'Superman & Lois' Showrunners Talk Brainiacal Season Premiere, What Could And Couldn’t Squeeze In Final Season
We also learn more about Elizabeth Henstridge’s stint as Lex Luthor’s daughter
After sitting out the 2023-2024 television season, Superman & Lois returned to The CW for its fourth and final season with a two-episode premiere, “The End & The Beginning” and “A World Without”. Viewers finally saw the fatal defeat and aftermath of Superman’s battle with Doomsday. Lois, Jordan, and Jonathan find Clark’s limp corpse in the street, missing his heart which Lex faked crushing under his boot while still having the actual, but still causing a furious Jordan to scream. Lex Luthor also forced Lois into a Sophie’s Choice of her sons over the phone but safely retrieved both with Lana’s help. The episode did answer exactly how Tyler Hoechlin would be utilized during the Man of Steel’s corpse era, and thankfully it isn’t all flashbacks. Superman entered a suspended state, only able to communicate with his family through a hologram at the Fortress he created shortly before Lois’ cancer diagnosis, in cases like his death.
“It’s not all tears all the time,” co-showrunner Brent Fletcher promises, “but we come into the season in a pretty heavy spot and we’ve got to earn it.” Emotions will still run high at least through Monday’s singular episode, he adds, “It’s kind of pedal to the metal from there on out. We turn over every card we can this season. That was sort of our philosophy going into it. We won’t have more of these opportunities, so let’s make the most of them.”
Notably, Amanda McCoy made her debut, played by Yvonne Chapman, and she delivered not only an important piece of technology to Lex, played by Michael Cudlitz, but a very important namedrop of who developed it. They just call him Milton, but Milton Fine is one of the aliases of Krypton’s destroyer, Brainiac, since the character’s 1958 debut. Even the Smallville iteration played by James Marsters used it. Other co-showrunner Todd Helbing iterates Amanda’s comment as “intentional”, that “there will be more to come” with Brainiac in future episodes. It essentially identifies what he told about a “significant character from the comics” being referenced early in this final season. “You hear the name drop, then you start hearing that name drop more…” culminating with a full-blown likely climactic appearance by the end. Some are even speculating that this is Tom Cavanagh’s teased character.
The episode also mentions Luthor’s daughter, who bears the name of her actress, the recently-revealed Agents of SHIELD alum Elizabeth Henstridge. Fletcher confirmed that it is indeed an original take. It makes sense, as there’s no reasonable way to have taken an adaptational approach, not only based on directional compatibility with the source material but where it can go with its time left. Sam Lane, Lois’s military father played by Dylan Walsh who the family rescued in the first episode, had arranged for her to go into hiding some time ago. Henstridge promoted the show in her Instagram stories Tuesday and essentially confirmed a single episode appearance.
Lana and Sarah were the featured ex-regulars returning as guests in the second hour. Lana vowed to use as much of her mayoral powers as she could to fight Lex, while Sarah helped Jonathan retrieve his father’s stolen heart, though as mentioned, they did not succeed. Fletcher reiterated that all of the shed regulars will have proper closure by the end of the season. “They all get a real story … and you kind of know where they are into the future.” Monday’s episode, “Always My Hero”, will see the Ironses John Henry and Natalie, played by Wolé Parks and Tayler Buck, called back in to help things along in the currently Supermanless Smallville, who need a hero. As the synopsis puts it “Reeling from failure, Jordan begins to spiral, while Jonathan discovers newfound strength. General Lane recruits John Henry and Natalie Irons to the DOD, before making a choice that will change everything.”
Getting back to the time left, the showrunners have revealed that the idea of including the Phantom Zone with just eight episodes remaining was not going to happen "We wanted to pack as much story as we could into 10 episodes and give the fans as much of a Superman and Lois Lane story that we could," Helbing told. "We were trying to do our version of the Phantom Zone for four seasons, and it was one of those things where it was like, ah, it just doesn't quite work." Fletcher says they had to "really plan it out surgically" on what to include. It seems the Phantom Zone was just that one thing that ended up having to be left out. It is unclear whether had they been afforded the three episodes they lost compared to last season would have meant inclusion, let alone the heights of 15 that the first two seasons ran.
They tease that fans will be surprised by how the series finale ends it all. "I don't think people are going to think we're ending the show the way that we are," Fletcher says. "On top of that, there's a lot of iconic moments that have the things that are really big in Superman canon, so we're excited to see how the fans react to those moments." The pair also acknowledged the increasingly rarer opportunity to end the show on their terms is rare, and it wasn’t taken for granted. "There's a unique pressure to ending a show because all shows are somewhat judged on that final episode, and so, you have to take a swing," Fletcher says, describing that a big swing originally conceived for a later season is moved up ensuring the idea makes it in at all. “We think the ending is unexpected, but we also think it does all the things that this show does — it highlights family and the emotions and character, and it really puts a prism on and distills what we think makes this show so special."
And then there’s honoring the shared universe it was conceived in, the Arrowverse, which the showrunners still felt somewhat of a "responsibility" to. In truth, it wasn’t a priority while crafting the end. "The best way that we could approach it was to just do the best version for our show," Helbing explains. "[As for] Easter eggs, there's the idealistic version — in a comic book you'd have all these characters at your disposal, so you can have whatever you want. But when you're talking about schedules and money and budgets, it would be awesome to have [The Flash star] Grant [Gustin] in this, but it's just not feasible. There are questions like that that come up, and then there's the reality that hits you, and so ultimately, as we discussed in the room, we can just do what we can do, and I think the best way to honor what has been done for 10 years was to hopefully have the audience watch it and then feel satisfied."
Even Hoechlin, who first appeared as Superman in the second-season premiere of Supergirl, titled "The Adventures of Supergirl", had his considerations, even if just “a little bit”. But I wouldn't necessarily say it felt like it was saying goodbye to all of that," he considered. "In a weird way, when we started the show, it was very clear that it was going to be different than what we had been doing on the Arrowverse shows, so I was able to leave that behind from the beginning. When this was coming to an end, it was really just about this and its totality in the last four years just because it was such a separate thing in so many ways."
Watch the preview clip for “Always My Hero”, a levity-giving flashback to when Clark and Lois disclosed the Superman secret to her father. The episode airs Monday at 8 PM/7 PM Central on The CW. All seven remaining episodes likely will air in the same slot as well, should there not be another doubling-up like the season premiered with.
