Lois and Clark was the primary source of live-action Superman content for the 1990s. It was also one of the foundational elements that led to me becoming a fan of the character, mostly because I was about twelve when it started airing. While the novel aspect of the show was its focus on the romantic relationship between the titular couple, it did also deliver some more typical Superman action-adventure plots as well. And, fortunately for this series of articles, one of those episodes was about Superman and the gang bringing down a Nazi conspiracy:
“Super Mann”
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Season 3, Episode 9
Original Air Date: 26 November, 1995
SUMMARY
The episode opens “2 years ago” and we find a trio of young, attractive, very blonde people waking up from some sort of suspended animation capsules in an underground lair. This newly-awakened trio wanders into the city above their base, checks a copy of the newspaper, and realize they’ve awakened to a world where the Nazis lost the Second World War. They are disappointed, but one of the men says “We will correct this. There is nothing that can stop us.” With that cue uttered, an accident occurs across the street and a little girl would have been crushed, if not for the timely arrival of a certain flying strongman. The three Nazis are understandably shocked at this, but before they can figure out who that was, their ride shows up. A man identifying himself as Senator Truman Black invites them into his limo with a “Hail the New Reich!”
We move to the present. Lois Lane and Clark Kent are engaged to be married and basking in the glow of a recent successful investigation into corruption in the National Intelligence Agency, but their good mood is interrupted by a car crash. They rush to help the driver, an elderly man with a bullet wound, who desperately warns them of a bomb planted in the basement of Metropolis Trade Tower. The wounded man is taken away by paramedics he clearly fears, and the heroes now have a mystery to investigate. At the Tower there is no bomb, but there are signs that suggest something had been there.
Meanwhile, it turns out the three unfrozen Nazis from the opening have, over the last two years, risen to prominence in celebrity fields. One is Hank West, country singer; another is Steve Law, quarterback; the last is Lisa Rockford, supermodel. It sure is nice that they’re not Nazis anymore. And they’re so successful in their new jobs, too. You like to see young people turn their lives around and make good.
Say, let’s hear what Daily Planet employee Skip Wallace has to say about Hank West’s music: “[H]e tells the truth. Hank West isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. He sticks up for the little guy. Y’know, America used to be great and he wants to put it back on track!”
Oh, I see.
It seems that fifty years prior, a thousand young Nazis were sent to the States to infiltrate American society. It worked. They now operate like ghost skins, secretly advancing their goals while acting outwardly like “normal” Americans. They are everywhere, including in politics (like Senator Black), the military, the news media, and the police. They also set up the false identities for the three unfrozen agents (from an experiment called Project Gotterdammerung) to slot into and become influential celebrities to serve as the public face of the group when the plan comes to fruition. By the way, this plan is intended to come to fruition in a matter of days. That wounded man in the car was William Stockdale, a member of this group who had grown to like America and wanted to stop the Nazis. He was killed for trying to get word out (the Nazis own the paramedic company), but now the baddies are annoyed to have two of the most famous investigative reporters in town on their case.
First, Nazi Hank takes one of their operatives, a police detective, along with him to the Daily Planet to talk to the reporters, explaining the presence of a famous country singer there by saying he’s researching a role in a cop movie. Nazi Hank lays on the charm and the detective tells Lois and Clark that Stockdale had been shot in a carjacking attempt and that his warnings about a bomb were probably just panicked ramblings.
But that excuse doesn’t stop the reporters, so Nazi Lisa tries a more direct approach. She shoots a rocket-propelled grenade into Lois’s apartment, intending to frame the National Intelligence Agency for the killing, since they’re known to have a grudge against our heroes. Naturally, this doesn’t work because Superman yet to meet the rocket-propelled grenade he can’t handle. Superman confronts Lisa, but rather than surrender, she activates a cyanide tooth and dies.
Nazi Hank and Nazi Steve are not pleased. Hank wants to postpone their big plan because of Lisa’s death, but Steve thinks Hank just isn’t fully invested (after all, he once said of America “Not everything here is worth destroying”). Steve is sure that Hank just wants to keep revelling in his celebrity status. He’s not wrong. Hank’s heart isn’t with their cause anymore. “The Fatherland is gone! The War is gone! Don’t you see? All we are are the last echoing death throes of an idea buried fifty years ago!” Steve shoots Hank. The plan continues on its original schedule.
The plan goes like this: One of the secret Nazis works at LNN (Luthor News Network) and goes live with a fake story about a mining disaster. Naturally, Superman flies off to the mine to lend a hand, but only finds a nuclear warhead that explodes and fills him with radiation that will kill any person who comes near him.
Then the Nazis do that thing where they take over the airwaves to go live on every television network at the same time. Steve gives a speech in front of an American flag:
Steve Speech: “Now I love this country, but like a lot of you I’ve become increasingly worried over the past couple of years. Everything seems to be suffering from the same growing neglect. Y’know, it’s kinda like one of the lines from a song my good friend Hank West sings. ‘We can work it out. It’ll last forever.’ But it’s not gonna be easy. It’s gonna take a lot of sacrifice and a lot of hard work. But together, we can make it happen. And that’s why I invite you to join me and the National Society for a Better America.”
A swastika replaces the flag behind Steve and he continues by announcing that they have more nukes hidden in Metropolis, Washington, and Los Angeles. With Superman is out of the picture, he says, America’s rulers (governmental and corporate) will have no choice but to surrender to the NSBA by nine o\clock or they will detonate.
Skip Wallace, a disaffected guy who works in the Classifieds section of the Planet but wants to be more important, shows up in full Nazi regalia accompanied by some storm troopers. He has joined the NSBA and he’s taking over the Daily Planet and turning it into the Daily Reich.
Lois manages to escape the hostage situation at the paper, cross a Metropolis where Nazis are raising banners all over, and get to STAR Labs, where Superman is in shielded chamber so he can’t hurt anyone. The radiation embedded in him is going to be toxic for 30,000 years, which is probably too long to help deal with this current Nazi uprising. Fortunately, they do devise a cure: Superman flies to the Sun to have the radioactive material sucked out while Lois goes to confront Nazi Steve (she is promptly captured).
Nine O’Clock and the government has not surrendered. Nazi Steve prepares to detonate the nukes. Lois points out that that would kill all his own people who are still above ground, but he simply says they will be remembered as martyrs. Superman arrives. Predictably enough, from this point on, the Nazis are unable to get the upper hand back.
Skip flees the Daily Planet, only for Superman to arrive and grab him by the neck. They do the glowing eyes thing that has become so popular to make it look like he’s going to burn Skip’s head off, but at the last second he moves the little traitor aside and sets fire to a Nazi flag instead.
In the wrap-up, we’re told that files were found in the Nazi base revealing the identities of all the members of the organization, which is supposed to be a happy ending, until we see Perry moping in his office:
Perry: “Yeah, well, for now they’re gone. But you know, ideas don’t die. I mean, we thought we got rid of the Nazis once and here they are back again. That’s why I always like to say that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Lois: “That’s a great line.”
Perry: “Well, Thomas Jefferson said it first… They picked up Truman Black a few minutes ago.”
Jimmy: “Senator Black? He’s a Nazi?”
Perry: “Apparently he was one of their high mucky-mucks. I’ve known him since I was Jimmy’s age. So if you all will excuse me, I uh, I think I’m gonna take the rest of the day off.”
Lois: “I wonder how many more are out there?”
Clark: “Who knows?”
And the episode ends.
SUPERMAN VS. BIGOTS?
The racist beliefs of Nazis don’t come up even once in this story. As with some of the previous Superman versus Nazis stories that I’ve covered (and even more so with a larger number of such stories I’ve not covered), Nazis are mostly used as default “You Know These Guys Are Bad” villains in stories like this. But while race didn’t come up, I do kind of like the way this is delivers an anti-fascist message.
I like seeing a message that there are Nazis in every walk of life and we need to be on the watch for them. It’s true to the “stay woke” message as it was, before the internet got hold of it. That said, the episode’s version of the message isn’t perfect. It depicts a world where all the Nazis in power are literal agents sent here from Nazi Germany during the War, as if it couldn’t possibly have grown in our own systems and institutions.
But then there’s Skip Wallace. He is a young man who feels he deserves more respect and more power, he just deserves it, and he’s drawn to fascism as a way to get it. It’s a story we’ve seen more and more in the decades since this show aired and remains sadly believable as a motive. “Super Mann” doesn’t include the kind of twist that “Clan of the Fiery Cross” did, showing how wannabe fascists like this are used as fodder by larger political interests, but at least it shows him for the loser he is.
STRAY THOUGHTS
- Gotta get it out of the way: I went in to this article intending to do a bit where I’d crop Clark/Superman out of the images because of Dean Cain’s own real-world Skip Wallace-like beliefs. I really would have got him good. But then, it turned out there just weren’t a lot of good images to work with anyway, so disrespecting him is now relegated to this Stray Thought.
- Storytelling-wise, I think they could have done better with the Truman Black thing. As it occurs in the episode, the audience knows he’s a Nazi even before we know he’s Perry’s friend. Surely it would have been better the other way around. Skip joining the Nazis makes for a mild surprise, but it’s already clear that the people at the Planet find him annoying (After he gives his little MAGA speech up there, Lois and Clark look at each other and say “Yikes.”) but Truman, being an actual friend of Perry’s, could have been an effective twist.
- It has nothing to do with the Nazi plot, but Perry is going through a divorce at this point, which gives us this line where he addresses his reporters: “Oh, look, I know I’ve been uptight and irritable lately. Quick to judge, quick to condemn. Sometimes I’ve been downright mean. What I’m trying to say is you, well, you can expect more of the same.”
- There’s a part (before they know he’s a Nazi) when Lois is talking about how handsome and charming Hank is and Clark uses his X-ray vision to reveal he is wearing lifts. I could do without that sort of thing.
- When Lois hails a cab, the driver is wearing a beret. There is no way this is intended, but because I know that nobody will care enough to disagree, I’m going to claim that this is the show’s version of Benny the Beret from the “I Am Curious (Black)” story in Lois’s book.
- The science of how they cure Superman. I know I am generally not a smart person, but I assume this is dumb: “Those little pieces of radioactivity that are inside you, it’s like you were shot with shotgun pellets. And if we could get a big enough magnet we could suck them all out of you … and gravity is kind of like magnetism, right? So what we need is a bigger gravity magnet than the Earth to suck all the radioactivity out of you. We could use the sun.” But it works, so who am I to question it?
- On that topic, the idea of Superman being radioactive and unable to come near people is tossed off as an aside here just to keep the story from being over too soon, but it has been used as the full plot of stories in the past. Notably is Action Comics #188’s “The Spectal Superman” and The Adventures of Superman episode “Superman In Exile” neither of which have Nazis involved.
