Mixed feelings this week. It's nice to give Clark a chance to connect with Lara in a sense, and maybe begin a redemption arc for Tal-Rho. But I've never really liked the whole "holographic ghost in the Fortress" angle. It never existed in the Superman mythos until the Reeve movies, and the adaptations over the past couple of decades have really overused it. Plus the movies and
Smallville never really explained just what Jor-El's "ghost" was, whether it was a computer simulation, his actual consciousness, or what. Okay, later productions have explained better that these are AI programs based on memory engrams and the like, but my distaste for the concept was already set by that point. Also,
Supergirl's Alura hologram was presented as basically a nonsentient expert program with limited responses, but S&L depicts its holograms as fully sentient, which seems like pushing the concept too far to me.
Technically Lara is the latest Arrowverse character to be recast for S&L, but she only appeared briefly in the opening of the
Supergirl pilot, so it hardly counts.
Lana running for mayor was predictable, but what I want to know is, when she and Kyle were considering candidates for mayor, why wasn't Clark Kent on the top of their list? You'd think he'd be the obvious choice, an admired, unquestionably honest, universally liked native son. Of course he'd have to turn it down, being busy enough with other responsibilities, but you'd think they would've at least thought of him. There should've been a line explaining why they ruled him out. (Or Lois, but I guess she's less popular in Smallville.)
The several attempts to adapt it have left me cold as well, but an ongoing show may be the place that can get it right. The Doomsday fight in Death of Superman was just a big fight to get to the heart of the story: Funeral for a Friend with the world and supporting cast mourning Superman showing his importance, then Reign of Superman with the mystery of how he was being brought back. The movies have all had to give those elements short shrift due to time constraints, but a TV show can let that breathe far easier.
Honestly, I'm not that interested in seeing that story either. I feel that serialization has made TV heroes too self-absorbed, too fixated on their own personal problems rather than helping
other people with their problems, which was more the focus in the episodic era. Superman most of all should be other-directed rather than self-directed. I want him to be the one helping, not the one needing help.
Plus, as I said, how the heck do you do a storyline where the show's lead actor is "dead" for weeks? You'd have to keep Hoechlin around somehow, and yeah, I guess you could go the impostor angle, but then the show isn't telling stories about Superman
and Lois, which is literally the title of the show. Hard to build a show around relationship drama when a key figure in most of the show's relationships is missing. And I just don't
want Superman/Clark to be absent for that long, certainly not when we're only in the second of this show's short seasons.
It's almost a shame the show feels as disconnected from the wider CWverse as it does, as it'd be great to feel the effects on the characters in the other shows.
Hmm, yeah... I could see it working as one of their week-long crossover events,
if they still had as much interconnection as they used to. It would've been good to show how the other heroes had to compensate for Superman's absence, except they never managed to establish a version of the post-Crisis world where Superman's
presence had any real importance to the other shows.
