Listen. I know that you know the big twist in this episode because you’ve clicked on this and I’m assuming you’ve watched it. So I’m not going to waste time with an intro this week. On the off chance you haven’t seen this week’s episode of Superman & Lois and you’re reading this, do yourself a favour and go watch it before reading on. No, seriously, go watch it.
Anyway. Spoilers below. Duh.
1. How To Raise A Superboy
I said last week that Jordan Kent is the best thing to happen to the story of Superman since 1938 and this week I’m sticking with that. While there are a lot of other things going on in this episode that we’ll get to, I really like how it followed up on the story of Jordan beginning to develop his powers. Mostly, I like how it is happening in fits and spurts, allowing for a focus on Jordan just having to deal with developing superhearing this week. Superman has a shit ton of powers that are often too many to list and having Jordan develop not in the way that Clark did, but by having certain powers flare up and be difficult to deal with is a nice touch.
Particularly because it allows for moments where Clark has to reflect on how he grew into them and what he experienced as a child with the perspective of a father. Sure, it must have been difficult for him to go through this kind of solar puberty and deal with the emergence of his powers, but now he has to watch his son suffer in the same ways he did and all he can do is support him, but he can’t take away any of that pain. It would have been so easy for this show to go a similar route to what the did with Jon in the comics and have his emergence of his powers come easily and fasttrack him into saving cats out of trees, but instead they heightened the drama of what a normal kid would have to go through if something like this happened. This is solid gold television.
2. Lana The Whistleblower
It might have been easy for this to slip under the radar given the big stuff happening in the rest of the episode, but I also have to mention Lana’s storyline up front because it’s actually really interesting. Having Lana be torn between her loyalty to Kyle and what he earnestly sees in the opportunities Morgan Edge is presenting for Smallville and her belief in Lois’s warning is good writing. Layering that by having her suspect that her charge to find individuals for a leadership program is a cover for something nefarious (but not to the extent that we know it’s a cover for him giving people Kryptonian powers) and being torn between putting Emily, someone who desperately needs the opportunity she believes it to be, forward for the position and warning her away is just… it’s really good drama.
It’s actually kind of hard to string these thoughts out some time because it so often boils down to the fact that I’m just really enjoying this show. The writing has been solid throughout, with only minor hiccups here and there, and the cast has been phenomenal. Emmanuelle Chriqui’s Lana Lang has to go down as the most interesting, layered and nuanced take on the character since her inception. She’s not here just to be Clark’s high school flame, she’s a person with her own life and family and her own stakes in the game and I’m really glad that the show has capitalised on that as much as it has.
3. Luthor Stands Revealed
Well, then. I have to admit I didn’t see this coming. Much like Lois, actually, I didn’t see this coming because I wasn’t looking. I fully bought into the man who has been revealed to be an alternate John Henry Irons being an alternate Luthor of some kind. I knew there had to be some kind of a twist coming given that his first name was never revealed, but this certainly wasn’t the reveal I was expecting it to be. Which is to say that, yeah, they got me. This was a hell of a surprise and it hit me like a freight train. And, yet, all of it makes sense. The power armour suddenly makes sense, their framing of him as a hands on inventor makes sense; those little moments that made me think that this was going to be a radically different take on Lex Luthor now stand as markers of John Henry’s personality shining through.
Continued belowNow, we’ll get to Irons and Superman’s actual fight in a different point, so I want to talk about Irons and what we learn about him here and the way we learn about it. This show has a history of being accused of having a toxic and racist writing room and production, mostly by former writer Nadria Tucker who was fired for voicing her objections to such an environment. I bring this up again because I don’t want it to seem like I’m pointing at the final product and saying “See? It can’t have been racist if the results are good!” because a) I’m white and I don’t get to do that about anything regardless and b) because I don’t actually know what happened in production to get to this point. What I do know is that David Ramsey, a black man who has been part of this whole DCCW thing since its inception, directed an episode in which we got to see the true, genuine emotion behind the man we’ve been told is the villain.
Again, Irons isn’t the kind of villain who stands before Superman in a silly pose, gloating about how he’ll pay for taking his world away from him. He’s the kind of character to remember the last precious moments he had with his wife and daughter while in his rundown RV in the middle of nowhere. He’s the kind of character to reminisce about doing his daughter’s hair while they build an exosuit to go kill Superman. There’s a lot more nuance going on here than just that he’s from an alternate universe where Superman is bad therefore he’s the bad guy in this universe and I think a lot of that comes out in this episode because of Ramsey’s direction. I only hope it can stay at this level.
4. The Good Brother
Jonathan Kent is an odd duck. He’s largely taken the back seat to Jordan ever since they moved to Smallville and he started exhibiting powers and started playing football. All of a sudden Jordan was the interesting, popular one and not the weirdo outcast. So, where has that left Jonathan? Well, with a broken wrist, mostly, and no place in life. Suddenly, he’s not the star football player of the family and, with that, a lot of his self worth has diminished. It sounds quite sad to put it like that, but being popular and good at football was kind of what Jon hang his entire being on and without that and with now having to spend all of his time either protecting or watching out for and lying for Jordan, he’s adrift.
So, when he finally has a genuine, human moment with Sarah after everything they’ve been through only to go home and have Jordan, who was spying on them despite having already gone off at Clark for doing the same thing like two episodes into the show, up in his face over their conversation, I can’t blame him for exploding on Jordan. Naturally, they make up by the end of the episode and manage to put water under the bridge, but I have to wonder how long Jonathan can stay adrift like this and how his relationship with Jordan will develop in due time. While there may be no secrets any longer, I think there’s a resentment Jonathan is harbouring that he isn’t letting on to.
5. Men Of Steel, or What It Means To Make An Evil Superman
Well, then. Phew. Where to begin, huh? Let’s start with this: I really enjoy the conflict of perspectives between Clark and Irons here. There’s a moment towards the end of their fight where, after Jordan and Jonathan show up in the nick of time to save Clark’s life, Clark is standing over a beaten Irons, holding him by his collar and reeling up for one last punch. As he does so, Irons sees the red eyes and the scowl of an angry Superman and his mind flashes briefly back to the black suited Superman who destroyed his world and killed his wife. It’s something that stood out to me as a marker that sometimes you only find an enemy when you go looking for one. Sure, the Superman of John’s world was a mass murderer, but he’s also someone for whom we have no context. We don’t know why he was the way he was or why he did what he did. We only know what he did. Contrasting that with our Superman, who we have as much context for as we possibly can, when we see him angry and defending his family and his world and his way of life from a man ready to take that all away, we see that different. We see that our Superman could never be “evil” without some outside push, without something being taken away from him.
In John’s eyes, our Superman in a fit of defensive rage is no different from his Superman cutting Lois down with his heat vision. All he sees is an enemy to stop. He sees in that anger an inevitability. To us, we see something entirely different. We see a father, protective and angry, ready to take a step too far only to be brought back down to Earth by his nature and his family. Much like we saw last week when Superman was provoked by the DOD during the whole Tag thing. It’s, fundamentally, incredible drama. And I can’t wait to see where this show goes with this now.
