Previously on SUPERMAN AND LOIS…
As we continue the CW show’s inaugural season, one thing is becoming perfectly clear: none of the bad guys on this show are who they say they are.
We’re just a couple of weeks removed from the big REVEAL that the “Captain Luthor” who’d been giving Superman trouble all season was actually the Joh henry Irons from another Earth. This week, it turns out that the other main antagonist of the first season of Superman and Lois – billionaire industrialist Morgan Edge – is someone else entirely as well. We don’t know who, exactly, but we do know that he’s a Kryptonian who came to Earth at the same time as Superman, whom he calls brother to end the most recent chapter.
Clark really needs to put in a call to his cousin, SUPERGIRL, to ask her what she knows about a long-lost brother, since she was alive on Krypton when Kal-El was born and she might have some more insight into who this “Morgan Edge” actually is. Did Jor-El and Lara have secret twins? Is Superman and Lois now a daytime soap?
Edge actually being a Kryptonian creates a lot of questions for the second half of the first season (which this episode kicks off), but it also answers some of the ones posed by Lois Lane here: specifically, why is Edge obsessed with finding the X-Kryptonite and with staying in Smallville when he’s left other communities in the greater fictional Kansas area after mere weeks? After encountering some more Smallville residents who had been turned into evil aliens with superpowers, it becomes clear that the residents of Smallville are more receptive to accepting the X-Kryptonite powers because of all the radiation they’ve lived with since Kal-El’s rocket ship came to Earth.
Sometimes I worry that this show is going to delve way too far into early-2000s Smallville (the TV show, not the fictional Kansas town) territory. Thankfully, they’ve managed to make it work so far.
Edge released more of his “leadership program” participants on Lois Lane and her family because of Superman’s weakened state after last week’s battle with gaseous Kryptonite in Project 7734. The Man of Steel responds to a bank robbery in Mexico where a few blasts from a regular shotgun nearly fells him, and later he’s shown with welts all over his chest. The Kryptonite poisoning spreads to his son Jordan, who manifests a cold that reveals his freeze breath.
After chastising Lois’ father and head of the Department of Defense, Sam Lane, Clark takes Jordan up to the Fortress of Solitude to cure him, leaving Lois, Jonathan and Sam open to an attack from their newly-powered neighbors. The least shocking reveal here is that Lana Lang’s husband, Kyle, took Edge’s offer and tries to kill Lois with his heat vision, but Superman gets back just in time and Kyle doesn’t seem to remember anything about the attack afterwards.
Edge seems to be growing his Kryptonian army, which would obviously dove tail into John Henry Irons’ fears of the destruction of his Earth being repeated here. I’m looking forward to an appearance from Steel towards the end of the season to pay off the faith Superman showed in him by letting him go. We have a lot to look forward to as we’re officially in the second half of the 16-episode first season, including a major war of the Supermen.