My Adventures with Superman season 1, episode 6 recap: My Adventures with Mad Science

At the end of the last episode of My Adventures with Superman, it looked like Lois would never speak to Clark again, feeling betrayed after learning about his secret identity.

However, very quickly the two of them are forced back together when they both realize that they stood up Jimmy’s camping trip and now he isn’t answering either of their phones. Clark tells Lois that he flew all over the forest looking for Jimmy but saw nothing, and she agrees to help him find Jimmy, but that’s it.

My Adventures with Superman season 1 episode 6 recap

On the hunt for Jimmy

As Lois and Clark look for Jimmy in the forest, Lois begins to grill Clark about his secret identity. Clark admits that Jimmy doesn’t know about Superman either, but doesn’t want to talk about it, which pushes Lois to ask if his whole life as Clark was just a cover for Superman, including the feelings that she thought he had for her.

Their argument is interrupted by a fenced-off area. What’s particularly odd about the area is Clark didn’t see it at all when he was flying over the forest looking for Jimmy. Lois calls Jimmy’s phone and can hear it ringing inside the fence. She ducks through a hole in the fence and Clark follows after.

Meanwhile, Jimmy wakes up to discover that he has been taken hostage by a giant gorilla and a sentient robot. While such a discovery would naturally alarm people, Jimmy couldn’t help but be excited about the new discovery he had made. It helped that both the giant (and also talking) gorilla Monsieur Mallah, and his partner, the robot named Brain, seemed to be more or less peaceful men of science. Yes, the robot would like to blow a lot of things up, but still, these supposed captors, actually seem to be the good guys.

Jimmy learns that they are two remaining scientists from a Project Cadmus site, an organization dedicated to furthering the world of science. The two of them reveal that the site was betrayed by the government entity they had been working for, Task Force X, causing a black hole they had been working with to destabilize and destroy the facility. With Monsieur Mallah and the Brain the only two survivors, they dedicated their lives to trying to recreate the black hole and stabilize it into a wormhole to travel to a dimension where they would be accepted.

More secrets revealed

Back in the woods, Clark and Lois are attacked by a series of robots and booby traps throughout the forest. They get away, but Clark’s powers aren’t working like they should. He tries to fly away but can’t, and the two of them are forced to run on foot. They come across the lab and find Jimmy with his new friends.

Clark and Lois apologize to Jimmy for forgetting about the camping trip. Clark tries to reveal his secret to Jimmy as well, only to learn that Jimmy knew all along. However, before the three can reconcile, the robots that have been chasing Clark and Lois show up. It turns out they aren’t from the lab, but from Task Force X. The two groups join forces to try and fight off the robots, when Monsieur Mallah has an epiphany on how to stabilize the wormhole. In doing so, it sucks in all the robots saving the group.

With the wormhole stabilized, the two scientists make plans to journey into the unknown. The Brain notices that the red sun shield that had been protecting the lab from Task Force X’s knowledge had affected Clark as well, and invites him to come along to a place where he will not be treated differently. However, Clark chooses to stay with his friends. With Jimmy, Lois, and Clark all understanding each other’s feelings better, the three of them set back off to the city, as the two scientists journey through the wormhole.

With the red sun shield destroyed in the fight, Task Force X is now aware of the secret Cadmus location. The General arrives with a captured Doctor Ivo in tow and tells him that this lab has everything he might need to defeat Superman. With a common enemy, Ivo sets to work as the episode comes to a close.

This show is the best possible kind of strange

Superman has been around for a very long time. There are tens of thousands of comic books featuring the adventures of Superman ever since his debut close to a century ago. While many of those comic stories are incredible, there are admittedly plenty of them that are very silly.

When Superman needs to fight something new every issue, month after month for years, you can see how we can start to get into some odd territory when it comes to Superman storylines. And a lot of times, people like to pretend that those parts of Superman don’t exist. When it comes time to make a Superman show or movie, we get the stories and the characters that work, and kind of just ignore all the wacky side adventures that took place when the storytelling strategy was to throw everything at the wall and see what stuck.

But silly doesn’t mean bad, and where some shows might tend to shy away from the silly side of these kinds of stories, this episode is enthusiastically running headfirst towards it. In this episode, a super-intelligent gorilla and his human brain transplanted into a robot partner, are two mad scientists with a secret lab in the woods who are trying to harness the power of a black hole in their lab.

At one point we find out that they created a pack of mutant children a while back, and it’s nowhere close to the most wild part of the story. This show has done so much already to remind us that Superman can be fun. These characters are supposed to be fun. These kinds of shows are supposed to be fun.

Silly can be a good thing when describing a Superman show, and when done earnestly, you can tell a really great story featuring some of the most forgotten characters in the DC universe. I mean, who ever thought there would be a Superman TV show where Superman meets Monsieur Mallah before he fights Lex Luthor?