Welcome, welcome, welcome! With Superman & Lois‘s foray into Bizarro World firmly in the rearview mirror, the show sets its sights on the consequences of Jon-El’s arrival on the Kent farm and, boy, I cannot stop admiring how much this show refuses to pull its punches or rely on a status quo. But I don’t want to get into that too much right now.
Follow me as we dive into Superman & Lois‘s “Truth & Consequences” in Five Thoughts! As always, spoilers will follow.
1. Welcome Home, Clark
After last week’s absolute banger of an episode crammed in more than I thought we’d ever see of Bizarro World, it was nice to have this episode slow things down a tad. Sure, things started off with a bang as the episode’s opening followed up on Jon-El’s arrival on Kent farm with Jordan defending his brother before Clark’s triumphant return, but then it brought things back down to Earth after Jon-El booked it. The piecemeal revelation for Clark that he’s actually been absent for a month hangs over the episode, but is rarely addressed directly; a nice touch, I thought, as it served to heighten the tensions surrounding the threat of Jon-El. I’ll get into it more in the next thought, but it went a long way to make Clark’s erratic behaviour around Lana and even his own family stand out. He doesn’t get a chance to assess the world he left nor he does get much of a proper reunion. He just hits the ground running after a bizarre version of his own son as tensions escalate with every scene.
It’s a wise move, I think, because I don’t think there was much of a chance of the show matching the wild heights of the previous episode nor the character focused drama of “30 Days And 30 Nights.” Instead, it feels quite breathless as Clark is left trying to pick up the pieces of Jon-El’s reign of terror through Smallville. We do, thankfully, get to see Clark have a moment of reconciliation and reassurance with Jonathan, but with a whole month of difference in their perspectives, there’s simply no time to truly see things transition back to whatever normal is for this family or for things to move in a new direction. Instead, its focus is on a ratcheting tension that backs not just Clark, but the entire Kent family into a corner and forces them to admit that something’s gotta change for them to be able to handle this incredible threat. And a big change is coming, but more on that in a moment.
2. Father Vs. Son, Brother Vs. Brother
I was really impressed with Jordan Elsass’s turn as Jon-El last week and especially the very empathetic way the episode showed the varying perspectives surrounding what drove him into Ally’s clutches, however it was an episode far more interested in showcasing Jon-El as a victim than as a villain. A victim of his father’s callous disregard for his family. A victim of Ally’s poisonous manipulation. A victim of his unfortunate situation in life, driven by the fame hungry cult of personality surrounding the El family. It framed Jon-El as someone to be pitied, more than anything else. Here, though, Jon-El stands as one of the most frightening villains that Superman & Lois has introduced. While we’ve seen more than a few Kryptonian (or similarly powered) antagonists come and go across the two seasons so far, none that have been as smart or as devious as Jon-El. His knowledge of the Kent family and their close relations and friends makes him the perfect person to truly tear apart Clark’s world and he does it with so little remorse. Immediately targeting Clark’s relationship with Lana by doing as little as standing there. It’s a notably different performance than anything we’ve seen from Jordan Elsass thus far and it’s genuinely chilling and shows Jon-El’s vindictive streak as something insidiously evil. He seems to stalk the background of the episode while Clark and his family struggle to pick up the pieces of their lives. While Clark and Jonathan struggle to reconcile with each other. While Lois and Jordan talk over each other about how to move on from his heartbreak. All the while is the knowledge that Jon-El is out there somewhere, waiting to strike.
Continued belowAnd when it comes time for him to strike, it’s almost admirable how easy it is for him to dismantle Superman. Using Lana as bait not only allows him to summon his Lana from across the void, but plays entirely into Superman’s weaknesses. Of course Superman is willing to put himself in harm’s way to protect another, especially someone he’s as personally close to as Lana, and all he gets for his troubles is a chest full of Kryptonite shrapnel. What I really loved about this move is that not only does it take Superman out of action, but it means that the big climactic battle of the episode is a rematch between Jon-El and Jordan. The reason this impressed me so is that fights involving Superman always have to keep in mind that Clark is a character who wants to resolve the situation with as little violence as possible. With him out of the picture, it’s down to Jordan to defend his brother and mother from this interloper from a backwards world and what follows is a bloody, brutal (at least, by this show’s standards), knock-down, drag-out brawl between Jordan and Jon-El. It stands as an apotheosis moment for everything Jordan has learned over this season. His training not just pays off, but he’s well on his way to being a completely different man than he was on track to become back in Metropolis. One Superboy versus another, and it’s pretty clear who comes out on top.
3. The Secrets We Keep
The big throughline of this episode, as can be gleaned even by the title, is truth. We’ve seen, on more than one occasion, the trouble caused by Clark’s secret identity on this show. Hell, the entire premise of the show’s pilot was built around Clark revealing his identity as Superman to his sons. With the danger posed by Ally Alston and her lackeys on the other side of the portal feeling closer to home than ever, this episode looks at the different ways the Kent family is straining against the secret that hangs over all of them. For the most part, it comes in the form of both Clark’s friendship with Lana and Jordan’s relationship with Sarah. Both are intertwined on a number of levels, but the frustration that the Clark and Jordan feel when they cannot be open about their lives to Lana and Sarah is at the forefront here. That’s a frustration pushed to its limit by the arrival of Jon-El. It might’ve been possible, once upon a time, for Superman and Tal-Roh’s fight over the souls of Smallville to be distanced from the Kents for the sake of their identities, but when it’s literally just Goth Jonathan targeting Lana there’s not a whole lot to do.
As Lois says in the episode, the family really does feel like it’s been drifting apart. Jordan’s growing control over his power has given him a newfound confidence that has manifested as something of a rebellious streak. Jonathan, in sticking to the principles instilled in him by his parents, has driven a wedge between him and them in a way that has irrevocably changed their relationship. Clark hasn’t been around for a whole month and Lois has been left to keep this whole ship afloat by herself. With everything that has happened this season, with how much the members of this family have had to change and grow, it’s about time that they really start to think about where the go next. And, as we’ll see by the end of this, the show still isn’t afraid to pull out the big guns in terms of major status quo shifts. It’s something I find genuinely admirable about the direction of Superman & Lois overall: while other CW shows like Arrow or The Flash leant heavily on an episodic status quo that only really shifted at the end of seasons, every episode of Superman & Lois feels like another brick being added to an overall narrative. It’s these sweeping changes that make coming back to this show each week feel so utterly exciting for me.
4. What To Do About The Irons
That being said… they do seem to be struggling to make Natalie and John Henry feel relevant, aren’t they? Between juggling their living situations and even writing them out of the show for a number of episodes, I had thought that setting them up with their own place would give the show an opportunity to involve them interesting ways, but I don’t really know if this is it. Sure, whatever device that the Natalie is devising and whatever plans John Henry has for the portal are sure to be important as the season ramps towards its finale, but how this episode got there was pretty underwhelming. With the tensions in every other plotthread of this episode being so high, every time it cut to Natalie and John Henry felt like a deflation. It was certainly more interesting once Bizarro Lana got involved, but this thing they’re teasing of John Henry keeping Natalie out of the loop simply to keep her safe feels like both trite drama and such an obvious lead-in to Natalie getting her own warsuit and I’m left wondering… why?
Continued belowThis season has made the threat towards Superman and his family more personal than ever, but that’s left the Irons out in the cold. Even the Lang/Cushing/Cortez family have had more to do this season than John Henry and Natalie. It makes me genuinely wonder about what they were thinking in bringing Natalie into the fold in the first place. It made for a hell of a season one cliffhanger, sure, but what’s really come of it? Some episodes where she and Lois have struggled to reconcile their odd connection, a couple where Natalie was mad at Clark for letting her dad get injured in the line of battle, but is that it? Is that the best they can do with these two? Wolé Parks has shown time and again that he’s one of the best performers on the show and Tayler Buck has certainly ingratiated herself into the cast well, but the material just isn’t there for them. After the incredibly heartfelt story with the two in “30 Days And 30 Nights,” I was really hoping for more here and it left me feeling like it could be a rote b-plot from any of the other DC/CW shows of the past. I have my fingers crossed for better for the Irons as we move towards the finale, but I don’t have my hopes up.
5. Why Are They Secrets?
Well, this was a surprise, and a welcome one, to be sure. As I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest strengths of Superman & Lois is its commitment to a constantly evolving serialised narrative. Each episode is a brick added to the wall that is the big picture narrative of the show. Not only does it mean that the show isn’t necessarily interested in catering to casual, first time viewers jumping into any random episode they catch on TV, but it means it can take swings like this. Clark finally reveals that he’s Superman to Lana. It’s something we’ve seen in various other interpretations, but what worked for me here was the commitment to Clark and Lana’s friendship so far. It was, fundamentally, built on the fact that, to Lana, Clark was just her friend from high school. There’s no way she would ever associate him with Superman outside of Superman’s working relationship with Lois and Clark as reporters. Does it make it incredibly silly when Lana can’t tell that Superman is really Clark Kent, despite having ripped shards of kryptonite out of his chest, until after Clark takes off his glasses? Yes! That’s the charm of this whole goddamn show and if you’re not on board with that by now, I can’t help you.
What really makes excited about this is possibilities it opens up for the show. It’s the second half of the title, after all, this show has always been about consequences and I simply cannot wait to see how this show handles the fallout of such a monumental bombshell. It’s the aspect of this episode that has really stayed with me all through writing this, something I’ve had to dodge talking about in every prior Thought, because my mind is simply racing wondering where it can go next. I’ve learned, time and again, not to try and second guess this show, but this is simply a case of barely being able to wait out the rest of the goddamn month until I can see what happens next. God, this show is good.
