Wow, what an episode. I have to admit, looking back on them, I wasn’t sure what to think about where this season was going so far for Superman & Lois after its first two episodes, but things have rightfully kicked into high gear with this third episode and it’s pretty clear that the show is still taking no prisoners. It would be easy to rest on one’s laurels after putting out not only what I would consider the best season of superhero television in recent years (perhaps ever?), but also perhaps the definitive modern take on the Superman mythos, but this isn’t a show for that kind of thing. Everything set up in those prior episodes is deepened and developed even further in “The Thing In The Mines” and I have a lot to say about it; so let’s dispense with pleasantries and dig into this bad boy.
As always, spoilers are to follow. And I mean spoilers.
1. Heavy Is The Head
It would be easy to lose sight of Clark in the midst of everything going on in this show. The inter-personal drama that is continually pushed into focus means that the ensemble cast gets far more to do here than your average superhero show. Between Lois, the boys, John and Natalie, and the Cushings, there are a ton of elements vying for attention, but they are all united under one banner: the journey of Clark Kent from superhero to father to… well, where is he now? If anything, he’s regressed. I’m struck by how this episode develops the debilitating visions that have cropped up in the previous two episodes to a boiling point in which Clark is fully inert in the face of the emergent Doomsday. I noted last week that the ground seems to shrinking beneath Clark’s feet. With no understanding of what’s happening to him and, more importantly, no one in a position of power above him to give him guidance, he is scattered, disheveled and, ultimately, scared and adrift.
Which puts him, in many ways, in the same shoes that Jordan was in for most of last season. While Jordan learned so much from the stability of having a father experienced in the changes and trials he was facing, Clark lost as much as he gained. He lost his Fortress, he lost his father, he lost the stability of his early work/life balance and he upped sticks and moved into his childhood home in the hopes that shoring up his family around him would give him the strength he needs to find the resolve sorely lacking in both being the world’s saviour and a farmboy from Kansas seeking his place in the world. The visions of destruction that have been plaguing Clark are more than just portents, they are being enacted by Clark as the presence of this coming Doomsday grows. Tyler Hoechlin has never been better than he is here; lashing out, frantic and scared, he feels so utterly lost and alone and there is no one there to help him. He is, in many ways, his own Doomsday.
Seeing him break down to the point of using the same venting mechanism, of firing his heat vision uncontrollably into his own hands, broke my heart. He is as much the scared little boy who is vainly grasping at the strength to keep it all together and put on a brave face and go out into the world and pretend like everything is fine all the while he is breaking inside as his son was. And to see the scars on his hands, his own self-inflicted stigmata, standing as a stark reminder that while he may be the Man Of Steel without, that he may be able to walk into a room and fear no bodily harm from others, he is not made of steel within; and he cannot protect himself from all the power he holds inside when it is directed onto himself. It’s beautiful, darkly poetic, and in many ways it brings to mind James O’Barr’s The Crow. A story of a man so steeped in pain and tragedy that the only lasting damage that can be inflicted upon him is at his own hands. Which, as we will come to see, is all too apt.
Continued below2. How To Save A Town Like Smallville
Much of the previous two episodes now feel like a re-positioning of characters and ideas so that this episode could dig down into them and really begin to explore what the show is, ultimately, going to be about going forward. Lana’s endorsement of… that one guy whose name I can’t remember, but who exited the show immediately after being introduced as the new mayoral candidate was clearly just a way of pushing Lana into this position of actually running for Mayor, which I only find myself caring about through the ways in which this episode explores what that actually means for Lana and the town. Here, Smallville feels doomed. It has ever since Kyle sat at the Kents’s kitchen and expounded on all of the friends they knew from high school who ended up in big cities and just never came back. At the time, it felt pointed at Lois and Clark for obvious reasons, but I think about it now because that’s just been the way of it for towns like Smallville. That cycle that Kyle talked about, of going off into the city to do degrees and get good jobs in order to bring that material and personal wealth and fulfilment back to support the communities that raised them, that was broken a long time ago. Farms are run by corporations that employ only enough people to maintain the production created by mechanical processes. Cities exist as these amorphous habitats to house the multitudes that labour and toil in factories and offices, as cogs in the never-ending machine of production and consumption. They do not go home. They do not rejoin their community. They do not grow up, multiply and prosper.
So… how does one fix that? How does one enter that system and promise that they can be the one to change it, that they can use their position of power to support from the top in order to raise the lowest among us when even a position like town mayor is at the whim of corporate interests and a federal government that profits from the ceaseless grind towards total capitalist annihilation? Furthermore, how does one such as Lana do that from a position of such fallibility as she has been in? She fell for all the same lies Morgan Edge told the town, hell, she parroted them for the longest time. To the town, she’s as much a part of those systems that seek to drain Smallville of all it has left as Edge was. How does she embody that saviour that these people need while saving face from these past ignorances; how does she become this perfect ideal that, frankly, cannot be lived up to by the fallibility of flesh and blood?
While the culmination of this in “The Thing In The Mines” might come off as trite, being an Instagram Live from her kitchen, it demonstrates to me something that this show is keenly aware of: the person behind the saviour. Lana was never going to win over the town by making them believe her promises, especially from her given her history, but she could win over the town by showing them who she is as a person. By inviting them into her home and embodying the ideals she wants to set forth within the town: a community of openness, of togetherness. One supported on the basis of breaking down the barriers set up by the systems that seek to control us and embracing the inherent connection between us all in the pursuit of shelter, warmth, nourishment and comfort. It does, I’ll admit, come off as a little too “tradwife”-y and all that entails for my tastes, but it’s a step in an interesting direction for the show and not only do I hope that Lana will ultimately win the race for mayor, but I hope the show is able to put into practice these radical notions of change that it supposes here.
3. Secrets & Lies
I don’t know if I’ll necessarily make this a recurring thing, but splitting down this third point in order to examine how this episode’s varying subplots all link together to carry the theme of the episode is definitely something I’m stealing from last week’s breakdown. In “The Ties That Bind,” the show looked into the varying relationships at the core of Superman & Lois and the values that hold those relationships together and the things that threaten to tear them apart. Here, the word of the day is secrets. What secrets we keep and why we keep them and, more importantly, whether the pain inherent in keeping those secrets (the pain of both the keeper of the secret and those it is kept from) is worth it.
Continued belowThe big one here is Jordan and Sarah. Last week, Sarah came clean about what she had been keeping from Jordan and it’s caused quite a rift between them. Which is understandable, given that fifteen year olds rather handle something like infidelity with grace. It’s interesting to see Jordan wrestle with this revelation because, in many ways, he’s refusing to address the actual situation at hand; he doesn’t know how to sit down and talk with Sarah about boundaries and consent and where they want this relationship to go because, well, he’s fifteen and this is his first girlfriend. Instead, he’s swept up in the rush created by Sarah’s admission and subsequently crushed by the weight of his own secret. To him, the only way out from under all of this pressure is to come clean in the same way that Sarah did, to confess the guilt of secret-keeping that is eating him up inside. What I love about how this storyline interweaves with what’s going on in the main plot with Clark is that, if this was last season and Clark was his usual, level-headed, super-dad self, this could be sorted in a meaningful heart-to-heart and it would all blow over by dinnertime. Now, Clark still gets there in the end and tees Jordan up for some serious Good Boyfriend Points, but the drama of Jordan’s adolescent anxieties aren’t a weight that Clark can carry right now and it leads to an interesting subversion on the multitude of blow-out confrontations Clark and Jordan throughout last season where we get to see the same anger and frustration boil over in Clark as we’ve seen it do in Jordan. I have to wonder if we’ll begin to see Jordan begin to move out from the shadow of his father and find his own strength after seeing how fallible, vulnerable and how human Clark can really be.
Meanwhile, Jonathan’s got a drug dealer girlfriend and he’s about to get hooked on X-Kryptonite out of pure hubris. That’s a pretty unfairly succinct summation of Jonathan’s subplot in this episode, but it is what it is. Jonathan has been pushed and pushed and pushed further away from every sense of comfort and stability he ever had in life while in Metropolis and he will never get it back. He will never be the freshmen star quarterback with the great girlfriend and the crazy brother who makes him look like the golden child by comparison ever again. He will always be holding the wrench. And, fitting with the show’s readiness to dig much deeper into these characters psychologically and drum up their anxieties and demons, is giving into every base instinct that tells him that he needs that back. He needs that strength and he cannot find it in himself because he is weak. He is flesh that can be cut, he is bones that can be broken. He cannot see through walls, he cannot shoot fire or x-rays from his eyes. The best he can hope for is to learn how to drive to save from walking. This is a move I am very intrigued by and there is every chance for this to slip into corny, overly moralistic teenage drug use moralising from the CW, but given everything else that the show manages to get right, I really want to see where this goes.
4. Finding Meaning In The Meaningless
This stuff with Lois, her sister and this cult leader has been bubbling under the surface so far and, by the end of the episode, it’s almost ready to boil over. Now, Lucy Lane was a nothing character back when she was in Supergirl. I could not tell you a single thing about her that was established in that show, and I have to admit that her inclusion in this season wasn’t exactly something I had my hopes up about. Superman & Lois continues to be leaps and bounds ahead of any other live action superhero property on any screen and its ties to the Arrowverse is always something I am wary of as someone who, frankly, despises those other shows. I do not want this thing I like to be dragged down by its association with these other things I don’t, you see. After this episode, though, I am pretty invested in Lucy’s inclusion because of the way the show is using her and this introduction of Ally Adston and her cult as a way of exploring the trauma inherent in the Lane family.
Continued belowLois brought up her feelings surrounding her mother’s leaving and her absence in her life afterwards in this season’s premiere and we know for a fact that Sam isn’t the kind of dad to be able to fill that void, so it’s easy to see how that could turn a girl into the whip-smart, firebrand activist and fiercely independent woman she is today. You can see it in the thorough warmth and resolute determination with which she holds her own family together. That sense that no problem cannot be overcome through familial unity. It’s hard to know who she would have been had her mother stayed, but in spite of every hardship she went through to get there, she resolved to be both a committed wife and mother and a revolutionary journalist. Knowing what we do now about Lucy, even without her physical presence in the episodes, it’s interesting to see a mirror of that. A girl who lost a guiding light in her life, who was without that maternal presence, and while Lois hardened and took on so much of her father, both good and bad, it’s easy to see how someone like Lucy could become lost.
And how she could become found again. Given purpose. Given comfort and safety when it has been denied. Given a family when it has abandoned her. Lois’s self-sufficiency in how she conducts herself at home and at work is as much a strength as it is a weakness and perhaps it’s something Lucy was lacking entirely. She needed a saviour and likely found it in Adston. While the whole Doomsday thing is looking to hold up a mirror to Superman and the ideas of messiah and saviour inherent in the character, it’s interesting to see how over on Lois’s side of the story, that theme of questioning the saviour is still present. Why we need saviours, why we look to these people that promise guidance and surety in unsure times, and how we let them twist that and strip ourselves of our agency and presence in the face of them.
5. Under The Mines, Under The Weight Of The World
Doomsday is a figure of little interest to me, I have to admit. I was born in ’93 so the hype surrounding the death and return of Superman in the comics was long gone by the time I was reading them and all that lingered were the unfortunate aftermaths of an event built on cheap hype strung together by the need to do something, anything to keep Superman relevant in waning 20th century. Doomsday was a tool. Superman needed to die so that headlines could be written about it and DC needed a killer. Enter Doomsday. He was big and he was mean and he was, y’know, the Hulk with bone spikes and green pants and after killing Superman and letting the expies take over just long enough for interest to wane so that The Real Superman™ could return to an awaiting readership, Doomsday was quietly shuffled off into the wings where he would wait for someone else to take a crack at doing something interesting with him.
Grant Morrison, in their run writing “Action Comics” during the New 52, is maybe the only writer I can point to as having a solid, interesting idea of how to frame Superman’s Doomsday. Superdoom was a “killer franchise,” the idea of a saviour made manifest and then corrupted by corporate greed so that it came to consume and swallow whole every variation on itself until all that would remain is the corporate-approved, hegemonic monolith that could be stamped and reproduced and profited from. That, as far as Doomsdays go, at least provides something to chew unlike the many, many, many times in which he has been trotted out simply to echo his original intention by being the means with Superman can be killed so as to be resurrected. If Doomsday is to be the cross on which Superman must die for our sins, what is that to mean for the story being told?
Thankfully, Superman & Lois is here to remind us that Superman stories can actually be interesting and about themes which are worth discussing and analysing when you actually sit down and think about the story you’re telling for more than, y’know, not at all. His arrival being presaged by a debilitating connection to Clark, one which has escalated to the point of heightening every fear and anxiety and stressor in Clark’s life to a breaking point, lay the foundation for a twist that while I didn’t necessarily see coming, feels entirely right for this season. Right before the reveal of the face in that big ‘ol suit, I wrote in my notes: i hope this doomsday is clark of another world; one broken down and without humanity / somewhere between bizarro and doomsday is The Beast, the doomsday in the form of a broken superman to hold up a dark mirror against our perfect sun god saviour to show that he is just as tangible and fallible as any man.
And you’ll never guess what. Doomsday is Bizarro. Doomsday is the literally dark mirror of Superman. The backwards idol. The dark cosmonaut from the upside, cubed world where nothing makes sense. He has found his way here. After a season pontificating on every reason why Superman could, might, perhaps should, and ultimately does become the Evil Dictator Superman™ that so many stories have been obsessed with, and how he finds his way back from that, Superman & Lois is finally able to use the real, interesting subversion of Superman to explore just what this character means for us today. They did this for me, specifically, and I cannot wait to see where this goes. Boy, oh boy, things are about to get interesting.
