[NAS] Season's Greedings

TV Programme: The New Adventures Of Superman
Season: 2
Episode: 9
Date I watched this episode: 26/12/2008
Time since I last watched this programme: 6 months, 7 days.

Well, as you can see from the above it's been a long time since I've last watched an actual episode of this programme. This is partly due to the fact that I haven't watched anything for quite a long time. Hopefully, this will be the episode that gets me back into a routine of watching my favourite programmes. Admitttedly though, my watching of this particular episode today (26th December) was partly motivated by the fact that it's Christmas, and this is a Christmas episode.

Let me get this out of the way straight away - I refer to this programme as "The New Adventures Of Superman", and not "Lois & Clark". This is because "The New Adventures Of Superman" was how the programme titles were styled when it was first screened in the UK (which is when I first watched it, in the early/mid 90s). Apparently, the reason for this was that the "Lois & Clark" title prefix was a reference to the famous explorers Lewis & Clark, and the studio thought that this pun would be lost on UK audiences. Nevertheless, when the DVDs were released, the region 2 version is still called "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman" and the titles use their American stylings. However, I've always known this programme as just "The New Adventures Of Superman", TNAOS for short, or NAS as a three-letter acronym, and will continue to do so.

I am always pleased when episodes include DC Comics characters rarely seen in that particular programme. Here, the example was the Toyman, or "Winslow Schott". Not being a big reader of the comics, I don't have a particular good idea of the Toyman's background, but I know he appears in future episodes (for me) of SMV and SBY, so I watched with interest the portrayal here. I was actually pretty surprised at how three-dimensional the character was made out to be. Usually these villains are one-sided, but we had the whole struggle within Schott's character of his real motives, superbly brought out by the character of Duffy. Unfortunately, this also meant (for a one-episode guest star) that this struggle had to be sorted by the end of the episode, so the character turned good by the end, rather unrealistically for a major comics villain.

I was pleasantly surprised at how the holiday theme pervaded into this episode. Most Christmas episodes have just some Christmas decorations around, or a Christmas side-story (like [FDS] "The One Where Rachel Quits" which I watched recently). However here the Christmas theme was at the centre of the story, and nearly every scene contained some Christmas-related elements. Because of this, I was really glad that I watched this episode during the Christmas season, as sometimes when I watch very Christmassy things outside of Christmas then it doesn't feel quite right.

However, I also felt that this was one of the main pitfalls of the episode. The episode was just trying too hard to include Christmas elements that it ignored the main story. In particular this was apparent with the climax to the episode. Instead of there being some big twist or action sequence, the episode came to a close very very slowly, and exactly how you'd have expected it to.

Dean Cain wrote this episode (incidentally the only episode of any programme he has written; make of that what you will), and he was clearly trying to emphasise the tension between Clark and Lois here. However this just didn't work. Not because it's been done too many times before, but more because there just didn't seem to be much chemistry there. They almost kissed at one point near the end...but didn't, and with the way continuity works in NAS at the moment, no doubt this will never be mentioned again (this is one of the things which annoys me at the moment, but apparently it does get better in later seasons).

All in all this was a fun episode to watch for the Christmas period, but critically it didn't stand up at all to the standard I've come to expect from this programme.