Tonight on “The Thing in the Mines,” fans of Superman & Lois were shocked by a twist that almost nobody expected. After three weeks of teasing a creature pounding its way out from the underground Shuster Mines, audiences finally got a glimpse of the creature in question…and it was not who anybody expected. The twist was something that series star Tyler Hoechlin was not advised in advance was coming, so when the scripts started to imply that one particular Superman villain would be coming to the show, he knew it wasn’t the case…but did not know how long that misdirect would be playing out.
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Here’s how The CW officially described the episode: Lois (Elizabeth Tulloch) reaches out to Ret. General Lane (Dylan Walsh) as Clark’s (Tyler Hoechlin) visions become worse during heated arguments with both Jonathan (Jordan Elsass) and Jordan (Alex Garfin). Meanwhile, Lana (Emmanuelle Chriqui) shares her frustrations with Kyle (Erik Valdez). Lastly, Natalie (Tayler Buck) learns that her father (Wole Parks) didn’t follow through on a promise he made to her.
There are spoilers ahead for tonight’s episode of Superman & Lois, titled “The Thing in the Mines.”
In the episode, a monstrous figure in a green suit blasts its way out of the mines and begins attacking Superman. With its bulky, full-body suit and the cables and mechanisms on it, the suit was a reasonably close match for the early appearances of Doomsday, the creature that killed Superman.
Doomsday, introduced in 1992, was a Kryptonian genetic experiment that was buried deep within the Earth. After he woke up, he cut a bloody path from Ohio to Metropolis, culminating in a fatal battle that killed both Doomsday and Superman. The idea of Doomsday arriving in the Arrowverse led many to believe that this season would deal with the death and return of Superman story as seen in the comics.
Tonight, though, it turned out this isn’t Doomsday but a more “classic” villain: Bizarro, a twisted doppelganger of Superman.
“I didn’t know how it was going to be done, but I did know that it was going to be Bizarro before we started shooting the season,” Hoechlin told ComicBook.com. “Todd Helbing, our showrunner, gave me a call to kind of run me through what the idea for the season was. And that’s when he kind of told me what was going to be going on, what they had in mind. It’s very cool, very exciting; this is a character that I think has never been done in the way that we’re doing it this season. So I think it’s something very cool for the fans, and hopefully something that they really enjoy.”
Hoechlin said that while he was clued in to the Bizarro twist early on, some members of the cast were not. Depending on individiaul preferences, some actors know more or less about how the season will play out until they have to play a scene.
“There’s some things that they kind of leave as surprises for us,” Hoechlin admitted. “I know some of the cast really don’t like to know anything. They read the scripts as like a fan would watch the episode. They really don’t want to know anything ahead of time. I didn’t necessarily know that that tease was going to be something we were doing. I just knew it was going to Bizarro. So when that came in, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s kind cool. That’s kind of cool.’ But at least for me, it was never pitched to me like, ‘Hey, we’re going to do Doomsday,’ and then ‘Oh, just, just kidding. You’re actually going to make it through the season…maybe,’ or that kind of thing. It was never presented to me that way. But I do know that some of the cast did read and be like, ‘Wait, what’s going on?’”
Superman & Lois airs on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
