Invincible Heritage, Human Fragility: What Really Makes the Kent Family Super

I recently rewatched Superman & Lois for the first time in several years, and this time I found myself paying attention to something I hadn't fully appreciated before.

For a series about Superman, remarkably little of what makes the Kent family strong has anything to do with being super.

Clark may be nearly invulnerable, Jordan and Jonathan may inherit extraordinary abilities, and Lois may regularly stand alongside people capable of impossible things—but some of the family's most difficult battles are the ones their powers cannot solve. Illness, anxiety, grief, insecurity, parenthood and the fear of losing someone you love remain stubbornly human problems.

That was what stayed with me after the rewatch. Superman & Lois isn't simply interested in asking what it would be like to belong to Superman's family. It seems equally interested in a much more complicated question:

What does strength mean in a family where being powerful still isn't enough?

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Superman & Lois begins with a contradiction.

Clark Kent is Superman. He can hear disasters happening miles away. He can cross continents in moments, survive impacts that would kill an ordinary person instantly, see through walls and stand between humanity and threats capable of destroying the world.

And yet some of the most important moments in the series happen when none of that helps.

He cannot use super-speed to make his sons grow up safely. He cannot punch Jordan’s anxiety into submission. He cannot protect Jonathan from every wound simply by being stronger than everyone around him. Most painfully, when Lois is diagnosed with cancer, there is no hidden Kryptonian solution waiting in the Fortress of Solitude.

Superman can save the world.

Clark Kent cannot guarantee that he can save his family.

That distinction may be the most important idea running through Superman & Lois. Beneath its capes, alien technology, secret identities and apocalyptic battles, the series repeatedly asks a surprisingly ordinary question:

What does strength look like when being powerful is not enough?

The answer can be found throughout the Kent family, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in one deceptively simple image introduced early in the series:

Sometimes you are the person doing the impossible.

And sometimes you are the person holding the wrench.

Superman's Most Frightening Enemy Is Powerlessness

Superman stories naturally create a storytelling problem: what can genuinely threaten a man who is almost impossible to hurt?

The usual answer is to find something stronger.

Kryptonite. Another Kryptonian. Doomsday. An enemy capable of matching Superman physically. Increase the scale of the threat until even the Man of Steel can bleed.

Superman & Lois certainly uses those threats. But its most effective method of making Superman vulnerable is much simpler.

It makes him a husband and a father.

Clark can rescue strangers from collapsing buildings, but fatherhood does not operate according to superhero logic. There is no super-hearing capable of telling him exactly what Jordan needs from him. There is no Fortress program that explains how to make Jonathan feel equally valued. Super-speed cannot give him more hours in the day when being Superman means repeatedly leaving his family behind.

Then comes Lois's cancer.

It is difficult to imagine a more effective inversion of the Superman fantasy.

Clark possesses abilities that would make him a god by almost any human standard, yet he must sit beside the woman he loves while she undergoes treatment just as countless ordinary families have done.

There is no villain to defeat.

There is no bomb to stop.

There is no object for Superman to lift.

There is simply fear, treatment, uncertainty and waiting.

That matters because Superman & Lois refuses to make Clark's inability to solve the problem a failure of heroism. Instead, it asks him to practise a different kind of heroism.

He has to remain.

The man accustomed to doing has to learn the importance of being there.

For perhaps the first time, Superman's strength is measured not by what he can prevent, but by what he is willing to endure alongside someone he loves.

And that same conflict between extraordinary power and ordinary vulnerability is inherited by his children.

Jordan Kent: What If Superpowers Don't Make You Feel Powerful?

Jordan initially appears to be the obvious heir to Superman.

Of the Kent twins, he is the one who begins developing Kryptonian abilities. Suddenly the anxious, isolated teenager discovers that something extraordinary has been hiding inside him.

In another superhero story, this might be liberation.

The awkward teenager discovers his true identity, learns that he is special and finally becomes the person he was always meant to be. Superpowers become a metaphor for confidence.

Superman & Lois complicates that fantasy almost immediately.

Jordan's emerging abilities make his body stronger, but they do not automatically make Jordan stronger.

His anxiety does not disappear because bullets become less dangerous. His insecurities do not vanish when he discovers that he can fly. His emotional volatility can actually become more dangerous precisely because extraordinary physical power now accompanies it.

That creates one of the series' most fascinating contradictions.

Jordan can increasingly survive things that would destroy an ordinary human body, yet he remains psychologically vulnerable in profoundly human ways.

His Kryptonian inheritance therefore becomes both gift and burden.

The closer Jordan moves toward Superman's physical abilities, the greater the expectations placed upon him become. Being able to help gradually becomes an expectation that he should help. Being Superman's son becomes something much heavier once he possesses the ability to follow in his father's footsteps.

And when Clark is no longer there to stand between the family and the impossible, Jordan discovers the terrifying difference between having Superman's powers and being Superman.

The distinction is crucial.

Clark's heroism was never simply contained in his biology.

Jordan inherits the power.

He still has to become the person capable of carrying it.

Jonathan Kent: Being Ordinary in a Family of Gods

If Jordan explores the burden of inheriting Superman's abilities, Jonathan spends much of the series exploring something potentially even more painful:

What happens when you don't?

Jonathan begins the series seemingly equipped for success. He is athletic, socially confident and outwardly much more comfortable in his own skin than Jordan.

Then the family discovers its extraordinary inheritance.

And it appears to have chosen his brother.

That changes Jonathan's place within the family almost overnight.

Jordan needs training. Jordan needs protection. Jordan needs explanations. Jordan's abilities connect him to a part of Clark's identity that Jonathan cannot initially share.

Jonathan becomes the ordinary person standing inside an extraordinary family.

It would have been easy for the series to treat him as the lesser Kent because of it.

Instead, Jonathan quietly becomes essential to its argument about heroism.

One of the earliest and most important examples comes in the first-season episode “Holding the Wrench.” The phrase works because it describes a form of heroism superhero stories frequently overlook.

Not everyone gets to fly.

Someone still has to help.

Someone has to stay beside the frightened person. Someone has to notice what everyone else has missed. Someone has to keep the family functioning while another person fights the visible battle.

Someone has to hold the wrench.

For much of the series, that is Jonathan.

And because Jonathan spends years without powers, he develops an understanding of heroism that does not depend upon having them. His worth has to exist separately from Kryptonian inheritance.

That makes the eventual emergence of Jonathan's abilities particularly meaningful.

His powers do not create his heroism.

They arrive after the series has already spent years showing us who Jonathan is without them.

He does not become valuable because he becomes powerful.

He becomes powerful after we have already learned why he is valuable.

That difference transforms what could have been a conventional superhero origin story into the culmination of a much longer argument about character.

Lois Lane and the Courage to Be Vulnerable

There is another Kent who complicates the idea of power even though she possesses no Kryptonian DNA at all.

Lois.

In many Superman stories, Lois Lane's humanity makes her physically vulnerable compared with Clark. Superman & Lois does not deny that vulnerability. It embraces it.

But it refuses to equate vulnerability with weakness.

Lois's cancer storyline makes this distinction unavoidable. Her body can become ill. She can be frightened. She can require help. She cannot investigate, argue or sheer-force-of-will her way out of every situation.

That does not diminish her.

If anything, it exposes how limited our conventional definition of strength can be.

The series repeatedly allows Lois to be angry, frightened, grieving and uncertain without treating those emotions as failures. This becomes particularly important in “Holding the Wrench,” when her reaction to Jonathan's near-death experience forces her to confront grief connected to a miscarriage she had never fully processed.

The revelation transforms the episode.

Lois's strength does not come from pretending the wound does not exist.

It comes from finally acknowledging that it does.

That idea eventually extends far beyond Lois herself. The Kent family survives not because its members are untouched by trauma, but because they repeatedly learn—sometimes painfully—to stop hiding their wounds from one another.

For a family built around the world's most famously invulnerable man, that is remarkably appropriate.

Holding the Wrench

This is why “holding the wrench” becomes such a useful metaphor for the entire series.

Superhero stories naturally direct our attention toward the person performing the spectacular act.

The person stopping the train.

The person fighting the monster.

The person saving the planet.

Superman & Lois continually redirects our attention toward everybody standing beside them.

The person waiting at the hospital.

The brother who stays behind.

The spouse who listens.

The parent who admits they were wrong.

The child who is frightened but stays anyway.

The family member who cannot solve the problem but refuses to leave you alone with it.

Traditional superhero logic places enormous value on intervention. If something is wrong, the hero does something and restores order.

But life contains problems that cannot be restored to their previous state.

People become ill.

Children grow up.

Parents make mistakes.

Relationships fracture.

People die.

Grief cannot be defeated because grief is not a villain. Anxiety cannot simply be overpowered. Mortality cannot permanently be outrun.

Eventually even Superman has to confront the fact that being strong enough to save someone today does not mean he can keep them forever.

And that is where the wrench matters.

Holding the wrench means accepting that helping someone and saving them are not always the same thing.

Sometimes love means fixing the problem.

Sometimes love means remaining beside someone when you cannot.

The Most Human Superman Story

That may ultimately be why Superman & Lois works so well as a reinterpretation of a character who has existed for generations.

It does not make Superman interesting by making him less powerful.

It makes his power less important.

The series surrounds Clark with people he cannot completely protect and gives him children who inherit different pieces of his extraordinary identity. Jordan demonstrates that enormous power cannot eliminate internal fragility. Jonathan demonstrates that lacking power does not make someone powerless. Lois demonstrates that physical vulnerability and extraordinary courage can occupy the same body.

Clark, meanwhile, has to learn from all of them.

He can be Superman without being able to solve everything.

Perhaps that is the final evolution of the character.

The cape, the strength and the ability to fly make Superman extraordinary. But they are not what make the Kent family heroic.

Their real strength appears when those things fail them.

It is Jonathan standing beside Jordan before he can stand beside him as an equal.

It is Jordan trying to carry responsibilities his powers alone cannot prepare him for.

It is Lois allowing herself to need the people who have always needed her.

And it is Clark discovering that sometimes the strongest man on Earth can do nothing more miraculous than stay beside the person he loves.

Superman & Lois therefore arrives at a wonderfully paradoxical conclusion:

The Kents are not inspiring because they are invulnerable. They are inspiring because they aren't.

Their Kryptonian heritage may allow them to survive impossible battles, but their humanity teaches them how to survive everything else.

Sometimes that means saving the world.

And sometimes it simply means holding the wrench.