Saturday, April 05, 2008

Legion of Super Heroes #2-13 Review

What Happened That You Have To Know About:

Superman-X gets a psychic signal from Superman that he's not really dead, so they go and fish him out of the sun before his 'corpse' is broken down. The Legion goes after Brainiac 5 to stop him from digitizing the universe, and Superman and Superman-X go into Brainy's mind to try and help him throw off the Brainiac programming while the rest of the Legion slows him down in real life. It eventually works, and everything Brainy reduced to information is restored (note: not Imperiex). Also Brainy seems to have become humanoid, somehow. Brainy, feeling guilty about all this, quits the Legion as Superman-X finally joins officially and goes home, and Triplicate Girl-White strolls out of a time warp and is reunited with her other two-thirds.

Review:

Well, it was fine. But certainly no way to end a series. The good news is, the LSH31C writers have plenty of plot threads to pick up on: Brainiac 5 rejoining, Brainiac surviving, Nemesis Kid...

Superman-X made a quick turnaround, didn't he? Or maybe not. He went from, "I'm mad at Brainiac 5 for taking away my chance to kill Imperiex!" to "Brainiac 5's my hero!" Maybe Brainy's just his hero because he killed Imperiex. There aren't a whole lot of Legionnaires I'd consider dumb... Timber Wolf has been a bit thick at times, Ferro was definitely a bit slow in the reboot, and various others have had occasional lapses... but Kell-El has never struck me as the brightest light on the marquee. I wonder if LSH31C is going to use him... if not, I won't miss him.

You know why I don't have a lot to say about this episode? Because, as I was watching it, I knew that about two-thirds of it didn't really matter at all. The big fight with all the Legionnaires versus Brainy and his Coluans? Come on. There was no way that any of that stuff was going to be permanent. It was going in one eyeball and out the other. But that's this show for you: you have to have a lot of fight scenes. It has always been thus.

Anyway, that's the series. It wasn't perfect, but I think we can justifiably call it a success. They left us wanting more. 26 episodes, that's more than a lot of good shows get. And, you heard it here first, we haven't seen the last of the Legion in animation. I haven't heard anything, but forever is a long time.

Membership Notes:

Brainiac 5 quits, and Superman-X joins officially. I had him down as joining sometime before the Timber Wolf episode, and I still think that's a better place to mark the start of his effective Legion tenure.

I don't think there were any more 'new' Legionnaires shown in all the fight scenes. I thought there was one new red-haired girl at one point but I suspect it was just Nemesis Kid.

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