Broadcast TV Superman & Lois - Season 2 (The CW) (1 Viewer)

[Adam Lenhardt]

The second season of the newest adventures of Superman (and family) will premiere at mid-season on the CW.

Season 1 thread

When we last left the Kent farm:

• Superman and Steel had teamed up to defeat the Kryptonian army, who had taken over the bodies of General Lane's soldiers.
• Lois freed her superpowered son from Zeta-Rho’s takeover of his body, moments before he choked his non-superpowered brother to death.
• Tal-Rho and Leslie Larr were safely in military custody.
• Lois bought half of the Smallville Gazette, which she now co-runs with Chrissy.
• General Lane decided to retired from the military to spend more time with his family.
• Jor-El received a proper memorial service as the Kent family buried what remained of his memory crystal.
• Sarah and Jordan got together.
• Natalie, Lois's daughter with John Henry Irons from another universe, crash landed in Kansas.

Casting news:

• Tayler Buck, who recurred as Natalie Irons in the glimpses we got of John Henry Irons's Earth, has been promoted to series regular.
• Sofia Hasmik, who recurred during the first season as Lois's editor at the local Smallville newspaper, has also been promoted to series regular.
• Ian Bohen will play Lt. Mitch Anderson, the Department of Defense's new point person for supervillain threats and dislikes Superman's status as an independent operator.
• Djouliet Amara will recur during the second season as "a new student at Smallville High whose past is riddled with secrets."
• Jenna Dewan will recur as Lucy Lane, Lois's younger sister. Dewan previously played the character for 13 episodes during the inaugural run of "Supergirl" on CBS. "Superman & Lois" is technically a spinoff of "Supergirl", but on "Supergirl" General Lane was played by Glenn Morshower while Dylan Walsh plays the character here. Crisis on Infinite Earths merged Earth-1 and Earth-38 (among others) into a new Earth-Prime; as such, the pre-Crisis events of the other Arrowverse shows are not necessarily still canon here.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

 

[ponset]

BTS photo of Lucy and Lois Lane.

 

[ponset]

BTS photo of Clark and Lois.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Trailer:

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

New poster:

 

[Walter Kittel]

Looking forward to the return of this series.

- Walter.

 

[Garysb]

Does Superman owe his allegiance to the USA or the world is a theme for Season 2.

Superman & Lois Season 2 Explores the Man of Steel’s Allegiance to America

Whose hero is he, anyway? That's one of several key questions tackled in Tuesday's season premiere of 'Superman & Lois.'

tvline.com

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Looking forward to the second season premiere tomorrow.

Does Superman owe his allegiance to the USA or the world is a theme for Season 2.

Superman & Lois Season 2 Explores the Man of Steel’s Allegiance to America

Whose hero is he, anyway? That's one of several key questions tackled in Tuesday's season premiere of 'Superman & Lois.'

tvline.com

The change of Superman's official slogan from "Trust, Justice, and the American Way" to "Trust Justice, and a Better Tomorrow" has been controversial, to say the least, but this show does a better job of most depictions of the character in really engaging with that slogan.

The show's Clark Kent is a proud Kansan who loved growing up in rural small town America. His unwillingness for Superman to be identified as American isn't a rejection of America. Instead, it's an understanding that -- as one of the most powerful beings on the planet -- he can't be seen as an agent of any one nation. To commit in such a way would convince the other powerful nations of the world that they need their own super being, and the superhuman arms race is not likely to end well.

 

[Garysb]

Here is a link to an unpublished Superman Comic written in 1940 where Lois found out Clark was Superman. When DC decided to keep Lois in the dark the story was scraped. Some original art work was discovered and restored, the majority is a modern recreation in the style of the time. This story also has the earliest introduction of Kryptonite, ahead of its introduction on the radio show to give Bud Collyer, the radio voice of Superman, time off.

http://theages.superman.nu/k-metal/?page=0&w=1280

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Good to have this one back.

The nice thing about the three month time jump is that it allowed the characters a period of normalcy. Smallville's settling back down again, even benefiting from the tourism that has resulted from last season's climactic battle, and Superman's well-publicized role in it. The stakes, when we pick things up are very grounded: Lois is grappling with guilt and her own feelings of abandonment, and her unwillingness to open it about it is creating tension in her marriage; Jonathan is getting the playing time he wants on the football field; Jordan's girlfriend went away to camp, and now she's acting distant; Kyle is jealous of the mayoral candidate Lana is backing, even though he understands why she's so invested in ousting the incumbent. I like the family stuff and the small town stuff is just as important to the show, if not more important, than the superheroics.

At the same time, the show doesn't skimp with the superheroics. Superman saving the North Korean sub was another standout sequence.

I like how affable General Lane's replacement is at the DoD. He got the job because he idolized Superman, and their rift ultimately comes down to ideology. Superman sees himself as Earth's protector, while Anderson needs him to be America's protector. And now, in lieu of that, he's dressing his own superpowered recruits up in the S shield and sending them out into the world. That's not necessarily a bad thing; just like the rest of America's military, they are capable of doing a lot of good. But they're green in ways that this iteration of Superman in particular is not. And they've taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;, to bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and to obey the orders of the president of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over them. They're part of a command structure in a way that Superman is not. And much like nuclear weapons, superhumans under such conditions are only as good as the people giving them their orders.

The stuff with Natalie Irons was just heartbreaking. Imagine literally tearing through the fabric of the universe to find your dad, succeeding, and then immediately being rejected by a woman who looks exactly like your mother -- a woman who is genetically indistinguishable from your mother, alike in just about every facet of her being except for the parts that your mother shared with you. And then going back to school, and seeing lots of familiar faces of people you knew really well. But none of them know you. It's like the scenario from It's a Wonderful Life, where Clarence shows George Bailey what the world would be like if he'd never been born. Except, in this case, the world where Natalie was never born is so much better than the world she's from. Imagine, seeing the world without you and feeling like it's better off. That just horrific.

And that ties back to Lois's mom walking out and Sam, Lucy, and her when she was younger. It makes me wonder if Lois's mom will be making an appearance later this season. But in this case, even though she has no immediate maternal feelings toward Natalie, her own sense of abandonment allows her to empathize with this girl from another universe. It's a way in, a way for them to begin to build their own relationship separate from the relationship Natalie had with the Lois of her world.

And so now we've got one of the most bizarre blended families ever:

• Clark Kent: An alien from another planet, raised in Kansas, Earth's protector. Perfect doppelganger of the alien who destroyed another Earth.
• Lois Lane: The alien's human wife. Her doppelganger was brutally murdered by her husband's doppelganger on that other Earth.
• Jonathan Kent: Clark and Lois's human-alien hybrid son, who thus far has not displayed any superhuman abilities.
• Jordan Kent: Clark and Lois's human-alien hybrid son, who very much has displayed several superhuman abilities.
• John Henry Irons: A human from another universe, who had been married to Lois's doppelganger before Clark's doppelganger made him a widower.
• Natalie Irons: Another human from another universe, daughter of Lois's doppelganger, sworn enemy of Clark's doppelganger, but genetic half-sister of Clark's two sons.

 

[NeilO]

It was a solid premiere episode. It took me a bit to figure out that Anderson's people didn't cause the earthquake. We appear to get a glimpse of what is behind that at the end. It should be an interesting season.

 

[jayembee]

The ending seems obvious to me. Which means that it really is obvious where this is going, or it's a red herring.

One word:

Spoiler

Doomsday

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Superman trusting that Tal-Rho had really been depowered was one of the first truly groan-worthy moments of stupidity on this show, which has mostly avoided the serial stupidity of the other Arrowverse shows. I did like getting more information about how the crystals work; they're basically snapshots of the person's consciousness at a moment in time. Tal-Rho's crystal of Lara was made before Kal-El's crystal of Lara, so the information possessed by this version of Lara is far less complete. Presumably the consciousness stored in the Eradicator that (briefly) possessed Lana was the latest iteration of Lara's consciousness.

I continue to be completely fascinated by the new blended family dynamic in the Kent-Lane-Irons household, where all the characters are related through blood with no more than two degrees of separation, yet the Kent family and the Irons family are complete strangers. And John Henry Irons, still mourning his murdered wife, has to watch as her doppelganger lives a happy life with another man.

We didn't really get to see much of the sibling dynamic between Natalie and her two (sort of) half-brothers, but the scenes between Natalie and Sarah were instructive. Natalie wasn't a gearhead just because she needed to be to stop her world's Superman; like her father, she genuinely likes tinkering with machines, and she's good at it. And she gave Sarah genuinely good advice: Either come clean, or find a better way of living with the secret. Natalie, like the Kent boys, knows something about keeping secrets.

And then when Sarah fesses up to Jordan than she kissed someone else, he just retreats. And the thing is, he kind of has to. He's not a saint like Clark, but he doesn't have the luxury of being an immature adolescent. If he lets his feelings go, terrible things will happen.

Likewise, I enjoyed the conversation between Superman and Lt. General Anderson. It wasn't overly antagonistic, but it was frank: If Superman is not going to operate within DoD's command structure, he can't be relying on DoD infrastructure and support. He's got to either be in or be out. There's an argument to be made that it's in the national security interests of the United States for Superman to have as much support as possible when it comes to unknown forces that are compromising him, given the risk he poses to the world if he goes completely off the reservation. But Anderson's not wrong to establish boundaries; unlike General Lane, he has no reason to mix the professional and the personal.

The tidbit about Lois's sister is interesting too. We know that the same actress who played Lucy on "Supergirl" is reprising the role here. But whereas in that show she was a uniformed lawyer in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, it sounds like she went down a very different path in the post-"Crisis" continuity.

Based on that beat at the end, it sure sounds like someone opened a portal to another world or another dimension, and whatever's punching its way up from inside the Earth is what came through.

 

[NeilO]

Superman trusting that Tal-Rho had really been depowered was one of the first truly groan-worthy moments of stupidity on this show

Yes, that was disappointing there.

And then when Sarah fesses up to Jordan than she kissed someone else, he just retreats. And the thing is, he kind of has to. He's not a saint like Clark, but he doesn't have the luxury of being an immature adolescent. If he lets his feelings go, terrible things will happen.

....

Based on that beat at the end, it sure sounds like someone opened a portal to another world or another dimension, and whatever's punching its way up from inside the Earth is what came through.

One thing about Jordan, he quit the football team last season, but I am surprised that no one at school has tried to convince him to rejoin this season.

I was also disappointed that the this new company was responsible for opening the portal and thus causing these earthquakes. She seemed very interested. I wonder what they hope to gain from it. Is it worth all the lives they've already lost?

 

[NeilO]

Another interesting episode. Lois had the great line that went something like

Spoiler

it is not doomsday

and we see that it looks like it isn't. Instead is appears to be

Spoiler

Bizarro Superman

. It is quite an interesting take on that. I have no idea where they are going with it, but I do hope John Henry reports what happened to him.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I liked this episode a lot. This show continues to find a compelling balance between the superhero stuff and the personal/local stuff.

Another interesting episode. Lois had the great line that went something like

Spoiler

it is not doomsday

and we see that it looks like it isn't. Instead is appears to be

Spoiler

Bizarro Superman

. It is quite an interesting take on that. I have no idea where they are going with it, but I do hope John Henry reports what happened to him.

Yeah, all of the foreshadowing was definitely a red herring, but I do think what we'd seen better fits with Bizarro than with Doomsday. We know from the other Arrowverse shows that bad things happen when two versions of the same person from different universes coexist in the same one for too long. John Henry Irons and Natalie both have specific reasons they're not affected: The version of John Henry Irons native to the Arrowverse Earth died before he arrived, and Natalie never existed on this Earth.

One of the tricky things with Superman is creating stakes since he's mostly invulnerable. His vulnerability this season is, I think, more interesting than having him be in significant physical danger. Instead, the vulnerability comes from not being able to trust himself, when his role as Earth's savior has always depended on having ironclad self-control. It also highlights one of the things that makes Superman stand apart from the other Arrowverse heroes, which is that he mostly works alone. Now he's in a situation where that's no longer an option, and he has to work through letting others put themselves at risk for their common goal.

On the flip side, the conversation between John Henry and Natalie at the end was a good reminder that they're survivors of a war zone, and there's a certain hardness that comes with that. Once Natalie accepts that John Henry is going to continue suiting up as Steel, she redirects her anxiety for his safety toward the pragmatic question of how the risk can be minimized as much as possible. That conversation is one that 99.9 percent of fathers and daughters would be lucky enough to never understand.

But the upside of this blended family dynamic is that the younger generation can lean on one another. When it all gets too much, they can be each other's normal. In the Kent boys, Natalie has people who understand what it's like to have a very unusual father with a very unusual and dangerous job. And vice-versa for Jonathan and Jordan. This situation isn't easy, but at least these kids have each other.

I loved how well Sam Lane adapted to retirement. The obvious choice would have been to have him stir crazy without his job, but having him loving fishing and taking it easy was so much better. And Dylan Walsh is able to bring a new vulnerability to the character now that he's out of uniform and not carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

The X-Kryptonite from the mines being used as a sort of street drug plays off of the meteor freaks from "Smallville", but in the more grounded way this show excels at. And rather than write Jonathan's girlfriend off for dealing drugs, the show takes a moment to observe why she's doing it. This is a very marginalized community, and a lot of people are just barely hanging on. For Jonathan's girlfriend, dealing is a way to keep the lights on and food in the pantry.

Jonathan opting to juice, however, is not going to end well. For one thing, he's half-Kryptonian so who knows if it'll even work the same on him as it does on the full humans. And even if it does, the long-term side effects are very much unknown. Remember the classmate last season who got accidentally dosed and ended up with superspeed? It took millions of dollars of Department of Defense R&D to get him stabilized. Being first string on the football team is not worth all of those potential risks.

I liked that Jordan's way of winning Sarah back wasn't with some grand superhuman act but rather something small and personal and meaningful.

I also liked that when Lana tried to run for mayor as a businesswoman, the townspeople called her out for her decidedly spotty track record in that area. Sarah and her reframing the campaign around her as a flawed, human mother was a smart choice. It allows her to own her mistakes, while reminding everybody that she's still the woman who has always been there when her neighbors needed her, who volunteered at all of the community functions and consistently put others before herself.

This whole thing with the Lois and the cult might keep my interest or might bore me. Part of it is writing around Jenna Dewan's limited availability as as a series regular on "The Rookie", and part of it is giving Lois an investigative arc to pursue this season. But last season, her investigation into Morgan Edge was also directly tied into what was happening in all of the other storylines. This cult thing doesn't feel as connected, so it's harder for me to get invested.

 

[NeilO]

Jonathan opting to juice, however, is not going to end well. For one thing, he's half-Kryptonian so who knows if it'll even work the same on him as it does on the full humans. And even if it does, the long-term side effects are very much unknown. Remember the classmate last season who got accidentally dosed and ended up with superspeed? It took millions of dollars of Department of Defense R&D to get him stabilized. Being first string on the football team is not worth all of those potential risks.

I was not convinced or rather I am hoping that Jonathan really isn't going to try to use the X-Kryptonite on himself. I was thinking he wanted to get ahold of it to see if there is a way to counter its affect - working with his parents or Natalie. Unfortunately, I think using it to help his football performance is more likely and is not going to go well.

 

[jayembee]

Yup. What I thought might be a red herring was exactly that. The obvious seemed a bit too obvious. Everything (a creature pounding rock to escape entrapment underground) pointed to

Spoiler

Doomsday

but as soon as Lois used that word in conversation, I knew it must have been a red herring. And as soon as "the thing in the mines" showed up, in some kind of suit, that kind of sealed the deal that it had to be something else.

A couple of obvious (to me) lines didn't get used. Clark should've said to Jordan, "The secret isn't just yours to reveal," because it affects the entire Kent family, not just Jordan. Clark did say pretty much the same thing, but not to that fine a point. On the other hand, I was half-expecting that Jordan was going to try telling Sarah that he has powers from exposure to X-Kryptonite.

The other line was something I would have expected Lana's husband to say, to suggest that she really could win the election, by telling her that the folk who questioned her at the meeting weren't afraid she wouldn't win, but afraid that she would.

As for Jonathan's plan, the other possibility is that he might want to be using a buy as part of getting proof of the "juicing". But I don't see him ruining his girlfriend's life, so...

 

[Garysb]

Spoiler: Spoiler

From what I read on the internet and saw when someone ran the clip backwards is that Bizarro speaks backwards. In the scene where his mask is ripped and he is on top of Superman he says "Leave Me Alone" twice if you run the clip backward, At the Fortress at the end he says "Home" Hopefully Superman will figure this out and they will add subtitles

Spoiler is interesting information about the guy in the metal suit.