After a strong opening episode, The CW have decided to renew Superman & Lois for a second season already. The big question is whether the second episode ‘Heritage’ will hold onto that large audience or just fritter it away. *Warning! Spoilers Lie Ahead!*
With the source material so well covered over the years, the writers of Superman & Lois will have to do something quite interesting to maintain the edge. Sadly, there have already been reports of unrest in the writer’s room. What that means going forward has yet to be seen, so many will be keeping a close watch on how things progress.
In the pilot they established that Clark (Tyler Hoechlin) and Lois (Elizabeth Tulloch) have twin sons, one of whom only appeared after the events of the ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ crossover event. After Clark’s Mother Martha (Michele Scarabelli) passes away, the family move back to Smallville to save the farm from being sold by the bank, and also to help Jordan (Alex Garfin), who has started to manifest powers. This is handled pretty well, and does hang together as a decent way to get them out of Metropolis and back into small town life.
What’s strange in ‘Heritage’, is that when Clark and Jordan start to examine his powers, it turns out that they are weak and will never be controllable. While this bit of storyline is useful and introduces Jor-El (Angus MacFayden), it essentially resets Jordan and makes it so that his powers can become a mcguffin of the week. It will be no surprise if in coming weeks he can’t do anything, and then suddenly be able to do something critical when plot demands it. The only way they’ll be able to avoid that is if they seriously lean into the psychological side of all the implications for Jordan.
The main way they’ve used it so far is as a trigger for Jonathan (Jordan Elsass), who resents that his brother has powers while he doesn’t. This could have been a great plotline where the two of them work out their differences and there is actual growth, but this gets short-changed. What actually happens is that Jonathan has his nose out of joint, and he only really reconciles when it becomes clear that Jordan doesn’t have all the powers he could have. We will never know if things would have been worked out properly without Jonathan knowing, and that ship has sailed.
The result is that we now have the situation where the only difference between some other iterations of the Superman story is that there is a Superman with children at school who know who he is. So, we can expect a lot of the usual high school tropes coming out, and some fairly tedious stuff, unless of course they decide to use Jordan’s ‘macguffin’ powers. Already, there’s a pretty rubbish high school football team rivalry happening that seems ridiculously dated.
What does seem to be working, at least partly, is the introduction of Morgan Edge (Adam Rayner), who appears as a reassuringly normal businessman. He could quite easily have been put in as a moustache-twirling villain, but it’s more subtle than that. The only flaw so far is that as someone with quite a large portfolio, the likelihood of him being at a small-town meeting, and at the Daily Planet meeting is small, and he’d probably have sent underlings. That aside, he comes across as a balanced character so far and there seems to be some good potential there.
Lois’ tenacity in investigating him seems on point, and she has a lot of strength in the face of adversity, but she is done a bit of a disservice by some plot decisions. Some of her actions seem a little disproportionate, and while you can understand why certain decisions were taken from a plot point of view, not all of them make any sense. For instance, she says that it’s the first time that she’s been re-written, but that doesn’t seem likely, as editors do tinker. She also leaves the Daily Planet and decides to write for the Smallville Gazette. Not only is that a massive step down in readership, but also in salary, surely? With Clark not working now either, it’s unclear what the family is living on. A thread in the plot about trying to sneak her points past editorial control, as well as also wrestling with the need for an income in the face of that would have given it much more nuance. As they have it, a strong lead is being undermined.
In the other main overarching bit of plot contained in ‘Heritage’, the mysterious Captain Luthor (Wolé Parks) is searching for Kryptonite, and looking for ways to defeat Superman. As the episode progresses we get glimpses of what his motivation is, including a battle scene where a different Kal-El is slaughtering soldiers. This is probably a result of the Infinite Earths event, so this will probably be resolved at some point soon. That is assuming they stop committing one of the worst plotting sins that we’ve seen in a while.
If you have two characters who are talking and one is about to reveal a critical piece of information, it is cheap and poor writing to have the other attack them suddenly, cutting them off. So far in the pilot and in ‘Heritage’, Superman and Luthor have been fighting, presumably to the death, without Superman knowing why. In this episode there is a bit more information given to the viewer, but at no point does Luthor say ‘Kal-El, you need to die because of…’. Obviously, that doesn’t happen because Superman and Luthor could then work out what really happened. Instead, we get this extended fight due to an idiotic trope.
What this all boils down to so far is that Superman & Lois has a good cast and characters that are being let down by some poor choices in terms of establishing the world. There is a lot of potential here, and while the writers are taking advantage of some of what they have to play with, many elements are being misused. With the order for a second season already in though, they have a chance to think about this on a much bigger scale. This has the potential to be great, so hopefully the choices from now on will be bold.
