Superman & Lois ended this past Monday with its fourth and final season. A combination of The CW moving away from expensive scripted dramas and the formation of DC Studios sealed the show's fate, though James Gunn reportedly pushed for the series to get a proper ending.
Original plans obviously called for Superman & Lois to last for more than four years, and co-showrunners Todd Helbing & Brent Fletcher recently told TV Line about some of the future ideas they didn't get a chance to explore.
"If we went on for a couple more seasons, we would have really explored Brainiac," Helbing says of the iconic villain played in Superman & Lois by Nikolai Witschl. "We would have done more cool, traditional Brainiac stuff with him."
Doomsday, who is often considered the ultimate Superman villain, was killed in the series finale and it turns out the duo hoped to up the ante by pitting the Man of Steel against Darkseid.
"There’s also a way to lead up to Darkseid that we had talked about," Helbing reveals. "I don’t know if DC would have given us permission to use Darkseid, but we would have pitched the hell out of it to try to get it. That would have been a lot of fun."
One character we did come close to seeing in season 4 is Adam Rayner's Tal-Roh, Superman's brother. He was last seen at the end of season 2 setting off for a new life in the Inverse world and Fletcher explains, "We weren’t able to do it... It just came down to schedules and money and time."
Something that will forever make Superman & Lois unique is the fact that, despite these scrapped plans, the series was able to tell a complete story with the title hero and even give him an ending. That's not lost on the duo as Fletcher acknowledged in a separate interview with ComicBook.com:
"We had been told that we were the only live-action Superman that had the opportunity to really close the book and so we took it literally. We just felt like, let’s take it all the way. Let’s show what his life meant and Lois’s life meant to the audience because they’ve been on this journey. So, let them complete the journey and close the circle. It just felt like a satisfying end."
"And also, because of how emotional it is, we felt it could do the thing that I think Todd [Helbing] and I both gravitate to a lot in movies and books and TV which is like ‘happy sad’. I really love happy sad. I like to smile and kind of cry at the same time and we just felt like this kind of had all of that stuff. And it was beautiful and it kind of encapsulated what the show is."
What did you think about the Superman & Lois finale?