Tear Jerker / Superman: The Animated Series

"The world didn't need a Superman. Just a brave one."

WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.

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• "The Last Son of Krypton":
  • Krypton's destruction, which is made even sadder and poignant by the beautiful soundtrack. Right at the beginning of the cataclysm and the arrival of another earthquake comes this exchange:
    Patroller: Not another one!
    Sul-Van: No. The last one.
  • Making it all the worse is the fact that Kal-El is, of course, a baby through all of it, but old enough to know who his mother and father are. Too young to understand what's going on, he's nothing but happy the entire episode.
  • Teenage Clark's reaction to finding out he's not human: "No, it's not true! I'm not a freak. I'm not! I'M NOT!"
• "Fun and Games": Toyman is revealed to have a vendetta against Bruno Mannheim, leader of Inter-Gang and uses toy based weapons to try and kill him. After Lois wrote an article that stated that Toyman is just another Psychopathic Manchild, he first kidnaps Mannheim and then Lois and takes them to his lair. While Toyman has Lois conduct an interview with him, Clark and Jimmy find out about the connection between Mannheim and Toyman. It's revealed that a toymaker named Winslow Schott wanted to create a toy factory, but didn't have the funds to do so, so Mannheim loaned him the money. Unbeknownst to Schott, the factory was a front for one of Mannheim's criminal schemes, and when the authorities found out, Mannheim was investigated but cleared of any wrong doing, Schott on the other hand was arrested and found guilty of all charges, and sentenced to prison. Clark suspects that Schott became Toyman after leaving prison, but Jimmy says that he died a few months before parole, which is when Clark reads that he had a son, Winslow Schott Jr.:
  Toyman: That's right, Miss Lane. The toymaker had a son. But without his father the poor little boy was bounced from foster home to foster home like a little toy that nobody wanted. A childhood is a terrible thing to lose, Miss Lane. But I'm getting mine back. With a vengeance.
• When Corben realizes how he's lost by becoming Metallo in "The Way of All Flesh":
  Corben: It's all fake. A FRAUD! There's the reality! The metal behind the man! It's all I am now! It's who I am... Metallo.
• "Stolen Memories": The three quick glimpses of the hundreds of civilizations Brainiac has slaughtered are as sad as they are horrifying (especially since one has a possible Censored Child Death). The way that the orbs containing all of their memories are lost in the explosion of Brainiac’s ship is even sadder.
• The premise of "Ghost in the Machine" is Brainiac, his body destroyed and his mind uploaded onto Lex Corps’ servers, holds Luthor hostage so he can build him a new body. He works Luthor like a dog, denying him food and rest, and threatening to give him an electric shock when his hunger and exhaustion start slowing him down. When Luthor angrily tells Brainiac he can’t keep functioning this way, Brainiac has a robot bust open a vending machine so Lex can eat. Luthor drops his knees and tears a candy bar open with his teeth out of sheer desperation...only to catch a glimpse of his haggard and exhausted face reflected in the broken metal. Luthor sighs sadly and turns away, disgusted with himself.
  • Mercy, trapped under a load of debris, calls to Luthor for help...and he abandons her. The episode gave a deeper glimpse into Mercy's loyalty and attraction to her boss, but he doesn't return any of it. Her expression as she answers his call later shows she's been truly shaken.
• "The Late Mr. Kent": Everyone's responses to Clark being dead. Lois' is particularly tearjerking:
  Lois: I always teased him... But I had so much respect! [in tears] And I liked him, too! I really did, I wish I'd told him...
  • In that same vein, Jimmy's reaction at the funeral. It's minor and in the background, but you can see the poor kid weeping for his good friend. You just want to give the poor boy a hug.
  • You can also see Clark's despair at his secret identity being lost. "I can't be Superman all the time! I'll go insane!"
• "Apokolips... Now!":
  • When Dan Turpin is killed. It's just so freakin' senseless, petty and, above all, completely out of nowhere. The fact that he's based on the late, great Jack Kirby makes it sting even more.
    • It's the senselessness that really hammers it home. Darkseid has been defeated, the forces of Apokolips are being forced home, and then Turpin makes a remark that gets Darkseid's attention, leading to him firing his Omega Beams and vaporizing Turpin. Whether an act of petty spite for his defeat or a knowing surgical strike in knowing it would hurt Superman for any human (let alone an ally) to die at his hands, Darkseid manages to get a victory out of his defeat, even if he doesn't take Earth.
    • In fact, when Superman brought this up in the finale, Darkseid doesn't even remember it.
  • Superman's reaction to Turpin's death. He howls with rage and starts tearing Darkseid's machine apart. Up until this point, we've never seen Superman this angry before.
  • The ending has Superman crying. Not that the ending wasn't such for the viewers as well...
    Superman: Goodbye, old friend. In the end, the world didn't really need a Superman... just a brave one.
  • The episode has some pretty tragic Reality Subtext too. The original plan was to kill off either one or both of the Kents, only to have them brought back in a later episode. After Jack Kirby died in real life, however, and to keep a sense of actual cost to Darkseid's invasion, the script was changed to kill off Turpin in order to allow the writers to give The King a send-off. All while making the final slate be even more beautiful as it states the episode was dedicated to..
    Jack Kirby: Long Live the King
  • As an additional tribute to Kirby, many of the funeral guests were cameos by DCAU production members Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, Dan Riba Glenn Murakami, and Mark Evanier, Alex Ross and his father Norman, Kamandi, Goody Rickles, Stan Lee, Nick Fury, three of the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Iron Man.
• The otherwise nightmare-inducing Toyman's pop-up book, which details how his innocent and kindhearted father was tricked into being arrested for mob activity, forcing his son to live a ruined and lonely childhood.
  Toyman: The boy moved from foster home to foster home, like a little toy that nobody wanted. A childhood is a terrible thing to lose, Ms. Lane...
• The alternate-Superman in "Brave New Metropolis" in his interactions with Lois. His expressions throughout the episode can be surmised as "dead inside".
  "You never knew how I felt about you. I didn't know... until you were gone."
• "Identity Crisis" ends with Bizarro sacrificing himself to hold up Luthor's collapsing clone lab long enough for Superman to save Lois. While he didn't stay dead, it was certainly a powerful moment, especially since it meant Bizarro accepting that he wasn't the real Superman.
  Bizarro: Me not Superman. You Superman... Superman... save... Lois...
  
  [After the escape]
  Superman: In the end, he really was a hero.
• Superman discovering the unimaginable magnitude of Brainiac's crimes, and collapsing to his knees in a hologram of one of the dozens of worlds he's destroyed, complete with a powerful circling camera effect.
• The entirety of "Action Figures". An amnesiac Metallo bonds with Bobby and Serena, and even ended up becoming a hero by saving the lives of her and a truck driver, but his mind is so consumed by revenge and hatred towards Superman that, once he recovers his memories, he ends up using the trust of the children simply to get another opportunity to kill the Man of Steel. Bobby even makes a last plea to "Steel Man" to not kill Superman, and Metallo seems to briefly consider it...but then he simply says that "Steel Man is dead", in the process breaking Bobby and Serena's heart.
• The whole sequence at the start of "Little Girl Lost", when Superman investigates the remains of his home planet, he comes across a distress signal that leads him to the frozen world of Argo. There, he finds a hologram of a scientist named Kala In-Ze, who explains that Argo had been the sister planet to Krypton. When Krypton was destroyed, it threw Argo out of their suns orbit, killing millions, and dooming the last survivors to a slow death of cold and starvation. Her surviving family (Her daughter, brother and nephew) was put in stasis and with tears in her eyes, she desperately pleads for rescue. The camera then pans to the pods, all of which have failed... except for Kala's daughter, Kara, the future Supergirl.
  Superman: I'm too late...
  • A more horrific thing revealed through Word of God is that it took 3 years before Argo became uninhabitable. These people saw the end coming for them, and were unable to stop it. And it all happened because Krypton and Argo shared the same orbit...
• "Legacy":
  • The end of the whole series, with Superman's brainwashed attack on Metropolis having turned much of the planet against him. Thank god the DCAU continued so this didn't become the actual ending for this version of him.
  • The people of Apokolips are so broken and bent to the will of Darkseid that when Superman gives him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, tossing him to the ground in defeat and declares to the slaves of Apokolips that they're free, they pick Darkseid up to help him heal. They're so far beyond the Despair Event Horizon that they can't even conceive of being without Darkseid, no matter how cruel he is.
  • Darkseid's response, both a TearJerker and utterly spine-chilling: "Here, I am God."
    • When their fight began, Darkseid told Superman that he was many things "Half of them you can't even begin to comprehend." Given Supes' horrified reaction to Darkseid's slaves saving him instead of taking their freedom, Darkseid was right.
  • Just the fact that Darkseid literally feeds off the misery of his people.
• In "World's Finest", after Superman saved her and Air Force One from terrorists, Lois tries to discuss about their relationship, but Superman had to leave to deal with another crisis. Lois berates herself for thinking they can have a future together. Soon, she become smitten with Bruce Wayne, to the point where she decides to move in with Bruce in Gotham, and eager to marry soon. Until she found out Bruce is Batman, realizing he's Married to the Job and doesn't want to spend the rest of her life worrying if he'll come home alive. Another relationship with a superhero she's not sure she can live with.

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