Review: My Adventures with Superman “Hearts of the Fathers”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Clark is still paranoid about finding the General, but puts that aside to help host Lois and Jimmy at the Kent Farm for Thanksgiving. To his shock, it turns out the General is actually Lois’ father! Even worse, the Kryptonite that Lois got from the League of Loises triggers an alert with the Kryptonian tech buried beneath the farm, causing a ship to rise out of the earth and make General Lane think that Zero Day is happening once again. Clark uses the Kryptonite to destroy it, mortally wounding himself in the process and losing access to his hologram father, so General Lane decides to leave him alone for now. Meanwhile in space, Brainiac informs an armored Kryptonian warrior of the failed invasion, but the warrior simply says their target will kneel.

OUR TAKE

Season finale time! And thankfully just SEASON finale, as they are happy to announce that Season 2 is currently in production. Hopefully they’ve already recorded everything or else we won’t be getting it for aWHILE. But anyway, THIS episode is mainly about wrapping up the General Lane stuff and Clark’s anxiety about his heritage, as well as setting up some battles to come. I honestly only figured out the General was Lois’ dad because the wikipedia episode synopses figured it out, so this twist reveal wasn’t exactly a shock, but I think they handled the shock for Clark well enough. Kind of reminded me of a similar scene in Spider-Man Homecoming, where Peter is picking up his date and finds out her dad is the Vulture. Not exactly the same commanding presence as Michael Keaton, but sufficient. A lot of this show is pretty much just…sufficient. Plus, even if I hadn’t spoiled myself on it, I think the twist was handled subtly enough that it wasn’t so obvious if you aren’t looking for it.

The bigger revelations come with us finally getting a better look at the Kryptonian ship and some more time with holo-Jor-El, who is still mostly speaking Kryptonian too so we can’t understand him…UNLESS you happen to have closed captions on, in which case you can completely understand him, which is certainly an odd choice. Since we’re now confirming that this show’s version of Kryptonians were in fact terrible conquerors who almost invaded Earth, it seems Jor-El (who isn’t named in the show but c’mon I’m not dancing around it) was an exception to this, but was either killed or sealed in the ship or…killed again now the ship is gone? Basically there’s still lots left to go into for Season 2. But the most significant lore change besides that is probably the way Kryptonite hurts both flesh Kryptonians AND their tech for some reason. In other media it’s just been enough to make them double over in pain, but here it seems to make crystals form out of their skin AND change the shape of their robots, which seems to indicate this species is techno-organic in some way. THESE are the creative liberties with the source material that intrigue me. And next week we’ll get into MORE that intrigues me when we look at the season as a whole. Won’t that be cool? I think it’ll be cool.