Been watching Superman & Lois recently, and with the 3rd season wrapping up, I wanted to talk about what I saw as "Drama Busywork" in this season.
One of the b-plots in this season is that Jordan, one of Clark & Lois's sons, is dealing with Teenage Issues. In episode S3 E12, he sees people make fun of his superhero alter ego right in front of him & he responds like most kid superheroes do in these types of shows, basically saying "so what if this new superhero is a kid and wears goggles? seems like this new superhero is kinda badass and saved some kids!"
That exchange makes his ex, Sarah, think that Jordan doesn't care about his secret and having a secret identity... despite the fact that she saw the entire conversation start to finish and saw him keep the secret, all he did was kinda go "whoa hold on peers, what if the kid hero is cool and awesome instead???" Sarah, going off of this wild interpretation of events laid out in front of her, tells her mom, Lana Lang.
But this game of telephone telephones-back? It starts as "heyyy what if the new kid superhero is cool haha", then Sarah sees this as "Jordan doesn't care about his secret, so I shouldn't have to care about keeping his powers a secret", which Lana Lang takes to Clark and Lois as "he cares too much about his alter ego", and finally Clark & Lois go to Jordan with "you don't think people knowing about your alter ego is bad". And this last point isn't in a "People should know Superman and Clark Kent are the same person" way, it's in a "People should know Superman exists" way.
So Jordan doesn't actually get to address the core problems here, which are:
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he is a bit of a Teen Weirdo dealing with Teenage Adolescence on top of being a Teen Hero
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His relationship with his ex, Sarah, is Bad
Watching the season finale right now, and we haven't gotten any meaningful closure on this Jordan arc. So, like, what's the point?
It really feels like meaningless drama that isn't really adding much to the story or the characters, it's just giving them something to do. Just a lot of characters handling things horribly, AND characters who aren't handling things poorly have the memories of goldfish.
One of the other characters, DOD Grandpa (cannot remember his character's name, but he's Lois Lane's dad) is the one who got Jordan on this whole alter ego track! But when everything comes to blows about Jordan wanting recognition as his alter ego, he gets to just kinda peace out of that whole conflict.
Another example from this same episode is a Clark and Kyle interaction, part of the C-Plot of Jonathan (Lois & Clark's other son) feeling kinda left out of the whole family because he doesn't have powers like his brother and he's not someone of worldwide importance like his mom.
Jonathan has been working as a firefighter in-training with Kyle, Lana Lang's ex. Recent developments have made it so Kyle knows Clark is Superman. This has had an impact on how Kyle treats Jonathan, since Kyle knows that not only is this Superman's son, but also Kyle used to be Clark's biggest bully. Clark goes to Kyle and asks to not treat Jonathan any different because Clark is Superman, and clearly and concisely states that this is about Jonathan not wanting special treatment and Jonathan wants to make it on his own merits.
Kyle would literally not be receptive to that idea from anyone other than Superman, he's still in "this man could kill me and coulda killed me in high school when I was his biggest bully" mode of thinking. So, how does Kyle take this new info to Jonathan? like Jonathan went and ratted to his dad! Even though Jonathan clearly states that's not what happened, Clark just overheard him talking about work! Jonathan's obviously comfortable talking to Kyle about these issues, or else he wouldn't expand on them and defend himself by basically saying "what, you expect me to never talk about work outside of work?"
This is the drama equivalent of worksheets. This is busywork. I don't feel like anything productive is happening here in these interactions, either as character work or as narrative. This doesn't get into the fact that a lot of underlying issues here are just... not really brought up again!
If we focus back on my two points with Jordan, there's one that's just normal High School Drama Stuff. The second is his relationship with Sarah, his ex. Despite this second point being a huge driving force in a lot of Jordan's B-Plot (I'd argue the reason he wants to be recognized as his alter ego is directly caused by this awful relationship) there isn't much movement on dealing with the relationship.
This angle is completely unresolved. The Sarah & Jordan angle starts going sour because Sarah cheats on Jordan over summer camp. They talk it out, and are still together despite it, until Sarah decides because of her own cheating she just wants to be friends. Jordan is (understandably!) heartbroken about this, and tries to continue to be friends with her and it bleeds into that first point. Now he's gotta deal with this heartbreak, on top of the usual High School Drama Stuff. It is the catalyst for all these other things in his life, and all his actions, but like... nothing satisfying is happening there!
(Additionally, this plot point hits really close to home for me! I've been on the cheated-on end of a situation, and watching all this knowing it comes from this unresolved issue that hits close to home makes watching Jordan's B-plot hard! However, that's a Josh-Issue not a Writing-Issue, but I felt it needed to be said so you can take that together with my criticisms)
Again, this all feels like busywork. I don't think any character development is happening, and I don't think the character work being done is good in these scenes. It's just... nothing. I know "Filler" gets thrown around a lot, but this feels like that! This feels like padding. It feels like taking up time to hit a word count.
Next season a lot of these characters are leaving the show. On the one hand, it sucks cause I think they're good on-screen! I don't necessarily dislike these characters! On the other, I think having a smaller cast with less of this writing baggage will likely be for the best, or at the very least we get a different type of bad writing.