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Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
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| Title: | Fly Hard |
| Episode Number: | 20 |
| Season: | 1 |
| Season Episode #.: | 20 |
| Production Number: | 455318 |
| Original Airdate: | Sunday March 27th, 1994 |
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Lois, Clark, Lex, Perry, and Jimmy find themselves prisoners of criminals who have invaded the Daily Planet building late on a Saturday. It seems these criminals are working for someone who has sent them to locate the secret vault of a Dragonetti, a rum runner and racketeer from departed days. To keep Superman at bay, Fuentes (their leader) threatens to explode a dirty nuclear bomb. Clark has to figure out how to defeat these people without endangering the citizens of Metropolis, and he has to do it before the hostages outlive their usefulness to their captors.
| There are no foreign summaries for this episode
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| Tracy Scoggins does not appear in either of the next two episodes, making this her last appearance as a regular.
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| (Jimmy enters the newsroom bearing a large sign cut into the shape of an elephant.)
Perry White: Hey, hey! Where are you going with that?!?
Jimmy Olson: What?
Perry White: This! This marked the way to the hospitality suite! '76 Republican convention! Judas priest, man, Gerald Ford tripped over this! It’s history!
| Perry White: (holding up a standee) Elvira, Mistress of the Dark!
Jimmy Olson: I don’t know, Chief, she looks pretty scary to me.
Perry White: Scary? Jimmy, she’s the reason I’ve seen Godzilla a hundred and fifteen times! She. Is Definitely. A keeper.
| Fuentes: The Daily Planet building is now ours. So I suggest you cooperate and everything will go smoothly. And in case you feel the need to contact the authorities or your friend, Superman, you can tell him I’m holding a small but dirty nuclear device. And if I catch so much as a glimpse of a red cape, this building and the gene pool of Metropolis will pay the price! So relax – by tomorrow morning this will all be over.
| Lex: I know this type of people. If we don’t do anything, we’re dead!
Clark: Luthor, he may be holding the lives of thousands of people in his hands. Don’t do anything to provoke him!
| (Perry fakes heart trouble. Fuentes enters the room and fires five times right at Perry. Perry moves his foot; there are five holes in a neat circle around it.)
Fuentes: Nine millimeter automatic. Better than a triple bypass. Am I right?
Perry White: Yes, sir! I... I feel a lot better already.
Fuentes: There will be no more tests of my patience!
| Lex Luthor: Terrorists believe that the value of a life, even if it’s their own, isn’t as important as their cause.
| Lois: Clark, take it easy. You’re not Superman.
| (In response to Lex’s attempted escape, Fuentes has handcuffed the hostages in pairs.)
Fuentes: We are now operating on the buddy system. If anyone is missing, or tries something heroic, your buddy... dies.
| Fuentes: What else has man sought after without pity or remorse since the dawn of time?
Lois: Inner peace?
Fuentes: Cold, hard cash.
| Lois: Do you relly think Dragonetti’s vault is still in the building?
Perry White: Well, I always thought it was a tall tale. Like that mess Geraldo got himself into that time. But maybe there’s something to it.
| (Cat Grant has entered the newsroom and completely failed to discern the hostage situation as she collects a bit of lingerie from her desk and leaves.)
Lois: If I’m still alive on Monday morning, she won’t be.
| Willie: I lost a lifetime because of Dragonetti. And I swore if I ever got out, I’d come back for what belonged to me. Dragonetti got his due, though. He was gunned down six weeks after I went to prison.
| Lois: You can’t just kill them!
Fuentes: You’d be surprised what you can do for thirty million dollars...
| Lois: Other women catch bouquets. I catch bombs.
Superman: I guess that’s what makes you so special, Lois.
| Lois: You know, it’s times like these I think maybe I should just get a regular boring job, settle down with a guy that sells insurance and have 2.4 kids.
Lois and Clark: (simultaneously) Nahhhhh!
| Cat Grant: (oblivious to the fact that her co-workers were taken hostage) WHAT a weekend. Now, I know he may not look like it, but under that mild-mannered façade, George is a wild man! I spent most of the weekend in handcuffs! So, what did you guys do this weekend?
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| Fuentes shows a “dirty nuclear bomb” the size of a small cigar box. No one has ever managed to build a nuclear device that small, in part because the fissile material necessary requires shielding to protect those near it, and in part because the laws of physics as presently understood place absolute minimums on the critical mass necessary to ignore a fission or fusion reaction.
| Fuentes identifies his firearm as a “nine millimeter automatic.” In fact, it is a semi-automatic. Automatic weapons fire continuously when the shooter squeezes the trigger; machine guns are one example. Semi-automatic weapons use a portion of the cartridge energy to operate a mechanism that prepares the next cartridge for immediate fire – however, they still (like revolvers) only fire once per trigger pull (unless illegally modified). Many, many people make this common mistake.
| It takes an awfully long time to send a simple, three character “SOS” message. Even in 1994 when computers were relatively slow such a message would have required a half second at most to send. No doubt the writers hoped to build dramatic tension by suggesting Lois’ attempt at summoning help was in danger of discovery, but there are certainly better ways they might have accomplished that.
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| The title of the episode, Fly Hard, plays on the title of a 1988 film, Die Hard. The plot of this episode is similar to the plot of the film; both describe a building invaded by criminals who sought money. Other parallels include Jimmy Olson’s escape (leaving a single individual outside the criminals’ control, much as John McClane was in the film), Jimmy’s monologue as he clambered through the ventilation ducts, similar to the dialogue of John McClane as he clambered through the ceiling of the Nakatomi building, and the fact that the intruders were initially believed to be terrorists, and later revealed as common (or uncommon, depending on one’s point of view) thieves.
| Jimmy tries to dispose of a large sign shaped like an elephant from the 1976 Republican convention. The elephant was then the mascot of the Republican partyand figured in a lot of signs and symbology. Perry notes that Gerald Ford tripped over it. Ford was the thirty-eighth United States president, assuming office following Richard Nixon’s resignation. During his tenure, he acquired a reputation for clumsiness, at least in part due to various mocking portrayals of him by slapstick comedian Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live.
| When Perry declares himself “The Captain” by virtue of publishing the daily planet, Jack suggests he’s the captain of the Exxon Valdez. On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez, a huge oil tanker, struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound and thereafter spilled 11,000,000 barrels of oil (about 20% of its cargo) into the sound. This was one of the worst ecological disasters to date, earning Exxon much negative publicity for its slow and poor efforts at cleanup and it’s steadfast resistance to paying court ordered settlements (as of early 2008, the case remains open; the Supreme Court is expected to hear it later in the year).
| Perry White characterizes the search for Dragonetti’s vault as similar to “that mess Geraldo got himself into.” Al Capone operated his criminal enterprise from a suite in Chicago’s Lexington Hotel in the late 1920s. Sixty years later, renovation workers discovered passages connecting the suite to various gin mills and whorehouses; these permitted escape in the event of a police raid. Further investigation culminated in a widely hyped live television program broadcast April 21, 1986 and hosted by Geraldo Rivera, in which opened what he believed was a secret vault full of treasure and perhaps even the remains of a Capone enemy or two. The vault contained only a few bottles; the term "Al Capone's vault" has since come to refer to anything that is puffed up and then falls flat.
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| Jack, who is among the hostages, first appeared in “Foundling.” There he was living on the street and trying to keep himself and his brother alive by stealing, because the foster parent system had failed them. At the end of the episode he got a job at the Daily Planet; he is still working that job in this episode.
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| This episode contains “flashbacks” to events that occurred decades earlier, and that explain the goals of the criminals in the present. The characters in these flashbacks are portrayed by the various actors from the series (as opposed to guest stars) – a time honored tradition (and doubtless a budget saver) in television stories that take place across several eras or in different “realities.” These flashbacks were in black and white to emphasize that they took place long ago.
| Early in the episode Fuentes reveals (through dialogue that Clark overhears) that he is working for someone. It is fairly obvious that this is Willie the Guard from shortly after Clark overhears Fuentes. Clues include his age, which sets him up as someone who might have known Dragonetti (and in fact, he was Dragonetti’s partner), his intervention to prevent the fire department from responding, and his relative lack of surprise when Clark and ? encounter him during their brief escape.
| Willie claims he “couldn’t hurt a fly.” That seems extremely unlikely, given that he was one half of the largest criminal organization in Metropolis as a young man. One does not generally rise to the top echelons of a criminal enterprise without leaving a trail of victims and bodies stretching back years. Having set Willie up as the victim of a frame that cost him decades of his life (and therefore encouraging sympathy for him), the writer probably didn’t want to muddy those waters by having Willie admit that there were other crimes for which he went unpunished
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