Superman & Lois Season 2: What to Expect When the Show Returns
Superman & Lois Season 2 is already confirmed, and showrunner Todd Helbing walks us through some possibilities to look forward to!
This article contains Superman & Lois spoilers.
The first season of Superman & Lois has come to a close, and what an absolute joyride it was from start to finish. Are you left craving more? Do you need to spend more time in Smallville ASAP? Well, we’ve got good news for you, because Superman & Lois Season 2 has already been confirmed by The CW, and the first episode has already been written!
We spoke with showrunner Todd Helbing to try and get some details about what to expect from Superman & Lois Season 2.
Superman & Lois Season 2 Villains
Superman & Lois has already given us multiple Kryptonians for Superman to have super-powered brawls and trade heat vision blasts with. There’s always an instinct to just give Supes someone he can hit, but the first season managed to do that while also telling a pretty nuanced, even tragic, story for its central villain. But that just means it’s going to be a little trickier to follow up Tal-Rho with someone equally compelling.
“From the earliest days that Greg Berlanti and I talked about this show, the question was always, ‘okay, if we’re going to do this, how are we going to make it different?’” Helbing says. “And if you go through any of the movies, I think the natural tendency is, you have to have somebody as strong and powerful as Superman, or he would never lose. The story engine that we have though, and what’s really important is the family of it. So once you become a father, once Superman became a father, he has weaknesses that he never had before, his thoughts about Lois, about the boys. That family aspect makes him a weaker in a lot of ways, because he loves more. But it also makes him a better hero, because he has something to fight for.”
It doesn’t seem like Helbing thinks power levels are as important to building a Superman threat as others do.
“It doesn’t have to be somebody that can punch as hard as Superman,” Helbing says. “I think of the end of episode 14, when he came back and he had to tell his wife that he can’t find Jordan. There’s a look on Tyler’s face, like he doesn’t know what to do. Those are the situations we want to put Superman in. Because I think to all of us, writers, actors, producers, that’s the most important and what really works on our show.”
Lex Luthor?
And everybody knows that if there’s one villain who definitely can’t “punch as hard as Superman,” it’s Lex Luthor, who has been brought brilliantly to life on Supergirl over the last few seasons by Jon Cryer. But with Superman & Lois determined to forge its own path, it may be awhile before we get to see Lex show up in Smallville.
“Look, I think Jon was awesome as Lex, so I’m certainly open to anything,” Helbing says. “I think we’d have to find the right story where it would work. Lex Luthor is such an iconic character, so it might be a bit, you know what I mean? There are some other characters that we want to explore. If we’re going to make our own stamp here and try to carve out our own story in Superman history, let’s tell some fresh new versions of this.”
Will There Be More Flashback Episodes?
One of the highlights of the season was the flashback episode, which told us big pieces of Lois and Clark’s history together before the boys were born, and showed us Clark’s first adventures in Metropolis as Superman (in that cool Fleischer-inspired costume).
“We’re not going to make the show into Lost,” Helbing jokes. “We’ll certainly have flashbacks if it’s going to help tell the story and help the audience understand where a character is and where they came from so it really lands emotionally, then yeah, we’ll do it.”
Still, that doesn’t mean that a flashback episode is automatically baked into the plans for Superman & Lois Season 2 just yet.
“We don’t necessarily have a format that we’re trying to follow per episode,” Helbing says. “Not having the typical sort of heroic television formula is really, I think, allowed us to approach stories from a different point of view and aspect, and not maybe worry about stuff that I would have worried about on The Flash.”
Will There Be Crossovers With Other DC TV Arrowverse Shows?
The pandemic put the kibosh on all DC TV crossovers this year, although in fairness, those were always expected to be smaller in scale after the massive Crisis on Infinite Earths in 2019. As for what characters or shows Superman & Lois Season 2 could potentially crossover with, Helbing isn’t talking yet.
“I think our sort of north star is just, it’s not any particular character, it’s just whatever benefits the story the best,” he says. “Honestly, it could be anybody right now. I think we’re under the assumption right now that things are going to kind of get back to how they were pre-pandemic, but I’m still a little hesitant to do that. And not just me. I think everybody is a little cautious, and we just want to be safe first and make sure everybody’s protected. We’ll see how it all plays out. I’m optimistic. I would love to do what we can.”
Helbing also teases more information about where Superman & Lois sits in relation to the other Arrowverse shows airing.
“There’s been a lot of talk and questions about how all the shows interact now and are related post-Crisis,” he says. “I think in season two, the audience will get a lot more answers about that.”
Natalie Irons and Steel
Helbing is keeping quiet on all the implications about Natalie Irons arriving from her corner of the multiverse to surprise her father, John Henry Irons, and the Kent family.
“We knew Nat was going to show up, and we knew we wanted her in the show, because we want to explore a new family dynamic,” he says. “I’ll just say, in season two, there’s a lot that everybody is dealing with, having to get used to new members of a family, I’ll just put it that way.”
Yes, we have to imagine she won’t be thrilled to see that her mother on this world is married to the man who murdered her on their world, for starters.
Will Reign of the Supermen Happen?
Look, you can’t blame us for speculating on this. Superman & Lois introduced John Henry Irons, and even gave him his Steel armor and hammer. They introduced the Eradicator, both as a piece of Kryptonian tech and also as the living embodiment of that tech with a mission to make Earth more like Krypton.
And in a sense, it also gave us Superboy. No, not the half-clone of Superman who eventually adopts the moniker of Kon-El (and then Conner Kent) but the actual biological son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, Jordan Kent. For Superman fans, this is 3/4ths of a set of “replacement Supermen,” the heroes who rose after Superman’s “death” at the spiky hands of Doomsday in the famed Death and Return of Superman comic book story.
Helbing admits that they’ve talked about things, but certainly won’t commit to the possibility, either.
“We talk,” he says. “We kick all that stuff around, and it’s … I won’t say no, but I won’t say yes either, because we already wrote the first episode of season two. There’s some really cool stuff coming.”
And since Supergirl already did a version of Hank Henshaw, the infamous Cyborg Superman, and with all the other love for Superman comic book lore already on display in Superman & Lois, is any of this ever being discussed by the writers?
“I think one of the things that we want to do is we want to stay away from any of the villains that Supergirl did for the most part, unless we’re going to completely reinvent them like Morgan Edge. So we’re trying to find some deep dives and bring those stories out in our show. And I think so far, I’m really excited about season two.”
Superman & Lois Season 2 Release Date
At the moment, all we know is that Superman & Lois Season 2 will arrive in early 2022. The first season arrived in February, so that might be a good spot to pencil in for now.
What do you want to see from Superman & Lois Season 2? Let us know in the comments!
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Mike Cecchini is a man with a deep and abiding love of comics published before he was born, low-budget sci-fi, lo-fi garage rock, giant monster movies,…