Superman & Lois A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events Featured Image Television 

Five Thoughts on Superman & Lois‘s “A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events”

By | June 23rd, 2021
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome back to my favourite time of the week! The time of the week I get to sit down and watch my favourite show on television and then wax poetical about Superman for, frankly, far too long. Last week saw the culmination of many of the story threads set up since the show’s first episodes, with Morgan Edge standing full revealed as Kal-El’s half brother and his plan to resurrect the Kryptonian consciouses inside the Eradicator in full effect. As you might imagine, Superman put a stop to all of that, but not without a cost.

And with that, let’s take a trip down memory lane with Superman & Lois as we look at “A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events” in Five Thoughts. Oh, and spoilers below, as always.

1. A Little Piece Of Home

The Fortress Of Solitude is a concept most takes on Superman have to grapple with, at one point or another. A home base for Superman to return to and muse over the events of story thus far and plan his next moves amidst the last relic of Krypton and a museum of his life and career on Earth. The trouble for most modern incarnations of the character is that the Fortress is a little… Silver Age. It’s a palace in the Arctic made out of ice and crystals and it may or may not have a giant key outside. It raises just enough questions from the audience that the story would have to halt and explain that most either brush over it or find ways, like in Man Of Steel‘s Kryptonian scout ship, to omit it all together.

Before we get into the rest of this episode which has some real meat on its bones, I wanted to talk about how nice it was to see this episode opening with the forming of the Fortress. Sure, it was lifted right out of Superman: The Movie, but with the context of what we’ve seen so far (which will be a big thing for this episode), it had a certain amount of weight to it. Showing the sunstone as a terraforming catalyst was a very clever answer to the question of how and why the Fortress was built. It turns a little bit of Earth into Krypton, using the natural landscape as a foundation for something utterly alien, and gives Clark his first contact with Krypton. Not only did it retroactively give weight to the Fortress’s appearances in prior episodes, not to mention explaining why it looks like that, it gives weight to the end of episode where he was shown how Tal-Roh found his own Fortress. This is just, man, this was just a really good episode.

2. When Man Became Super, And Everything He Lost

I genuinely wasn’t sure what to expect from this episode after last week’s finished. We had just seen the biggest episode of the series so far with the villain and his plan laid out and, for a second, thwarted by a Superman who had just exhausted his powers. Where could we go from there? I had briefly noticed the title of this episode on IMDB before and thought, sure, maybe we’ll get something of a bottle episode with the Kent family swapping stories, but this… this was not a bottle episode. Taking us back to the very beginning, we finally get to see Superman & Lois show where this Superman came from. Sure, it’s been touched on before in the first episode’s opening montage (which actually operated as a cut down version of what we see in this episode, something I’ll touch on next) and even in the flashback to Clark’s early attempts at stopping crime in Smallville, but this is where we see the idea of Superman form diagetically. The moments in which Clark goes from feeling the need to do something to help to becoming the champion of the world. And the best part is that the show has Jor-El tell Clark that no matter how much he can train up here in the snow, he’ll never be ready until he re-immerses himself in the world and finds his love for humanity again.

So what does the show do next? Pulls the rug out from under him. We see the last moments of Clark’s hero’s journey. The moment he returns home to realise life moved on without him. Lana is already married to Kyle. Smallville isn’t the same place he left. Or, more importantly, it is. It’s exactly the way he left it. The people have moved around, but it’s still the small town in the middle of nowhere he grew up in. It’s not the world. We’ve seen the moment he left home the first time around, just after Jonathan’s death, and here we see it again, knowing how much it hurt the first time around and now knowing it’s for the better. I just love how much this show can make the viewer empathise with Clark by showing the humanity underneath the very familiar story of Superman’s origin.

Continued below

3. Where It All Began, Again

This episode was a darling to watch, especially after how dour and dramatic the series has become. Not only getting to see where Superman came from in this world, but going right back to the beginning of this show to see an extended look at that flashback montage just really hit me where it matters. Superman’s first appearance saving a suspiciously green car in that Fleishcer inspired suit is a scene I can and probably have watch(ed) a hundred times over, but the expanded context this episode provides makes it all the better. It’s link into Clark’s interview at the Planet and his first meeting with Lois was perfect and then everything goes in a completely different direction than what I expected.

The dynamic Clark and Superman have with Lois has always been an odd duck, with the harsh and hot headed reporter often immediately falling head over heels for the man in blue tights who flies down to save kittens from trees only to ignore the intrepid and curious reported always by her side. It’s always been something I’ve thought has neutered attempts to make Lois a forward thinking portrayal of a civilian love interest in a superhero story, especially looking at recent, rather meek interpretations like Kate Bosworth and Amy Adams. Not to criticise their acting, but to explore how Lois’s love for Superman can overtake her character if handled poorly in the writing.

Here, though, the show goes to great lengths to show Lois as someone frankly uninterested in Superman because of course she wouldn’t care about the guy saving kittens from trees when she’s busy rooting out the source of neo-nazi attacks on minority neighbourhoods because this isn’t the 30s. Metropolis needs to have real problems for Superman’s presence to even matter in the first place and the way the show explores Clark’s naïvety in contrast to Lois’s keen eye was perfect. Putting Clark in Lois’s life before Superman creates that lasting bond between the two long before Superman even enters their life, making that revelation down the line matter all the more. It’s just a genius re-contextualisation of their relationship for the modern day.

4. The Man Before The Super

And that’s not even getting into the development of their relationship over the course of this episode. There’s something so beautiful about using parts of this episode as the montage that set up the show in the first place because it creates this sense of a foregone conclusion, as any prologue or prequel does. We know Lois and Clark fall in love and he reveals his secret identity to her and marries her and they have two boys and move to Smallville and… well, we know all this because it’s the show we’ve been watching. That montage was nothing more than a primer for the decision to move to Smallville in the first place. So, at that point, you have to wonder why exactly we’re getting this story at this point in the show. Surely, it can’t just be about Superman’s origins, there has to be some deeper meaning, right?

I’d say if there is, it’s to show that Lois Lane fell in love with Clark Kent long before she fell in love with Superman. That, if this show is about testing Superman’s loyalties and convictions, that this is what marks our Superman as fundamentally different from John Henry’s. Lois was never the key to Superman, she was never Superman’s anchor to the world. She was Clark’s. She was the woman who fell in love with him as a man first, who took the dorky glasses and the tie and shucks gee willicker patter of a Midwestern boy at face value and saw underneath it all not just a great reporter but a man with a good heart. That’s the key to Superman; he’s Clark Kent before he’s anything else. Very few stories understand that and even fewer can re-contextualise what we know about him and the world he lives in and the people he surrounds himself with in a way that supports that with thematic weight. Because as we find out…

5. For The Man Who Had Everything

All of this was a ploy by Tal-Roh to get inside Kal-El’s head to see what makes him tick. To see what makes him side with the miserable weaklings of planet Earth over his own flesh and blood. It’s actually perfect, when you think about it. We’re not seeing this story as the audience, we’re seeing Tal-Roh see it for the first time. Kal-El’s life on Earth, his humble upbringing in small town middle America, the virtues of two kindly farmers that instilled in him the notion that he had a responsibility to use his powers for good. His journey to becoming a Superman is a marked difference to the life of suffering and oppression that Tal-Roh experienced and it’s markedly incredibly closer for this episode to put them on that level of even footing. Having Tal-Roh learn everything he can about Kal-El puts his world in danger in a way it never has been before. Ending this episode with Lois and Jordan and Jonathan being threatened and forcing Superman to submit because he just doesn’t have the strength right now to fight is the perfect way to give the audience a brief respite from the stakes of the previous episodes before pulling the rug out from under them at the last second and developing that conflict even more.

Which puts into question: how different is our Superman from John Henry’s really? How inevitable is it that this conflict leads to Kal-El joining with Tal-El? Even with a more palpable connection to humanity, all that really did was create a weakness to be exploited. And yet, I can’t help but still see it as a strength. Underneath all the suffering at the hands of his father, Tal-Roh is a scared, little boy looking for a home and a family. I can’t help but wonder if seeing the life and love that Kal-El experience on this world will be what turns him against Zeta-Roh in the end. At least, I certainly hope that will be the case.


//TAGS | Superman & Lois

august (in the wake of) dawn

sworn to protect a world that hates and fears her, august has been writing critically about media for close to a decade. a critic and a poet who's first love is the superhero comic, she is also a podcaster, screamlord and wyrdsmith. ask her about the unproduced superman screenplays circa 1992 to 2007. she/they.

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