The Superman cartoon from the ’90s had, as far as I can remember, no episodes directly dealing with bigotry. But it had this one, so let’s talk about this one:

“The Late Mr. Kent”

Superman: The Animated Series, Season 2, Episode 22

Original Air Date: 1 November, 1997

SUMMARY

It begins with most of the Daily Planet staff attending a funeral. Clark Kent is dead. Watching the funeral from a distance is Superman, who is kind enough to have a flashback so we can see the events leading to this.

Ernest Walker was a small-time thief who was convicted of murdering a woman during a burglary five years ago. He insists he is innocent. Now, only days before he is set to be executed for the crime, he pleads with reporter Clark Kent to help him prove his innocence.

Clark believes Walker, so he takes the case. He goes to Detective Kurt Bowman, the cop who originally investigated the murder and who caught Walker trying to fence the victim’s necklace. Bowman agrees to give Clark the relevant files, but insists it’s pointless.

Even Clark’s coworkers are certain Walker is guilty.

Jimmy: “Everyone knows he did it, Clark.”

Clark: “Everyone thinks he did it, Jimmy.”

Lois: “Come on, kid. He’s a sucker for lost causes. Let’s get some burgers.”

While those chumps head off to eat, Clark investigates Walker’s alibi. At the time of the murder, he says he was at home and had had a pizza delivered. Not much to go on, but Clark heads to Round Th’ Clock Pizza to check on it. The guy there is surprisingly helpful. While he has no pizza delivery guys who were around five years ago (he can barely keep them for five days, something very believable to me, someone who works in a restaurant). But what they do have is newfangled computer technology! A dusty box of old floppy discs, backups of the whole system, one of which may have the receipt of Walker’s order “along with a million others.”

They don’t even bother giving us a super-speed montage because we know what show we’re watching. Clark finds the digital receipt that confirms Walker’s alibi and immediately calls Lois to brag. Before long, Clark is driving to the Governor’s home with the evidence, naturally along a cliff-side road. Suddenly a car bomb detonates sending him off into the ocean. Even worse, the exonerating evidence disc is destroyed. Even more worser, this was all witnessed by a fisherman, so Clark can’t just burst out of the sea as Superman without it being very easy to piece together his secret identity.

Detective Bowman gets into an argument with Lois at the scene of Clark’s “demise.”

Lois: “Who else but the real killer would have done this? He was probably afraid Kent was getting too close!”

Bowman: “Kent was a reporter. Who knows how many enemies he had? This might come as a kick in the pants, Lane, but nobody likes you guys.”

No trace is found of Clark’s body, so Lois holds out hope that maybe he escaped, but Bowman is ready to call it. In fact, he phones Ma and Pa Kent to break the news that their son has died, surprised how unconcerned they sound. Martha blames it on the shock, while Superman stands next to her.

The episode has now caught up to Clark’s funeral from the opening, and Clark makes his decision. He needs to go to the Governor to make sure Walker is exonerated, even if it means the end of his Clark Kent identity. He heads to his apartment for one last time and finds Lois there, searching for any backup of the evidence that Clark might have made (Clark feels like an idiot for not having thought to have done that). Suddenly a bomb goes off and destroys the apartment.

Superman gets Lois out in time, of course. Then, as he scans the crowd gathered below he notices Detective Bowman is there. They put it all together then: he was the investigating officer on Walker’s case, first on the scene at Clark’s supposed death, and now present on this bomb that was clearly intended to take out any further evidence. Bowman is the baddie.

Soon Lois confronts Bowman and presses him until he incriminates himself and attempts to kill her. Superman rescues Lois while Bowman races to the helipad on the roof. As I’m sure you expected, it all comes down to a Superman versus helicopter fight, and Superman wins.

Lois and Clark finally get to Governor’s home with the evidence to free Walker, but the Governor isn’t home. The butler (or whatever he is) tells them that the Governor has decided to attend the execution in person. After all, “it is an election year.” Our heroes barely had time to save Walker as it was, so now Superman has to take out all the stops: Just as Walker is about to be killed, Superman smashes through the wall of the prison, smashes through the gas chamber, and pulls the innocent man to safety.

With all that taken care of, Superman goes about putting his life back together. He determined that the fisherman had terrible eyesight, so Clark can get away with any old claim. He acts as though Clark had a foggy memory after the explosion and has been recovering in hospital. He even has his childhood friend Lana there to confirm his story. Lois is just happy Clark is back.

The episode ends with Bowman, in prison, reading an article by Clark Kent. Even as he is brought to the now-repaired gas chamber, he wonders how it’s possible that Kent could have survived the car bomb. Suddenly it comes to him: Kent is Superman. And then the switch is pulled.

SUPERMAN VS. BIGOTS?

This is not overtly a Superman vs. Bigots story. The fact that Ernest Walker is a Black man doesn’t actually come up within the narrative. But still, Walker is a Black man and I don’t think that’s accidental.

We never learn what happened with the murder five years ago. Maybe Bowman committed the murder in the first place. I’d also believe that someone else did and he’s covering it up. I’d even believe that he was assigned to investigate, couldn’t figure it out, so he framed Walker just to move it to his “solved” column. What we do know is that Bowman intentionally took one of the victim’s necklaces and placed in front of Ernest Walker’s home so that Walker would find it and then could be blamed.

Bowman correctly believed that the system would not give Walker a chance. Clark notes that Walker’s public defender “didn’t bother” to check up on the pizza delivery aspect of Walker’s alibi. The Governor only cares about the case enough that he intends to be there when Walker is killed, presumably to show how “tough on crime” he is. Whatever reason Bowman had for doing it, he knew that a young Black man like Walker, who is “no angel” because he has priors, would convicted without anyone (Even Lois or Jimmy!) bothering to question it.

“The Late Mr. Kent” was not the first appearance of Kurt Bowman. He showed up earlier in the season, assigned to investigate threats to Lois’s life. His animosity to reporters was present there as well, which Lois said was because she had previously written an article about police corruption that had cost him a promotion. So we’re definitely supposed to see Bowman as a “bad apple” within the police force. But this episode doesn’t make any attempt to say that the police are otherwise good. There are “good cops” on this show. Recurring characters Maggie Sawyer and Dan Turpin are intended as “good guys” and it’s meant to be a good thing when they arrest “bad guys” at the end of most episodes. But neither of them appears in this one (not even at Clark’s funeral!). That would have complicated this episodes message that the system is badly flawed, that racism is a key facet of those flaws, and that innocents suffer because of it.

STRAY THOUGHTS

• I love seeing Superman exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted. It just feels like a perfect thing for the character. After all “Truth” is the first part of his famous credo, and freeing someone from execution was literally the first heroic deed we saw Clark perform all the way back in Action Comics #1.
• I wish Ernest Walker had been given a moment at the end of the episode. We see him smiling on a Daily Planet front page, but he was already, by nature of the plot, an inactive character in the story. I would’ve liked to see him actually step into the world as a free man or even just had something to say about it all.
• The episode has speaking roles for only a handful of characters, and Walker is the only Black person among them. Even Ron Troupe, fellow Daily Planet reporter, is not active here. He does show up to Clark’s funeral and the fact he had a leftover pizza (pepperoni and black olives) on his desk is what inspired Clark to investigate that angle of Walker’s alibi. So, in a way, Ron Troupe saved the day.
• Clark Kent owns a car? Well, owned anyway. It’s convenient for Bowman’s murder attempt, but the episode does feel the need to explain why Clark is bothering with it. He narrates: “I suppose I could’ve flown to the Governor as Superman and given him the disc, but that could have raised some awkward questions. Maybe there was some ego involved too. I wanted this to be Clark’s victory, not Superman’s.”
• I gather from the Internet that this is among the popular episodes of this show, and I do think it’s good enough, but it strikes me that they actually don’t do so much with the idea that the “Clark” identity is dead. Clark tells his parents how important the Clark life is to him, Lois admits that she respected Clark a lot, and we get Superman finding a way to bring Clark back. It feels like the basic beats of such a plot, rather than a thorough exploration of it. But then, I guess there’s only so much you can do in a twenty-minute cartoon when you need to save room for the helicopter fight.