We Don’t Know Anything About Earth-Prime Clark And Lois’s Sons

It’s an Arrowverse Weird Mystery. Am I a couple of years late on this? A year late? Naaaah it’s still worth pointing out

At the end of the Arrowverse adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths, as the ramifications of the multiversal reboot set in on Earth-Prime, Lois Lane calls her husband Clark Kent, who’s flying over…Earth skies as Superman, telling him he needs to get home to Metropolis. “It’s the boys”, she says. Clark is confused, because pre-Crisis, they only had one infant son, Jonathan. This change was blatant setup for their spin-off, Superman & Lois, which revealed they now had twin teenage sons, Jonathan and Jordan.

At first, this was fine, it just completely rewrote their relationship and professional timelines. It was very possible this meant Clark and Lois’s actors, Tyler Hoechlin and Bitsie Tulloch, were playing older versions of the characters than their physiques allowed it to appear. It also likely meant instead of getting pregnant when Clark’s cousin Kara (Supergirl) was an adult, the 2006 birthdate that the boys have (or at least has been settled on) means it was much sooner after Kara landed on Earth. While Tulloch and Hoechlin, who first appeared in their roles on Supergirl and in the The Flash episode of the “Elseworlds” event respectively, reprised, Lois’s father Gen. Sam Lane was recast from Glenn Morshower to Dylan Walsh. Which was fine, a universal reboot could totally selectively rewrite DNA. That was until it wasn’t. And fans were not let in on such until Superman & Lois’s season 2 finale, when the general told the boys "I've been working for the DOD for a long time. I've seen things you would not believe — glimpses of other worlds and the leagues of superheroes they have on them. And even though we only have your father on this planet, thank God that we do, because he's the finest of any Earth." Superman & Lois wasn’t taking place on Earth-Prime after all.

Now, it’s well-documented how COVID-related production hurdles nudged them in that direction. Crisis references were written out of the pilot, the Batwoman crossover was canceled. By the time that reveal moment aired, Supergirl and Black Lightning ended on their own, and Legends of Tomorrow and Batwoman fell to the pre-emptive massacring before The CW was sold to Nexstar. But the thing is, it removed all the events and details we thought we were building on with the Earth-Prime versions of the characters. And that includes every detail about Clark and Lois’s sons. Everything is discarded but the names of their parents. The Arrowverse Wiki gives some credit and functions under the assumption that Jonathan was not renamed, but even that’s not guaranteed. The other brother doesn’t have a name and his Wiki page reflects that, with the only information being that conversation with indirect reference. Ages? They could theoretically be significantly younger than the 15-year-olds that we thought them to be, but they were left home alone with Lois initiating the call while walking on sidewalk. What do they look like? Well if they don’t age-match there’s even less likelihood that they look like Michael Bishop and Alex Garfin, or even teen Jonathan’s original actor, Jordan Elsass. They even could very well have never left Metropolis and are still there to this day. The only detail we know of their post-Crisis timeline is the two boys. Their stories essentially ended on that phone call that had all of its payoff taken away.

And then there’s Earth-Prime’s part in this absolute lack of knowledge. The kids aren’t mentioned after that phone call, and Clark and Lois themselves stop being mentioned at all after Supergirl season 6, episode 8 “Welcome Back, Kara”, aired August 24, 2021, the first episode to air after taking the next shift, as a COVID production disruption had Supergirl sub in and start its final season early from March 30 to May 11 before Superman & Lois finished up from May 18 to August 17. Even The Flash, which ended up the last Arrowverse show standing because of the fork, last mentioned Clark in “All’s Wells That Ends Wells”, the season 7 premiere (aired March 2021) that was the antepenultimate season 6 script pushed by COVID. The Flash still had 50 episodes after this and still managed to pull off some tie-ins, with Alex Danvers, Kara’s adoptive sister, appearing in the “Armageddon” 5-parter (along with a good handful of other characters from across the Arrowverse) and mentioned Kara was offworld…with J’onn J’onnz, and only J’onn. Sure COVID made some options limited (and made Superman & Lois unavailable since its forking was already set) but surely a mention couldn’t hurt.

Concrete answers will likely never come unless Arrowverse-based comics start popping up again, but Warner Bros.’s fears of brand confusion have struck again, costing Superman & Lois the longevity its fellow survivors may attain. A ten-episode fourth and final season premieres this fall on The CW.

Credits: Entertainment Weekly, Arrowverse Wiki (1, 2, 3, 4)