[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Superman & Lois Season 4 Episode 3 “Always My Hero.”]
Superman & Lois isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to hitting fans where it hurts in the final season. The two-part premiere killed off Superman (Tyler Hoechlin). And there’s another major death in the October 14 episode—but this one comes with a sign of hope.
With Doomsday coming after him, General Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh) injects himself with the serum containing Superman’s blood, so it’s flowing through his heart when he dies—Doomsday snaps his neck. His heart can be used to bring back Superman; he’d been looking for a donor but there was no one, so Sam knew when he went outside how it would end up.
“A lot” went into the decision to kill off Sam, showrunner Brent Fletcher tells TV Insider. “It was a tough call. We love Dylan so much as an actor and love Sam so much as a character. It’s not something we did without thinking about it a lot, but there [have] to be real consequences for something, [and] we just felt like if we were going to bring Superman back, there had to be a great sacrifice to do it. It had to be earned, it had to be important.”
That’s how it all fell together. “We felt like there’s no better way than to have it come from Sam Lane and to tell the story of their relationship in those flashbacks, how it went from cold to understanding and let that be the underpinnings of this giant decision that he makes, which is to give his life to bring back to Superman,” Fletcher continues. “We thought that earned the decision that we made to bring him back and we knew that an actor like Dylan could perform it in a way that was worth it and he did.”
Colin Bentley/The CW
Adds showrunner Todd Helbing, “It also completed Sam Lane’s arc from the beginning of the show to the end and you see the growth and he didn’t always do the right thing. He was trying to be a good dad, but he failed and multiple times and it caused a lot of friction between he and Lois [Elizabeth Tulloch]. And then if you go back and you watch all four seasons and you see his arc, it felt like to us the perfect way to complete it.”
Clark’s eyes do open at the end after the transplant, but there are concerns about using Sam’s heart. And there’s also the matter of how he’ll feel about what Sam did.
“It sets up a philosophical consideration for Clark. It’s like any near-death experience—in this case, it’s an actual death experience he comes back from—you sort of reevaluate your life and what you want from it and how to be the most impactful. So Clark starts dealing with that question,” notes Helbing. “And then there’s also just a question of, it’s not a Kryptonian heart, so is this going to change things for him? Whenever a decision like this is made from a story perspective, you want it to be impactful and for there to be some version of consequences. So you start to see how this will play out in the next couple episodes.”
In a much more light-hearted part of the episode, Jon (Michael Bishop), after watching his twin Jordan (Alex Garfin) with powers, develops his own, and quickly, he can do everything their dad could.
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“The first three episodes are pretty dark and the one thing that we were really excited about was if we gave Jon powers how excited he would be,” explains Fletcher. “For four seasons, he hasn’t had them and now all of a sudden he does. And to see the joy of that amidst all the darkness, we felt like that was going to be a nice counterbalance to things.”
Not only does this give them plenty of story to cover going forward, but this is one area where it benefited them that the show was ending. “Since it was our last season, we didn’t have to worry about having too many people with superpowers,” Fletcher adds. “That’s one of the only luxuries of knowing it’s your final season, is that you can do things and not have to live with them forever. And for us it was like, okay, well, we can do this. We know we’ve got stories for this season and we don’t have to worry about how it impacts Season 5, 6 or 7, production-wise and story-wise. And we thought it was a lot of fun for him.”
What do you think of Superman & Lois killing off Sam and giving Jon powers? Let us know in the comments section below.
Superman & Lois, Mondays, 8/7c, The CW
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