A week ago I watched an episode of the 'Super 14', and was rather disappointed. You see, the 14 were not super. Don't get me wrong, all 14 appeared to be far better than standard in strength, speed and general fitness, and they did readily display that. However they showed no evidence of the fantastic abilities one would expect from a team associated with the word 'super'. There was no sign of telepathic, telekinetic, teleportatic, or tele-anything-ic phenomena.

Also, one would expect a 'super 14' to be engaged in altruistic good-guy type behaviour - rescuing people from peril, defeating evil genius villians, etc. Instead, they competed in a tournament focused on the posession of an artifact I shall call the 'ovoid of power', their adversaries were another 14, who also were not super. Mere possession of this ovoid was not sufficient for a victory though. The competition was not at all pragmatic and all 28 were encumbered by a single adjudicator, to whom they all submitted, even the ones who were obviously more than a match for him physically.

I theorised that this 'referee' must have mighty and terrible powers if all 28 were so willing to allow him thwarting their plans without retaliating. He did, however have a sonic weapon emitting a shrill piercing noise, which would cause all to cease battle in order to submit to his judgements. I noticed that only a couple of the 28 wore helmets. It occurred to me that this may be for the purpose of shielding themselves from mind-reading or mind-control, but as I previously asserted there was no evidence of telepathic phenomena and the remainder were not wearing helmets. Perhaps they offer some relief from the sonic weapon for those more acoustically sensitive. Apart from these, there were no weapons or gadgets of any kind.

As you can imagine, I was quite puzzled by this and wondered if such curious dynamics among the characters would be explained in the back-story. Hoping for a flashback or two to help with my understanding, all I was rewarded with was the occasional slow-motion-replay of an action sequence. Anyway, in short, I think anyone expecting another Justice League will be most frustrated by this so-called 'Super 14'.