Superman & Lois Post-Mortem: Showrunners Discuss [SPOILER]’s Death

WARNING: Spoilery events from the October 14 episode of Superman & Lois titled “Always My Hero” are being discussed in this article. If you haven’t watched yet, bookmark this page, wait until you’ve seen it, and come read after you’ve screened the episode!

It went by so fast… and with those words, we say goodbye to General Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh) who sacrificed himself to Doomsday with a final plan to save the life of Superman. He literally gave his heart for the man whose heart is shared with Sam’s daughter — Lois’ husband, Superman, who appears to be able to recover in the Fortress of Solitude.

Leading into the fourth season, KryptonSite spoke with Showrunners Brent Fletcher and Todd Helbing about what Dylan Walsh brought to General Lane over these four seasons of Superman & Lois. [According to a social media post by his wife, Dylan Walsh only appears in two episodes for this final season, so this is it.]

“Dylan brought everything, ” Brent Fletcher said. “He’s such an incredible actor, and couldn’t have knocked it out of the park more than he did with his performance in Episode 3.”

“Just the idea of Sam making the ultimate sacrifice to bring Superman back, we felt, was really the only way to do it and justify him coming back, because it’s such a big thing. When you kill Superman, you have to live with it for a while, and if you’re going to bring him back, it needs to have consequences and stakes. It shouldn’t just be something simple and easy and everybody lives happily thereafter. We wanted everything to feel real and lived in,” he continued. “Death is a big thing, and we didn’t want our audience to think that we were playing lightly with it just because it had been done in comics before. We felt having Sam make that sacrifice was a way to earn it, because people love him so much, and we love him so much.”

The characters of the show recently went through losing Superman, and now, they will be saying goodbye to a father figure and grandfather who touched them all. Only seven episodes of Superman & Lois remain, but Sam Lane’s impact and sacrifice will surely reverberate for weeks to come.

Superman & Lois airs Mondays at 8PM ET/PT on The CW.

Craig Byrne

Craig Byrne has been writing about Superman TV since 1995, when the "Lois & Clark Krypton Club" launched. He founded KryptonSite.com in February 2001, becoming the first fan site for The WB/CW television series Smallville. He also wrote the Official Companion books for Smallville seasons 4-7 as well as the Smallville Visual Guide.

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  • His death was expected the moment it would be his last episode. They were not kidding about several deaths occurring in the final season.

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