Days after CW Network inadvertently dropped a 77-second teaser for Superman & Lois on its app, Warner Bros. Television released the trailer officially today at the Superman & Lois panel at San Diego Comic Con. This actually represents the acclaimed series’ first SDCC panel, since the show debuted in early 2021, and is usually filming during the summer when Comic Con is happening. At this point, the series has wrapped, and the final season is set to debut in October, so the cast and crew are free to promote Superman & Lois at the biggest pop culture show in the world.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The fourth and final season of Superman & Lois will loosely adapt “The Death of Superman,” the best-selling 1990s event story in which Superman and Doomsday died at one another’s hands — or more accurately, “Funeral For a Friend,” the story that immediately followed Superman’s death. The question raised in the initial teaser art was what happens in a world without a Superman — and that’s the tagline for “Funeral For a Friend.”
The trailer teases a grisly end for Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh), among other heartbreaking moments. Without Superman to step in, one has to wonder how a lot of these things will play out…especially with a season that’s only ten episodes. The shortened season also comes with a number of cast members either leaving altogether, or being scaled back from series regulars to recurring guest stars. Walsh is one such actor, along with Emmanuelle Chriqui (Lana Lang), Erik Valdez (Kyle Cushing), Inde Navarrette (Sarah Cushing), Wole Parks (John Henry Irons), Tayler Buck (Natalie Irons), and Sofia Hasmik (Chrissy Beppo).
The “Death of Superman” story has been adapted a few times — first in DC’s first DC Universe-branded animated movie, Superman: Doomsday. In that story, it wasn’t a very close adaptation of the comics, but it did introduce the notion that Lex Luthor was tied to the creation of Doomsday. That happened again in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which also ended with Superman’s death, and then there was a two-part Death and Return of Superman animated movie. In Superman & Lois, Doomsday is a mutated version of Bizarro, sent after Superman by Lex Luthor.
After his death, Superman was revived in Reign of the Supermen!, a story in which four other characters all tried to replace the dead Man of Steel. The four “Supermen” were John Henry Irons/Steel, a genetically-engineered Superboy, The Eradicator, and Hank Henshaw, a Cyborg Superman who proved to be the story’s ultimate villain.
Versions of Eradicator, Steel, and Superboy have all appeared in Superman & Lois, presumably setting up some version of Reign of the Supermen! during the fourth season. The show also used a version of Superman’s black “recovery suit,” which debuted in Reign of the Supermen!, as the suit for an evil Superman who killed Lois on John Henry Irons’s Earth. It’s hard to imagine too much of the season happening without Clark or lead actor Tyler Hoechlin, though, so it’s unlikely to be a 1:1 translation of that story.
Superman & Lois will debut its fourth and final season on Thursday, October 17th. The series will return from its long hiatus with a 2-hour premiere, airing between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET. Beginning the following week, Superman & Lois will air Thursday nights at 8 p.m., followed by new episodes of the adventure series The Librarians: The Next Chapter, from Leverage executive producer Dean Devlin. The series will have a ten-episode order, although with likely breaks for sports and the holidays, it’s hard to guess when the finale might air.
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