First the good news: I watched the pilot episode of “Superman & Lois” and… it was *actually* *good.* It is not the usual Superman storyline; Clark Kent and Lois Lane have been married for near on to two decades at this point and have to teenage sons. The sons are of course non-canonical, but it works and is a perfectly cromulent extrapolation of the characters. The plot, acting and dialog were pretty good; the VFX were top notch. One scene that I thought was particularly well done was when Clark Kent gets a devastating phone call that causes him to dash across the continent in seconds. It was simple, but it worked.

I will continue to watch the show with interest, which is far more than any of the other CW shows can boast.

BUT THEN…

A Superman Solo Film Is on the Way From Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams

Oh, goodie. A race hustler and the guy who almost single-handedly set both Star Wars and Star Trek on the roads to ruin joining forces to turn one of the oldest American sci-fi IP’s into hot garbage.

I have a plot idea. Feel free to run with it. Hollywood: feel free to steal this plot and spend $200 million making it.

So, it turns out that Lex Luthor is the bagrillionaire behind the scenes puppetmastering various nefarious schemes, a process decades old. One of his leading efforts: manipulation of the press. Specifically: whenever a cop is involved in any tenuous way with the death of a black suspect, the press – under Luthors hidden influence – runs inaccurate stories calculated to drive up rage and violence. The BLM/Antifa riots and insurrections are being driven by Luthors schemes; aiming to sow as much chaos as possible in order to destroy faith in the government, police, institutions and America as a whole. Part of this is seeing to it that major political parties nominate senile old kiddie-sniffers and incompetent diversity hires for major offices. Part of it is manipulation of the tax code to make sure that major corporations offshore their operations; this not only unemploys millions of Americans but empowers the Chinese Communist government, further driving down the American publics faith in the government. Part of this is funding crackpots to infiltrate colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, pre-schools and HR departments, filling them with anti-science, anti-engineering rigor, anti-objectivity nonsense so that STAR Labs and WayneTech and the like are starved of competent talent.

Superman, aided by a dark detective from Gotham City, finds all this out. But what Luthor is doing isn’t strictly illegal. So Superman goes to the public with what he’s learned… and he is promptly cancelled by the woke mob. Twitter and Facebook deplatform Superman for spreading politically incorrect “disinformation.” He is declared a Nazi and a white supremacist after he puts out a fire at a science fiction bookstore at the latest arsonriot.

Movie ends as Superman sadly says “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore” and flies off into the sky to find somewhere less insane and stupid. Post-credit scene: Luthor is now President of the US. The woke mob celebrates… for about five minutes, and then Luthor turns on them.