Heavy Metal

Having a real job is taking its toll on this, my fake job that I don’t get paid for. But I keep trudging on for the 6 people who read this. And of course, for Diane Duane, who is probably here now, reading this. ‘Sup Diane? Don’t worry, the rest of this has nothing to do with you.

And everything to do with the Superman episode titled Heavy Metal. As opposed to heavy medals, which they give out at strong man competitions. Those things are the best. “Carry this semi 30 ft” is a wonderful way to test a man.

The episode opens with a dude making a metal mask. We see that the guy is John Henry Irons who we actually met in the earlier episode, Prototype, which I haven’t reviewed yet so don’t go back through the archives or anything, even though there’s only 3 months of archives and it wouldn’t take very long. At any rate, that episode ended with him looking rather thoughtful in that position that I’m always careful to make whenever thinking about something.

The reason being that he had gotten the idea to build some sort of suit for crime-fighting, since he had lost his job working for Luthor. I don’t know how fighting crime is gonna pay the bills, but I guess I’ll leave that to him. He’s pretty smart, he’ll probably get rich.

He’s talking to his niece, Natasha, whom he calls “Nate” for short, even though “Nat” would make a lot more sense. I even kept trying to make sure I was hearing him right. Maybe he was saying Nat and it just sounded like Nate. I don’t fucking know. Maybe he needs to enunciate better.

John asks her about supper and then makes a terrible joke about needing a cast iron stomach, which would not only be painful but be a poor way to digest food so maybe that’s not the best fucking idea. As they’re talking, a special news report comes on, and they cut to Angela Chen in the field who does that adorable reporter thing where they don’t know the camera is on so they say something stupid and then they’re all embarassed and stuff. She’s reporting on a robbery and has a live interview with our old pal Bibbo who says that one of the robbers was rather strong. As in, karate chopping buildings strong. He rambles a lot because that’s what guys whose stomach you can see bulging from their shirts tend to do.

At the Metropolis Bank, another robbery is going down and the banker insists that he doesn’t know the combination and also doesn’t even have a key to the men’s room which, in the list of bank staff, puts him somewhere below janitor and above hobos that aren’t even employed there. They don’t need the combination though, as one of the robbers rips the door to the safe right off. The two other ones run in and start throwing the money into bags. The bags don’t have huge dollars signs on them, so they are hardly fit for the duty of holding robbery money. As they’re working on that, the lowly banker has discovered the button to hit in case of robbery, which seemed to be under the counter he was standing at earlier, and which he probably had plenty of time to hit before the robbers were standing right next to him with their guns.

The strong robber breaks down the wall at the back of the safe and the two pansies climb into a van to make their escape, while the strong one stays behinds to dispose of the coppers. It seems like a great deal of work, especiall considering that if they had taken 10 minutes to figure where the safe was from the alley way, they could’ve broken down the wall in the back, gotten their shit and escaped way easier, but whatever. Maybe I just spend too much of my time thinking of better ways to break the law and get away with it.

All kinds of cop cars are crashing in this alley which is wider than alley I’ve ever been in in my entire life. One blows up because it was delicately fashioned from roman candles. A cop on a motorcycle goes zipping after the van and does a wheelie to show the crooks that he means business. Another cop car crashes and I can’t help but notice how often the random cars have a black cop and a white cop partnered up like it’s Lethal Weapon or something, except these dudes are mostly incompetent though you can’t really blame them.

As the excitement moves through town, we see John in an alley shooting stuff with his armband gun. He doesn’t try to conceal what he’s doing, he’s just doing it in broad daylight under the assumption that no one will care that he’s shooting an experimental weapon that’s pretty much blowing shit up. A cop is driving alongside the van when it crashes and alerts John to the trouble that’s a brewing. He takes a shot at the van’s wheel and the robbers take aim and shoot back at him. Fucking miraculously he deflects the bullets with his arm band. Holy fuck. He is just a dude how the shit did he just do that. One of the bullets breaks it and John hides behind some barrels to try to fix it. The robbers have him cornered and are all kinds of ready to shoot him and his stupid earring.

When out of the nowhere! Superman shows up! He grabs the robbers and stuffs them into garbage barrels. He decides to trap them by squishing the tops of the barrels around their necks like those ridiculous collars dogs have to wear sometimes so they don’t lick themselves.

Supes takes a moment to ask John how things are going, how’s the family, did ya see the game last night, how about that scoring when suddenly the third robber, the actually mildly threatening one returns to ask where his friends are. Seeing them humiliated in the barrels in what is not only a humiliating position, but likely an uncomfortable on, he gets so fucking pissed that gives Superman a good smackin’ and then rips off his robber out to reveal that ho fuck it’s Metallo. And that fucker has been getting shit from Intergang, who are total assholes. He blasts Superman with his kryptonite but Superman manages to grab him and fling him at wall. Metallo crashes into it head first and scares a couple of hobos who have made a fire between a couple flights of stairs, which is one of the stupidest places for hobos to be starting a fire ever.

He pops back out and Superman starts throwing fans at him. The blowing kind, not the woohoo go Superman kind, even though there is some crossover between the two.

Superman pokes at Metallo with a telephone pole or something and I don’t know where he got the idea that that would ever fucking work. Supes this guy is throwing you the fuck around, and you are poking at him with a log like a child who has found a dead bird and isn’t scared of the bird flu one fucking bit. Metallo shows off his new kryptonite eye beams though and is getting pretty damn close to just downright killing Superman.

John tells Natasha to hide and he grabs a pole and whacks Metallo with it. You can about guess how well that went. Imagine you’re beating up on a dude and then some guy shows up and hits you with a tube sock. It’s about as effective as that.

Natasha comes zooming up in their van and hits Metallo with it. It’s has a bit more of an impact than that pipe. John at this point has grabbed Superman and hops into the van with him. They zip off before Metallo can gather his senses. He gets up and rips the goons out of their garbage barrel prisons and begin pursuing our heroes in a police car. They turn the sirens on too, in case they manage to fool them into just pulling over with their license and registration in hand. As Natasha is steering them down an alley (the only place action occurs in this episode) a garbage truck is lowering a bin right in the way. She manages to make it past but the bin stops Metallo and his henchmen.

Natasha zips around town and somehow end up back outside John’s workshop which I thought they were probably near because he had gone outside to practice and I figured they were in an alley near his house because who drives halfway across town just to shoot stuff in an alley that isn’t your alley, I mean you’re still just shooting crap in an alley. They carry Superman inside and place him under some lamps so he can get better.

Outside, Metallo pulls up in his cop car and demands that the people there tell him where Superman went. They don’t really want to because if a guy with half a face shows up, you try to pretend like you don’t see him. One citizen grows a pair and strikes harshly at Metallo’s kryptonite heart, flinging out insults like referring to him as “robobutt.” He used the word “butt” and lo, he shall pay. As Metallo lashes out, his feelings crushed, we see John in his workshop pondering his suit thoughtfully. Probably something like this:

Metallo is still questioning the citizens who are just hanging around instead of maybe leaving.

“Where’s Superman?”

A brash youngster replies, “Try the planet Krypton.”

“Oh gosh let me see, it blew the fuck up you insensitive prick. Why the fuck would he be there?”

Metallo does some property damage and some huffing and puffing and finally one citizen cracks and points to a nearby building. Before he can go in though, John shows up in his suit and introduces himself as Steel. Metallo says to him “may the best alloy win” even though “metallo” isn’t an alloy. He starts shooting at Steel who blocks the shots with his hammer. Metallo chucks a manhole cover at him and Steel ricochets it back, then grabs Metallo’s goons and throws them in a garbage bin before sealing it up. Garbage has been a running theme in this episode.

There’s a lot of fighting with throwing and crashing and stuff happening and then Steel grabs Metallo and flies him up high. Metallo actually says that he has more business “in the ‘hood” and breaks away causing him to crash into the building holding Supes. There’s some more beating on Steel before Supes gets the energy to put a stop to it.

I should take a moment to note some things about Metallo. First off, any other time kryptonite shows up, Superman is almost dead just looking at it. He can barely even get up much less fight a dude. Except when it’s Metallo. Then he take blast after blast and still manage to lay a hand on him, and ya know poke at him with sticks and shit. Secondly, fuck, someone just rip that chunk of kryptonite out of him. If you can take like a million blasts from it, Superman, rip the damn thing out and throw it away. Man.

So Supes heads for Metallo and grabs him from behind, but Metallo goes all Exorcist with his head and turns it around to blast him. You can also refer to this as “going all Ken doll.”

Supes is getting his ass kicked again, but Steel gets up and chucks his hammer right into Metallo’s chest, fucking finally and it, ya know, breaks him or whatever.

Superman gets up and says thanks and Steel goes back to grab the money that had been stolen from the bank because a guy’s gotta fuckin’ eat.