Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today's the big day where I'm finally able to talk about Superman & Lois season 1 as a complete piece. I'm going to be getting into some spoilers because I need to talk about the fact that none of the predictions that I made after the fourth episode are right, and I can't do that if I don't talk about specific details of the show. So if you're not caught up on season 1 of Superman & Lois please go do that before you read this review. Unless you don't care about such things. Let's get into it.
I say this every time I talk about this show, but Superman & Lois is the best comic book based TV show that's on The CW right now, and one of the best DC Comics based shows that's airing right now. And I can say that with confidence because the season is over and it actually maintained it's quality throughout the entire season. And it was awesome! All season I've been saying that The CW didn't want to interfere because it's a Superman show and they didn't want Superman fans coming after them for screwing up the character if they didn't let Greg Berlanti and Todd Helbing do what they wanted with the show. And it worked. It actually, freaking worked! Which is pretty cool given how much The CW likes to come in and tell producers to change things to fit on their network, like they did with Riverdale back when that show was being developed.
The cast on this show is absolutely phenomenal. You have Tyler Hoechlin as Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman, Elizabeth Tulloch as Lois Lane, Jordan Elsass as Jonathan Kent, Alex Garfin as Jordan Kent, Erik Valdez as Kyle Cushing, Emmanuelle Chriqui as Lana Lang-Cushing, Inde Navarrette as Sarah Cushing, Wole Parks as John Henry Irons/Steel (that's a twist I'll be talking about), Adam Rayner as Tal-Rho/Morgan Edge, Stacey Farber as Leslie Larr, and Dylan Walsh as General Sam Lane. They're all fantastic. The kids especially.
Usually on shows like this the kids are obnoxious and just really hard to watch but the kids on this show were actually interesting. The three main kids, Jonathan, Jordan, and Sarah, anyway. Their recurring high school classmates were the stereotypical kid characters that show up in every teen drama and comedy show and movie since the dawn of the genres in the '50s. But they were fantastic. Sarah especially had some pretty great moments throughout the season. I was afraid she was going to be the typical troubled teenage girl character like Marissa Cooper on The O.C., Peyton Sawyer on One Tree Hill, Quinn Fabray on Glee, or even Thea Queen in the first couple of seasons of Arrow, but she wasn't. She had her problems of course, but she didn't go out looking for trouble and she definitely didn't cause the trouble like the other characters that I mentioned did. She didn't even cause drama the way Lana did on Smallville, when it was revealed that Jordan was hiding something from her. Mind you Jordan also isn't making lame excuses like Clark did on Smallville. Which is nice.
The Superman stuff was extremely cool. It's the kind of thing I've wanted to see on TV basically since the first season of Smallville. So in other words, I've been waiting 20 years for this stuff to be on TV. Which is a long time. We sort of got it in the early seasons of Supergirl, but pretty much after the second season, when Superman first appeared, they quickly made that show separate from the Superman mythos except for the part of Superman's origin that coincided with Kara's origin. Especially because Justice League was coming up in 2017 and a Man of Steel sequel was promised for 2018 or 2019. Of course that sequel never happened, and any appearance Superman was supposed to have in the movies was thrown out, except for Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021), so that's when this show was greenlit by WB.
Probably the biggest twist in this entire season is the fact that "Captain Luthor", who was revealed to be the man in the suit that went after Superman in the pilot, turned out to actually be John Henry Irons, from another, unspecified, Earth where he was married to Lois Lane, and she was killed by that world's Superman. Which is why Irons went after Clark on Earth Prime. It was pretty cool since we haven't seen John Henry Irons in a live action show or movie since Shaquille O'Neal played him in the 1997 movie, Steel. That and the fact that "Morgan Edge" is actually Tal-Rho, the half-brother of Kal-El, in a Spock/Sybok kind of way, except they share a mother rather than a father and both are fully Kryptonian even though Kal was raised on Earth as Clark Kent. The twist doesn't actually explain how Tal-Rho took the name of Morgan Edge when Morgan Edge already existed in the Arrowverse as played by Adrian Pasdar on Supergirl.
And yes, this show is set on Earth-Prime of the Arrowverse though the producers and writers chose not to deal with most of those connections during this season. The only one that was actually blatant was the appearance of John Diggle though he's no longer Spartan and he apparently chose not to put on the Green Lantern ring that he apparently got at the end of the Arrow series finale. Though he does mention it to Sam during the episode he shows up in. Honestly, I think it was very smart of the writers and producers to let Superman & Lois stand on it's own and not use it's connections to the rest of the Arrowverse even though it would've been so easy to call up Kara or Barry to help with the Morgan Edge situation. I'll be honest and say that even during the finale I kept waiting for Supergirl, the Flash, Diggle, Green Arrow, or Black Lightning to show up to help Superman and Steel the way Barry did for Oliver and Team Arrow in the finale of the third season of Arrow. But it didn't happen and I'm actually glad it didn't. Superman & Lois works just fine on it's own.
One thing that completely surprised me was how Kyle grew to become so likeable over the course of the season. I said in my review of the pilot that Kyle was the jerk character that we love to hate. Except, he didn't stay that way for all that long. I'd say that by mid-season he'd grown on me as an actual likeable character. And that's despite the marital problems that he and Lana were having due to Kyle's anger issues and his push to let Morgan Edge work in Smallville. He had a complete 180 turn when it was revealed that Edge was actually Tal-Rho. So that was cool.
I do wish they'd spent a little more time on Clark and Lana's relationship though. In at least two episodes they stated they were best friends, but we didn't really see that all that much. And not enough to know whether Clark told Lana about his Kryptonian heritage before he left Smallville. Judging from the flashbacks that we saw in episode 11, it doesn't appear that Clark told Lana anything. At least not before he left Smallville to learn about his Kryptonian heritage. And given that Lana doesn't recognize Superman as Clark, it doesn't look like Clark told her anything after he got home or even before he moved to Metropolis. So I hope we see more of their relationship in the second season.
So yeah, all of my theories for where this season was going to go were wrong. And I'm fine with that because what we got was pretty great. I'm glad that John Henry Irons turned out to actually be John Henry Irons and not yet another version of Lex Luthor. And I'm also glad that Sam didn't turn against Superman at all. He's not as stupid as he appears to be in the comics most of the time.
Overall this was a fantastic season of Television. It's exactly the kind of show that we need right now. It's not too heavy, it's entertaining, and it was alot of fun. Especially when certain Superman easter eggs popped up like the original costume from Action Comics #1/the Max Fleischer cartoons appearing in the pilot and the flashbacks in episode 11. I highly recommend that if you've never seen the show or just haven't caught up on it, that you watch it because it was such a good show.
That's going to be it for me for today. But, I will be back on Saturday for my review of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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