Superman on Television
Superman: The Animated Series - Episode Reviews
Season 2 - Episode 7: "Target"
Original Air Date: September 19, 1997Reviewed by: Jeffrey Taylor
"I'm not having a good day" - Lois Lane
Welcome to the obligatory murder mystery episode. A mystery is easy to write badly by either revealing too much or too little if the ending is meant to be guessed. There must be a number of suspects and the mastermind behind it all should be hard to be sure of before the end. The "it's the one you least expect" story structure has become such a cliché that for some stories, you should expect the antagonist to be the one you're supposed to least suspect. Mysteries in non-literary media are usually best left for feature film or even hour long dramas because it allows the story and characters to be fleshed out. In this 30 minute episode, only three characters could have been the villain and one of them was Lex Luthor, who was easily stricken from the list the moment he was mentioned. The real villain's motivations were not revealed until after his identity was clear, so all the guess work an audience member should reasonably be able to conjure up has to be based on an understanding of the basic structure of a mystery.
The villain of the episode was an original character to Superman: The Animated Series who would later return under a different villainous name, but since he hasn't quite achieved super-villain status yet, I'll refer to him by his given nomenclature.
Rating - 3 (out of 5): Although this episode was rife with clichés, it was well crafted as a mystery, whether you as an audience member can figure out the secret at the end or not. This certainly wasn't an M. Night. Shyamalan film, but rather a half hour animated episode for kids. Sometimes a 3 out of 5 rating means an episode was middle of the road (see the season one episode My Girl), but in this case, the good parts of the story weighed out equally with the bad.
Theoretically, the list of people in the Superman universe who would want to kill Lois Lane at any given time should be at least sixteen to eighteen pages, single spaced in 10 point Times New Roman font. No matter the series or entertainment format, when Lois Lane's life is in trouble and it's unclear who's behind it, there's always a joke about a list of people who would want her dead.
At first the villain appeared to be Lex Luthor, although he would never write, "You win, you die" on Lois's napkin before trying to kill her. It's just not his style. She was winning an award for her "Lexscam" articles which cost Lex a lot of money. Whenever Lex has been the mastermind of the story's villainy, the audience was shown what he was up to. So there was never any chance of him as the mystery attacker. Then it appeared to be Police Detective Bowman who lost a promotion several years earlier because of another story Lois wrote. So a lot of people have reasons to want Lois dead.
No one would have suspected it was Edward Lytener, the nervous but helpful friend who has never appeared in any other episode and who was clearly doing a job that would otherwise be performed by Emil Hamilton. He was the least likely suspect, and therefore the only real possibility.
Lois needed a lot of saving in this episode, which meant a lot of Superman scenes and some great rescue moments. Lois was trapped in an elevator with rockets on its underside shooting into the sky and as Superman rescued her, he said, "I believe this is your floor," which is a reference to the Eiffel Tower scene from Superman II. The only type of rescue situation missing from the episode was the one where Lois saved herself. It never happened. It takes away from Lois's resourcefulness when she can't save herself just once. However, the elevator rescue turned into double jeopardy when the sky bourn elevator hit a helicopter, causing it to fall. Actually that would be quintuple jeopardy if you counted Lois, the bomb, the helicopter, the pilot and the passenger, each of which had to be dealt with individually. It's a fun scene and worth rewinding.
Clark appeared to have been injured just before the first commercial break, so he wore a sling on his arm for the rest of the episode, which was a nice touch. There was even a funny moment when he used his "bad arm" when no one was looking.
Luthor actually helped Superman rescue Lois without knowing it. While Lois was being attacked directly by Lytener, Lex called Clark revealing Lytener's potential guilt. It's easy to miss the irony, but it's there. I don't believe for a moment that Lex desired Lois's continued health.
These good moments outweighed the bad in the episode and made for a fun, albeit obvious mystery. The most laughable moment was when Lytener revealed the reason he wanted to kill Lois. Luthor was a suspect because Lois wrote an expose on his company. Detective Bowman was a suspect because Lois wrote a news story about him. Although Lois didn't write an article directly about Lytener, he was the whistleblower in the Lexscam scandal and lost his job.
Yep, that's it.
Lytener wanted revenge because he voluntarily came forward to implicate his boss and he got caught. Therefore Lois must die. There are plenty of people who take leaps of logic in the real world, but in a story, the leaps of logic should at least make some kind of sense. This didn't. If you're going to avoid Lytener's motivations until his identity is revealed in order to keep the audience guessing until the end, at least let those motivations make sense.
Then Lytener fought Superman wearing a super-suit that was "powered by the spectrum of a red sun." So how did it have any power on Earth under a yellow sun. Something red sun-based could definitely affect Superman, but red sunlight makes no sense as a power source when there are no red giant stars close enough to provide that power.
For the first time in the continuity of Superman: The Animated Series, Lois flirted with Superman, asking him to come see her some time when she didn't need saving. Superman responded, "Someday." Alas, not in this series.
The curse of working in television (other than premium channels) is that a show's running time needs to fit within a very specific space, which means some stories will be stretched out or stuffed full, often to the detriment of the story. Stretching out this story would have helped raise the tension and offer more opportunities to propose potential villains within the mystery. However, this story in no way needed to be two parts, which is why the writing had to follow a basic mystery formula instead of attempting to break any new ground.
From a technical standpoint, the production of this episode was just about the time that Superman: The Animated Series began to hone the style that would launch the rest of the series. At first, the show was set entirely in daylight to accentuate Superman's costume and play against Batman: The Animated Series, which the same team created several years before. The style of Batman was very dark and almost exclusively set at night, but the artists had a wonderful way of using ambient light sources and creating pitch black shadows, making mundane settings beautiful, yet creepy. For a good example look at the scene in Lois's apartment in this episode. The style often didn't fit in the Superman series' daylight settings until they realized just how great Superman's costume colors looked in the dark.
Soon to be super villain Edward Lytener was voiced by the spectacular Robert Hays, best known for his work on Airplane! Parts 1 & 2. He was also a guest star on TV's Wonder Woman with Lynda Carter and was Tony Stark/Iron Man in the animated Marvel Action Hour of the mid-90's.
Another stellar guest star this time out was Jonathan Harris who voiced the character Julian Frey. Harris was Dr. Smith in the original Lost in Space TV series and was in My Favorite Martian.
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