HEROMAN - Episode 9

Last time out we saw Joey seemingly out for the count as Kogorr appeared to gain the upper hand in the battle of the planets... Does the defeat of Joey also mean the end for Heroman himself?

Initially it seems so, with our hero... err, man... left inert once Joey is rendered unconscious, although of course in truly heroic style Joey somehow manages to find the strength and spirit to find on... at least for a little while, before being smacked around some more by Kogorr and finally succumbing to defeat.


At this point something changes however, with Heroman "catching fire" and going beserk, a new mode of operation which sees him give the evil Kogorr the thrashing he deserves, almost literally beating him to within an inch of his life and threatening to "do a Unit 03" on him (sorry, there goes my Evangelion obsession again. At this point Joey comes around again in time to stop Heroman from doing something apparently un-heroic, giving Kogorr a temporary second wind until he's defeated, seemingly for good this time.

Naturally, defeat for this evil mastermind can mean only one thing... Time to set off that handily installed self-destruct mechanism. This leaves Professor Denton and company with a race against time to stop the spheres traversing the planet before the entire place blows sky high; something they achieve, frustrating Professor Minami's own plans to impress the world in the process. So, the Skrugg command centre blows to smithereens, the invasion is over, and the world is a safe place once again... or is it?

If I'd been in charge of choosing the English episode titles for this series, I think episode nine would have been headed as "Why won't you die?", as that seemed to be a recurring theme throughout - Just how many times could Joey and Kogorr be beaten to a pulp before they actually die? Are they both Homunculus or something? Who knows, but this was perhaps a more unwelcome old-school cartoon cliché in an episode where there were plenty to choose from. This wasn't really helped by Joey's bizarre insistence upon Heroman not going berserk on Kogorr, depite being quite happily to see him kill numerous henchmen across the course of the series without so much as a flicker of guilt - Is ripping someone's face off really worse than punching their head off? Apparently so in the bizarre moral maze that is Joey Jones' brain.

All joking aside, I guess this was pretty undemanding fun once again, although in concluding the alien invasion arc so quickly it does threaten to run out of the steam from this point forth - After all, what can top evil aliens? Sure, we have our future bad guys all laid out (I'd place bets on Nick making a return now, if I were you), and some Skrugg technology conveniently left behind, but is it going to be as interesting as spaceships and weird spheres? I can only hope so, as the blend of entertainment and cheese is still working better for this series than it perhaps should.