Introduction: The Beginning of the End
When Superman & Lois debuted in 2021, it promised something rare: a superhero show grounded in emotional realism, familial complexity, and small-town charm. Four seasons later, it leaves the stage as both a success story and a cautionary tale. Season 4 is the end of the road, a season tasked with the impossible: to conclude character arcs, reignite interest after a divisive third season, and wrap up a legacy show within the budgetary constraints and existential uncertainty of The CW’s declining Arrowverse.
The result is a season of mixed intentions and uneven execution. At its best, Season 4 reaches back toward the grounded emotion and character-first storytelling that once defined it. At its worst, it feels like a cliff-notes version of a final season, racing through plots, abbreviating character beats, and leaning heavily on Lex Luthor without doing justice to the wider ensemble.
This isn’t a triumphant farewell. Nor is it a disaster. Superman & Lois Season 4 is, in the end, a season of contraction: smaller in scope, more intimate in ambition, yet hampered by pacing issues, missed opportunities, and the limitations of a show that ran out of room before it ran out of potential.
Narrative Framing: The Season of Lex Luthor
Season 4 begins by acknowledging the tectonic shift introduced at the end of Season 3: Lex Luthor (played with intimidating stillness by Michael Cudlitz) has returned. Released from prison and burned by betrayal, Lex now sets his sights not only on vengeance, but on reshaping the world in his image. He quickly becomes a dominating force, emotionally, narratively, and thematically, in a show that has typically reserved its villains for side arcs.
The pivot to Lex is effective, at least initially. Where previous seasons juggled multiverse duplicates, resurrected meta-humans, and ethically tortured scientists, Luthor feels chillingly direct. He’s the dark inverse of Clark: methodical, egotistical, contemptuous of human weakness. His manipulation of public opinion, weaponization of Lois’s cancer recovery, and eventual entrapment of Bizarro Superman show a villain not just with brute power, but with an ideology: human supremacy in a world growing dangerously reliant on super-powered saviors.
But as powerful as Lex is as a presence, his overemphasis comes at a cost. Half the ensemble is marginalized to make room. Side plots are abruptly dropped or shallowly resolved. And while his story is the most cohesive of the season, it also reinforces the sense that Superman & Lois had one big story left, not several. The rest is scaffolding.
Clark Kent / Superman: The Ghost in the Spotlight
One of the season’s most baffling contradictions is that, despite being in nearly every episode, Clark Kent feels distant. Season 4 tries to split the difference between domestic Clark and Superman-in-crisis, but in doing so, lands on neither.
Thematically, Clark faces existential threats both personal and global. Lex’s manipulation of public trust threatens his legitimacy. Bizarro’s transformation into Doomsday threatens his mortality. His sons are growing up. His wife is recovering from cancer. Yet for long stretches, Clark seems emotionally disconnected. He responds to crises, comforts his family, and speaks earnestly, but he doesn’t feel. Not in the deep, emotionally transparent way that made earlier seasons resonate.
Part of the problem is screen time. With Lex’s rise, Jordan’s evolution, and multiple subplots converging, Superman is often reacting, not driving the story. And in a truncated season, those reactions are compressed: his growing paranoia over Lex never quite builds; his grief after the Doomsday fight is cut short; his heroism is shown, but not contextualized.
Tyler Hoechlin remains committed. His performance is still empathetic, and he conveys strength without bravado. But the writing gives him fewer windows into Clark’s psychology, fewer scenes where we sit with his doubt, his love, or his fear. By the time the season ends, Clark has saved the world again, but we barely know how he feels about it.
Lois Lane: Recovery, Resilience, and Regression
Season 4 wisely continues to explore Lois’s recovery from breast cancer, a narrative thread that began in earnest last season. Elizabeth Tulloch delivers another emotionally grounded performance, especially in scenes dealing with survivor’s guilt, physical trauma, and the slow re-emergence of professional confidence.
Early episodes touch on powerful ideas: Lois’s discomfort with being seen as “brave,” her anxiety around recurrence, and the guilt of feeling helpless while the world spirals. Her bond with Clark is also a highlight. Even with reduced screen time, their partnership remains one of the show’s most authentic emotional anchors.
Yet for all that, Lois is underused in the back half of the season. As Lex becomes the focal point, and as the action ramps up around Doomsday and the Kent boys, Lois is too often relegated to exposition. She conducts interviews, offers pep talks, and stands firm in the face of fear, but her inner life goes mostly unexamined. Even her final confrontation with Lex, once her nemesis, feels anticlimactic, brief, and overly polite.
The show avoids melodrama, to its credit. But it also avoids emotional closure. Lois’s arc needed one more big moment, a reckoning with Lex, a reckoning with death, or a reckoning with motherhood after illness. It doesn’t arrive.
Jordan and Jonathan: Divergent Roads
The Kent twins, once the emotional center of Superman & Lois, experience radically different seasons.
Jordan: The Fall and Rise
Jordan Kent, now operating as Superboy, is thrust into the spotlight in Season 4. His desire to help, to live up to his father’s example, and to define his own identity propels much of the season’s B-plot. His powers have matured, and so has his confidence. But this maturation comes at a cost: arrogance, recklessness, and impulsivity.
Jordan’s arc flirts with darkness, and wisely so. His clashes with authority, including with Clark, offer glimpses of how easily power can isolate. His breakup with Sarah and awkward flirtations with self-righteous heroism suggest a teenager slowly losing his compass.
Yet the show pulls its punches. His descent never truly threatens his relationships. The consequences are minimal. His “training” under Sam Lane is episodic and shallow. And his reconciliation with Sarah feels rushed and sentimental. A potentially rich arc, about the cost of adolescent power, becomes a lesson lightly learned.
Jonathan: Still Underwritten
Jonathan, on the other hand, remains the show’s most mishandled character. Ever since losing the “power lottery,” he has been sidelined. Season 4 gives him a job as a firefighter trainee, an honorable role, and thematically appropriate, but it barely registers.
His relationship with Candice is abruptly rekindled and then dropped. His frustrations about living in Jordan’s shadow are only addressed in passing. There’s no meaningful subplot, no major choice, no emotional arc.
The contrast is stark: Jordan grapples with power, identity, and risk. Jonathan… just exists. In a final season, that feels like a missed opportunity and a disservice to what once made him so relatable.
Lex Luthor: A Villain Worth the Spotlight
Let’s be clear: Michael Cudlitz’s Lex Luthor is excellent. Brooding, calculated, simmering with rage and intellect, he brings a new flavor of menace to a role long associated with either camp or coldness. This Lex is neither. He’s philosophical, brutal, and scarily patient.
Season 4 wisely avoids turning him into a monologuing mastermind. Instead, he manipulates through silence, through legality, through perception. He buys influence. He wins press wars. He makes Bizarro into Doomsday not through science, but through psychological domination. His villainy is less about weapons and more about weakness exploiting others’ fragility.
And yet, the emphasis on Lex reveals a structural weakness: the rest of the cast shrinks around him. He absorbs narrative space like a black hole. Few characters are allowed to challenge him directly. The final confrontation with Clark is epic in action, but surprisingly lacking in ideology. Lex’s manifesto, about humans reclaiming control, is left underdeveloped.
Still, as a character, he’s the best addition in years. Had he arrived in Season 2 or 3, with more narrative runway, he might have redefined the show’s second act. As it stands, he’s a compelling presence in a season that doesn’t always know how to handle his gravity.
Bizarro / Doomsday: Lost Potential
The transformation of Bizarro into Doomsday is a fascinating premise, one that connects mythology, horror, and tragedy. It could have been a season-long meditation on identity, pain, and monstrosity.
Instead, it’s rushed. Doomsday becomes a blunt instrument for the finale. His fight with Superman is epic in scale but oddly weightless in meaning. Bizarro’s internal conflict is barely explored. There’s no dialogue, no POV, no tragedy, just mutation, violence, and defeat.
This is where Season 4’s limited episode count truly hurts. A full season might have explored Bizarro’s humanity, made us grieve his fate. Instead, we get a silent monster, and Superman punching him into the sun. Visually cool. Emotionally hollow.
The Supporting Cast: Shrinking Circles
Nearly every supporting character is diminished in Season 4: a consequence of time, budget, and focus.
- Sam Lane has moments of mentorship with Jordan, but his arc is truncated. His relationship with his grandchildren, especially Jonathan, could have offered depth, but it’s left hanging.
- Lana and Kyle, once mainstays, are barely present. Their storylines from Seasons 2 and 3 are dropped or resolved off-screen. Sarah remains defined by her relationship with Jordan, which feels like a disservice to her once-compelling arc.
- Chrissy Beppo, now romantically involved with Kyle and pregnant, has a few sweet moments but otherwise exists on the periphery.
These absences reinforce the sense that Season 4 is more epilogue than ensemble. The cast that once gave the show its community flavor now feels ornamental.
Themes and Tone: Half-Explored, Half-Forgotten
Superman & Lois once wore its themes proudly: family, sacrifice, responsibility, the double lives we live. Season 4 gestures toward those ideas but rarely interrogates them.
- The idea of Superman becoming obsolete in the public eye? Raised, then dropped.
- The ethics of resurrection and power? Touched on, but never fully debated.
- The trauma of illness and survival? Present in Lois’s performance, but not explored communally.
Instead, Season 4 adopts a tone of compressed resolution. Things move quickly. Lessons are learned quickly. Emotion is often implied, not expressed. The result is a season that feels more like a wrap-up than a climax.
There’s still beauty in the tone: quieter scenes between Clark and Lois, moments of paternal worry, flashes of teenage confusion. But the show that once lingered now hurries. And the thematic weight of saying goodbye is lost in the rush.
Pacing and Structure: A Victim of Finality
Only 10 episodes. That’s all Season 4 had to work with. And it shows.
The pacing is erratic: the first half is methodical and slow-burn, while the final three episodes accelerate dramatically. Emotional payoffs are unearned. Conflicts end too neatly. Characters change abruptly.
This isn’t the writers’ fault alone, it’s a structural limitation. But it leaves Season 4 feeling lopsided. The early groundwork isn’t given the time to blossom. And the ending feels more like a series of checkboxes than a finale earned through character development.
The final episode, though visually striking, offers limited catharsis. There’s no funeral for Bizarro. No speech from Superman to the world. No moment of reflection with the family. Just Lex locked up, the family together, and a lingering sense that more should have been said.
Conclusion: A Worthy Farewell… Almost
Superman & Lois Season 4 is not a failure. It’s a farewell. And farewells are difficult, especially for a show that once promised so much, and still had more to give. This season course-corrects some of Season 3’s missteps. It returns to character-first storytelling. It elevates Lex Luthor into a formidable final antagonist. And it reaffirms that, at its best, this show was never about powers, but about people.
Yet it also suffers: from time, from scope, from ambition reined in. Characters are shortchanged. Themes are half-explored. And the emotional resonance that once defined the series is muffled in its final notes.
Still, this was a rare superhero series. One that dared to ask what comes after the cape. One that made Superman a father first. And even if Season 4 didn’t quite land the plane, it reminded us of why we took the flight in the first place.
One Gay Astronaut 
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