Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for Superman and Lois season 2, episode 5, “Girl… You’ll Be A Woman, Soon.”
Superman and Lois season 2 seems to be recycling the Mirror Monarch storyline from The Flash season 6, but presenting it in a better way. The comparison seems apt given that both plotlines feature a female villain with plans for world domination and a warped version of Earth-Prime in another dimension. However, Superman and Lois‘ Ally Allston (Rya Kihlstedt) has been more firmly established as a sinister presence, whereas Mirror Monarch’s storyline was more ambiguous and, ultimately, confused.
Superman and Lois season 2 has presented a number of complex plotlines and fake-outs in its first five episodes. Chief among these was the setup for what was thought to be the premiere of the Arrowverse version of Doomsday, instead introducing Bizarro Superman. The season has chronicled Superman hunting his strange doppelganger, as Lois Lane faces the threat of legal action from Ally Allston, the same self-help guru who brainwashed her sister. The two storylines came to be connected in the final moments of Superman and Lois season 2, episode 5, “Girl… You’ll Be A Woman, Soon,” after the Man of Steel found a way to communicate with Bizarro and learned that he had come to Earth-Prime to save it and his dimension from Ally Allston, who was said to have taken over the United States and possibly the entire Bizarro World.
This base concept of a master manipulator from another world seems eerily similar to the concept of Mirror Monarch from The Flash season 6. Iris West-Allen (Candice Patton) spent most of the season trapped in the Mirror World dimension with Eva McCulloch (Efrat Dor), a scientist who claimed that her husband had corrupted her work to form the Black Hole crime syndicate. However, this was all part of a ruse, and Eva was revealed to be a Mirror World duplicate who only thought she was Eva McCulloch. After learning the truth and killing Eva’s husband, the self-proclaimed Mirror Monarch tried to take over Earth-Prime by dragging people into the Mirrorverse and replacing them with mirror duplicates under her control.
Beyond the problems caused by her storyline being broken up by the COVID-19 pandemic and partly delayed into The Flash season 7, Mirror Monarch’s story failed to resonate with fans. The chief problem was that the twist that the real Eva McCulloch died did nothing to eliminate the sympathy the audience felt for Mirror Monarch, after several episodes detailing her torment and decreasing mental instability. It didn’t help matters that Barry was uncharacteristically unsympathetic and refused to bargain with Mirror Monarch for his wife’s life, even when he thought he was dealing with an imprisoned gangster’s wife rather than a Mirrorverse doppelganger.
Superman and Lois established the same threat as The Flash, but was much more effective in how it unveiled the mystery around Ally Allston. While the self-help guru was implied to be a figure of influence, there was little to suggest she had any special powers beyond a gift for reading people and knowing how to manipulate them. Ironically, this made Ally Allston into a more threatening villain than Mirror Monarch.
The mundanity of Allston’s brand of evil is another factor that has made her more compelling. While the concept of a familiar face being something alien in disguise as in The Flash season 6 is a horrifying one, it pales in comparison to the idea of a loved one being turned into something monstrous, as with Lucy Lane’s transformation into a willing disciple of Allston’s empire in Superman and Lois. All of this adds up to a truly fearsome plot, that is far more thrilling than the broken narrative behind Mirror Monarch.
