TV Review: Superman and Lois Season 2 Episode 1

Superman and Lois Season 2 Episode 1 “What Lies Beneath”

Director: Gregory Smith

Starring: Tyler Hoechlin, Elizabeth Tulloch, Jordan Elsass, Alex Garfin, Erik Valdez, Inde Navarrette, Wolé Parks, Tayler Buck, Sofia Hasmik, Dylan Walsh, Emmanuelle Chriqui

Rating: TV-PG

Runtime: 42 minutes

Spoilers follow:

A lot of TV shows, especially in the superhero genre, try to reinvent themselves to certain extents from season to season in order to keep things fresh.  Based on the Season 2 premiere, Superman and Lois isn’t doing that.  “What Lies Beneath” seamlessly continues on from the first season, with the same balanced mix of comic book spectacle and mythology and small-town family drama.  I’m a little concerned that some interpersonal storylines may get too melodramatic but overall it’s still the same excellent series it was last year.

The episode starts off back at the end of last season, when John Henry Irons’ (Wolé Parks) daughter Natalie (Tayler Buck), whose mother was an alternate universe version of Lois (Bitsie Tulloch), crash-landed in an escape pod on the front lawn of the Kent farm.  After embracing her father, Natalie is stunned to see who she thinks is her mother and begins to rush toward Lois before John stops her and begins explaining what’s going on.  Lois is, of course, equally stunned and remains silent, even when Clark (Tyler Hoechlin) urges her to say something to Natalie.  She quietly walks back to the house as John Henry drives away with Natalie.

The main action of the season then picks back up three months later.  Summer is ending and Clark asks Lois if she wants to call Natalie before her first day at school.  Lois snaps at him that Natalie still won’t speak to her before angrily leaving, leading Jonathan (Jordan Elsass) and Jordan (Alex Garfin) to ask Clark how long she’s going to be like this, which Clark doesn’t have an answer to.  The boys are also dealing with their own issues, though these aren’t quite as dramatic.  Jonathan is once again struggling to prove himself on the football field and is frustrated at his lack of meaningful playing time.  Clark encourages him to talk to Coach Gaines (Danny Wattley) but Jon doesn’t think this will work.  But when new girlfriend Candice (Samantha Di Francesco) tells him the same thing, worded slightly differently, he compliments her insight, with Clark’s background guffawing marking Tyler Hoechlin’s first adorkable Dad moment of the season.  When Clark must rush off to rescue a damaged submarine as Superman he leaves Jon and Candice home alone, leading Lois to walk in on them making out, likely about to have sex, when she returns from work.  Lois lashes out, outraged at both Jonathan for doing it and Clark for giving him the opportunity (Clark being surprised Jon would even be thinking about doing something like this because he never did at his age is Adorkable Dad Moment #2), with her anger of course exacerbated by everything else she’s going through.  Jordan is excited to greet Sarah (Inde Navarette) when she returns to Smallville from camp, taking her out to the pond they hang out at where he’s lit a bunch of candles (with his heat vision, while Sarah wears a blindfold, because Jordan still isn’t as careful about this whole secret identity thing as he needs to be).  But Sarah has a muted response to the romantic gesture and quickly leaves after claiming she wasn’t feeling well.  Her father, Kyle (Erik Valdez), senses Sarah’s newfound hesitation about her relationship and reminds her that she’s the “alpha” in the couple and if she wants to slow things down she just needs to tell and show Jordan that.  As Sarah notes it’s surprisingly solid advice, filtered though it may be through Kyle’s characteristically meat-headed wording, but it’s surprising that it’s needed at all.  All relationships have conflict, of course, and it’s particularly realistic for the show’s teenage romances to be rapidly shifting but it’s still jarring to see Jordan and Sarah’s relationship in such an insecure place given where it was at the end of the last season.  The end of Season 1 gave Sarah more and more reasons to be suspicious of the Kent family secrets and it would make sense if that led to some distance between her and Jordan but that doesn’t seem to be the main issue here.  Sarah’s reactions when her family mentions camp compared with how she reacts to Jordan strongly suggest she may have had some kind of romantic encounter with someone at camp.  This is, again, realistic but it also threatens to throw the show too deeply into soap opera territory and could squander the meaningful development of Sarah and Jordan’s relationship from last year.  I’m willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt here given how well all its relationships, and this one, in particular, has been handled so far but this storyline was arguably the biggest cause of concern for me in this episode.

Also on the more melodramatic side of things is Natalie’s storyline.  Although John Henry has warned her about the difficulty of living on another Earth she’s still taken aback when she meets the doppelgängers of her friends at school and cuts most of her classes, not returning to where her father is waiting to pick her up until late at night.  Natalie’s situation is more far-fetched, and therefore less relatable than a lot of other storylines on Superman and Lois but it’s still understandable why she’s upset.  But the script isn’t able to articulate her issues that well, and her declaration that she was better off dead is definitely a little too angsty.

Still, things improve, both for the character and the storyline’s quality, later on.  Lois figures out the source of her pain and has a calmer and more open discussion with Clark.  She admits that she’s been blaming him for things unfairly and explains how she’s really feeling about the Natalie situation.  Lois states that upon seeing Natalie she felt nothing.  Since then she’s reflected upon her mother, who abandoned her family when she was a child, fearing that she’s doing the same with Natalie.  Bitsie Tulloch’s performance is, as usual, exceptionally emotional and the writing’s handling of her feelings about Natalie is even more nuanced than I hoped.  Although Lois eventually tells Natalie that she’d like to be friends, and the Irons’ return to Smallville, planning to stay at the Kent farm while they figure out their next steps, I’m glad that things weren’t oversimplified by having Lois fully trying to replace Natalie’s mother or by Natalie standing in for the baby Lois and Clark lost.  Maintaining the right balance between warmth and healthy distance between these characters will be a challenge for the show but I’m fairly confident it can pull it off.

While the personal drama gets more screen time, there are plenty of interesting things going on on the Superman side of things as well.  The submarine Clark rescues is a North Korean military vessel and new D.O.D. boss Mitch Anderson (Ian Bohen) is annoyed that he didn’t bring it to America to be taken into custody.  Anderson is a self-professed Superman expert but he’s angry that Clark won’t put American interests ahead of the rest of the world.  This is a common debate in Superman comics but it hasn’t been brought up much in live-action and it looks to make for an interesting arc on the show, especially after Clark encounters Anderson’s new powered operatives, graduates of the superhuman training school Tag Harris (Wern Lee) was sent to last year, whose uniforms are emblazoned with the House of El “S” symbol.  Clark asserts to Anderson that his loyalty is to the whole world and criticizes him for using his family’s crest without his permission.  Hoechlin’s friendly charm is often highlighted as one of the main appeals of his performance but these scenes were a nice reminder of how commanding and authoritative he can be.  Another issue plaguing Clark are inexplicable headaches accompanied by abstract visions, with one happening in the middle of his mission, almost preventing him from making the save.  These are likely related to the new, otherworldly threat, which begins to take shape at the end of the episode.

Throughout the episode, Smallville is hit with increasingly severe earthquakes, with one so devastating that Clark must fly through the town saving people, especially at the mines.  While I look forward to the next superpowered brawl as much as the next fan I wasn’t bothered by the lack of fights in the episode.  Focusing on Clark directly saving lives is another demonstration of how deeply this show understands the character.  The visuals also continue to be excellent, both in terms of the cinematography and color and the visual effects, which are much more convincing than those on any other broadcast superhero shows.  Although the town believes the quakes to have passed after the big one, while the Irons’ and Kent’s head inside Clark lingers on the farm lawn, his super-hearing detecting smaller vibrations.  The camera cuts back to the mines before zooming deep underground beneath them, where an armored hand pounds its way out of a layer of rock.  This immediately led most fans to assume that the being underground is Kryptonian monster Doomsday, as the sequence clearly references the character’s comic introduction, in which he punched his way out of a tomb buried underground while wearing a hi-tech containment suit before his bestial appearance was fully revealed.  Superman and Lois creators have since effectively confirmed that the series will be bringing the character in.  This has met with a somewhat divided response.  While many fans are excited to see how the series handles the famous villain others feel Doomsday, and the storyline he is most famously associated with, The Death and Return of Superman, have been adapted into other media frequently enough, with versions like those in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Krypton still fresh in viewers’ minds.  I certainly understand those feelings and share some of them myself (to an extent) but I also like that the creators are ambitious enough to tackle such an iconic, well-known story and I think Superman and Lois has a lot going in its favor that could make its version stand out.  First of all, Clark’s character and his relationships with friends, family, and the world have been so well developed until this point that a depiction of his famous death, as temporary as it would surely be, would be much more emotionally impactful than in past adaptations which have focused on younger, less-established Supermen.  In addition, Superman and Lois has been drawing pretty heavily from the Death of Superman mythology since it started.  John Henry Irons and the Eradicator are both most famous for their roles in the “Reign of the Supermen” portion of the expansive comic arc (though the show’s Tal-Rho is a very loose adaptation of the latter), in which they act as two of the heroic replacements for Clark after his death.  Another one of the replacements is the Conner Kent version of Superboy, which Jordan and or Jonathan could easily stand in for on the show.  Given all this, Superman and Lois seems well prepared to deliver one of the most comic-accurate versions of the story, while still adding in its own unique flavors, and I am very excited to see how it plays out.  That sentiment is essentially a microcosm of how I feel about the show as a whole.  There are some minor flaws and causes for concern but overall, based on this confident and compelling season premiere Superman and Lois will continue to be an excellent modernization of the world’s first superhero and one of the best shows on TV.

Notes:

• While Superman and Lois is still not set for any major crossovers (or at least none that have been announced) and was not represented in The Flash‘s Armageddon event David Ramsey is said to make at least one more appearance as John Diggle and Jenna Dewan reprises her role as Lois’ sister, Lucy.
• In order to get corrupt Mayor Dean (Eric Keenleyside) out of office Lana is campaigning for his opponent, Daniel Hart (Nathan Witte), and while Kyle’s helping out, he also seems suspicious of Hart.  The end of last season made it pretty obvious Lana was going to run for mayor herself so this seems like an unnecessary instance of stalling.