Well, been a minute, huh? It’s been nearly half a year since we last saw Smallville and the first season of Superman & Lois wrapped up. While I had planned to do a longform piece on that opening season and how it answered my call for a radical, modern interpretation of the Man Of Steel, life kind of got in the way. You know how it foes. Maybe I’ll still get around to it one day.
But that’s not what we’re here for today, is it? Today, we’re here because Superman & Lois has returned for its second season and if you were expecting an explosive, action-packed opening… well, I don’t know what show you’ve been watching. This isn’t a show that goes in for that kind of thing. So, what are the Kents getting up to as this second season kicks off? Well, let’s dive in and find out. Oh, and spoilers below.
1. Worlds Collide / Picking Up The Pieces
While it may have been one of the strangest times of our lives these past five months, especially that Holiday period, this episode opening right where we left off brought me all the way back to where we were when we last saw Smallville. Tal-Roh and the Eradicator plot have been defeated. The Kents are finally looking forward to living their life in Smallville and rebuilding the town and their relationships therein and then wham. A pod falls from the sky. An orphan from a dead world (or, well, dead universe) steps out onto the sunlight and the cornfields of Kent farm and… she looks at Lois and calls her mom. It was an Earth-shattering revelation at the end of last season to see Natalie Irons, alive and well, step out of that pod and, thankfully, it hasn’t turned out to be the empty, last second twist ending that I secretly worried it might be.
“What Lies Beneath” picks up three months later and things aren’t quite as settled as you might have expected them to. Lois is still struggling with seeing the daughter she never had from a world that doesn’t exist standing in front of her and with no idea how to cope with that, it’s put a stressor on everything else going on in the lives of the Kents. Her relationship with Clark is strained further than we’ve ever seen it, she’s become overbearingly watchful of her sons without any of the warmth and care that she had shown prior and it’s lead to a fractured household. Jordan has put all his attention in welcoming Sarah back from camp even if Sarah might not be on the same wavelength, Jonathan has found a new squeeze, Candice, and is certainly trying to do some squeezing and as we catch up with the Cushings and the Irons, we see that things aren’t exactly all comfy cosy as they should be.
This episode made me reflect a lot on the show’s premiere and all the ways it surprised me, now close to a year ago. When you say “Superman show on the CW,” there are many things that come to mind and a pilot exploring loss and grief and family tensions in rundown, small town America, one that prioritised Clark Kent’s life over Superman’s, wasn’t exactly at the forefront. This show has always kept me on my toes and while this season opener didn’t contain any massive shocks, the way it explored the fallout of last season’s closer continues to show how much it prioritises characterful, communal storytelling over superhero bombast and how that makes for damn fine television.
2. The State Of The Town
As much as things aren’t exactly cushty for our characters, the same isn’t entirely true for Smallville. Three months is enough time for a town to pick itself up, dust itself off and get back to work. With Morgan Edge gone, there’s certainly a power vacuum to be filled and so enter Daniel Hart. We don’t get much of him in this episode besides the fact that Lana vouches for him for mayor and how that split focus has put some strain on Lana and Kyle’s relationship — which culminates in a really sweet scene where Clark and Lana vent about their surprisingly similar relationship troubles before reconciling with their respective partners — but it’s still fun to see the show continue to put such a focus on Smallville. Sure, the way Emily Phan and Coach Gaines hound Hart at the get-together is a little hammy for my tastes, but I’m interested to see what the show does with this guy and how much the show will continue to explore the politics and practicalities of small town living in current year America (albeit one without the C-word).
Continued belowMeanwhile, across town, things aren’t looking too hot for the Smallville Gazette. Sure, when there was the drive to uncover the story behind Morgan Edge, Christie and Lois could make do with their skeleton crew of, well, literally just the two of them, but it’s been three months since that story wrapped. A newspaper needs newspeople to survive and with Lois’s inability to grapple with her feelings over Natalie and that whole situation bleeding into the tensions in all aspects of her life, things are suffering. Given how all that plays out later in the episode, I really hope we get to see more of a development of the Gazette as the season plays out. Lois is, obviously, as much a pivotal role in this show as Clark is and, in many ways, the Gazette is her superhero persona, her costume to go out into the world and make a difference. Sure, poking fun at new media and social media as a way of showing how off-kilter Lois is makes for a fun scene and all, but I want to see the show build on that feeling of the Gazette as Lois’s equivalent of Clark’s role as Superman. I want to see what this paper becomes and how it can make a difference in town and to lives of the people there.
3. Man Of Visions, Man Of Priorities
To me, the first season of this show was about building a Superman from the ground up. We’ve seen so many takes on the character put the icon before the man and coming off of how visible Zack Snyder and Henry Cavill’s take on the character was, one who grappled with the responsibility and consequences and inherent destiny of the mantle of Superman, it was nice to see a Clark Kent with normal problems. His youthful prime in Metropolis is past. The days of balancing his secret identity with the ever inquisitive nose of Lois Lane are long gone and replaced with a marriage and sons and the responsibility of actual being a patriarch in not just a thematic sense. It took a massive change of lifestyle and location to get him in a place where he could even remotely balance all of those things and we finally saw the apotheosis of that come in the form of defeating Tal-Roh and the Eradicator with the strength of his family around him.
So, now what? Where does Superman go from there? Well, this episode throws two major curveballs his way and I’m very intrigued by both. The first is a series of debilitating visions that complicate his rescue of a North Korean submarine and, later, his response to a suspicious earthquake at the same mines where Edge found the X-Kryptonite. Finding weaknesses and vulnerabilities that aren’t just Kryptonite in stories about Superman has always been a struggle for writers of the character ever since he was taken out of the hands of Siegel and Shuster and this show’s first season did a fantastic job of making the balance of his work and family life the vulnerability that had to be overcome. That’s been done, now, though, you can’t just keep returning to the well of “Oh no! Jonathan’s in trouble and Superman is off fighting Parasite on the other side of the country!” every episode and since Jonathan and Jordan are standing firmly on their own two feet, it’s time to make Superman’s troubles be about Superman.
I’ll save much of the talk about the visions as they’re really just a ploy here to make a standard sub rescue more complicated (and to set up for whatever the visions are telegraphing) and focus instead on the other major curveball: Lieutenant Anderson. With Sam Lane stepping away from the DOD, Superman needs a new liaison with the American military and putting in Sam’s place someone who doesn’t have that unique relationship with Superman (and, more importantly, with Clark) really shakes things up. Anderson doesn’t necessarily see the man behind the S. He may see all the good deeds Superman does, but he also seems to see him as a tool to use and to be kept under the chain of command. There’s no leeway for Superman to operate outside of Anderson’s and, by extension, his superior’s interests. Remember how I mentioned that sub being North Korean? Yeah, that’s a problem for American interests even if it is a no-brainer of a situation for Superman. It’s funny because this is often the kind of relationship that Sam and Clark have had in their early days in the comics and seeing it re-interpreted with Anderson, someone who is a distant and remote consideration, after coming off of a season that developed the relationship that Sam and Clark had as both people and relatives makes it all the more interesting to see where these two go in the future. As I often say, I can’t wait to see it.
Continued below4. The Couple That Never Argue / You Are Not Your Mother
The heart of this show has always been Lois and Clark. Hell, it’s in the title. They are the first couple of superhero comics and, realistically, no one’s ever really figured out what to do with them since they first got married. I mean, how do you juggle stories in which Superman punches a big robot with the trials and tribulations of married life and have each side of that equally matter? The real trick of Superman & Lois is that, somehow, they’ve managed to nail that balance with two of the most perfect actors to ever step into the shoes of these characters. It’s impossible for me to imagine this show with anyone else in the title roles and this episode really shows that by having the two of them go through a pretty ordinary spat. There’s no big argument to be had here, there’s nothing Earth-shattering happening. Lois is going through it and isolating herself from her own emotions and not letting Clark help and by not letting Clark help, she’s turning her frustrations on him for wanting to help. It’s a rough cycle, but one that feels incredibly genuine and you can see the tensions of three months of this wearing down on them.
I remember thinking, back when the first season revealed Lois’s miscarriage and built an entire episode around her still trying to emotionally deal with that, that this show has done more for Lois Lane than it has, perhaps, for Superman. Tyler Hoechlin’s Superman is as back-to-basics as it gets and a lot of the charm of the show comes from his performance and the way the show is able to smartly balance the cheese and schlock of Superman as a concept with the character drama it brings to the forefront of each episode and it’s through Lois that it primarily does so. Bitsie Tulloch gets almost all of the emotional heavy lifting to do in this episode as she deals with the whole Natalie situation and it all coming to a head with her admitting that she feels like it has given her a look into what her mother experienced when she left Lois and her sister was heartbreaking. I tried not to guess how they’d deal with the Natalie thing because I want to let myself be surprised by this show and it always seems to work. Your average CW superhero show would have strung out these emotions all season in empty, reiterative scenes before a saccharine conclusion, but this one episode eschews all of that. Lois’s emotions (and Natalie’s struggle to find belonging on this strange world) are perfectly readable and understandable and the entire episode is built on the tension that puts on her and her family and how that ripples outward.
To have that brought to a head and resolved in this episode was done wonderfully and allows the show to go to places that I can’t expect from here. That’s what keeps bringing me back week after week to this show and why I can’t get enough of this. This is the gold standard for telling superhero stories in live action, as far as I’m concerned.
5. What Lies Beneath
The way this show manages to balance interesting and thoughtful character drama with schlocky superhero tropes will always make me laugh because it will follow up a genuinely heartwarming scene of Lois welcoming Natalie and John Henry into her and her family’s life with the promise that the season will explore how Natalie finds her belonging in this world… with a tease that there’s something at the bottom of the mines trying to get out. I’m not exactly one to sit and speculate on who or what might be down there because I spent most of last season avoiding speculation and it led to the show genuinely surprising me with both the reveal of the Stranger as John Henry Irons and of Morgan Edge as Tal-Roh. This isn’t a show that’s interested in garnering empty speculation about these teases because, more often than not, it ends up answering them the next week and then using them to push the story in new directions. It’s all about the heart of the story, the family at the centre of it all, and how these larger than life events affect them going forward.
I don’t know if I expect this season to be bigger and more epic or whatever terms we’re throwing around these days because that’s not what I come to this show for. I come to this show for, well, what lies beneath the surface. For the ways in which it explores and interrogates the iconography of the world’s most recognisable superhero and the man he is underneath the cape and costume. I don’t care if it’s Doomsday underneath the mines or if it’s something completely out of left field. What I do care about is how whoever or whatever is down there is used to further the emotional and characterful drama; that’s the real reason to watch this show and given how this first episode went, I fully trust that this season is on the right track to deliver something special.
