Superman & Lois Recap: The Thing in the Mines

| Jan 25, 2022 |

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Superman & Lois - The Kent Family — *Photo: DC/Warner Bros. Tv set*

This article contains Superman & Lois spoilers.

Superman & Lois Season ii Episode 3

When it actually comes down to it…it was never gonna exist Doomsday, was it? The whole mission argument of Superman & Lois has always been to do things a little scrap sideways from what the fans await. Superman mythology is so ingrained in popular culture consciousness that whatsoever setting, whatsoever tease of a comics story, any new character, is instantly going to give audiences the idea that they know what'southward coming. And despite the absurdly dominant monocultural juggernaut that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has get, and the fact that comics featuring those characters are only as readily available as the Homo of Steel's, they don't have the same problem that Superman does.

Why? Perception.

Of the three nearly recognizable, marketable superheroes in the world (the other two, for the purposes of this argument being Batman and Spider-Human), only Superman has struggled (unjustly) with shaking the perception among full general audiences that they know his story. General audiences are either locked into the archetype version of the character, the clandestine identity, the beloved triangle of ii with Clark/Supes/Lois, the endless retellings of his origin, or they're the more savvy comic book fans (similar this writer) who think nosotros can predict every twist and turn in adaptations thanks to our knowledge of roughly every Superman comic published in our lifetimes.

Hollywood's reaction to this has been extraordinarily wrongheaded at times. The most successful Superman story of the '90s involved the Man of Steel's decease at the hands of the monstrous Doomsday. That volume certain shifted some units, which meant that the suits in charge of such things spent the next twenty years trying to arrange that verbal story to the screen. When they finally succeeded, with 2016'southward Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice , it was almost an afterthought, an obligatory moment bafflingly crammed into the final moments of the film for a "shock" ending. When they weren't doing that, they were trying to strip Superman of everything that made him recognizably Superman, shy near everything from the costume itself to the ability of flight, adding needless layers of heart-searching to a graphic symbol who can exist plenty conflicted without self-indulgent malaise.

And and so along comes Superman & Lois to do the incommunicable. The idea of making a Superman show that feels truly dissimilar from anything we've seen on the page or screen earlier seems similar a recipe for some unpleasantly un-Superman like stories.

Instead, the prove started past taking both its title characters out of their near familiar location (Metropolis), their careers (at The Daily Planet ), and gave them not one, but two teenage sons. So they had the sheer, unadulterated brazenness to make both of those sons positively delightful characters, and to make the family unit drama equally as compelling as the superheroics. Yous'd think that maybe they'd take the easy route and permit the fact that only one of these two sons inherited their dad'southward powers and make it cause some static between them. But no, Jonathan continues loving and supporting his brother Jordan, facing his own relatively mundane challenges with exactly the kind of moral compass you'd expect from someone raised by Lois Lane and Clark Kent.

To confound us comics-reading wiseasses fifty-fifty farther, the ane of those sons who shares a name with a Kent child in the comics, Jonathan, isn't even the ane who inherits his dad's powers. And yet? Everything else about the entire Kent family remains Superman in every imaginable way.

That's no pocket-size feat on its ain. Then you add the show's penchant for masterful misdirection, which began with the very commencement episode, and…well, maybe you lot'd retrieve I'd have learned my lesson past now that it's fourth dimension I cease making predictions based on what I know from the comics. As that first season progressed and they started bringing in other recognizable elements from a very specific era of Superman comics (John Henry Irons, the Eradicator), everyone, myself specially, just assumed that we were gonna become some version of Doomsday on the show at some indicate.

That certainly appeared to be what the showtime few episodes of this season were building towards. Hell, they've even been giving u.s. the live action equivalent of how Doomsday was first introduced in the comics: only trivial teases over a period of time of a monster in a containment adapt, pounding away at a subterranean prison. The monster's reveal in this week'due south episode is so PERFECTLY the Doomsday of those archetype comics…except for one "problem." It isn't Doomsday at all.

Of class information technology isn't. When has Superman & Lois always given us exactly what we look? Never. And perhaps more chiefly, when have they ever disappointed usa later on a swerve of this magnitude? Also never!

Bizarro

Yeah, folks, that isn't Doomsday, information technology's Bizarro. Not only is it Bizarro (or a Bizarro…or maybe it's even Bizarro #1, but why split hairs), information technology's Bizarro with an advisable costume: backwards S, mysterious medallion and all.

Then the thought that this is a creature who is gonna put Superman in the ground all of a sudden seems a little remote. Why? Considering Bizarro is often a pretty sympathetic creature when y'all go to know him. Whatsoever this version of the graphic symbol is, he clearly shares a psychic link with Superman, and at to the lowest degree some of his memories, knowing his way to the Fortress. And while I couldn't make out the line of dialogue he speaks to Clark during their first meeting (I doubtable it's phonetically backwards), the give-and-take he speaks when arriving in the Fortress would sound the same backwards or forward: "mom."

Now, here's where things go tricky: nobody here seems to quite know what Bizarro is. But Supergirl fought a Bizarro way back in her first season. Is information technology possible that, similar the Morgan Border of that show, that this particular piece of inconvenient continuity was wiped away by Crisis on Infinite Earths ?

Far more pressingly: as I discussed subsequently terminal week'south episode, at that place are clearly a LOT of unlike villains and potential villains being put into place for this season. And my suspicion is that whoever is responsible for creating Bizarro is gonna be the big bad backside it all (and yeah, I'm still looking directly at YOU, Mr. Luthor).

But then again, I'm pretty sure I oasis't been right yet when information technology comes to predicting what Superman & Lois has in shop. Why outset at present, correct? It's more fun this way, anyway.