WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Superman & Lois Season 2, Episode 3, “The Thing in the Mines,” which aired Tuesday, Jan. 25 on The CW.
As Superman & Lois Season 2 progressed, Jon Kent (Jordan Elsass) shockingly shifted from being okay with having no powers to suddenly wanting them. It all stemmed from Jordan (Alex Garfin) succeeding at football and Jon getting benched, but it went deeper than that and it wasn’t about truly about Jordan — but Timmy, who turned out to be doping in order to keep his job as starting quarterback. This made Jon desperate, as he’d like to shine on the football team and move up the social rankings at school.
It pushed him to hit up his girlfriend, Candice, for the performance enhancing-drugs. Rather than this just being the ignorance of youth creating a short-sighted Jon, however, this might just be the show remixing the darkest Superboy story ever.
The story can be found in 1999’s Superman & Batman: Generations from John Byrne. On it Clark and Lois had two kids: Kara and Joel. Unfortunately, while Kara became Supergirl, Lex Luthor used Gold Kryptonite to poison Lois and take Joel’s powers away when she was pregnant. Joel would go on to become bitter and, during the Vietnam War, his men shot him up for basically proposing genocide.
Joel was saved — Lex Luthor used a serum to give him powers and told him that his father took his powers away, so Joel would never surpass him. Then Lex outfitted him with a green and purple suit, allowing Joel to raid Kara’s wedding and murder her. The story ended in disaster for everyone but Lex, as Lex’s serum killed Joel, giving him his biggest win — totally crushing Clark’s family and making the Man of Steel live an immortal life knowing his legacy destroyed itself.
Superman & Lois could be reworking this story on self-discovery, because the crystals Candice is dealing with are already linked to Smallville’s Shuster Mines and the X-Kryptonite. They empowered folks like Tag with super-speed, so Jon could use the drugs the same way Joel used the serum. It may even unhinge him like Joel, making Jon more violent, not just towards schoolmates, but Clark and Jordan as well. This can lead to a battle to save Jon’s soul, especially if he becomes addicted, with the big twist being that, like Joel’s tragedy, Lex was the puppet master all along. After all, it’s easy to see Lex using the crystals, or some form of the mineral, to infect Clark and/or Lois, altering her pregnancy.
It’d explain why Jordan got powers but Jon didn’t, with Lex playing a probability game and waiting to corrupt Jon. It’s easy to picture him knowing Superman’s identity, as Sam Lane’s military unit had all the details on the Kents, so Lex could have used this to shape the ultimate revenge on Kal-El, ruining the Man of Steel’s dynasty.
Even if Lex didn’t know Superman’s identity, he could have poisoned Kal, with his genes eventually powering up one kid and not the other. It’d just be fate that Jon ended up coming to Candice for the drugs, eventually going on to feud with his family. Ultimately, both stories of a son craving power through the wrong means and for the wrong reasons paint a much more cerebral narrative than the Superboy clone who hated Kal just because Lex told him to, all while creating the scariest Lex ever.
To see how Joel Kent’s story is possibly being reworked, Superman & Lois airs Tuesdays at 8pm ET/PT on The CW.
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