman
- Metallo
- Parasite
- Karkull
- Brainiac
- Mr. Mxyzptlk
- Kalibak
- Harley Quinn
- Lobo
- Luminus
- DeSaad
- The Preserver
- Bruno Mannheim (and Intergang!)
- Kanto
- Mala & Jax-Ur
- Mercy Graves
- The Prometheon
- Corey Mills (NEW ENTRY)
- Earl Garver
- Titano
- Bizarro
- Detective Bowman
- Weather Wizard
The Matt Signal 
Leave a comment