In this one, America tells Japan that their cartoon can beat them up.

After the opening (it’s the new nature-themed one again) this short is basically just a montage of Superman sabotaging Japan (it’s apparently okay when he does it). Our intrepid reporters are prisoners in Japan, but every night Clark secretly busts out of the room he’s being kept in to bust up all the boats and bridges and stuff. I’m all for Superman wrecking up violent empires, but I could stand to see it with less wanton destruction. Take “How Superman Would Win The War” in which he strikes directly at the leaders of the aggressive nations. There at least he doesn’t kill a bunch of soldiers and destroy cities. Maybe you say that he can only do that in a sort of What If scenario like that short story because in the real world he can’t end the war? Well, to that I say maybe Superman isn’t the best place for this particular kind of propaganda then.

But hey, speaking of propaganda, we are still dealing with racist depictions of Japanese men, with the buck-teeth and so on. I’d take wanton destruction if we could get rid of that.

Anyway, they try to stop Superman by saying they will kill Lois if he keeps it up. He keeps it up. They put Lois in front of a firing squad, but just in time to block the bullets Superman arrives and beats them up and saves her. He brings her back to America, where she notes that Clark is still captured in Japan, but Superman will be there to protect him. It’s genuinely a sort of never-give-up bit of badassery that people like in superhero stuff and it would go down soother if not connected to the racist propaganda.

Gale Frazer is a woman who has seen some of the worst that humanity has to offer. Her father and her brother died in WW2 and the Korean War respectively, and when we meet her in this episode she is recently returned from serving as a nurse in ‘Nam. She has a plot of land in a rural area that she clearly hopes she will get to live on in peace, but that plan comes crashing down like a flying saucer when she witnesses a flying saucer come crashing down. When she finds a survivor at the crash site, even though he looks human, she infers he is an alien of some kind. But still, her nurse instincts are strong so she makes every effort to keep this guy alive.

The alien who survived the crash is going by Blake. He was only supposed to be delivering another Invader, one who had a courier mission, but that guy died in the crash so now Blake has to take over. He has to deliver a box to a nearby mine. While Gale keeps him healthy, he forces her to help him. As always I’m interested in seeing things from the Invaders’ point of view, so it’s interesting to hear Blake describe humanity as fighters and killers and betrayers who act that way because of the emotions we have. We know from a previous episode that their kind can develop emotions and the ones that do are ostracized, but Blake believes that his kind’s emotionless style makes things run a lot more smoothly. Gale’s opinion on humanity isn’t so great either given all that she’s been through.

When David Vincent inevitably rolls into the scene and tries to convince Gale to either let Blake die or at least take him to a doctor who can study him, Gale doesn’t go along with it. Not to short-change that aspect, which is the bulk of the show, but Gale eventually learns her lesson after Blake kills her potential love interest and reveals that he would be perfectly happy wiping out all humans on Earth if his plan doesn’t work. After that Gale admits to Vincent that probably she was in the wrong here. (For the record I need to note that the mission Blake was on was part of an experiment that, if successful, would have made the Invaders immune to the toxic effects of oxygen and allow them to exist on Earth in their natural forms. No go for that.)

The episode ends with a chase through some tunnels during which Blake’s human disguise is melting away, which will be slow but fatal since they can’t exist in their natural form on Earth. When some of Blake’s allies show up and find out the experiment was no good, they casually intend to kill Blake because he is no longer of any use, but he kills them first and then begs Vincent to kill him more quickly than the decay of his human form would. Vincent obliges.

As ever I wonder about the true forms of the Invaders. At this point I don’t think we’re going to see them, since this story in which Blake was “reverting” would have been a chance but all we get is his humanoid shell getting all. Probably for the best, since the show would almost certainly have to disappoint me. What we DO get is Vincent making a reference to a human who saw their true form and went mad. Did that happen in an episode? I don’t remember it. I’ll say this, it’s definitely proof that these Invaders are a cosmic horror threat more than standard sci-fi invaders. (I looked it up, it’s a reference to the guy who looked in the car way back in Genesis. I think I must either not have got that that was what happened when I saw that episode, or just forgot.)

Linus Eckles is from an episode of NCIS: Origins, which is a the procedural cop show I guess exists.

Linus Ackles keeps bees. He’s a quiet detail-oriented type who keeps to himself mostly. He’s had some trouble with the law, has been to prison, but on the outside he mostly just cares for his bees and works on his little projects. One of his projects is a car bomb that he uses to kill a lawyer. That’s what gets the show’s cast involved in his business.

You see, Ackles believes he is on a mission from God. He was stalking this lawyer guy and discovered that he, a defender, was having an illicit affair with a prosecutor, which means that all the cases those two lawyered at each other were actually marred by a conflict of interest. Ackles thinks this is wrong, as per his mission from God, so he went all vigilante on them (with an eerie calmness, rather than Beekeeper Rage). The cops in the show are baffled at the idea that Ackles wants to right a wrong that happened to people he didn’t even know, but such it is. Ackles actually just saw that something unfair happened and he wants to remedy that.

Except for one thing: Ackles did know one of those people. One of the lawyer’s previous defendants, one who the lawyer failed, was in prison with Ackles and became a preacher in there. He was the one who got Ackles interested in God and he was the one who convinced Ackles to stalk the lawyer in the first place which allowed the affair to be discovered. This kinda removes any actual supernatural God intervention from Ackles’s mission, doesn’t it? The plan works, though. This guy gets set free because his case was declared a mistrial. I don’t know if this guy was a recurring character in the show or just there for one episode, but either way his freedom at the end shows that Ackles was a success.

Ackles does not get free. When the cops solve the mystery of the lawyer bombing they raid Ackles’s home and arrest him. Knowing they were coming, Ackles freed his bees so that they would be able to go on living while he went to jail, since he doesn’t deny his guilt in the slightest. He even apologizes on behalf of the bees if any of the cops got stung. The guy is just wholly bought in on the worthiness of his mission and caring for his bees.

Three Honeycomb out of Five. It’s a low three, but he just barely makes it, largely in part because when the preacher guy gets out of prison, a bee flies by as if checking in on him. It may not even be one of Ackles’s bees, but I take it as one and I say that this proves the hive is keeping an eye on the guy whose freedom was apparently worth that of their keeper. If this show wants to prove this bee is NOT doing that, well someone will just have to let me know.