It’s easy to see Dean Cain as just another one of those washed up actors with a mind empty enough to be filled up with MAGA Nazi ideology. Without Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Dean Cain would be a never-was instead of a has-been.
If Dean Cain was merely an actor who showed up, put on the Superman costume, delivered his lines and then promptly forgot about the show, and thus missed the point of the show, that can be reconciled with his joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an honorary agent, with his even wanting to do that.
Maybe I did watch every episode of Lois & Clark, but the only scene I can remember is Superman flying to Antarctica to scream after Lois (Teri Hatcher) said yes to marrying Lex Luthor (John Shea). On YouTube, I watched a clip from the pilot episode, and it was new to me.
From what I can gather on the Web, the pilot episode skipped the origin story to go straight to Clark Kent’s arrival in Metropolis, unlike the old Adventures of Superman show and the later Smallville. So maybe Dean Cain somehow managed to ignore Kal-El’s back story as an undocumented immigrant?
When Dean Cain announced last year he was joining ICE, no one from that agency nor from Customs and Border Protection had murdered any Americans (that we know of), but any moderately intelligent person could see that things were headed that way. And now that it has happened, Dean Cain has made excuses for the murderers, going so far as to victim blame.
Star Trek scholar Steve Shives is also a big fan of Superman. Since he considers Lois & Clark to be the best TV iteration, it’s especially disappointing to him that Dean Cain made this heel turn. By the way, Steve Shives is also a big fan of wrestling, though not of Hulk Hogan (in that case, there were earlier red flags).
Dean Cain is not exactly pure Aryan. If he looks vaguely Asian to you, that’s because he actually has Japanese ancestry. In an interview for Variety, Dean Cain said “My family was interred in the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. That was a horrible injustice, but I don’t think that I deserve any sort of reparations.”
Well, even if he’s not hurting for money, that’s not relevant to the question of whether or not he’s owed reparations. But at least he acknowledges that what happened to his family was an injustice. So, um, maybe, um, don’t do that kind of thing to other families?
Steve Shives brings up something else that makes me find Dean Cain’s heel turn even more unsettling.
