The third season of My Adventures with Superman came to a close with Saturday’s episode, “The Return.” Like previous finales, it was a big brawl that saw our heroes defend the world from danger, while also repeating a point made last season and earlier in this one: family matters.
Jonathan and Lara Lane, Clark and Lois’ time-traveling kids from a second, worse off future, stand with Kara and ARGUS forces to fight the Eradicator, Lex Luthor’s self-improving android. But as last week’s “Vae Victus” showed us, Eradicator used Jonathan’s watch to time travel and adapted to enough battles to where it’s returned to the present with years of strategy and combat knowledge under its belt. While the others try to hold their ground against it, Clark takes a trip back to the Fortress of Solitude so he can regain his lost powers.
Co-showrunner Jake Wyatt wrote “Vae,” and admitted to io9 a challenge in landing this particular plane. After season two, the team thought they’d had their fill of Krypton and could move on to other threads. But Clark losing his powers unintentionally made the season “a lot about power,” said Wyatt. “And when we asked ourselves, ‘How does Clark get his powers back?,’ we knew we had to go back to Krypton.”
In “Vae,” Clark meets an old, uncorrupted version of Brainiac living inside the Fortress’ steward robots, who agrees to restore his powers if he proves his worth. And that means a history lesson: originally as mortal as a depowered Clark, the original Kryptonians fought a group of Coluan refugees, the race known in the comics for creating Brainiac. The Coluans were the first people to be conquered, and Kryptonians used that victory (and their enemy’s technology) to become the empire the evil Brainiac served until his defeat.
At our interview, Wyatt confessed “Vae” was partially driven by his love of 1982’s Conan the Barbarian. Through the sword and sandals adventure, Clark has to regain his powers on “terms he couldn’t live with,” including the threat of dying in real life if he’s slain in the simulation. He’s shown that right away when, despite his attempts at diplomacy, a Coluan soldier attacks and nearly kills him.
Instead of giving into his rage, Clark spares the soldier and opts to return him back to his fellow Coluans and learns they’re refugees. It’s through this experience that Clark “ideologically confronts the core ethos of his people and beats them on his terms,” said Wyatt. Despite Old Brainiac’s urging to kill the refugees, Clark’s able to fulfill his promise without any bloodshed. But Old Brainiac’s not having it: not only is it a betrayal of Krypton’s ethos, it also whitewashes the AI’s personal history. That soldier Clark saved became Brainiac, his brain turned into an artificial intelligence that became, in his words, an “eternal servant of the empire.”
Eventually, Clark’s able to convince the Steward to help him restore his powers. Now Superman once more, it’s time for he and Bizarro to join the others against Eradicator, who takes the form of longtime Superman baddie General Zod. And with five Kryptonian heroes on screen, My Adventures with Superman has its first full Superfamily, a pleasant surprise the season’s early trailers were able to hide.
Unsurprisingly, picking those family members was a process unto itself. Wyatt revealed there were “more characters in scripts and outlines” before cuts had to be made. Among those casualties were fully fleshed out versions of Power Girl and Conner Kent, the first non-Clark Superboy. Kon was referenced in marketing posts, so this news likely helps explain some of that social confusion. It’s not new for superhero adaptations to consolidate similar characters, so the current Jonathan has some of Conner’s traits, an apparent compromise to have both Superboys in the cleanest way available.
“[Conner and Power Girl] had to be totally obliterated out of the season after script, because we didn’t have time to service everything we could come up with,” Wyatt lamented. “It would’ve been twice the season you got.”
By his and Clogher’s admission, this season was “so much” to make, and they mentioned the team really “went for it” and took some swings. At time of writing, there’s no word on if My Adventures with Superman will get a fourth season, but if it does, they’ve got “plans” for Steel, another would-be Superman successor in the “Reign of the Superman” arc this show’s adapting. And that’s not the only thing they’ve got designs on, as the season’s final moments show us.
Eradicator’s defeat means Jon and Lara return to their future, while everyone else relaxes now that they’ve stopped the current crisis. At the farm, Lois asks Clark how he got his powers back, and he mentions making a deal with Rau, the living sun inside of the Fortress. Quick flashes of him getting set ablaze and his vague answer of “no [price] I wasn’t willing to pay” is pretty ominous. Is this deal connected to whatever Lex saw with his interstellar satellites and spooked him into creating the Eradicator?
Any answers will have to wait until we hear about the future of My Adventures with Superman. Until then, the now three seasons are all on HBO Max.
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