Oh, boy, I haven’t been able to wait to dig my teeth into this episode. Last week we saw that not only has Morgan Edge included Kyle Cushing in his plans for world domination, implanting him with the consciousness of a dead Kryptonian, but also that (spoiler alert!) Morgan Edge himself is Kryptonian! And called Superman brother! I’ve been chewing over what could happen next all week and I can’t wait to dive in a break down Superman & Lois‘s “O Mother, Where Art Thou?”
As always, spoilers will follow.
1. Oh, Brother, or A Child Of Two Worlds
Superman not being the last son of Krypton has been a factor in the comics for decades now, going as far back as the introduction of Supergirl and Krypto and is still being toyed with in more recent stories like the return of Jor-El. It’s something the comics swing on a pendulum, going from embracing a wide cast of Kryptonian family members for Superman to surround himself with to shunning the idea in order to bring him back to basics. We’ve also seen a number of stories in which a Kryptonian comes to Earth with the plans of resurrecting Krypton on the bones of Earth. Hell, it’s the basis of Man Of Steel. In fact, I find it interesting that Superman & Lois was noted for having a visual aesthetic basically ripped from Man Of Steel when now, most of the season in, it also feels like it took a lot of story cues from the film as well.
What’s different for me here, though, is the changing of context in which this problem is presented. This is not a young Superman fresh on the scene whose first real villain is presenting him a choice as to what world he swears allegiance to after spending his entire life in hiding, bullied and shunned for his existence. This is a Superman who has a home here. Who is entrenched, with a family, in living on Earth and among humans. Presenting him not just with another Kryptonian, but a brother who wants more than anything to bring back their world and their mother, even if it means destroying humanity, is a juicy conflict. I loved it and while it is brought up once, I love that the show doesn’t have to make it totally explicit that this same scenario happened to a Superman with far weaker ties to Earth and humanity on John Henry’s world. Suddenly, that Superman’s turn feels completely understandable even without the show having to make it entirely explicit.
2. Father Of The Year
Man, Kyle’s had a rough time. I’ve stuck up for him a number of times while reviewing this show because I really, genuinely feel like the show’s done a good job of making him a more realistically flawed and rounded character beyond just being a small town, hypermasculine dad. His inferiority complex, his feeling of needing to be a patriach and provide for his family when he just can’t catch a break leads him to repressing his emotions and it distances him from his family. This is that, turned up to eleven in order to hit it’s breaking point. There’s nowhere left for them to drag out the deadbeat dad stuff without either Lana kicking Kyle out or him changing his ways and I really commend the show not just for making the latter work and feel earned, but in also tying it into the overall narrative.
I love the way the Cushings have been incorporated from this story from the start, not just as the family next door, but as real characters with their own story and arc that has been affected by the presence of Superman in Smallville. Their lives changed immeasurably when Clark and Lois moved into town and no one could have seen how far the ripples would take them, but they’re entwined and I think it’s an important part of the overall theming of the show that their proximity to Superman also allows them a happy ending. By being in a Superman story, they become better just by the nature of being in his orbit. That’s how you should be telling stories about Superman.
Continued below3. Smallville Under Siege
Boy, I knew this had to happen eventually what with Sam staying in town and an army of Kryptonians hiding in plain sight, but seeing the US military in almost every scene of this episode was a trip. While I liked their omnipresence as a factor of things feeling out of sort to a point of worry, as I would imagine it feels to see soldiers in your small town in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, there’s also my personal weirdness with seeing such a militarised presence in this show. I know, I know. I’m bringing politics into it again, it’s just weird that a show that seems to be so on the ball about how the villain’s plan is alien colonialism and why that’s bad and Superman should aim for a better solution, not just punch him until he gives up, to not really mention that the Army being so present in the show is also an example of colonialism that, y’know, happens in our world where there aren’t alien despots. I don’t know, it was something crawling in the back of my mind during this episode and couldn’t shake it. I’d like to see the show address its use of the military more than just saying that Sam is one of the good ones because he’s Lois’s dad.
4. Lana Lor-Van
This was lovely. Honestly, I was smiling like a peach during this whole thing. It was set up perfectly, it made perfect sense in terms of the narrative flow of the episode and not only was it pretty cool, it lead to maybe my favourite scene in the show so far. Much has been made of Superman’s two dads. Jor-El, the space dad who sent his baby in a basket down the river in the hopes that whatever home would find him would give him a better life than on his doomed homeworld, and Jonathan, the kindly farmer raising a sun god from outer space to be a good and kind person. Less emphasis is put on his two mothers, at least, we really only get to see Martha’s side of things. Many tellings paint Lara as little more than Jor-El’s wife to be sacrificed to the origin story planet explosion. Here, though, getting to see her reunite with her son, if through the medium of Lana’s body, was really touching.
Jor-El is often Kal-El’s teacher in his afterlife, a programmed consciousness to guide him, but he can never truly be a father to him after his death. Clark getting a moment, especially in the wake of Martha’s death, to say “Hey, Ma, I made it.” is one of the greatest Superman moments I’ve ever seen, comics or otherwise. This is why I keep coming back to this show. They have a finger on the pulse of what makes the character tick more than anyone else going and they’re using that to tell what might be retreaded story, but in a way no one else has before them. That’s good telly.
5. The Power Of Family
I love how this show uses its theming. I’ve talked about its theme of consequences and family so many times, I worry that I’m actually going to run out of ways to rephrase it as we approach the end of the season, but I find it a marvel that an episode with this many moving parts all felt connected but its overarching theme of family. There is no us or them, as Clark puts it. It’s all just us, in here, together. And we’ve all we’ve got. All life is one big family, all looking out for each other, just like a small farm town in the middle of Kansas writ large. And this show gets that so even when the threat is Superman’s long lost brother who landed in Britain and was subjected to abuse and torture and now wants to resurrect Kryptonian with a magic space computer and some space rocks, the moral underpinning of that story and the characters within that story are about family. It’s just really solid writing and even as the show embraces even more goofing, comic book plotting and goes whole hog on Superman using a silly MacGuffin to save the day from an army of Kryptonians in the bodies of Smallville townspeople, it works because there’s such a strong moral fibre to the story that exemplifies everything Superman stands for.
