Superman rescues a strange pair of humans who are being
hunted by cyborgs from the future.
The future scenes of this mini-series take place in 2032.
The back cover of each issue features a digitized version of
Superman's "S" shield. On each subsequent cover, the shield
becomes more digitally distorted.
Didja Notice?
2000:
On page 1, panel 1, the Daily Planet and LexCorp buildings
are seen on the skyline of Metropolis. In the DC Universe,
Metropolis is the home city of Superman. The Daily Planet is
the largest newspaper in Metropolis and also the employer of
Superman's civilian identity of Clark Kent. LexCorp is the
multinational corporation owned by billionaire,
super-villain, and very stable genius, Lex Luthor.
2000:
On page 1, John Connor is seen exiting a Toy Sack store. Toy
Sack appears to be a fictitious business.
2000:
The T-800 that suddenly arrives by time displacement uses
laser-vision to
attack the Connors. This is the first time a Terminator has
been depicted with such a capability. The Terminators
throughout this mini-series exhibit this functionality
without explanation. I suppose since this version of the
Skynet-ruled future takes place in a timeline of the DC Universe,
superhero powers would be taken into consideration when Skynet was
designing and building Terminators and it included laser-vision as a
version of Superman's heat vision.
2000:
On page 4, a Belmont Camping catalog is seen on a countertop
in the camping store.
Belmont Camping appears to be a fictitious company.
2000:
On page 7, Superman identifies the Terminator endoskeleton
as made of "some kind of titanium steel." This is the first
time titanium has been revealed as part of the Terminator
polyalloy hyper-alloy combat chassis.
2000:
On page 11, Sarah tells Superman that Skynet has been
sending Terminators back in time for years, trying to kill her son.
In the "Death Valley" timeline this takes place in, there is limited
contact with Terminators by Sarah and John:
the T-800 Sarah encounters in
The Terminator
in 1984 and one she and John encounter in 1999 in the
The Dark Years.
2000:
On pages 11-12, Sarah wonders how Skynet was able to trace
them to Metropolis considering they've been travelling under
false names and John tearfully admits he entered a contest
at the toy store to win a trail bike and had to give his
real name so he could collect it if he won. This seems like
a rather lame plot device to use. One, John should already
know better by now and, two, the Connors are constantly
moving around, so how would he know he had won and why would
his fake identification not work for a toy store contest any
less than the way the Connors use them now?
2000:
On page 12, Superman wonders if Steel would be able to make
more sense of Sarah's story of time travel paradoxes. Steel
is John Henry Irons, who wears a technologically advanced
suit of armor as a super-hero in emulation of Superman.
Steel himself appears later in the story.
2000:
The cyborg character who first appears on page 13 is Cyborg
Superman, Hank Henshaw. In the DC universe, Henshaw was an
astronaut whose body died after an accident and encounter
with Superman. His mind survived in a computer and he
eventually went completely mad, blaming Superman for the
death of his family. Henshaw was able to construct a cyborg
body made partially from the DNA of Superman and became the
villain known as
Cyborg Superman.
2000:
The characters appearing in
Cyborg Superman's memory upload to the Terminator skull on
page 14 are (besides Superman himself): Supergirl (actually
Matrix from the Pocket Universe established shortly after
Crisis on Infinite Earths), Superboy (a partial
clone of Superman), and Lex Luthor, Superman's arch enemy.
2000:
The final panel of page 14 reveals that
Cyborg Superman has been using the facilities of S.T.A.R.
Labs to inspect the Terminator skull. S.T.A.R. Labs (Science
and Technology Advanced Research Laboratories) is a
multinational scientific research organization in the DC
universe.
2000:
On page 15, a construction crane has a Metro sign mounted on
it. "Metro" is presumably short for "Metropolis".
2000:
On page 19, we learn Lois Lane's phone number! 555-9207.
The 555 prefix is one commonly used in fiction written in
the U.S. and Canada, as a block of numbers have been
reserved by the phone companies for that purpose. Lois, of
course, is the girlfriend-then-wife of Superman/Clark Kent.
2032: On the last page of the issue,
Steel tells Superman he has arrived in the year 2032.
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