Superman & Lois: The Best of Smallville

Superman & Lois 1.5:  The Best of Smallville

On this week’s episode, Smallville celebrates its annual harvest festival, Jonathan struggles with his new life, Captain Luthor reappears, and part of Morgan Edge’s evil plan is revealed. Here’s a summary as well as my thoughts on the episode (full disclosure: I’ve never read a comic book, but I have watched lots of DC-themed shows and movies).

**Spoilers ahead**

Clark is over-the-top giddy about the Smallville Harvest Fest, which is an event about charity and goodwill (and fried dough and chocolate-covered bacon) that he has enjoyed since he was a kid. Jonathan and Jordan engage in some teenage eye-rolling as they have significant doubts that the festival will be anything but lame. Lois does her best to be supportive of Clark.

Jonathan’s girlfriend of a year from Metropolis is supposed to visit, but she dumps him by phone the day she is supposed to arrive (really, after she’s bought a plane ticket?). This is pretty much the last straw as he’s very tired of his life in Smallville and so he gets drunk at the Harvest fest with some other guys from school and suggests to his parents that he should move back to Smallville.

Meanwhile, Jordan is faring better – Sarah invites him to go to the Harvest festival with her. She’s really struggling with all the issues at home between her parents and is ready to open up to Jordan when Jonathan and his drunk friends show up and ruin the moment.

The boys’ experiences are interspersed with flashbacks to a very awkward Clark growing up in Smallville and the circumstances that led him to move to Metropolis when he was just out of high school.

On the Edge front, Lois and Chrissy are surprised when their previous source, the woman with the missing son who worked in Edge’s mine, shows up at the Gazette with her no-longer-missing son in tow. He claims to have been in an accident, had amnesia, but now he’s fine. And he has nothing but good things to say about Edge, of course. It’s pretty apparent that the guy is not “fine” and sure enough, he goes to the Harvest Fest donation drop-off with his mom, freaks out, runs to a back room, manifests laser vision, and basically burns down the whole building, injuring a firefighter in the process. Clark manages to put out the fire and allow Kyle to rescue the other firefighter without outing himself as Superman (or even showing up as Superman), but the whole situation with how quickly the fire both started and was put out are more than a bit suspicious. After starting the fire, the newly super previously missing miner tells his mother he needs some “space” and takes off. Of course Edge donates a bunch of money to replace everything that was destroyed and keep himself looking good in the eyes of the normal Smallville residents.

Chrissy is able to track the miner from his mother’s phone and follows him to a sketchy industrial area where Leslie Larr, Edge’s somewhat super henchwoman, puts him in this horizontal vault thing that gives him even stronger powers. Apparently that kryptonite that Larr and Edge found in the last episode wasn’t normal kryptonite, it was x-kryptonite. X-kryptonite, in comic book lore, was created accidentally by Supergirl when she tried to destroy green/blue kryptonite. It doesn’t affect Kryptonians, but gives humans Kryptonian-like powers. So, Edge and Larr are planning to use an MRI-like machine and x-kryptonite to create some sort of super army. Very Luthor-esque.

Speaking of Luthor, Captain Luthor is now slumming it in a crappy RV with his AI personal assistant now taking the form of a souped-up Google Home or Alexa device (natch!).  He realizes that Lois is the key to finding Supes and figures out that she’s in Smallville, so he goes there as well. He approaches her in the guise of being another reporter trying to get info on Edge (Does he have any knowledge of Edge other than what he found researching Lois?). He sees Lois with Clark but doesn’t seem to make the Clark-Superman connection. Potentially because he’s too upset at seeing her with another man, because….drumroll…they dated on his world!

About this time, Superman finds Edge’s latest super soldier and they end up in a giant game of flying tag, until Captain Luthor sees them, and shoots them both down with a missile. Superman is unharmed, but the miner basically spontaneously combusts after telling Superman that Edge resurrected him.

But, we’re still not done with super powers because Jordan is walking home by himself when he’s accosted by Tag, the wide receiver from the football team that had developed powers after the bonfire. He apparently blames Jordan for his misfortunes…

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We got some answers in this episode, but certainly a lot more questions! How did Tag escape from the DoD facility? Is there any way that Lois’ father could be involved? It seems unlikely that he’d turn an out-of-control teenager with super powers loose, but we still have no idea what the protocol he initiated at the end of the last episode was about and Tag should have been under his purview. Why does Tag thing Jordan is involved? Does he really know something, or is it just a coincidence?

There just happens to be the motherlode of X-kryptonite in a mine in Smallville? How did Edge know that it was there? How many super henchmen does Edge have? We’ve seen 3 so far, two of which are dead.  Are Jordan’s powers from Clark, or could they be from the x-kryptonite?

Are the Captain Luthor and Edge plotlines completely independent? There’s an awful lot going on in a “small” town right now!

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Due to COVID-related delays, Superman & Lois will be taking a 7-week hiatus before finishing out the first season in late spring/summer. The next episode is scheduled to be shown on The CW on Tuesday, May 18th. Supergirl will be taking over the timeslot in the meantime. Check out our other coverage of Superman & Lois here.