Superman & Lois: First Trailer for Final Season Released

The CW has — seemingly inadvertently — released the first trailer for Superman & Lois‘s fourth and final season. Ahead of the show’s presence at San Diego Comic Con later this week, a 77-second teaser trailer arrived on The CW App. Redditors discovered it, and while it has not been officially released on any of the network’s social media accounts, it showed up on the DCU Prime TV account — a social account run by fans — shortly after Reddit took notice. Pretty serious spoilers ahead of the show’s fourth season, which will debut in the fall, so watch at your own discretion.

Alright, everybody who doesn’t want to see it gone? Good. Here’s the trailer:

As suspected by more or less everybody, 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. In this version, Doomsday is a mutated version of Bizarro, sent after Superman by Lex Luthor.

The 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.

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.