Warning: SPOILERS for Superman & Lois season 1, episode 8, “Holding The Wrench”.
Superman & Lois season 1 reveals a massive and tragic chapter in Lois Lane’s life, due to a significant Arrowverse change caused by Crisis on Infinite Earths. Before Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch’s respective characters became regular Arrowverse players, Crisis on Infinite Earths helped set up their spinoff show. Besides merging worlds with the other Justice League characters, Crisis on Infinite Earths altered their family history. Instead of having just one child as they did on Earth-38, Lois and Clark ended up having two sons, Jonathan and Jordan Kent. As they are going through their first season, Superman & Lois is still unveiling new changes made to Earth-Prime after the latest crossover.
After the big reveal that Wolé Parks’ Captain Luthor was actually John Henry Irons a.k.a. Steel, Superman & Lois season 1, episode 8, “Holding The Wrench” spends some time going a bit more into his backstory. Something the show had already established was that John was married to Lois back on his Earth. But “Man of Steel” revealed they also had a daughter together, named Natalie “Nat” Irons. In “Holding The Wrench”, Lois learns about her doppelganger’s marriage and the daughter they had, which brings up some trauma for her, revealed as a major post-Crisis Arrowverse change.
The latest episode of Superman & Lois explains that a few years after Jonathan and Jordan were born, Lois became pregnant again and was expecting a daughter. When Lois goes to see her therapist after lashing out at Jonathan for going into John’s trailer alone, “Holding The Wrench” drops a big change Crisis did to her new life. Lois revealed that she had a miscarriage and lost the baby, something she, understandable so, is hurting from to this day. While Lois may not have married John on Earth-Prime, she did have one thing in common with her Arrowverse doppelganger. Had her daughter been born, Lois would have named the baby Natalie after her grandmother.
In the original pre-Crisis Arrowverse, this was never part of Lois’s life on Earth-38 as baby Jonathan was her and Clark’s first child. Since Crisis on Infinite Earths happened only a year after the events of Elseworlds, Lois and Clark never had other children as they, along with most of the heroes, were erased by the Anti-Monitor before Earth-Prime was born. While Superman & Lois is the first time that any live-action Lois has had this family story, it is one of the most devastating Arrowverse changes, if not the most tragic post-Crisis addition of them all.
From a writing and acting perspective, Tulloch’s performance marks one of her most powerful and heartbreaking turns on Superman & Lois. Her scenes with the therapist are not only devastating but one of Arrowverse’s most real moments in the franchise’s entire run. It perfectly explains why Lois was so angry at Jonathan because it was based on fear of losing another child after her miscarriage. Even the Natalie aspect becomes a bigger connection between the two Arrowverse Earths, which adds more to the overall story with John. For Superman & Lois, this was an unexpected Arrowverse reveal to come out of Crisis on Infinite Earths as it pertains to Lois Lane’s Earth-Prime history.
