Dan Liebke's Astonishing Tales

Starring Clark Kent (Tom Welling) as Superlad, Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) as Sinead, Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) as TIAC, Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) as Bo, Martha Kent (Annette O’Toole) as Boring Old Ma, Lionel Luthor (John Glover) as Porthos, Kara Kent (Laura Vandervoort) as SBH and Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) as herself. For more information on these people and more, consult the scorecard.

We open at the school swimming carnival.Superlad has reached the final race against Young Aquaman to determine who is the best swimmer in the school.

You’re probably thinking that’s pretty much a foregone conclusion – Superlad may be Super, but Young Aquaman is half-fish! – and as evidence of the foregoneness of the conclusion, Young Aquaman takes his wench, a bubbly cheerleader type, off for a quick snog just before the race.

But then, during the race, Young Aquaman starts to drown! Well, something’s surely amiss there, so Superlad, sensing the opportunity for some more mouth-to-mouth action, swims to his rescue.

He pulls him out and prepares for some lip action, but Young Aquaman has taken the whole wet-skin-wrinkly thing to extremes and aged into Extremely Old Aquaman.

Superlad refuses to kiss such an old coot and on this startling note, we go straight to the opening credits

Zoom over to The Death Claw and Lana’s been snooping around and found a picture of her mother, goofin’ around with some strange man who’s not her father.

Superlad is sure that there’s some perfectly rational explanation for this.

“Perhaps your mother was a tramp?” he suggests.

Lana searches for a different explanation.

“Hmmm…” she says. “Maybe they were just friends. The picture was taken nine months – or three trimesters – prior to my birth. My parents were happily married at the time, so who was this man?? Perhaps I should ask Aunt Ricki…”

“That’s probably a good idea. She’s sure to know whether your mum was a slut or not.”

“Yes, thank you Superlad.”

Sinead shows up, looks at the photo and decides to stir up some trouble.

“Cute couple,” he says, smirking.

“It’s my mother with some strange man, one human gestation period before my birth. Superlad and I are trying to work out an explanation for the photo…”

“Have you considered the possibility that your mother was a filthy whore?” asks Sinead.

Superlad nods.

Sinead, apparently moonlighting as a truant officer, then offers to drive the kids to school. Lana declines on the grounds that she’s ‘too cool for school’. Superlad suggests that he was just planning to run there.

“Well,” says Sinead. “I don’t think you could outrun my Porsche.”

Superlad raises his eyebrows. “Couldn’t I, Sinead?? Couldn’t I?” He smiles knowingly.

“Well, you’d have to be able to run at superspeed, like an individual with superpowers, to do so,” points out Sinead.

“Uh, yes,” says Superlad, hurriedly. “Hahahaha.” And agrees to be driven.

Sinead stops off to pick up some groceries (some Tim-Tams, scalp polish and a cuckoo clock)…

But by the time Sinead stops off to pick up some groceries (some Tim-Tams, scalp polish and a cuckoo clock) they’re running late and Superlad has been locked out of school by the new principal, Morgan Freeman.

Principal Freeman also knows Sinead from Sinead’s unruly youth at Supervillain Boarding School. So he holds this against Superlad and warns him that, in future, such tardiness will lead to detention and possibly a Breakfast Club ripoff.

Back to the Kent farm and Bo sits at the table, scratching his head, trying to work out how he’s going to be able to pay the bills for another month.

“Look at this pesticide bill!” he says. “Do we really need this much??”

“Well,” says Ma. “You know how I feel about head lice. Hmmm… Why don’t we cut out the Pay-TV service?”

“Are you mad, woman! You know I can’t get by without my 18 Wheels of Justice fix.”

Back to the main plot and TIAC has been reading a bit of the script, and worked out that somebody just sucked the youthfulness straight out of Young Aquaman.

“That’s outstanding script-reading,” says Principal Freeman, stepping suddenly out of the shadows. “One day, you will be a journalist of extraordinary renown!”

TIAC does her ‘aw, shucks, and I’m rather pretty to boot’ thing.

Then Principal Freeman drags Superlad off to the Principal’s Office where he accuses him of being a ‘slacker’. Following this Marty McFlyesque moment, he asks him where he thinks he’d be if he went five years back to the future.

“Probably flying around in a cape, keeping the world safe from such villains as Bizarro, Richard Pryor and Darkseid the Destroyer.”

“Ummmmm, yes. What about Sinead Luthor?”

“No doubt I’ll be forced to keep an eye on him, too,” agrees Superlad.

“No, no, no. Why are you hanging around with him?”

“‘Cause he’s rich and a magnet for hot chicks. Duh!”

And off he goes, but not before Principal Freeman insists he write a five page essay on where he’ll be five years from now.

Then what happens?

Why she doesn’t just contactthe Ponds Institute, I do not know.

Well, Young Aquaman’s bimbo, Bubbly Lass manages to suck the youth out of Young Aquaman’s best friend (The Young Sub-Mariner), in order to keep herself youthful and smooth of skin. Why she doesn’t just contact the Ponds Institute, I do not know.

Exciting Old Ma manages to contact her father, who Bo hates because he (EOM’s Dad) correctly predicted that he (Bo) would only ever manage to lead a totally poverty-riddled life. (“Boy, he sure nailed you,”says Superlad. “Got you in one!” “Go to your room!” orders Bo. “I can’t. You sold it for firewood,” says Superlad. Bo: “Damn and blast!”)

Exciting Old Ma’s father then gets a visit from Superlad, who explains that while Bo may have zero monetary sense and is leading the family into an inexorable fiscal demise, he’s also… um… well, he can drive really fast that’s for sure. EOMF hands over a cashier’s cheque for a squillion dollars. Superlad pockets it.

Sinead goes a little bit Godfatherish and visits Principal Freeman, offering to provide a new computer system for the school if Principal Freeman agrees to stop giving Superlad grief. Principal Freeman refuses and tells the story of how Don Porthos had made a similar unrefusable offer several years ago re: Sinead, and it cost him (Principal Freeman) his swanky job at the Supervillain Boarding School. Don Sinead shakes his head, rubs his cheek and mumbles incomprehensibly. “That’s very good,” admits Principal Freeman.

TIAC has found the time to read the rest of the script and pinpointed Bubbly Lass as an inexplicable century-old youth-sucker who has managed to lure Principal Freeman to the Death Claw to destroy him. Superlad dashes over and stops her, and she therefore ages to death. In the process, Superlad even manages to use a superpower for the episode, hurling Bubbly Lass onto a keyboard, badly wounding a passing Harold Faltermeyer. Probably unnecessary to unleash superstrength upon a 120 year old woman, but who am I to second-guess Superlad?

And then Lana shows up to the barn and reveals that Sinead has snooped around and discovered that the guy in the photo was somebody her mother had been busy seducing, while she and Lana’s father had been undergoing a trial separation.

“Your parents were Siamese twins??!??” says Superlad.

“No,” says Lana. “Pay closer attention.” And she explains it again, before pausing dramatically. “This man may well be… my father.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s going to come as a surprise to anybody,” says Superlad.

But despite this anticlimactic revelation, a fantastic episode all round. Superlad hands in his essay about his future adventures, which he’s just copied out of some old comic books and everybody’s happy. You have to love any episode where the main plot is completely swamped by a myriad of subplots. I therefore give this episode a score of 86.3 out of 89.1 and look forward to…

Next Week: Some silly woman claims that she is both Superlad and Sinead’s mother. Which doesn’t make a lick of sense. And after that, we have a bit of a rest, while Channel Nine search for a later timeslot so they can show the R-rated next few episodes, which as I understand show Lana’s navel.

Discuss this episode at KryptonSite

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