Superman & Lois: Shocking Character Death Sets up Superman’s Return

Spoilers ahead for tonight’s episode of Superman & Lois.

The final season of Superman & Lois kicked off last week and, as almost everyone had expected, it began with the death of Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) in his battle with Doomsday. There were a handful of unexpected twists, including the fact that Doomsday survived the battle (in other adaptations, as in the comics, the two die at the same moment), and the fact that Doomsday, more sentient in the show than he usually is, had been instructed to rip out Superman’s heart after the Man of Steel was dead.

In the second episode of the season, Superman’s son Jordan (Alexander Garfin) tried to recover the heart, but instead Luthor destroyed it. That leaves us off in a pretty bleak place at the start of this week’s episode.

With Superman’s body in stasis at the Fortress of Solitude, the question became how to get him a heart — especially given that Kryptonian hearts aren’t the same physiologically as human hearts. That’s where things get a little dicey.

Without Superman, the world has been left without its protector, and so has Lois and her family. Nobody is feeling it more acutely than General Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh), whose job it is to hold down the fort at the Department of Defense while also worrying about his daughter and grandkids.

In the spirit of that, Lane acquired a serum — the same one used to revive Bizarro last season, before Lex turned the latter into Doomsday. It wasn’t clear at first what his plans were for the serum, but when one of Luthor’s goons shot Sam and he was about to bleed out. That’s when he confided in John Henry Irons (Wole Parks) about his plan.

Not long after, Lane — still bleeding — emerged from the DOD building as Lex Luthor sent Doomsday after him. Lane willingly walked right up to Doomsday and allowed himself to die. Why? Well, the serum — laced with a little of Superman’s blood — had been running through Sam’s veins at the time, and the hope was that his heart could be used to give Clark a transplant.

That kind of heroism among the everyday people — from Lois and Lana to John Henry and Nat — is a key focus of the episode, culminating in General Lane’s sacrifice in the final moments.

“You have Superman in the show, and nobody’s going to be able to compete with him on that level,” explained showrunner Todd Helbing. “In order to make everybody else become their own version of a hero, you have to put them through the wringer. There’s a couple of things that we’re trying to do is to show the audience that all of our characters are going through their own journey. They all have their own hurdles they had to jump, and it’s how they respond to those challenges that makes somebody heroic or not.”

He added, “I think in the last season, the death of Superman really is going to highlight all those characteristics from the rest of our characters.”

Tonight’s episode, “Always My Hero,” opens with Lois giving a eulogy that the audience is meant to assume is for Clark. After the episode ends, it cuts back, and the eulogy is actually for her father. It’s a powerful moment, and yet another emotionally taxing episode for series star Bitsie Tulloch, who seems to have spent the first three episodes crying her body weight out.

“When they outlined a little bit of what was going to happen — because season three was incredibly emotionally intense with the cancer stuff — and then when they said, ‘Superman’s going to die in one, and your dad dies in three,’ I was like, ‘Guys! Again?’” Tulloch joked. “And it was crazy intense because they had said, ‘You’re going to be there when your dad dies.’ And that scene in particular…for me, as an actor, that scene int he parking lot at the DoD with Doomsday and my father was just pure anguish, truly.”

Luckily, the episode was directed by David Giuntoli, Tulloch’s husband, who could work with her to capture the best performance and minimize the trauma she has been putting herself through.

“David could tell that I was ready to go, and he was like, ‘Do you want me to start close and just see what happens and what you do naturally?’” Tulloch explained. “It wasn’t so much that we had to block and I had to hit the mark. We had a certain amount of blocking at the beginning, and then once she sees him die, I was given freedom to react. I almost threw up the first time. I actually gagged while I was crying and screaming, i was gagging, and I was thinking, ‘I’m going to puke.’ As an actor, you really pray for those moments that you’re so in character, you have no idea what’s going on.”

She said she had a similar experience on the the 2013 movie Parkland (which also starred Smallville‘s Tom Welling), when she played a John F. Kennedy superfan who was yards away from the President when he was shot, saying that the scene is still with her more than a decade later.

“That scene int he parking lot with Dylan was really trying,” Tulloch said. “And then of course, it’s film, you do it over and over and over again, and I try to be a generous actor, so when they turn around and they’re getting Dylan’s stuff, it’s like, keep it up. By the time you go home, you’re just so depleted, and you feel like a shell of a human being, but my job is to bring it as much as I’m capable, and so that’s what I was trying to do.”

New episodes of Superman & Lois air on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.