Spoilers "Superman & Lois" Season 2

Honestly, I was beginning to suspect that S&L was separate from the Arrowverse. And now it's confirmed. I don't mind it, just wish they said something earlier.

However, I feel season two wasn't as strong as season one and I sure hope season three is more on par with the first one.

Also, Chrissy getting uppity that Clark only worked at The Daily Planet? She makes it sound like he didn't accomplish anything in his time there or covered or broke huge stories. I dunno... as a former journalist, Chrissy and Lois' journalism storylines really grated.

The journalism in the first season was the best it's ever been on any Superman show. It felt right. Note taking. Investigating a bank loan mortgage scheme prying on elder farmers. There was a naturalism to it and attention to the details of reporting.

This season it's devolved back to what the journalism in Superman has mostly been... just set dressing.

 

No references to other superheroes, especially Kara, the whole Morgan Edge/Tal-Ro thing, and the fact that Clark's Fortress of Solitude looked absolutely nothing like the one we saw in Supergirl all had me suspecting this wasn't Earth Prime before the last season ended.

 

I'm pretty sure it was, give or take the editorializing in describing it as "cynical manipulation." The second-hand description we got of DC's motives were that they were business-related and understandable. There might've been some sort of distribution or promotional deal contingent on Superman and Lois being of a unit with the other CW DC shows that could've been endangered if it was described in publicity as somehow separate. Granted, you can't really throw the rights-holder under the bus while the show is still on the air, but I think if the secrecy was purely, directly pointed towards the audience, DC would've rather insisted on the show remaining nominally tied in to the other shows, rather than explicitly severing the link within the actual show. Like, you could walk it back if it was just one of those post-episode breakdown interviews where they said, "Hey, we decided this show isn't going to be on Earth-Prime after all, don't expect Supergirl et al. to show up," but having it as dialog within an episode commits them to staying on this path.

The description of how the decision became inevitable over time reminds me of the character of Boxey in the Battlestar Galactica remake. He had scenes throughout the first season, all the way up to the finale, but all but one of them were cut, to the point where they didn't need to explicitly write him out of the show, he just stopped being there. The critical moment was probably the pandemic preventing the Batwoman cross-over, but cutting out all the side-references, the Clark-remembering-two-worlds stuff, even redesigning the suit and never showing the old one even in flashbacks all tipped the balance towards this being a stand-alone show, and I'm glad they finally settled it rather than just leaving it an open question and hoping variants and outbreaks stop long enough to have a crossover. It also blunts the promise of the Earth-Prime story move allowing more casual interactions between the Supers and the rest of the CW shows but that's really the pandemic's fault, too.

 

I think this means that all of the current CW DC shows are now set in their own unverses. Flash is on Earth Prime, Stargirl is set on Earth-2, and Naomi and S&L are both set on their own, so far unnamed Earths.

 

Naomi is no longer "current," having been canceled after one season. But yeah, from what I saw of it, it was clearly on a separate Earth as well -- and had people crossing over from yet more universes, including some other Earth's Superman.

 

Oh, I didn't realize it was cancelled already.

 

Yeah. I always resisted the idea of them merging Earth-1 and Earth-38, since it seemed narratively unnecessary, and when they actually did it, I felt it was incumbent on them to do something with the merger, to have it actually serve a purpose. But because of the pandemic and other factors, it never really did, except in cursory ways like kryptonite showing up in a Batwoman arc.

In a way, making the show separate does resolve some problems I had with its concept. The Superman arc in the Arrowverse established that Clark and Lois needed to go to Argo City to start a family so that Lois wouldn't get killed by a superstrong fetus kicking around inside her. Retconning them to have teenage sons would've required them to be born years before Argo was discovered, so how were they born? Then there are other inconsistencies, like the Fortress, the appearance of the heat vision effect, and whether Kryptonians can fly and survive in space. So having it be separate at least insulates the Arrowverse from a lot of the conceptual problems it raises. Although it introduces plenty of other conceptual problems, like how Kryptonian biology can be so different in parallel worlds with identical doppelgangers.

Still, the fact that it's unconnected, that it's not what we were promised going in, just compounds my deep disappointment at what this show has ended up being. This is not the Superman show I wanted, on any level besides the casting.

Yes, that's sad. In less than eight months, with the ending of Supergirl, the cancellations of Batwoman and Legends, and now this news, Earth-Prime has shrunk from five shows (so we thought) to just one. It's shocking how quickly it all fell apart. I wonder if there's any real chance that the Justice U series will actually happen.

 

Just because you assumed that the show wasn't set on Earth Prime (despite being designed to be and promoted as being) based on those factors doesn't mean that everyone else was supposed or guaranteed to draw that same conclusion.

 

True. But the available evidence was insufficient to rule definitively for either option until it was expressly stated. Therefore, we had a “Schrödinger’s Superman” until Sam Lane “collapsed the wave”. Clearly this mattered to many people but I’m entirely indifferent about it. The actual explanation works (and real life pandemic issues largely accounted for the other possibility).

 

I don't have a problem with it not being the 'main' arrowverse Earth... Hell, from the start I think a lot of people (including myself) said we liked how the show worked WITHOUT being lumped into it and that it felt different.

I think the main issues are what really was the point of hiding it or fooling people? There was no "Sixth Sense I see dead people" type payoff. It was just random line that didn't blow your mind or alter the episode.

The way Diggle talked in his first appearance can certainly be construed as attempting to leave 'intentional wiggle room' as to connecting to the Arrowverse. I don't believe he ever showed his Green Lantern box on S&L, he didn't have headaches like on Batwoman or the other Arrowverse shows.

Is it possible this Earth had an Oliver Queen who was the Green Arrow and fought alongside Superman and died and 'others' who fought and died and now Superman is the only 'superhero' left? Sure. Was it intentionally misleading? Sure. Did it really serve a PURPOSE to be that way? I dunno. If the creators were worried about not bringing along Arrowverse fans unless they made them think they were following the same Superman & Lois they watched on shows there?

I

 

My problem is not that it's in a separate universe per se. My problem is that I'm deeply disappointed in the show overall, and this revelation is just one more disappointment on top of the rest, because now I don't even have an Arrowverse connection to give me a reason to care about the show. If I actually liked what they were doing, I'd be okay with it being its own universe, but at this point, my feeling is, why did I have to get stuck watching this show instead of one about the Earth-Prime Superman & Lois? I can't help feeling I'd enjoy that one more.

 

It was rather obvious that viewers assumed S&L was in the same universe as the other Arroverse series due to the showrunners at Berlanti Productions having SM appear on Supergirl several times, while Diggle appeared on S&L--including the season 2 finale; if they always intended the S&L characters to be inhabitants of another reality, that should have been laid out from the start....but it was not because that was not the intention.

With the in-progress (and suggested widespread) changes happening to DC movie and TV media under WB/Discovery CEO David Zaslav, this "different universe" business may another way of acknowleging that the Berlanti end of DC productions are being excised (i.e. cancelled, as in the case of Legends of Tomorrow & Batwoman), in favor of a more cohesive brand message. Whether or not that helps Superman and Lois is anyone's guess at this point.

 

Viewership seems to have stabilized at 0.8 million which is fine by cw standards, though this show might be more expensive than others...

 

Stuff and things.

 

Getting beat up by Supergirl.

 

Putting the utterly stupid aspects of how and why powerless Clark Kent had his Superman chest, and how powerless Clark survived getting within a million miles of the Sun, (not to mention how powerless Clark survived the vacuum and cold of space) let alone powerless Clark being inside the Sun, it's still a better show than a couple of their other, now cancelled shows, (which helps this show's budget) were imo.

Comic book magic!

I can't wait for the ocean fortress of solitude family vacation!

 

I was expecting a line from Superman to Tal about how it was a good sign for their plan that being that close to the round, yellow sun restored enough of his vitality that he hadn't already died from exposure to space, but I can take that as implicit.

 

Even so, how could they hear each other through the vacuum of space? Is this the Silver Age "Super-ventriloquism" power?

I prefer versions like in Supergirl and Superman: The Animated Series where Kryptonian powers aren't magic, where they still need air to let them breathe and fly, so they need technological assistance to operate in space.

 

That's a lot of truly stupid things to push to the side.

 

I am enjoying the Adventures of the Kent Family aspect. You may have read me write I never read the comics.., well this is my first exposure to that story line and it's been fun.