‘Superman And Lois’ Recap (Seasons 1-3): Things To Know Before Season 4

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The pop culture scene in the present age is characterized by aggression, cynicism, and edginess—to such a point that the virtues of simplicity, high ideals, compassion, and morality are seen as laughable, naïve traits. The direct effect of this can be seen in the superhero genre, which has deluded fans to equate cheap, lazy thrills with quality; the caped wonders who once inspired generations have been replaced by copycats who exist as conduits of shock value. In this climate, CW’s Superman and Lois is a rare hidden gem that allows us to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, altruism and the ideals of truth and justice—not merely through words but through actions as well. 

In mainstream media, Superman’s presence as a beacon of hope and as one of the most inspiring figures has been highlighted time and again, and going a step forward, Superman and Lois brings Clark Kent to the forefront, showcasing his role as a parent, as a husband, as a friend, and most of all, the human side of his character—which is the true superpower of the Man of Steel. Additionally, Superman/Clark is as much of a lead in the series as his talented, driven, humanitarian wife, Lois Lane, the investigative journalist, is. As the couple navigate their way through the challenges of life, parenting their teenage twin sons, Jonathan and Jordan, and maintaining their work/life balance all while standing up for those in need, it makes the narrative the best Superman media release since the late Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of the Man of Steel. However, all good things must come to an end, and after three successful seasons, Superman and Lois will end its journey this year with its fourth and final season, bringing an end to CW’s DC superhero era. To get a proper idea of the story so far and what can be expected from the upcoming season, let’s take a look back at the major events from the last three seasons.

Spoilers Ahead


Season 1: Eradicator’s Assault

In All Star Superman, writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely summed up Superman’s origin within four panels, capturing the legacy of the iconic character perfectly. A similar sense of poetic precision is replicated in the opening scene of the pilot episode of Superman and Lois, which shows Kal El’s arrival on Earth, being raised by his kind adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, in the idyllic country town of Smallville, moving to the city of Metropolis following Jonathan’s death, becoming a reporter at the Daily Planet, and meeting the love of his life, ace journalist Lois Lane. Clark reveals his secret identity to Lois while proposing to her, and years later, at present, the duo have their work cut out as working parents of their teenage twin sons, Jonathan and Jordan. Jonathan is the more expressive, confident, mature elder brother, who is extremely protective of his younger brother Jordan, who is quite reserved, suffers from social anxiety, and is sensitive. 

After Martha’s passing, Clark and Lois bring the teenagers to Smallville, after Clark loses his job following crooked industrialist Morgan Edge’s takeover of Daily Planet. Clark reveals his true identity to his son, and Jordan is revealed to have inherited superpowers from his father. Following Lois quitting her job at the Daily Planet to maintain her journalistic integrity by not complying with Edge’s terms, the Kent family decides to settle in Smallville at Clark’s family home, which also allows them to keep Jordan’s identity a secret from the world. Lois takes a job at the Smallville Gazette and befriends the chief editor, Chrissy Beppo, and the Kent family catches up with family friend Lana Lang, her husband Kyle Cushing, and their daughter, Sarah. Jonathan starts a relationship with Sarah, while Jordan feels excluded due to his lack of powers—but Lois manages to help him overcome his insecurities. Clark guides Jonathan to take better control of his powers. 

Trouble arises when, armoured with an exosuit, a ‘Stranger’ appears, who is initially introduced as Captain Luther and who wants to end Superman. Later on, the Stranger is revealed to be an alternate earth counterpart of ex-soldier John Henry Irons, who lost his world and his wife at the hands of a tyrannical version of the Man of Steel and has become stranded in this world after being separated from his daughter, Natalie. The fact that John Henry’s wife is an alternate version of Lois Lane makes this scenario more interesting after he discovers Superman’s secret identity. However, in the end, Lois is able to convince John Henry to spare Clark’s life, and he begins a life of his own in Smallville. Lois’ father, DOD chief General Sam Lane, with whom she shares an estranged relationship, has a lot of explaining to do after it is revealed that, with his knowledge, the army had created secret failsafe measures against Superman with Kryptonite weapons. While clarifying the fact that trust goes both ways, Clark promptly conveys to his father-in-law that his responsibilities are not limited to a single nation but extend to all life. 

On the other hand, Morgan Edge, who sets his evil gaze upon Smallville, is revealed to be Kal El’s half brother Tal Rho, whose spaceship crash-landed in another part of the world, and since his childhood saw him being exposed to the malicious side of humanity—a total contrast to Kal El’s experience. A young Tal Rho was later indoctrinated by his Kryptonian father, and in order to enslave humankind, he started implanting the consciousnesses of Kryptonians into the minds of the people of Smallville and gave them powers through an X-Kryptonite mine located near the town. Tal Rho himself became an eradicator after being strengthened by solar energy. After a prolonged struggle, surviving almost getting possessed by General Zod’s consciousness, Superman was able to defeat Tal Rho and his human-turned Kryptonian army with the help of John Henry Irons, and at the end of the first season, Natalie Irons arrives from the alternate earth and reunites with her father, and gets dumbfounded after seeing Lois, mistaking her to be her deceased mother. 


Season 2: Parallel Earth and Parasite Mayhem

Natalie struggles to accept the reality that she and her father are stuck in a world where a doppelganger of her late mother lives, that too as a wife of the person whose evil counterpart was responsible for her mother’s death. However, Lois helps her to process the conflicted feelings, and the Irons family eventually comes to be on good terms with the Kents. Natalie, a brilliant inventor, had designed her father’s exosuit and wants to don one of her own, but John Irons is too overprotective of Natalie to let her embark on this superhero lifestyle. However, eventually, John is able to respect Natalie’s freedom of choice after realizing that by donning the suit, Natalie will be able to defend herself. 

Lana, who played an instrumental role in Smallville community building in the first season, decides to run for mayor and stand against the corrupt Mayor George Dean, who had allied himself with Morgan Edge to bring the town to ruin in the first season. However, Dean delivers a low blow to Lana’s mayoral campaign by digging into and exposing her family troubles as her husband, Kyle’s extramarital affairs, become public news. Lana leaves Kyle, much to the dismay of him and their children. 

Three villainous figures play a significant role in the second season: a cult leader known as Ally Allston, whose troublesome self-healing methods almost cost Lois’ sister, Lucy, her life in the past, after which Lois was able to shut Ally down by writing an exposé. In the present, Ally manages to make a comeback as Lucy turns on her sister—as it is revealed, there is much emotional reconciliation pending among the Lane family members. After his wife left, Sam Lane wasn’t able to cope with the grief and couldn’t afford the much-needed time his daughters, Lucy and Lois, deserved from him. While Lois was able to handle herself, taking on the role of her mother, Lucy’s fragile psyche didn’t improve, and she fell prey to the influences of dastardly people like Ally. Later on, it is revealed that through a portal located in the X-Kryptonite mine near Smallville, Ally wants to visit an inverse parallel world and merge with her inverse counterpart, and both of them possess a cosmically powered necklace that can draw energies from an external source and imbue its user with it. A Bizarro version of Superman from inverse earth is the second threat, who, getting addicted to Kryptonite, tries to apprehend his earth’s counterpart of Ally but fails in the end, and arriving in Clark’s reality, starts hunting for Ally’s cosmic necklace. The final threat is General Anderson, who replaces Sam Lane as DOD chief and starts antagonizing Superman by trying to use X-Kryptonite to create an army of Supermen who will act under the control of the government. Anderson’s plan is foiled as Bizarro kills the Superman replacements before getting apprehended by Superman himself, and later on, Anderson takes his revenge by fueling himself on X-K and murdering Bizarro. Despite Anderson’s dastardly actions, which jeopardized the safety for many, Clark gives him a chance to redeem himself, and Anderson ends up sacrificing his life while taking on the Bizarro version of Jordan Kent. 

Tal Rho gets pulled into the mix as, after John Henry sustained a severe injury previously during a battle with Bizarro, Clark decides to take help from his half brother to stop Ally’s heinous plan of merging both the real and inverse worlds. However, Clark gets depowered as Ally drains his strength completely, but at the end, Tal Rho manages to rejuvenate Clark by sending him into the Sun. After recuperating, John Henry assists Clark, this time by letting Natalie join him in her own exosuit—but the duo nearly gets trapped in the limbo between the two worlds. Strengthened by immense solar energy, Clark reaches his strongest potential and manages to save the day in a spectacular fashion by literally delivering an energy punch to separate two worlds, rescue John and Natalie, and separate Ally from her counterpart. Tal Rho finds his place in the inverse world by the end, after reconciling with the Kent family. 


Season 3: Battle With Mortality

The third season of Superman and Lois presents the most poignant, emotionally draining arc of the series as it follows Lois’ diagnosis with breast cancer and how it presents the worst crisis the Man of Steel had to face till date. Lois herself faces difficulties coming to terms with her predicament and handling the excruciating physical and mental struggle involving it, and Clark, the ever-shining beacon of hope and optimism, finds himself at a loss as, unbeknownst to him, his agony charged with optimism nearly turns into denial. 

Bruno Manheim, the mob boss, is the big bad in the third season, who is controlling southern Metropolis in the guise of being the benefactor of the impoverished community. Additionally, Bruno is revealed to be using former supervillains as his test subjects and imbuing them with powers by harvesting genetic material from Bizarro Superman’s corpse. To investigate Bruno, Lois decides to get admitted to a cancer hospital funded by Bruno and befriend a fellow cancer patient, Peia, who, unbeknownst to her, is Bruno’s wife and a deadly sonic power-based metahuman assassin—who often squares off with Superman throughout the season. It is revealed that Bruno had killed this earth’s counterpart of John Henry, and as Bruno’s son, Matteo, starts dating Natalie, a clash emerges between the two fathers. On the other hand, Peia’s true identity creates tension between Clark and Lois as the duo are torn between sympathizing with her and acknowledging her past as a murderer. 

Bruno is revealed to have been experimenting with metahumans to formulate a cure for Peia but ends up losing her as, unable to process the cure, Peia breathes her last. With Peia’s help, Bruno was able to concoct evidence years earlier, using which Lois was able to put Lex Luthor, the evil billionaire mastermind, behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. As Bruno confesses to his crimes after Peia’s passing, Lex is released after serving a long term in prison and pledges to take revenge upon Lois and kill her protector, Superman. Mutating the corpse of Bizarro Superman, Lex creates Doomsday and sets him upon Smallville, and in the finale of the third season, a vicious battle ensues between Superman and Doomsday. The third season ends in a cliffhanger, as Superman takes Doomsday to the moon for a final showdown. 

The upcoming fourth and final season will adapt the seminal The Death of Superman storyline. Lex will play the role of primary antagonist, and as the series marks the end of CW Arrowverse as hell, some larger DC universe connection might be explored as well. 


Siddhartha Das
Siddhartha Das
An avid fan and voracious reader of comic book literature, Siddhartha thinks the ideals accentuated in the superhero genre should be taken as lessons in real life also. A sucker for everything horror and different art styles, Siddhartha likes to spend his time reading subjects. He's always eager to learn more about world fauna, history, geography, crime fiction, sports, and cultures. He also wishes to abolish human egocentrism, which can make the world a better place.


 

 

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