How Arrowverse Can Still Have An Evil Superman (Despite Crisis' Ending)
Despite how Crisis on Infinite Earths ended, it looks like Superman & Lois is somehow making use of alternate timeline characters, including an evil version of Tyler Hoechlin’s Man of Steel. This new take on Superman was revealed by a flashback in episode 2. While this sets up exciting storyline potential for the CW show, it does seem to contradict the Arrowverse post-Crisis — or does it?
Crisis on Infinite Earths changed the way the Arrowverse worked. Before the event, there was an untold number of Earths in existence in the multiverse, with many being the homes of different DC TV shows and movies, such as Smallville, the 1966 Batman series, and the Birds of Prey show from the early 2000s. Shortly after these worlds were wiped out by the Anti-Monitor (LaMonica Garrett), the universe was reborn through the efforts of Oliver Queen as the Spectre. This resulted in all of the Arrowverse shows (and Black Lightning) sharing the same world, Earth-Prime. This allows for more crossovers but takes adventures to places like Earth-2 off the table. Other active DC TV shows still have their own Earths, but all other timelines in the Arrowverse are seemingly gone forever.
How Crisis impacted the Arrowverse raises important questions about this new storyline with Captain Luthor (Wolé Parks), who is from a place where Tyler Hoechlin’s Superman is a cold-blooded murderer. In Superman & Lois, he wears a black suit identical to the one used in the 2018 Arrowverse crossover, Elseworlds. It seems that both he and this new version of Clark’s greatest enemy are from another Earth, but Superman & Lois has yet to explain how that could be. It’s possible that the series will avoid contradicting Crisis by explaining that the evil Superman seen in episode 2 no longer exists. It could be that sometime after destroying the planet, Superman was killed when the anti-matter waves collided with the world. Now, he may only be a part of the Arrowverse’s past, and not someone that Earth-Prime’s Superman will ever get to meet.
That explanation would make sense of the new Superman, but it wouldn’t explain how Captain Luthor can be on Earth-Prime, or how he could have knowledge of other Earths before Crisis. It could be that on whatever Earth he was from, Luthor interacted with some sort of special technology or energy source that saved him from being erased. Somehow with the aid of science, Luthor might have migrated to Earth-Prime unchanged and with his memories of his old life intact.
How Luthor survived the Crisis is a big question that will likely be answered at some point in the near future, given that the character appears to be key to season 1’s story. As Superman & Lois dives further into Luthor’s backstory, more information will hopefully be uncovered about his identity and why his Earth’s Superman turned evil. There’s also a possibility that as more twists and turns occur in the story, Superman & Lois will reveal that Hoechlin’s villainous Last Son of Krypton secretly followed Luthor to Earth-Prime, and will emerge as a threat later, but that remains to be seen.