[COLUMN] In Superman & Lois, Even the Man of Steel Cannot Defeat Time | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for the four seasons of Superman & Lois. Which is a fairly decent and endearingly charming take on the Man of Steel, if a little bit too “CW” in spirit at times.

Across the four-season run of Superman & Lois, there is a recurring preoccupation with the importance of watches.

In the first season, the supervillain Thaddeus R. Killgrave (Brendan Fletcher) muses that “Einstein saw time as an illusion, one that gets us to wear a watch.” Asking one of his guards for the time, he notes, “Nice piece. And analog. Good for you. A lot of people go digital.” In the show’s third season, on the way to the first chemotherapy session to treat her cancer, Lois (Elizabeth Tulloch) is gifted a watch by her daughter-from-another-universe, Natalie (Tayler Buck).

These are small scenes, but they fit within the larger thematic concerns of Superman & Lois. More than most comic book adaptations, Superman & Lois is very conscious of the passage of time. Indeed, the series marks that passage in a number of ways, most obviously with its emphasis on death. The first season begins with Lois and Clark (Tyler Hoechlin) moving their family back to Smallville following the death of Clark’s adoptive mother, Martha (Michele Scarabelli).

The first season ends with another sort of death, the destruction of the holographic representation of Clark’s biological father, Jor-El (Angus Macfadyen), with the remains of the crystal that housed his consciousness buried beneath a tree on the Kent farm. That tree also comes to serve as the final resting place of Lois’ father, General Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh), after he passes away early in the show’s final season. These deaths are tragic, but they are also inevitable.

Throughout Superman & Lois, trouble arises from characters who refuse to accept that passage of time. The first season features two refugees from different dying worlds who act monstrously in their attempts to mitigate that destruction. John Henry Irons (Wolé Parks) arrives from an alternate world where he was married to Lois, a world destroyed by an evil version of Superman. Irons plots to prevent that from happening by killing Superman before he can turn.

Similarly, the primary antagonist of that first season is the Kryptonian Tal-Rho (Adam Rayner), who plans to “restore Krypton” by destroying Earth, using humanity as the raw material “to resurrect [his] people.” In the third season, crime boss Bruno Mannheim (Chad L. Coleman) refuses to accept the terminal cancer diagnosis that his wife Peia (Daya Vaidya) has received, embarking on a series of experiments that almost destroy the City of Metropolis.

Across the third and fourth seasons, Superman is confronted with the monstrous Doomsday. This version of the iconic Superman foe is a version of Clark from another alternate world. This version of Clark cannot die, but every time that he comes back, he returns in a more monstrous form. In the series finale, Superman shares a touching moment with his alternate self. Doomsday accepts the inevitability of his own destruction, letting Clark push him into the burning yellow sun.

Clark himself has to come to terms with the idea of mortality. In the third season, Lois is diagnosed with cancer, and Clark finds himself struggling to accept that she might die and that there is nothing he can do about it. “I find myself facing a problem that I can't do anything about,” Clark admits in the spousal support group. “I have no idea what's gonna happen.” Superman can save the world, but he cannot stop death itself.

Appropriately enough, the classic comic book storyline The Death of Superman haunts Superman & Lois. Many of the supporting characters from that story, the “Replacement Superman”, feature prominently in the show. John Henry Irons is the superhero Steel. Tal-Rho embraces the ancient Kryptonian weapon known as “the Eradicator.” In an alternate world, Clark’s son Jonathan (Jordan Elsass), is styled as the “Superboy” from The Death of Superman.

When Doomsday kills Clark at the end of the third season and the start of the fourth, it almost feels inevitable. Superman & Lois is in many ways about death, so The Death of Superman was unavoidable. While Clark is resurrected midway through the fourth season, he is brought back with a human heart and so ages and dies. The series finale of Superman & Lois ends with Superman dying for a second time, seemingly permanently, a bold choice for a character often treated as immortal.

In some ways, death is the ultimate marker of the passage of time, a reminder that everything ends. However, Superman & Lois marks the passage of time in other ways. The show is set rather late in Clark’s career, and there is a strong emphasis on the idea that Lois and Clark have lived a life together. By the time the show begins, the pair have put supervillain Lex Luthor (Michael Cudlitz) in prison for nearly decades. They have two children, Jonathan and Jordan (Alex Garfin).

These characters have histories. They are defined by their pasts. Lois is still haunted by a miscarriage early in their marriage, a daughter she would have named Natalie. Tal-Rho is actually Superman’s half-brother, as Lara Lor-Van (Mariana Klaveno) had a separate family before she married Jor-El. This theme of complicated evolving families extends to Smallville. Lana Lang (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and Kyle Cortez (Erik Valdez) divorce halfway through the show, and each starts a new family.

Superman & Lois marks the passage of time through the lives of these characters. At the start of the second season, Lana and Kyle’s daughter Sarah (Inde Navarrette) admits that it “felt a little different” to return to summer camp as a counsellor. At the start of the third season, Jonathan learns how to drive. In the show’s final season, as Clark comes to terms with his newfound mortality, he even finds his hair turning grey.

Throughout Superman & Lois, history rhymes. Clark remembers using his powers to save Lana from a car accident during their high school days, and Jordan ends up doing the exact same thing for Sarah decades later. When Clark has his near-fatal heart attack in the series finale, he notes the irony that “it was almost exactly where my dad died.” Adding to that sense of symmetry, in most adaptations, Clark’s adoptive father dies of a heart attack. Still, these repetitions are a reminder of time’s passage. The past shapes these characters, but it does not trap them.

In this context, it feels very deliberate that the defining trait of Superman & Lois’ take on Superman’s archnemesis Lex Luthor is Luthor’s refusal to accept that passage of time. At the end of the third season, Luthor is released from prison and seeks to avenge himself on Lois, as her reporting put him there. Luthor is motivated by the loss of all that time. “Seventeen years of my life, gone!” Luthor yells. “And you think I want words?  My daughter, she was 14.  Now she won't talk to me.”

Midway through the final season, Clark and Lois arrange for a reunion between Luthor and his estranged daughter Elizabeth (Elizabeth Henstridge). Elizabeth is pregnant. Luthor is going to be a grandfather. Elizabeth makes her father an ultimatum. If he can let go of the past, and embrace the present, he can be a part of their lives. However, to do this, Luthor needs to let go of his vendetta against Lois. Luthor refuses. He cannot – and will not – change. Asked if Luthor has moved on from Smallville, Lois notes, “I don't think Lex Luthor is someone who can ever really move on.”

This emphasis on time, change and death is very interesting in the context of an adaptation of an iconic and beloved comic book character. After all, comic books are sort of frozen in a perpetual “now” with a “sliding timescale.” In the mainstream comics, Clark Kent is not much older than he was when he was introduced in the 1930s. In comics, time is an illusion, both literally in the medium’s use of still imagery and conceptually in its understanding of the flow of time.

The nature of comic books is that they are built around iconography, and so tend to crystalize. There have been significant changes to comic book continuity over time, but more often than not these changes are temporary and default back to factory settings so they can offer readers “the illusion of change.” For example, in the comics, Superman’s marriage to Lois has been erased from continuity and subsequently restored.

This is one of the challenges in adapting comic books into media like film and television. Actors age and time passes. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has struggled with this reality, broaching the topic as early as Age of Ultron. Indeed, one of the central tensions of that shared universe in the wake of Endgame has been the push-and-pull between accepting the reality that time marches on and the impulse to play into pandering nostalgia by pretending things never have to change.

In many ways, Superman & Lois is an extension of Zack Snyder’s Superman trilogy. This is obvious in the show’s sepia-tinted cinematography, its early interest in Superman’s relationship to the American military-industrial complex and in Dan Romer’s score. However, its interest in mortality and the passage of time is also an extension of one of the core themes of those films: an understanding that Superman isn’t about invoking some nostalgic past but instead about finding a way to move forward.

One of the big challenges facing Superman as a character is the urge that some creators feel to assert his perpetual relevance and to insist that he is truly timeless and ageless. That Superman always has been and always will be a perfect ideal. Part of the beauty of Superman & Lois is that it makes a much more interesting and compelling argument for the enduring appeal and necessity of the Man of Steel.

In Superman & Lois, Superman is not an abstraction who exists in some “altered state of existence” trapped in “suspended animation” like his undead body in the wake of Doomsday’s murder of the hero. Instead, Superman is a living, breathing and changing concept. A hero who defines himself as “faster than a speeding bullet” and “more powerful than a locomotive” needs be able to move with the world around him.

As Clark observes in the final line of the show’s run, “Life, it goes by, so fast.” It is a mission statement for the series as a whole. Even with superspeed, Superman & Lois understands that a key part of Superman’s strength comes from being able to keep up with it.