Plot summary: Brainiac travels back in time to try and murder a teenaged Clark Kent. Luckily three of The Legion of Super-Heroes follow to play defence.
Notes and Trivia
Episode: 44 (S3.E3)
Original Air Date: October 31st 1998
Directed: Butch Lukic (1)
Written: Stan Berkowitz (8) & Rich Fogel (8)
Animation: Koko Enterprise Co., LTD & Dong Yang Animation Co., LTD. (28)
Music: Kristopher Carter (12)
Jonathan Kent tells Clark that he almost gave him a heart attack. You’ll never guess what he generally dies of in most continuities…
Clark’s teen rival, Kenny Braverman, becomes the villain Conduit in the comics.
One of only two episodes where Clark never appears as Superman following the very first episode. Ya know, where he’s a child.
Recap
We open in the year 2979, as Brainiac raids a scientific facility and reconfigures some of the machinery into a time portal, disappearing through it.
Three members of The Legion of Super-Heroes are called to the scene and opt to follow, unbothered by the warnings that they will struggle to return. They find themselves in Smallville.
At Smallville High a teenaged Clark Kent causes a scene at a school dance, embarrassing a mean jock but injuring him in the process. Lana scolds him for his recent arrogant behaviour.
Brainiac attacks, but the trio of Legionnaires make the save, being introduced as Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl and Chameleon Boy. Brainiac opts to teleport away.
Saturn Girl shows Clark their utopian future, revealing Superman inspired scores of young superheroes from across the universe to team up, but Brainiac is aiming to kill him before that can ever come to pass.
Naturally Clark runs away, all the way to Kent farm… but Brainiac knows where he lives after terrorising some locals and cuts the power and sends in some drones.
Clark and the Kents do their best until the Legion arrive, but Brainiac proves too strong for all of them. Saturn Girl telepathically instructs Clark to target Braniac’s teleportation device and he does just that, sending the villain directly into the freaking Sun!
Saturn Girl alters everybody’s memories and the Legion use the tech in Brainiac’s hover-chair to return to their time. Lana and Clark have a little moment.
Best Performance
This is one of those episodes where nobody is that good or bad so I’m having to kind of throw a dart and picking one at random. I guess I kind of liked Jason Priestley as Chameleon Boy, though some of that is the vocal effects. He’s got a good energy to him though, and he was the one that stood out to me the most from a voice work perspective. Melissa Joan Hart and Chad Lowe are far more generic as the other two Legionnaires.
Corey Burton would be a close second. Brainiac’s characterisation has flown out the window recently, which makes Burton’s job significantly more difficult. At one point we were doing a ‘the machine doesn’t realise it’s a slave to its emotions too!’ thing, but now Brainiac is more of a generic villain. Burton’s probably at his best when Brainiac intimidates the locals.
Episode Ranking
I don’t think they’ve ever deliberately deployed the episode title late to act as a stinger. It was cool!
The Legion’s cool powers battling Brainiac at arguably the deadliest its been to date carries most of the episode. Chameleon Boy’s shapeshifting, Cosmic Boy’s telekinesis and Saturn Girl’s telepathy (all supplemented by Legion Flight Rings) are all a lot of fun, particularly Cosmic Boy wrecking shop in a junkyard. I also appreciated Chameleon Boy extending beyond just animals (in particular turning himself into a brick wall to hide them), and that the process appears to slightly pain him each time.
The thing is though, there should have been a lot more juice to getting to spend time with Clark as a teenager and highlighting the ways in which he’s changed as well as foreshadowing the man he will become… and they just did a kind of underwhelming job with that aspect. Sure they get their chuckles with the whole ‘these glasses aren’t going to fool anyone’ bit, but there just isn’t a very concerted effort to delve deeper. It’s all surface level ‘whoa, what’s going on?’ stuff and Clark being a little bit more impetuous. Lana tries to call him on it, but I don’t think the episode portrays him is unheroic, just a bit cocky, and his encounter with Brainiac does nothing to dissuade him of that behaviour. He’s far more aggressive, and nothing comes of The Legion telling him to hang back and let them handle it. If the idea is his hotheaded nature is detrimental to his future as a hero, shouldn’t he have to learn a karmic lesson after doing something hotheaded? Plus they wipe everybody’s memories anyway!
(Sidebar: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a character with special powers perform incredible feats in a basketball scene in films and TV that go so ludicrously over the top that it pains me a little. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is still the all-time offender for me, but I hate them all. It’s one thing to be suspiciously good, it’s another for a room full of people to witness you exhibit super-speed, toss a guy clean across a room and jump higher than anyone has in human history for a slam dunk. I do understand the impulse though; it feels like a nerd fantasy to not just beat all the jocks at their own game, but utterly humiliate them.)
And if they weren’t interested in that side of the time split, they could have at least done more in the future. The opening is lighting fast, and while it’s cool to see all the most famous members of the Legion for a brief moment in Saturn Girl’s vision, they leave it there with that stuff too, so ‘The Implication’ has to do the heavy lifting. Plus what the heck kind of solution to being stuck in the past was repurposing Brainiac’s chair? Brainiac needed the special tech from the beginning of the episode to create the time portal, it couldn’t do it independently!
I did enjoy Brainiac’s assault on Kent Farm, cutting the power and sending in little seeker drones for Clark to play cat and mouse with in the dark, and the Kents taking turns to blast Brainiac with shotguns was fun.
Fundamentally they’re doing the world’s softest 20-minute Back to the Future X Terminator mash-up and it fails on all fronts. It’s a good idea that needed a considerable amount of punching up to be anything more compelling than a few neat fight scenes.
- The Late Mr. Kent
- Brave New Metropolis
- Apokalips… Now!
- World’s Finest
- Livewire
- Double Dose
- Fun and Games
- Warrior Queen
- Knight Time
- Father’s Day
- Little Girl Lost
- 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
- Where There’s Smoke
- Protoype
- My Girl
- A Little Piece of Home
- Feeding Time
- New Kids in Town [NEW ENTRY]
- Speed Demons
- Two’s a Crowd
- Identity Crisis
- Heavy Metal
- Monkey Fun
- Bizarro’s World
Rogues Roundup
Brainiac (Corey Burton) (sixth appearance)
Frankly hilarious that they did yet another ‘Surely Brainiac is dead this time!’ last episode, only to bring it back as soon as humanly possible. Sure it’s meant to be a thousand years in the future within the fiction, but they just say ‘he somehow reassembled himself.’ I think we’ve maybe gone beyond the tasteful confines of a ‘hard to kill’ character here, gang.
It is funny that the Legion consider Brainiac to be a relatively simple foe given it’s positioned as one of Superman’s most powerful villains, and if anything it appears stronger here than usual. Probably the best part of this script to be honest. The teleportation kicks things up a notch, and doing a knockoff Terminator routine isn’t a bad way to go either. Pretty dope death scene too.
Still… introducing a brand new weakness that makes it so easy to defeat in the end it’s kind of laughable sort of offsets all of that to the point I’m inclined to yet again leave B in exactly the same spot. Which is convenient because at some points I’ve thought I had it ranked too low, but back to back ‘blah’ appearances solidify my opinion.
- Livewire
- Darkseid
- Lex Luthor
- The Joker
- Toyman
- Queen Maxima
- Metallo
- Parasite
- Karkull
- Brainiac [–]
- Mr. Mxyzptlk
- Harley Quinn
- Granny Goodness
- Kalibak
- Volcana
- The Gotham Rogues
- Lobo
- Luminus
- Project Firestorm
- The Female Furies
- DeSaad
- Detective Bowman
- Bruno Mannheim (and Intergang!)
- Steppenwolf
- The Preserver
- Kanto
- Mala & Jax-Ur
- Mercy Graves
- The Prometheon
- De’Cine
- Corey Mills
- Earl Garver
- Titano
- Bizarro
- Weather Wizard
The Matt Signal 
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