Characters / My Adventures with Superman

Character page for My Adventures with Superman.

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Main Trio

Overall Tropes

Left to right: Lois Lane, Clark Kent, Jimmy Olsen

The main trio are interns at The Daily Planet and serve as the series' leading protagonists.

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• Adaptational Job Change: The series begins with all of them working as interns, instead of established reporters/photographers at The Daily Planet like they usually are. This changes at the end of Season 1, with all three of them getting promoted to full-time employees.
• Badass Bystander: Despite not having any superpowers, Lois and Jimmy have proven to be loyal and invaluable friends to Clark several times. Most notably in "Zero Day part 2" when they livestreamed the battle between Superman and Parasite to rally support from the entire city to help Clark. And seen again in the season finale when Lois stood her ground against her own father and begged him to spare Clark's life.
• Best Friend: In this continuity, Clark and Jimmy have been close friends and roommates since college. Lois is their mutual gal pal, who soon becomes Clark's crush.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: They're the unknown heroes of The Daily Planet, who do the actual investigative reporting and break all the major stories. Except Perry never gives them the credit because they're interns, so he gives their research and all the credit for their efforts to the Scoop Troop instead. They finally get their due in the Season 1 finale when Perry promotes the three of them to staff writers for their story on the battle between Superman and Parasite.
• Muggle Best Friend: Lois and Jimmy are just ordinary humans, but they've still got Clark's back. So whenever he's busy fighting to protect Metropolis and the planet, they do whatever they can to protect him. The series is called "My Adventures with Superman" for a reason, after all.
• Secret-Keeper: It isn't long before Lois and Jimmy both figure out Clark is Superman, but they keep his superhero identity secret from the public to safeguard him.
• Two Guys and a Girl: The guys are roommates, while Lois has her own apartment since she's the girl in their group.

Clark Kent / Kal-El / Superman

See his page for more information.

Lois Lane

Lois Lane

"A man flew down from the sky and risked his life to save us. Not for a reward, or fame, but just because we needed help. Don't you want to know who that person is?"

Voiced by: Alice Lee

An ambitious young intern seeking to be taken seriously by her seniors at the Daily Planet and Clark's love interest.

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• Action Survivor: When a disguised Clark makes his first real fight as Superman against military robots and isn't having a good time of it, this Lois quickly establishes that she'll do the right thing to help others by immediately rushing for disabling the robots at their controls even amidst laser fire that would've killed her instantly had even one hit.
• Adaptation Personality Change: In most media, Lois is a hard-nosed, no-nonsense veteran reporter who is brutally honest and willing to stand up to anyone. The Lois in this story is much younger and eager to prove herself. This is on top of her Tomboyness Upgrade, being much cheerier, and being much more obviously attracted to Clark.
• Adaptational Hairstyle Change: She has Boyish Short Hair, while previous iterations of Lois usually have long hair or a bob cut.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Played with as Lois has of course always been incredibly intelligent, but when it came to figuring out Superman's real identity most media show her being very oblivious for quite a while before putting two and two together (though historically Lois in the comics has been able to figure it out quite easily, she just couldn't prove it). Here she puts it together in only a couple episodes, albeit only after finding a critical clue Clark had hidden in his coat pocket.
• Adaptational Job Change: In most depictions, Lois is a veteran reporter for the Daily Planet. In this series, she's an intern like Clark and Jimmy, only slightly senior to them, though she clearly aims to break a huge story and rise above her station.
• Age Lift: Just as Clark has been aged down from his late 20's/early 30's to his early 20's, Lois has been as well (specifically 23, as mentioned in Episode 7).
• Alliterative Name: Lois Lane.
• Ambiguously Brown: Lois has tan skin compared to more "white bread" Loises of past depictions, some of which are (or have lookalikes as) her multiversal Alternate Selves within the series. She also wears clothes hinting at Korean heritage at one point, and her voice actor is of Korean descent too, but nothing is explicit in the show yet.
• Berserk Button: She hates when people lie to her or otherwise keep things a secret from her due to her father never telling her that her mother was terminally ill. This drives a wedge between her and Clark when Clark doesn't immediately come clean about being Superman, primarily because of her fear that Clark was lying about other things, including his affection for her.
• Boyish Short Hair: This time, Lois is depicted with shorthair to go along with her new tomboy makeover. It gives her a look that's practical^note short hair being much easier to manage and sporty, which suits her preference for casual wear, sweats, and gym shorts.
• Brutal Honesty: Lois has exactly zero sense of subtlety. Her idea of interviewing people is to get in their faces and immediately ask them compromising questions, which only makes them run away.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Does this at the end of "Hearts of the Fathers," where she cuts through General Lane's bullshit about Superman being an "alien threat" and points out that he just risked his life to stop the alien invasion General Lane is accusing him of being a part of.
• Crush Blush: Virtually guaranteed to happen during intimate scenes between her and Clark, or whenever he expresses his feelings for her. Seen again when Jimmy sent pictures of her to Clark's smartphone!
  Jimmy: [evil grin] Smile for Claaarrrk!
  [snaps photo and quickly sends it]
  Lois: Um, wait — You just sent it to Clark.
  Jimmy: Sure did, "partner".
  Lois: [flustered] Well as your boss, I need you to stop! Or, at least let me approve the pictures first!
• Culture Equals Costume: She wears a jeogori as part of her formal attire in episode four, and according to Word of God this reflects her Korean heritage.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: She didn't make a conscious decision to do this, but she's dating Superman, the same man that General Lane spent the entire first season trying to kill.
• Determinator: Lois is remarkably stubborn. When she has an idea in mind, she will pursue it to its conclusion regardless of the risks, as shown by her lying to Clark and Jimmy to get them to help her with the story about the stolen robots. While her willingness to brave danger in pursuit of hard-hitting news is admirable, it also gets her in hot water with Perry and the bad guys she's chasing.
• Detrimental Determination: Lois is certainly a Determinator, aiming to find out Superman's identity and cover stories about him. But this goal also involves consistently lying to Clark and Jimmy, breaking into crime scenes, and even intentionally putting both Jimmy's life and her own at risk just to talk to Superman. Even putting aside the fact that Clark is Superman (and thus also lying in return), Lois is presented in a way that makes her determination look like a character flaw because of how reckless she's being.
• Fatal Flaw: Recklessness. Lois is always Going for the Big Scoop, optimistic and upbeat about her goals, and not one to back down. Even so, her determination to prove herself also gets Lois and her new friends in trouble when she barrels into a situation without thinking about the consequences of her actions. The first episode has Perry White tell Lois that she's on her "last chance" after coming in with yet another story she wants, despite the fact that she's an intern. At one point, Lois even intentionally gets herself and Jimmy kidnapped, just because she thinks Superman will come by and she can get an interview with him. Lois is frequently called out for this kind of reckless behavior as a result, and part of her Character Development is learning that her determination is perfectly fine, but she needs to know when to dial it back for her own safety.
• Foil: To Jimmy, in regards to both of them finding out Clark is Superman. While Jimmy found out much sooner but is very understanding about Clark's Secret Identity having baggage about it, Lois takes it very personal and stays mad at him without really thinking how he felt.
• Freudian Excuse: She implicitly explains to Clark in "Let's Go To Ivo Tower, You Say" that the reason she's almost self-destructively driven to uncover the truth of anything is because her father never told her anything while she was growing up, including the fact that her mother was terminally ill.
• Genki Girl: Lois is relentlessly energetic and optimistic in this incarnation. She's always rushing off to try to get the next big story and manages to be perfectly okay with working out of the decaying newspaper morgue.
• Girl Next Door: Previous incarnations of Lois have always given her the look and mannerisms of glamour girls and fashion models, usually depicted as wearing makeup, designer dresses, and high heels. This version of her is portrayed as down-to-earth and accessible, and typically dressed in T-shirts with either gym shorts or yoga pants. Making her the sort who's more comfortable in informal wear and hanging around guys, as seen by how well she gets along with Clark and Jimmy.
• Going for the Big Scoop: Wouldn't be Lois Lane without this trope, with an additional twist that she is also proving herself to be promoted from an intern.
• Go Through Me: Lois shields Clark from her dad by standing directly in his line of fire, during the season 1 finale. When General Lane tearfully asks her to stand aside, she refuses and pleads with him to spare Clark's life by pointing out that it'd be cold-blooded murder. Especially after Clark had just sacrificed himself to save the planet.
• Hidden Buxom: When wearing a jeogori in the fourth episode, she's shown to have a nominal-sized chest.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Clark is visibly the tallest member of the cast and towers over just about everyone he interacts with. Lois is visibly the shortest member of the cast and is dwarfed by every other adult character they interact with.
• Hypocrite: She is furious when she finds out Clark is Superman that he kept a secret from her and calls him a liar. This is despite the fact that she had no trouble lying to Clark and others multiple times in the course of investigating stories. It's given more nuance when she clarifies in the following episode that it wasn't just that Clark had kept him being Superman from her but the fact that him hiding such crucial information about himself made her doubt everything about his character, including his feelings for her. Besides that, Clark himself had been the one to call her out for her own deceptions, making his own lying sting of hypocrisy itself.
• Innocently Insensitive: At the end of the first episode, she makes it clear that she wants to interview Superman and draw out all of his secrets to turn into front-page news. She's unaware of how Superman is Clark, who is clearly very worried about that.
  Lois: I've been trying to interview Superman, but he keeps running away! Seriously, what is that guy so scared of?
  Clark: Well, just a guess. Maaaybe he doesn't want you to...find-out-all-his-secrets-and-publish-them?
  Lois: Yeah, but he doesn't know that's my plan!
  • In episode 8, Lois asks Clark to try being normal for a while. This triggers Clark's mounting insecurities over his identity as Superman, and before Lois has a chance to apologize, he flies off.
• Insecure Love Interest: Episode 6 has Lois start to feel she isn't worthy of Clark's affection when compared to the other alternate Loises. She even tells Clark that he should seek out a "better" Lois. Naturally Clark reassures her that the only Lois for him is her.
• Intrepid Reporter: Technically, Lois is an intern at the Daily Planet. But that doesn’t stop her from trying to break her own stories anyway. Deconstructed since her methods involve lying, stealing, and generally endangering herself. To get an interview with Superman she deliberately puts herself in harm's way to corner him when he rescues her. Clark calls her out on how selfish her actions are, especially dragging him and Jimmy along, and she realizes it when she believes Clark was endangered by Intergang.
• Jerkass Realization: In Episode 1, Lois initially tries to justify her lying to Clark and Jimmy by saying she wouldn't have gotten their help otherwise. But then she recounts all the times Clark helped others throughout the day without seeking reward and feels awful about abusing their good will.
• Like Father, Like Son: Pre-Character Development, Lois exhibits many of the unsavory habits of her estranged father Sam; pigheadedly chasing the version of the truth she wants to find, thinking ends justify underhanded means, and assuming people who are less than transparent must have dark secrets that need to be exposed.
• Likes Clark Kent, Hates Superman: Downplayed. Lois doesn't hate Superman, but his refusal to sit still for a prolonged interview and apparent cageyness with his answers aggravates her. She considers him a liar for giving her a Cassandra Truth that sounds like a Non-Answer and continues to wonder what his angle is. By contrast, she quickly grows close to Clark, who is consistently kind and openly supportive of her. When Clark mentions that Superman may really just be a Nice Guy trying to use his powers to help others, Lois scoffs at him because that's what Clark would do with powers, not a stranger like Superman. Averted entirely after she discovers that Clark and Superman are the same person, and they start dating in episode 7.
• Love at First Sight: She's immediately smitten with Clark the second he holds the door open for her at a donut shop. She can frequently be seen with a Crush Blush when their faces are close to one another, she devolves into Gibberish of Love when he catches her during a fall in Episode 1, and Jimmy notices when Lois calls Clark "[Jimmy's] dumb, beautiful, coward of a best friend" even when she's mad at Clark.
• Mr. Vice Guy: She's reckless and somewhat amoral, but she's generally a kind and friendly person.
• Ms. Fanservice: Lois is very pretty and beautiful, and although not as frequent as Clark, she has her moments of being just as alluring. In Episode 4, when taking off her jeogori, Clark was captivated by her tantalizing figure and exposed back. There's also a few times her butt is centred in frame and takes focus.
• Official Couple: Lois and Clark affirm their relationship status near the end of episode 7 by mutually confessing their feelings for each other, before sealing it with a kiss. After they return to their dimension, Jimmy quickly excuses himself to give the happy couple their privacy. The two share another kiss, after which, Lois asks Clark to treat her to a cup of coffee.
• Parental Issues: She refuses to answer her father's calls due to him never telling her that her mother was terminally ill while she was growing up. When reading about the accomplishments of other Loises who have achieved more than her in "Kiss Kiss Fall in Portal", one is "better" for simply being ready to speak to her own father in person.
• Plucky Girl: Lois is the Determinator of the Daily Planet, aiming to rise above her new station as an intern at the Daily Planet and become a reporter. She also is optimistic, upbeat, and determined to find out Superman's identity, confident that she can do it. This is shown in the introduction of the first episode, when she claims that she will "be extraordinary" on her assignments, rises to greet the morning with a smile, and psychs herself up with a pep talk when getting ready for work.
• Properly Paranoid: As Mxyzptlk points out, Lois doesn't trust anyone and tends to dig up people's backstory or try to pick apart their statements. Even when faced with alternate versions of herself who are much more obviously successful than her, Lois still feels the need to break into their files and figure out what they're hiding. More often than not, this cynicism and paranoia proves warranted.
• Race Lift: This Lois is Ambiguously Brown compared to the usual versions, and is implied to be of Korean descent by her wearing a jeogori during Ivo's party in episode four. This was confirmed by the showrunners on social media, but has yet to be outright said on the show itself.
• Relationship Upgrade: After a rough patch over Clark hiding his identity as Superman, she and Clark get together at the end of Episode 6, indicated by them holding hands.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Lois comes to greatly admire Clark for his good nature and his concern for her. It hits a sour spot in Episode 5 when she learns what he's hiding from her, but she admits in Episode 6 it was because she feared his feelings for her were a lie. Once she realizes he genuinely cares for her, she gets close to him again admits he loves him in Episode 7.
• Textile Work Is Feminine: Episode 4 reveals she carries a sewing kit on her at all times in order to patch up any rips made in her clothes while investigating. She's gotten good at using it, as seen when she patches up Clark's jacket.
• That Came Out Wrong: In episode 8, Lois tries to convince Clark to take a break from superheroics and to try to be normal for a while. She quickly realizes her mistake, but before she can apologize, Clark flies off to face Task Force X.
• Tomboyness Upgrade: Lois was always intended to be seen as tomboyish, due to being a spunky reporter which was a traditionally male-dominated profession. It's just that her "tomboy" image didn't translate well, given her typical glamour girl appearance and taste for high fashion. Whereas this version of Lois is younger and eager to prove herself to her bosses at the Daily Planet. In addition, her core design elements such as her short hair, her preference for casual attire, and her informal manner makes her more accessible than any of her comic book, or movie incarnations.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: Despite Lois's more prominent tomboyness, a few more feminine traits are present. She still wears earrings, gets flustered around Clark easily, carries a sewing kit and knows how to use it and has no issue dressing up for formal events. Episode 6 reveals she does own at least one date dress which she was planning to wear for her date with Clark, but we never see it.
• Trauma Button: People keeping secrets from her, because it's what her father did with her mother's sickness.
• Twice Shy: Lois and Clark clearly have a thing for one another, but both of them are too shy to actually take the next step. Jimmy takes notice when she calls Clark "[Jimmy's] dumb, beautiful, coward of a best friend", noting that she added the word "beautiful" in there.
• The Unfettered: Downplayed. Lois does have some moral compunctions, like putting people in danger, but besides that she will do anything to get the story. In Episode 3 alone, she steals press badges, impersonates a Daily Planet reporter, steals the warden's keycard to break into a crime scene, and tries to get herself and Jimmy held hostage by criminals so she can corner Superman for a story. She even forces Clark into a Morton's Fork by throwing herself off the roof of the Daily Planet, coercing him into revealing his powers to her lest she hit the ground.
• Was It All a Lie?: The bulk of her anger at Clark for hiding his identity stems from her fear that he was lying to her about significantly more than just his moonlighting as Superman, up to and including his affection for her. Once it becomes clear that Clark was being sincere, pretty much all of her animosity vanishes.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Pulls this on Clark when she confirms that he is Superman, angry that Clark lied to her after revealing that she hates it when people lie to her in the previous episode.

Jimmy Olsen

James "Jimmy" Olsen

"It's Kent and Olsen, uncovering truths. Like the fact that aliens walk among us."

Voiced by: Ishmel Sahid

Clark's Best Friend, roommate, and another one of the new interns at the Daily Planet.

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• Adaptation Dye-Job: Has black hair in this show rather than his traditional red hair from the comics.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Most versions of Jimmy Olsen are portrayed as Superman's plucky young sidekick, being roughly 5-10 years younger than Clark and Lois. In this version, Clark and Lois being aged down to their early 20's means they're all relatively the same age. Clark and Jimmy in particular start working at the Daily Planet at around the same time and have been roommates since their freshman year of college.
• Adaptational Hairstyle Change: Fitting with his Race Lift, this Jimmy sports a prominent "hightop" fade as opposed to the iconic red hair he has in the comic.
• Adaptational Intelligence: This Jimmy managed to figure out Clark Kent is Superman way before any other incarnation, having discovered Clark's secret several years before the first episode took place.
• Adaptational Job Change: He's a photographer for the Daily Planet in the source material and many other adaptations. He's just a new intern here alongside Clark and is only supposed to help out the reporters in the office with things like making scans and fetching coffee. He remains an avid photographer, however, despite it not being in his official job description.
• Age Lift: Jimmy is typically a few years younger than Clark and Lois. In this story, they're all close to the same age and he shares an apartment with Clark.
• Agent Mulder: Jimmy will instantly jump to the most outlandish conclusions imaginable about any scoop he can think of, with his favorites being that merpeople or aliens are behind something. Occasionally, he's right, such as his conclusion that Superman is an alien.
  • It's likely he acts this way because he realized his roommate was a superhuman in college. Once you learn your roommate is an alien, nothing seems too outlandish anymore.
• Best Friend: He and Clark are established to be tight off the bat, living together, working together, and supporting each other's journalistic ventures — Clark even humors Jimmy's seemingly wild supernatural theories. Episode 6 reveals that they've been roommates since their freshman year of college.
• Camera Fiend: As per usual, Jimmy Olsen always carries around his camera to catch Superman in the act. He's not very good at it yet though, as his initial pictures of Superman are all blurry and out of focus. Or it's probably intentional so he doesn't rat out Superman's real identity.
• Chekhov's Gun: Jimmy's YouTube channel, Flamebird, initially seems to be a geeky hobby of his with little relevance to the plot. But after it suddenly blows up in popularity thanks to Jimmy consistently covering Clark's escapades as Superman, the sheer number of people following it makes it a valuable source of information, as Jimmy can contact a million people about what they're currently seeing all at once. In "Zero Day, Part Two", Lois and Jimmy use it to broadcast Superman's fight against Ivo to all of Metropolis and convince its people to shut the power to every building in the city to starve the Parasite armor of energy.
• Conspiracy Theorist: He believes that aliens, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster are real, and has a Youtube channel talking about these theories. It only has five followers, and Lois is hesitant to subscribe to the channel.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right:
  • He immediately concludes the flying man that saved him and Lois on the docks is an alien. Seeing how the man in question is Kal-El, for once he's right on the money. Subverted when it turns out he wasn't guessing. Jimmy's known Clark's secret for some time.
  • "My Adventures with Mad Science" implies Jimmy is correct about a lot more than people realize, such as the Loch Ness monster (actually an escaped mutant), a sonic gun invented by a CIA researcher that vanished afterwards (Cadmus recruited him), and the existence of Cadmus itself.
• Distressed Dude: At the end of episode five, he's kidnapped by Monsieur Mallah and dragged to Cadmus under suspicion of being a spy sent by Task Force X. It takes Jimmy's thanking them for confirming his suspicions about the existence of super-intelligent gorillas and ranting about his friends ditching him for Mallah and the Brain to reconsider killing him.
• Foil: To Lois, in regards to both of them finding out Clark is Superman. While Lois gets very mad at Clark for hiding it, Jimmy simply didn't want to press the issue because he felt Clark needed the right time to reveal that out of respect for him (though he still gets mad at him for revealing that to Lois first).
• Hidden Depths:
  • Despite initially seeming like The Load for any journalistic investigation due to his wild belief in the paranormal, he is capable of some shockingly grounded detective work, like figuring out where Leslie's ship ended up after she escaped from the docks. He also has some knowledge of forensics, as he uses the UV light he brought from the Daily Planet's camera room to reveal which of the buttons on Alex's console powers the Parasite armor based on the fingerprints.
  • "My Adventures with Mad Science" shows that many of his wild conspiracy theories are actually right (or as close as he can get without top secret info), implying he's a much better investigator than anyone realizes.
  • As much as he strives to prove aliens exist, even though his closest friends verbally dismiss his theories, he's fully aware that Clark is a superhuman, and had figured he was alien in origin, but has not only not pushed Clark to reveal this information until he was ready, but never used it to prove his own theories.
• Irony:
  • Obsessed with all things paranormal, especially aliens, but has no idea his closest friend is from another planet. Only for it to turn out he knew all along.
  • When Lois and Clark both go nuts trying to plan out their first date, it's the conspiracy theorist that's trying to drag them back to reality.
• Mythology Gag: A good number of his conspiracy theories (Sub Diego, the existence of merpeople, psychic starfish, intelligent French gorillas) are allusions to actual events and people in DC comics.
• Naïve Newcomer: Jimmy is always excited to catch a scoop, even if he's under the assumption that it's aliens or some other supernatural activity. But while he has great passion for his work, he's clearly lacking in experience, as his initial photos of Superman are all blurry and his YouTube channel has barely any subscribers. Subverted over the photos; he's presumably making them blurry on purpose.
• Not a Morning Person: Jimmy sleeps right through the alarm clock until Clark destroys it by accident. This is in contrast to Clark, who immediately gets out of bed when he hears his alarm.
• Only Sane Man: If Clark or Lois is going nuts about something, Jimmy's the one trying to pull them back to reality.
• Playful Cat Smile: The intro shows Jimmy smugly making such a face at Lois and Clark's romantic tension.
• Properly Paranoid: His conspiracy theories might seem outlandish, but given that he lives in the DC multiverse, most of them are true in some way or another.
• Race Lift: Jimmy has changed from a Caucasian redhead to an African-American, similar to the Supergirl TV show and the Super Sons movie.
• Rags to Riches: Downplayed in that Jimmy isn't exactly poor beforehand, but he ends up going from middle-class to millionaire over a single day after he sells Flamebird to the Daily Planet for 5.6 million dollars.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Many of Jimmy's bizarre theories show signs of being correct, and he is absolutely right that Superman is an alien, but none of this is because he has thought them out. Rather, by simply believing in nearly every crazy theory he encounters, Jimmy occasionally hits on the truth (or something close to it) by sheer happenstance thanks to the world he lives in.
• Secret Secret-Keeper:
  • Episode 6 reveals that Jimmy has known that Clark is Superman the entire time, having instantly deduced it back in freshman year of college when Clark ripped the door handle to their room in half. But Jimmy kept quiet about it out of respect for Clark's boundaries, believing that Clark would come clean when he's ready.
  • "Hearts of the Fathers" has Jimmy entrusted to both the General's identity, and the truth that other Supermen across the multiverse have gone bad, by Lois and Clark without the other's knowledge. He's so frustrated at keeping the whole situation bottled up that he quickly declares he's done keeping any more secrets.
• Shipper on Deck: He's aware of the romantic tension between Clark and Lois and actively tries to bring them closer.
  Jimmy: [to Clark] You liiiike her.
  Clark: No! What? I mean, I-I admire Ms. Lane.
  Jimmy: Yeaaah, you do.
  Clark: As professionals, Jimmy. Professionals.
  Jimmy: [wearing a smug Playful Cat Smile] Well c'mon, Kansas! Take a risk! What's the worst that could happen?
• Small Name, Big Ego:
  • He's very proud of his YouTube channel, Flamebird, in which he describes his craziest theories to all five of his "believers".
  • Played with. When his channel actually gains millions of followers, he's more concerned about helping Clark than about his newfound fame.
• Third Wheel:
  • Although he's a Shipper on Deck for Clark and Lois, Jimmy often ends up being a Moment Killer during especially tense moments between his friends and sees outings with them as a group of three best friends. But by the end of the fourth episode, Clark and Lois are so preoccupied with each other that they don't notice how they left Jimmy behind. Even though he's been pairing them together from the beginning, Jimmy can't help but feel a little upset at being ignored. Episode five sees him attempting to deny he's being left out until eventually he has enough and decides to go on his long-awaited Bigfoot hunt alone, but they manage to resolve things emotionally in episode six.
  • Subverted when Clark and Lois actually go on their first date. He's the one reminding them they're trying too hard to make it perfect, and once they finish their adventure, he immediately excuses himself to give them some alone time together.
• What You Are in the Dark: Episode 6 reveals that he's known Clark had superpowers for years with nobody even suspecting that he knew. This means that a Conspiracy Theorist who wants to prove aliens exist has basically hit the jackpot with an alien roommate and could've outed Clark at any moment to accomplish his life's goal... but instead chose to keep it secret and pursue other, less-credible conspiracy theories out of respect for Clark. It's even feasible he purposely screwed up his first photos of Superman- before Clark got the costume- to protect his secret, costing him the scoop-of-the-century in the process.

The Daily Planet

Perry White

Perry White

"Now shut up, I'm about to be nice."

Voiced by: Darrell Brown

The editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet and Clark, Lois, and Jimmy's boss.

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• Adaptational Jerkass: He's always been grouchy, but White in the comics was always respectful of his reporters in recognizing their talents and hard work. He's much more dismissive of the main characters in this show, owing to their junior position as interns, even denying them the byline on their own story in favor of his more senior staff.
• Always Second Best: Turns out that Perry and Vicki Vale knew each other in college, where Vicki ran the number one college newspaper while Perry ran the number two. Perry still appears to be bitter over this.
• Da Editor: He's the editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet and the one the heroes answer to. He appears to be deeply cynical and doesn't expect much out of his interns besides bringing coffee and scanning papers. Even when Lois brings video evidence that could lead to a bigger story, he dismisses her without even considering it. He even violates journalistic ethics by giving the byline of the Superman story to his veteran reporters even though Lois and Jimmy did all the work in breaking it.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": As usual for the character, he vocally dislikes being addressed as "Chief."
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite Perry's cynical and dismissive attitude towards the interns and not giving them credit to their work, he has some morals, disagreeing with Vicki's Intrepid Reporter methods.
  Vicki: You want to be number 1? You don't get there by writing fluff, you go for blood. That's something Perry never understood.
• Get Out!: Most meetings with him tend to end with him barking at the employee to leave, followed by a shot of that employee's back to the door as it slams shut.
• Ironic Name: An African-American with the surname White.
• Jerkass Has a Point: He's not completely wrong to be annoyed with Lois's attempts to personally deal with matters beyond her station, as she does repeatedly get herself and whoever she drags along with her into trouble with her dogged determination to follow any lead. In just the first two episodes, there are several points where she could have gotten herself killed had Superman not arrived. That being said, outright denying her and Jimmy credit for breaking the Superman story is unbelievably petty.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He does care about his staff underneath all his grouchiness. He eventually promotes Clark, Lois, and Jimmy to reporters, both because he feels they've proved themselves and because he knows they're going to keep putting themselves in danger for stories regardless.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: At the end of episode 2, he appears to give begrudging respect to Clark, Lois, and Jimmy for their role in investigating Superman. Then at the end of the episode it's revealed he gave all the credit to their senior colleagues.
• Just a Kid: Very clearly values seniority over actual talent, as he's incredibly dismissive of Clark, Lois, and Jimmy due to them being fresh-faced interns. He doesn't even credit them in the byline of the Superman story Lois and Jimmy broke, choosing instead to give the credit to some senior reporters.
• Mean Boss: To Clark, Lois, and Jimmy at least, as he's incredibly dismissive of their legitimate investigations into the various bizarre goings-on in Metropolis, refusing to even look over the evidence they've found. He won't even give credit to Lois and Jimmy for breaking the Superman story. Averted in "Hearts of the Fathers," where he promotes the trio to full-time reporters after publishing their story on the Superman vs. Ivo fight.
• Perpetual Frowner: After their first meeting, Clark comments that he looked mad. Lois replies that "that's just his face". As shown in his picture, his preferred coffee mug has a frown on it, indicating his usual mood.
• Pet the Dog: In "Hearts of the Fathers", he promotes Clark, Lois, and Jimmy to reporters for their story on the battle between Parasite and Superman that occurred in "Zero Day, Part 2".
• Race Lift: Caucasian in the comics, African-American in the series (reminiscent of his DCEU incarnation played by Laurence Fishburne).
• Running Gag: Every meeting he has with Lois, Clark, and Jimmy ends with Perry yelling at them to get out of his office. Followed by an abrupt transition shot of the bewildered group standing out in the hall somehow, just as the door slams shut behind them.
  Perry: (at Lois and Jimmy) Why are you still in my office?? Get out!
  (Lois and Jimmy start to explain)
  Perry: No! Don't tell me! I don't care! Go. Now. LEAVE!
  (cue shot of Lois and Jimmy suddenly out in the hall as Perry's door slams shut)
• Tsundere: Even when he gets it through his head that Lois, Jimmy, and Clark are capable reporters, he has to word him promoting them as him giving them a different job because they're terrible interns.
• You, Get Me Coffee: He tells Lois in the first episode that she, Clark, and Jimmy's sole purpose as interns are to scan files and make coffee, not go out to investigate and report. In fact, he almost fires them because Lois defies this trope.

Flip Johnson and the Newskid Legion

A gang of paperboys and -girls working for the Daily Planet. Serves as an informant for Lois in exchange for tutoring.

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Tropes that applies to all of them

• Baker Street Regular: Flip and the other news kids serve as informants for Lois.
• Intrepid Reporter: They have ambitions of starting their own paper.
• Knowledge Broker: Because they see everything during their paper route, they know what's happening in the city and Lois goes to them for information.

Flip Johnson

"The Newskid Newspaper is the latest from us, the people on the street."

Voiced by: Azuri Hardy-Jones

The young leader of the Newskid Legion.

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• Gender Flip: Was a boy in the comics.
• Good Feels Good: When Lois tries to send the Newskid Legion home because it's too dangerous for them to help them find Superman, Flip explains that when she thinks about helping Superman, like how he helped her, she doesn't feel so small. Hearing that convinces Lois to allow them to help.
• I Owe You My Life: In "My Interview with Superman", Superman saves her life by catching an I-beam that was about to land on her. In "Zero Day, Part 2", when Lois and Jimmy are having trouble finding Superman, Flip and the Newskid Legion wants to help because Superman saved her life.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: She's not particularly feminine, yet wears a bright pink bike helmet with a unicorn horn and angel wings.
• Tomboyish Baseball Cap: She wears a blue backwards baseball cap to emphasis her tomboyishness.
• Verbal Business Card: She tends to introduce herself as "Flip Johnson, Woman of Business". She even gives out her own handmade business cards with this exact phrase printed on them.

Big Words, Gaby, and Patti

Members of the Newskid Legion.

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• Adaptation Personality Change: From the original Star-Spangled Comics onward, Scrapper was always the feistiest and most stereotypical "Dead End Kid" of the Newsboy Legion, up for a fight at any time. His counterpart here, Patti, keeps his energetic streak, but can best be described as "feral".
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The rest of the gang aren't exactly fond of Patti due to her wild behavior. Patti is only included in the gang because Flip's mother wants them to be nice to her.
• The One Guy: Big Words is the only boy in the gang.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Big Words's real name is never revealed and he only goes by his nickname.
• The Voiceless: None of them have said anything on-screen yet and most of their talking occurs off-screen as Flip once mentioned that Gaby did an interview with Superman at some point for their own newspaper.

The Scoop Troop

Overall Tropes

Three Daily Planet reporters assigned to the Superman beat.

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• Immoral Journalist: They are perfectly okay with screwing over other reporters to get the credit for some hot scoop.
• Jerkass: Steve and Cat openly steal the credit for Lois, Clark, and Jimmy's work as well as their research. And they make it a point to rub it in their faces, take Lois's coffee that Clark bought for her, and then order them to fix the copier for them. They get better as the season goes on, with their characterization becoming closer to that of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold (or bronze in Cat's case).
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Steve and Cat act like flamboyant hotshots, but they don't actually have a clue about how to do their jobs and are content to let Clark, Lois, and Jimmy, who are interns, do the research for them and then steal the credit.
• Large Ham: Steve and Cat act like villains straight out of a kids' anime. Cat even does an honest to God Noblewoman's Laugh.
• Manchild: Despite being adults even older than Clark, Jimmy, or Lois, Steve and Cat seem to be stuck in their hotshot teenager phases of life, hamming it up and publicly pulling melodramatic poses that would make Team Rocket blush. Steve continues to act like a Jerk Jock, complete with a letterman jacket, and Cat like a drama queen rumormonger, even getting reporting jobs (sports and human interest) that let them continue to stick with these obsessions.
• Nice Mean And In Between: Ronnie (the Token Good Teammate of the bunch), Cat (enjoys being a bitch to the trio and does a Noblewoman's Laugh to boot), and Steve (is a self-absorbed blowhard with a case of Sticky Fingers, but is surprisingly capable of Hidden Depths and is genuinely fond of Jimmy).
• Pet the Dog: They're legitimately proud of Clark, Lois, and Jimmy getting promoted to staff reporters.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: Steve and Cat really like antagonizing Lois, Clark, and Jimmy. Lois doesn't think much of them either due to their snotty personalities and general lack of competence.
• Two Girls and a Guy: Cat and Ronnie are the girls with Steve as the one dude.

Ronnie Troupe

Ronnie Troupe

Voiced by: Kenna Ramsey

An investigative journalist who's one of the nicest of the trio.

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• Condescending Compassion: While Ronnie is by far the least self-absorbed and haughty of the trio, and while she does offer sound advice to the main characters, Jimmy points out while impersonating her that she comes off as pretty condescending in the process.
• Gender Flip: Ronnie is a female version of Ron Troupe, originally depicted in the comics as a male who marries Lois' little sister Lucy. This exploits Ron/Ronnie being a Gender-Blender Name (short for either Ronald or Veronica). In the same vein, Jimmy claims to be Ronnie himself while wearing her stolen ID (from a distance), which coupled with his Race Lift is a Mythology Gag to the original Ron.
• Not So Above It All: During their introduction, Steve and Cat make it a point to be as flamboyant as possible, while Ronnie just meekly, with a bit of second-hand embarrassment, introduces herself. After Steve and Cat take most of Clark's, Lois', and Jimmy's research on Superman and the high-tech weapons crime spree, Ronnie politely reminds them that Perry assigned her, Cat, and Steve to those stories because they're seasoned professionals, while Lois, Clark, and Jimmy are just interns, and wheels away their "murder board" so that the "scoop troop" can use its information to get the scoop on Superman and the high tech weapons.
• Only Sane Man: Ronnie is the least flamboyant and most professional of the trio, and the one who objects to the idea that they are a trio, let alone the name "Scoop Troop."
• Pet the Dog: Though she comes off as condescending with her "real reporter" comment, Ronnie does promise to give Lois, Jimmy and Clark an additional reporting credit when the Scoop Troop is done. When they're promoted in the Season 1 finale, Ronnie also gifts Lois a nameplate titled "Future Award Winning Journalist" for her new cubicle.
• Token Good Teammate: Ronnie seems to be the only one of the three actually interested in doing her job as a reporter and calls out Steve for blatantly stealing from other people.

Steve Lombard

Steve Lombard

"I'm not just a handsome face, y'know. I notice things."

Voiced by: Vincent Tong

A sports reporter who acts like a stereotypical high school jock.

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• Adaptation Dye-Job: Usually drawn with red or brown hair in the comics, here he has dark hair. Under the right lighting, it appears brown which can be taken as a Mythology Gag, but it's usually black.
• Freudian Excuse: It's implied that his self-centered nature stems from drifting apart from his closest friends when he was younger, taking his lone wolf status and fully embracing it.
• Hidden Depths: Despite his self-absorbed, blowhard attitude, Steve is eventually revealed to be highly observant, seeing the cracks in Jimmy's relationship with Lois and Clark over being a Third Wheel. He congratulates Jimmy on becoming a "lone wolf" and warns him that even the closest friends can break apart over time, something he knows from experience. And, for a short while at least, is exactly what happens to Jimmy due to Clark and Lois missing their planned camping trip due to being Superman and finding out that Clark is Superman respectively.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: Inverted. At first, Steve seems to view Jimmy and his friends as beneath him. It gradually becomes apparent he sincerely likes them, particularly Jimmy; it's implied Steve just doesn't realize he's acting like a jerk.
• Innocently Insensitive: It's implied that Steve isn't actively malicious so much as he doesn't realize how much of a jerk he comes across as, and he sincerely likes Jimmy despite clearly rubbing Jimmy the wrong way.
• Jerkass Has a Point: When Jimmy angrily asks whether or not Perry knows that the story Steve requested a photographer for was actually just filming social media videos (social media videos trolling Jimmy's own videos no less), Steve points out that Jimmy and his friends almost always just do their own thing and ignore Perry's orders anyway.
• Jerk Jock: Even though he's long out of high school, he still acts like the stereotypical jock bully while working as a sports reporter. He even wears his letterman jacket to work.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While Steve can be insensitive, rude, and is a bit of a kleptomaniac, he's shown over the course of Season 1 to be a decent guy at heart. Most notably, he seems fond of Jimmy and tries to give him genuine advice about friends drifting apart over time that isn't just a plot to break apart the main trio. And when the main trio gets promoted to full-time reporters, Steve sincerely congratulates Jimmy, gifts him a wolf plush in a playful nod to his lone wolf comments, and even gives him a hug while crying Tears of Joy.
• Lovable Jock: Though it's heavily buried beneath a Jerk Jock exterior, he's actually a pretty decent guy and genuinely thinks of Jimmy as a friend.
• Morality Pet: Most of his redeeming qualities tend to surface near Jimmy, as he seems to think of him as a protégé of sorts.
• Sticky Fingers: "My Interview with Superman" shows he has a habit of taking things that aren't his, including things that aren't even related to his job (like a cup of coffee Clark went out of his way to buy for Lois).
• The One Guy: He's the only male member of the Scoop Troop.
• Troll: Steve runs a YouTube channel specifically to debunk and mock Flamebird's videos. He seems to have quit after learning Jimmy was the one running the channel.
• You Keep Using That Word: As Ronnie points out, Steve seems to think that he can take whatever he wants from anyone so long as he calls it "a scoop". He ignores Ronnie calling this out and joyfully exclaims "scoop!" while tearing Lois's coffee out of her hand.

Cat Grant

Cat Grant

"If you can't say something nice, darling, then come sit by me! But not too close."

Voiced by: Melanie Minichino

A gossip and human interest reporter with a very distinct laugh.

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• Alpha Bitch: As part of her and Steve's Manchild demeanors, Cat acts like the rumor-mongering popular girl at school who's only interested in getting dirt on people.
• Ambiguously Brown: Cat Grant in most other media is usually a Caucasian but this iteration has a darker skin tone, while still being blonde.
• Gossipy Hens: She's a gossip reporter so it goes with the territory, but she says it best while introducing herself, "If you can't say something nice, darling, then come sit by me. But not too close."
• Noblewoman's Laugh: Cat Grant has the arrogant laugh of an aristocrat down pat. Lois even mocks it when she impersonates Cat.

Smallville, Kansas

Jonathan and Martha Kent

Jonathan and Martha Kent

"You will always be our son."

Voiced by: Reid Scott (Jonathan) and Kari Wahlgren (Martha)

A pair of good-natured Kansas farmers and Clark's adoptive parents.

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• Almighty Mom: One Death Glare from Martha is able to cow Jonathan and convince him to fake illness and leave.
• Cannot Keep a Secret: In "Hearts of Our Fathers", Martha is so happy that Lois, Clark, and Jimmy's article made front page news that she nearly spills that Clark is Superman when Sam needles Clark about his background. Only Clark's interjection prevents the secret from becoming an open one.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Downplayed, but John is a bit spacier than most Pa Kents are depicted. He may have been joking, but he manages to comment that there's nothing odd about a boy digging up his spaceship with a straight face and, at Thanksgiving with the Lanes, he pulls Jimmy out of two very tense conversations merely to confide in him that the turkey isn't coming to temp.
• Doting Parent: Martha is especially loving toward Clark, calling him the "perfect" son, framing his first front page article on the wall, and talking about how proud she is of him while having guests over. She loves him so much that she soon learns to hate Sam Lane for being critical of Clark and needling him with questions.
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: Downplayed. Martha and Jonathan Kent are exactly the kind of paragons of humanity's goodness that could turn a super-powered alien into an All-American hero, but one hour around General Sam Lane and his militant (in more ways than one) Jerkass act and Martha makes clear that she really hopes General Lane will leave and never come back.
• Foil: The Kents are this to Lois' father, Sam. Jonathan and Martha are extremely close to their son Clark and openly support him in all of his endeavors. They frame his first frontpage article on the wall of their home and are clearly excited (if a little worried) about his adventures as Superman. By contrast, Sam is distant to Lois, doesn't read anything she writes, and constantly keeps secrets from her. He struggles to be emotionally open with her or supportive of her career despite loving her as much as the Kents love Clark.
• Good Parents: They love Clark as their own son despite not being related to him by blood, and are very supportive of Clark's endeavors, be it crime-fighting, reporting, or investigating his alien origins. No matter how many doubts Clark has about himself, Martha and Jonathan assure Clark that he's their son and perfect just the way he is.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Jonathan is a head taller than Martha, who barely comes up to Clark's chest.
• Like Father, Like Son: Some of Clark's Dork Knight tendencies clearly came from Jonathan, as when he winds up putting himself in hot water with Martha, he awkwardly fakes a sudden illness and flees, not unlike Clark did earlier in the episode. Martha also isn't much better at keeping secrets than Clark is, nearly blabbering about Clark's adventures as Superman to Sam Lane, aka The General of Task Force X.
• Mama Bear: During Thanksgiving with her family and Lois and her father, Martha is able to let the elder Lane's curtness mostly wash over her, but becomes genuinely angry once his cutting comments are directed at her son.
• Muggle Foster Parents: To Clark, in typical Superman fashion. He's an alien with godlike powers and they're completely normal humans who raised him after his ship landed on their farm.
• Muggles Do It Better: Played for laughs in "Hearts of the Fathers", as Jonathan spends most of the episode "in the turkey zone" cooking dinner the old-fashioned way. He's not too proud to ask Clark for help in the end, trusting that his heat vision will roast it to perfection, but he makes an effort to try his best up until dinnertime when the bird turns out undercooked.
• Not So Above It All: Although Martha encourages Clark to give Lois's dad a chance, she quickly comes to dislike the man herself within minutes of his needling questions and clear aloofness.
• Secret-Keeper: As in most iterations, they are the only ones who know about Clark's powers and his superhero alter-ego.
• Sweet Baker: Martha is a doting parent to her son Clark and is ready to pull out a freshly baked pie for him when he returns home in Episode 2.

Kryptonian Empire

Jor-El

Jor-El

"Kal-El, my son... live."

Voiced by: Jason Marnocha

Clark's biological father and a brilliant Kryptonian scientist. He perished alongside his wife in the destruction of Krypton shortly after sending his son to Earth, and appears to him in the present day as a hologram.

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• Aliens Speaking English: Averted. Jor-El's hologram speaks Kryptonese with no translation or subtitles (though the caption track starts translating them in episode 10). This really bites Clark down the line, because it means he can't adequately explain or refute the General's accusations of his purpose on Earth being a Living Weapon for his kind to invade the planet. "Hearts of the Fathers" have him speaking a few words in English, implied to be picked up from the brief interactions he's had with Clark, but in other cases it's also implied to be Translation Convention, such as his shock over detecting "the poison" on Earth.
• Ambiguously Evil: In-Universe. Upon seeing the footage of Zero Day and how "Nemesis Omega" appeared to be a hostile Kryptonian acting as the vanguard for an Alien Invasion, Clark is stunned by the revelation and comes to question why Jor-El sent him to Earth. He almost comes to the conclusion that his immense might and varied abilities is because he was meant to be a Living Weapon for his species before Lois talks him out of it. Out of universe, viewers aware of traditional Superman lore are fully aware that Jor-El had benevolent intentions for sending his only son away from Krypton, but given that Nemesis indicates Kryptonians are more villainous in this adaptation, it's unclear to what degree he was complicit in any of his race's apparent invasions. "Hearts of the Fathers" all but states that Jor-El was completely uninvolved in the Zero Day event, and that he sent Clark to Earth to save him from Krypton's destruction as is normally the case.
• Bilingual Bonus: Although Kryptonese is usually rendered as a hash of Latin and Germanic roots, the caption track for episode 10 does fully translate his dialogue.
• Disabled in the Adaptation: In a first, Jor-El is portrayed as having lost an eye in his lifetime.
• Eyepatch of Power: Jor-El's character design features a shield-shaped eyepatch.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Though a piece of him survived in hologram form within the scout ship, he willingly helps his son fight through the ship's defenses to stop the invasion; he transports Clark away in a pod as the core reaches critical contamination, and the last remnant of Jor-El dies when the kryptonite destroys the ship.
• History Repeats: Jor-El's Virtual Ghost perishes the same way the original Jor-El perished 22 years ago—rocketing Clark to Earth to protect him from an imminent explosion.
• Hologram: His appearance in the present day has him depicted as such since his original self perished on Krypton.
• Language Barrier: The hologram of Jor-El in Clark's spaceship speaks Kryptonese instead of being translated into English like some adaptations, making it impossible for Clark, Jonathan, or Martha to understand what it's trying to tell them. The simulation seems to figure this out after several failed attempts at communication, resorting to an Exposition Beam. By episode 10 he seems to have picked up a few words, specifically "my son" and "live", enough to make Clark seem to finally realise who he's talking to.
• Papa Wolf: While he hasn't been present in his son's life by virtue of being dead, what little time he gets with Clark shows he genuinely cares for his son. Despite the implications in "Zero Day, Part 2" that Jor-El sent him to Earth as a weapon, it's all but stated in "Hearts of the Fathers" that Jor-El just wanted to save his son from Krypton's destruction as is usually the case. He later helps Clark fight off Brainiac's robots, and saves his son again when his ship is about to explode and Clark, suffering from kryptonite poisoning, is unable to escape on his own.
• Poor Communication Kills: Not him directly, but the Language Barrier on his simulated AI on Clark's ship prevents his son fully understanding the reasoning behind him being sent to Earth, preventing him from being able to explain how he's not a threat to Task Force X, resulting in their antagonism towards him. Upon seeing the footage of Zero Day, Clark even comes to wonder if he really was sent to Earth to be a Living Weapon, whereas readers of the traditional Superman lore are aware that that's not the case.
• Posthumous Character: Naturally, he perished on Krypton. He mainly interacts with Clark through a hologram produced by the escape ship.
• Shout-Out: His redesign is based off of Big Boss, as admitted by the show writer, Jake Wyatt.
• Token Heroic Orc: Of the Kryptonians who've appeared so far, he seems to be the only one without any intentions of conquering Earth (besides Clark, who grew up on Earth and has next-to-no memories of Krypton). Despite Clark's assumptions that Jor-El planned for him to kickstart an invasion, his motives for sending Clark to Earth seem to be that he genuinely just wanted to save his son's life as initially thought. He later helps Clark destroy his ship to prevent an invasion and saves his son's life knowing full well his hologram won't survive.
• Virtual Ghost: Though he initially seems like a simple hologram/artificial intelligence at first, the more he appears the more it's suggested the original Jor-El is in there somewhere.

Lara Lor-Van

Lara Lor-Van

Clark's biological mother. She perished alongside her husband in the destruction of their home planet and appeared in Clark's vision given by Jor-El.

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• The Voiceless: She doesn't speak in her sole appearance in season 1.

Nemesis Omega (UNMARKED SPOILERS)

Nemesis Omega

The mysterious threat behind Zero Day.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Everything about this guy is a mystery - who he is, where he comes from, why he attacked Earth. He appears to be Kryptonian, with his armor similar looking to Clark's costume, but he doesn't have an insignia or Kryptonian crest. He commands an army of robots with three doted lines on their chestplates, similar to Brainiac's own symbol, leaving it up in the air who (or what) exactly he is.
• Ambiguously Human: He has a humanoid shape and is heavily implied to be Kryptonian, but his helmet is shown opening with a glowing red light behind it, in a different manner than a natural Kryptonian's would to allow for their Eye Beams.
• Bait-and-Switch: The way Task Force X referred to Superman as "Nemesis Omega" indicated it was a classification given to him as the first known contact between their races. "Zero Day, Part 2" would clarify that Clark is not the first contact between Earth and Krypton, and instead, they mistakenly believed that he was this thing clad in a different getup, switching to a different tactic of appearing as a hero to the people after his direct invasion attempt was abruptly terminated.
• Beware the Superman: Its attack on the American military demonstrated quite firmly how out of their element humanity was when faced with the might of an alien menace, and motivated the formation of Task Force X to prepare as best they could for a possible second invasion. It's the reason why Clark is faced with animosity from the government throughout the series, and underneath all the antagonism they direct his way, there's an unspoken concern that their best efforts wouldn't be enough to stop Nemesis when it launches a second all-out attack. Given that Superman can handle Task Force X even when intentionally suppressing his strength to avoid killing them, it's a valid fear.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Even calling it a "battle" is generous. Its appearance on Zero Day had him sweep through the army forces on the other side of the portal without any effort or meaningful resistance despite their best attempts. The only thing that stopped the Alien Invasion was a mysterious event on the other side of the portal, implied to be the destruction of Krypton itself, and it's made very clear that both the General and Waller were aware they were saved by luck, not any effort of theirs or military might, motivating their current extreme actions against Superman's kind.
• Didn't See That Coming: The cause is implied, but the massive explosion that terminated Omega's ongoing Alien Invasion of Earth clearly caught it off-guard, as it was primed to one-sidedly slaughter all of Earth before the blast occurred.
• The Dreaded: Task Force X's actions throughout the series - creating super-weapons, forcing super-criminals to fight on their side and one-sidedly antagonising Superman — were all done because they believed they were necessary to combat "Nemesis" in disguise. Both Waller and Sam are implied to have gained PTSD from their near-death at Nemesis' hands, and the abundance of futuristic laser technology even amongst street-level law enforcement like cops and security guards are implied to be because of the government distributing said tech in case Nemesis attacked again, allowing people all over the country to have a chance at defending themselves from its threat, not just their military. From what is seen of Nemesis in action, it has powers comparable to Superman with none of his moral restraints — and given the entire series has Clark constantly suppressing himself and still curb-stomping his opponents without going all-out, it's easy to see why everybody's afraid of it returning. It's even greatly implied that Waller and Sam go so far because they're afraid their best efforts still wouldn't slow Nemesis down.
• Evil Counterpart: Its design, build and demonstrated abilities are so similar to Clark as Superman that it's revealed that the General and Waller thought he was this thing, going by a different disguise in an attempt to infiltrate Earth when the direct invasion was abruptly thwarted.
• Eye Beams: It's shown to have the capability of this, just like a natural kryptonian, but shown in a different manner. Its helm seems to charge the energy up and fire it out in a vertical slit on its face, leaving it unclear if this is a feature of the helmet channeling a kryptonian's powers without exposing their face, or if this thing is just mimicking the abilities of one. It makes use of this to casually slaughter the military forces on the other side of the portal from afar, which winds up saving both the General and Waller, as that leaves it on the space side of the portal when the mysterious explosion occurs and cuts the invasion short.
• Flying Brick: It's shown flying unaided in the vacuum of space when the portal opens, suggesting that it has this as a power and furthering the implication that it might be kryptonian. That said, it doesn't move much during the invasion itself, instead using its Eye Beams to wipe out the military from afar without needing to enter the portal itself.
• Greater-Scope Villain: His attack on a military base on Zero Day is what caused the General and Amanda Waller to become hardened into the villains they are in the present day, and set their sights on Superman believing him to be a similar invader.
• He Was Right There All Along: Omega and his spaceship have been prominently displayed in the show's opening, right in the centre of Superman's Rogues Gallery, but with Omega far back enough out of focus to be easily missed. The framing also makes him appear similarly-sized to Clark, showcasing their opposing roles.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Its reasons for attacking Earth are unknown, as an explosion behind him in the portal cuts him off from completing his annihilation of the army base.
• Invincible Villain: When it first appeared on Zero Day, there was nothing that could stop it, and only an unseen incident stopped Earth from being conquered. Task Force X's formation and the weaponisation of the remnant alien technology was done in an effort to avert this should Nemesis return, but given that Clark can stand up to the super-criminals using the tech without using his full strength, it's greatly implied that their best efforts aren't enough, given that Nemesis seems to have powers comparable to an actual Kryptonian.
• Knight of Cerebus: His attack on the military's camp is played deadly serious, with several on screen casualties. It also puts a whole new perspective on why the General and Waller are willing to go to such lengths.
• Mistaken Identity: The General and Amanda Waller believe Superman to be Nemesis due to their similar build and abilities not realizing that Clark grew up on Earth. While the General is willing to accept the possibility that Clark is being honest, Waller isn't.
• Never Found the Body: It was last seen being engulfed in light from the explosion on the other side of the gate, and while the robots were recovered, there were no traces of Nemesis Omega. Both the General and Waller live in fear that it's still out there or even on Earth, biding its time, and believe that Superman is its new identity.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: In contrast to the other villains in the series, who tend to talk up a storm or completely overestimate their abilities, Nemesis Omega is straight to the point, immediately launching a massive attack on the military base the moment the portal opens.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Nothing is known about this thing for certain, not its reasons for attacking Earth, whether it can be reasoned with, or even if it's a Kryptonian at all. All that is certain is that it's one-sidedly hostile towards Earth, and possesses abilities comparable to Superman without any of his moral restraints. It's unknown if it even survived the explosion that thwarted its imminent invasion of Earth, and both Waller and the General have spent 22 years desperately trying to prepare for its return without even being certain if their best preparations can stop it.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Has black and silver armour with red accents and a red cape, a glowing red laser behind his helmet, and led a devastating attack on Earth.
• Those Were Only Their Scouts: It's heavily implied in Episode 10 that Nemesis Omega was a low-ranked scout, as Brainiac neither knew nor cared about losing it 22 years ago and only turns his attention to Earth when Kryptonite is detected there in the present day.
• Uncertain Doom: Omega is shown looking back in shock at something unseen before defending itself from a massive explosion that breaks the portal, implied to possibly be the destruction of Krypton itself. It's unknown if it survived or what state it's in, but given that there doesn't appear to have been any further full-scale invasions like what was witnessed on Zero Day over 22 years, despite Omega's forces apparently being able to transport a warp gate straight to Earth, it's implied that Omega itself didn't escape unscathed even if it survived. "Hearts of the fathers" reveals that Brainiac, the apparent strategist of the kryptonian invasion armada, was completely unaware of Earth's existence until Clark's ship activated, implying that Nemesis, for whatever reason, was unable to report about the planet they were in the middle of invading, or find it again afterwards, leaving it further unclear as to their current condition.
• The Voiceless: Never speaks a word while attacking the General and Amanda Waller, which only contributes to Nemesis's unknown identity.

Brainiac

Brainiac

"I have found a new planet for you. It is a planet in rebellion."

Voiced by: Michael Emerson

A mysterious and machiavellian Military AI with connections to Zero Day and currently leads the conquests of different planets throughout the universe alongside a mysterious Kryptonian Warrior at his side.

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• Affably Evil: Speaks in a polite, almost friendly way to the Kryptonian Warrior about the next planet that they'll invade.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's clear that he's connected to Nemesis Omega, but to what extent is unknown.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Serves as one of the two Greater Scope Villains of the first season with the Kryptonian Warrior, although due to his drones attacking during Zero Day and the season finale, Brainiac is the more proactive villain of the duo.
• Dissonant Serenity: Talks about invading Earth as though it's a bag of garbage that needs to be taken out to the sidewalk.
• Final Boss: Technically serves as this in the Season One finale, overseeing the Kryptonian ship that activates when Jimmy accidentally exposes Clark to kryptonite, and prepares to send his warship through the portal when it opens.
• Graceful Loser: His reaction to the portal cutting his ship in half and destroying it is quite mild.
  "Ah. Unexpected."
• Greater-Scope Villain: While he doesn't seem to be Nemesis Omega, his symbol appears on the robot army that attacked during Zero Day, thus making him the real cause for Sam Lane's paranoia.
• Last Episode, New Character: Brainiac and the Kryptonian Warrior are introduced in the final seconds of the Season 1 finale.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Talks in a calm, carefree way about the next planet that he and the Kryptonian Warlord can invade.
• Vocal Dissonance: He has the appearance of a large, fearsome alien android, but he speaks with a surprisingly calm, soft voice.
• You Don't Look Like You: Is quite different from Brainiac's normal appearance, even his robotic ones - rather than a green-skinned, black-and-white suited, armored humanoid, this Brainiac bears a large red cape, red Tron Lines, and an oddly shaped head. If not for Brainiac's symbol on the head, it would be hard to tell that this is the same villain.

Kryptonian Warrior

Kryptonian Warrior

"Let them rebel. It does not matter. In the end, they will kneel."

Voiced by: Kari Wahlgren

A mysterious Kryptonian warrior whom Braniac is working with. Their connection with Nemesis Omega, or if they are actually them, is unknown.

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• Ambiguous Gender: Downplayed. They appear to have a masculine body and voice, but they have a female voice actor and both their armor and their voice are heavily obscured by machinery.
• Badass Boast: When Braniac tells them of how Earth is "in rebellion", they say that it doesn't matter since the planet will eventually kneel before them.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: With Brainiac, as one of the two Greater Scope Villains of the series.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Is a warlord working with Brainiac who's teased as possibly invading Earth in a future season. Their words about making said planet kneel hint at them possibly being General Zod or someone related to them.
• Kneel Before Zod: They claim that all of Earth's subjects will kneel. Whether or not they really are Zod has yet to be revealed, but their body proportions seem noticeably different from the humanoid figure Kryptonians have, and look markedly different to the similarly-armoured Nemesis Omega, leaving it unclear if they're a subordinate or the man himself.
• Last Episode, New Character: The Kryptonian warrior and Braniac are introduced in the final part of the Season 1 finale.
• Vertical Mecha Fins: Their armor has this.

Antagonists

Leslie Willis / Livewire

Leslie Willis / Livewire

"You're right. I am the smartest one here."

Voiced by: Zehra Fazal

A mercenary and thief who uses electricity-projecting devices in combat. She first crosses paths with Superman while smuggling stolen military robots through Metropolis.

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• Adaptation Dye-Job: In Superman: The Animated Series and the comics Leslie had black hair before transforming into Livewire. Here, her hair is blonde.
• Adaptation Personality Change: Typically, one of Livewire's biggest personality traits is that she's a massive Attention Whore, which was the main reason she got her powers in the first place (usually involving her being irresponsible regarding her show), and what fueled her supervillainy–she just loved the notoriety so much. Here, she's an amoral but fairly serious-minded mercenary who got her electricity from Powered Armor, and is implied to be recruited into the Suicide Squad. Notably, Livewire has never been on any previous incarnation of the Squad because she was so dangerous and unstable that even Amanda Waller couldn't realistically control her. Episode 9 winds up proving this true, once Leslie actually develops natural electrical abilities, though Waller did notice this in time to prevent any escape attempt, it's implied she allowed her to proceed both to use the chaos as proof of the general's inability to properly lead Task Force X and because she recognized that Leslie's new powers would make her too dangerous to contain down the line
• Adaptational Job Change: While previous iterations of the character start her off as a Shock Jock before gaining her powers, here she's already a hardened criminal stealing from the US military.
• Adaptational Modesty: Her DCAU and comics counterparts go around in basically a leotard with a deep lightning-shaped neckline and thigh-high boots, while in the show she wears tactical gear and armor with tech. Zigzagged in Episode 2, when her Superpower Meltdown melts off most of her outfit, exposing her arms, shoulders, and midriff. Leslie's legs remain mostly covered up, though.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed. In most DC media such as the comics, the DCAU, or in DC Super Hero Girls Livewire is portrayed as a selfish, egotistical Jerkass to the point that in the comics, even Amanda Waller thinks that recruiting her for the Suicide Squad is a fool's errand. Here, while she's a ruthless, amoral mercenary with a bit of an ego, she is not as callous as she quickly strikes up a Villainous Friendship with every other member not named Anthony Ivo and eventually organizes an escape for them.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: This incarnation of Livewire is not a metahuman, but instead a normal-looking woman using electrical weaponry. She glows blue akin to her usual blue-skinned depiction after her tech is overloaded, and though it fades away once she's subdued, she's then left with permanent blue Volcanic Veins, implying that might have changed. Episode 9 confirms it, and whilst not quite as powerful as her comic self, Leslie can throw a mean set of lightning bolts all on her own, and even manages to developed a Flash Step ability, apparently briefly turning into pure energy to do so.
• Adaptational Villainy: A variation. Livewire is always a rogue for Superman whether in the source material or in the comics. But before she becomes Livewire, Leslie is usually just a Jerkass Shock Jock. Here, Leslie starts out as a criminal mercenary and a villain right from the start without starting off in a more legitimate, if tasteless, profession. Downplayed, as she's more honorable and professional as well.
• Adaptational Wimp: Zigzagged with Adaptational Badass. In the comics, Livewire is so powerful that Waller can't draft her into Task Force X because there's no way to reliably control her. Here, she manages to give an inexperienced Clark a run for his money (briefly), but she's captured as soon as she gets de-powered. That said, Comic Leslie is a DJ with little combat training while this version is able to match blows with Deathstroke hand-to-hand before activating her trump card and in episode 9 flat out curbstomps him and takes one of his eyes in the process when she gains her new powers, even with said powers being newly-developed and limited compared to her comics self.
• Ambiguously Brown: In contrast to her usual depictions where she's clearly a dark-haired white woman before getting powers, here she has tan skin, platinum blonde hair (that may be dyed or not due to her undercut appearing darker), and blue eyes.
• Badass Fingersnap: When the General orders Livewire to "Shut him (Superman) up", she snaps her fingers and knocks out Superman by summoning a bolt of lightning from the sky.
• Bifauxnen: Unlike previous adaptations, this version of Leslie is drawn more androgynously.
• Came Back Strong: At the start of the series, Leslie was the leader of a gang of mercenaries, but due to a combination of Superman's interference and her own ego, found herself captured and conscripted into working for Task Force X. Come episode 9, not only does she have actual superpowers, but is now the de facto leader of a gang of dangerous, highly trained supervillains all armed with reverse-engineered Kryptonian technology.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Played with. In her debut two-parter episode, she's only referred to by her real name, but Slade mentions that she also goes by a codename, only to be cut off mid-sentence before he can actually say it. In the end credits, she's credited as "Leslie Willis/Livewire". The next episode, Jimmy Olsen has given her the name "Livewire" on his YouTube channel, and Clark starts using that name for her.
• Composite Character:
  • While she has the name and powers of Livewire, her role as an arms dealer and mercenary who initially uses super-tech and serves as the Starter Villain of a Superman animated show owes a lot to the DCAU version of Metallo. Their designs are even strikingly similar, both having tan skin and platinum blonde hair. She even tries to dispatch Superman with a robot that he struggles with due to inexperience during a heist, like that iteration of Metallo did.
  • Her energy-based powers and background as a mercenary is also reminiscent of Conduit.
  • She replaces Adeline Kane, Slade's ex-wife, as the one who takes his right eye.
• Dark Action Girl: Leslie in this show is a hardened mercenary skilled enough to fight Deathstroke on equal footing even without her electro suit. She becomes this even moreso when she develops actual superpowers, allowing her to flat out curb-stomp Slade and take out one of his eyes in the process.
• The Dog Bites Back: After being captured, tortured, and conscripted into Task Force X by Slade and gaining her new powers, Leslie leads a jailbreak and frees herself and the other criminals out of prison, and gets some personal payback on Slade by taking out one of his eyes.
• Electric Black Guy: She gets a Race Lift from white to dark-skinned and retains her usual electricity-based powers.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Leslie is a hardened mercenary in this show capable of taking out two undercover agents sent after her with ease. When using her suit, she can injure Superman with her lightning bolts. In episode 9, she gains the ability to generate lightning without the need of her suit, and proves to be good enough with this newly-developed power and her natural smarts and skills to both Curb-stomp and maim Slade and orchestrate a mass breakout of every asset of Task Force X's, even exploiting Ivo's Roaring Rampage of Revenge as a massive distraction by deliberately feeding him energy to dangerous levels.
• Evil Is Petty: After her heist goes off the rails, Leslie decides to freely distribute the stolen tech to low level criminals as a giant middle finger to Task Force X.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Normally she has a short bowl cut with nape-length hair in the back, but all her hair stands up when she's using her electricity akin to her usual design.
• Eye Scream: Inflicts this on Slade in episode 9, taking his right eye.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride and Impulsiveness. While a dangerous and highly competent mercenary, Leslie tends to overestimate her abilities and believes herself the smartest person in the room. Also, when angered, she tends to make rash decisions in the heat of the moment. When her heist goes off the rails and her deal falls through, rather than try to salvage some profit off of the stolen alien technology, she instead freely distributes it to low level crooks throughout Metropolis as a form of revenge against Task Force X. Later, when Lois and Jimmy show up during her negotiations with Slade, she erroneously believes that they're working together and attempts to blow up the city in a rage, leading to her battle with Superman and her subsequent defeat, capture and conscription into Task Force X.
• Game Changer: Leslie's theft of the alien technology from the military, followed by her freely distributing the tech to low level crooks throughout Metropolis, ushers in a new era of supervillains for the city. Her developing the natural ability to generate electricity on her own without a piece of technology that can be separated from her like the rest of the super-criminals shows how they're developing into threats that only Superman's immense might can contain.
• Irony: She's a lighting-using metahuman in the comics with the ability to naturally generate her own power, but in the show, she's initially beaten by Slade Wilson overloading her power source with stun batons, subjected to Electric Torture by him, and then kept in line with Task Force X's Shock Collar, essentially being constantly beaten with electricity. Then episode 9 reveals that she's been altered by her malfunctioning battle suit into an actual metahuman like her comic counterpart, and her new abilities make her the perfect counter to Task Force X's countermeasures.
• The Leader: In episode 9 she arranges a mass breakout of Task Force X's various assets, additionally exploiting both Ivo's insane focus on Revenge against Superman and his suit's need for power with her newly-developed natural abilities to create an immense destructive distraction whilst the rest of them escape. It's implied that the various super-criminals have more or less accepted her as this amongst them, due to her newly-developed powers, smarts, and gratitude for her rescuing them, as Heat Wave blocks several laser shots aimed at Leslie with her armoured body when Leslie's briefly winded after using her Flash Step to take down Slade.
• Manipulative Bitch: In episode 9, she helps break Ivo out of prison, promising him the chance to kill Superman. In truth, she was just using him as a distraction while she, Intergang and Heat Wave made their escape, though it's worth noting that Ivo was clearly too unstable to be a valuable asset to them, even nearly crushing them by accident during his rampage.
• Man of Kryptonite: Task Force X using a Shock Collar instead of the usual Explosive Leash on their assets comes back to bite them when Leslie develops the ability to create lighting on her own without any Kryptonian technology, enabling her to tear their restraints off and arrange a breakout almost single-handedly.
• Never My Fault: Although her heist had already well and truly gone off the rails long before Lois Lane showed up, let alone Superman, during her battle with him she insists that Superman is to blame for everything going wrong in her life.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Well, the first couple of episodes made it clear that she was very competent as a criminal and dangerous in a fight thanks to her electricity-creating battle suit, but she was still presented as a Starter Villain that was captured and imprisoned with ease once her power source was destroyed, additionally being coerced into joining Task Force X when previous versions of Livewire were a no-go to join the Squad because of how uncontrollably powerful they were. Then Leslie discovers that her malfunctioning battle suit has altered her into a lightning-generating metahuman like her comics self, orchestrates a mass breakout of Task Force X's assets, curb-stomps and maims Slade Wilson with her new abilities, and escapes scot-free as The Leader of the super-criminals, being in a better position than she was at the start of the series as a freelance criminal.
• Pet the Dog: While she manipulates (the clearly unstable) Ivo as a means of escaping, she does go out of her way to free Heatwave and the Intergang in the process, rather than just bolting and saving herself.
• Race Lift: Usually Caucasian, here she is ambiguously brown with blonde hair and blue eyes. It should be noted that her actress is Pakistani-American.
• Required Secondary Powers: Played with; the technologically enhanced battle suit she utilises allows her to create electrical fields or blasts she can control, or summon electricity from the environment for her use without danger of her getting harmed from the same lightning. However, despite the suit and technology seemingly getting fused into her following her first fight against Superman, Leslie is not naturally immune to electricity, getting subdued by the same Shock Collar as the rest of Task Force X's "volunteers". Once she discovers that her exposure to the malfunctioning Kryptonian tech turned her into a lightning-creating Metahuman, Leslie develops these in full, enabling her to tear off the shock collars with her bare hands.
• Revenge Before Reason: Leslie chooses to freely distribute the tech she stole to petty criminals largely to spite the people she blames for the job going south rather than try and salvage some profit or concessions using it. She subverts this in episode 9, though mainly for pragmatic reasons. Despite hating Superman and being eager for payback, she instead exploits Dr. Ivo's far more insane desire for Revenge on the Man of Steel to use him as a massive distraction whilst she escapes with the other super-criminals during the chaos.
• Shock and Awe: Like her counterpart from Superman: The Animated Series, Leslie has the ability to emit powerful lightning shocks that can bring even Clark to his knees. She's also able to manipulate electromagnetism to lift people and objects into the air and use them as projectiles. Unlike previous versions of her, Leslie's powers come from a battle suit made with Kryptonian technology stolen from the U.S. government. In episode 9, she gains the ability to generate electricity without her suit.
• Shoulders of Doom: A downplayed version with pointy shoulder pads. Oddly, they stay on after she's captured, implied to be stripped of the rest of her outfit, and made to wear a robe.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Her theft of Task Force X's technology and distribution of it to Metropolis' criminal groups sparks the story arc of Task Force X retrieving it and Clark using his powers to protect the city from empowered criminals, drawing the two into inevitable conflict.
• Smug Snake: Leslie is a competent criminal plotter, and her snarky critiques of her henchpeople's stupider moves in the first episode are fairly on-point, but her downfall comes from her egotism and stated belief that she's always the smartest person in the room. She jumps the gun and completely misreads the situation while negotiating with Slade Wilson, ignores warnings about misusing technology she does not fully understand until it literally starts killing her, and keeps shooting at Superman as he tries to save her from the consequences of her actions. The end result is her total defeat and humiliation, then capture and torture at the hands of Task Force X.
• Spanner in the Works: Subverted. Her developing natural lightning-generating abilities from her exposure to the Kryptonian technology enables her to organise a mass breakout of Task Force X's assets and even permanently maim the most efficient front-line agent they have. However, Amanda Waller actually noticed Leslie first developing the powers whilst she was still inside her cell, but intentionally turned off the cameras monitoring her to enable her to fully break out, exploiting Leslie's escape as proof that the General wasn't fit to lead task Force X properly, unlike her. Whilst her actions where immensely damaging to Task Force X, she only got that far because Waller allowed her to.
• Starter Villain: Is the first big antagonist Superman faces in the series. When her original buyer falls through, her decision to instead quickly offload all the stolen alien technology to petty criminals around the city as a form of revenge against Task Force X for ruining her deal drive the plots of the next few episodes. Following episode 9, she's more or less The Leader of the super-criminals after arranging a mass breakout, developing the ability to use lighting naturally without a crutch like them, and setting the more powerful but unstable Dr. Ivo into a destructive fight with Superman and Task Force X that ends with his capture.
• Super-Speed: One of her new powers in episode 9 allows her to use her electricity to move at incredible speeds, easily outmanuvering and defeating Slade.
• Surrounded by Idiots: While the second episode firmly establishes her as not nearly as smart and capable as she thinks she is, during the first she's repeatedly exasperated with her partners for doing foolish things like loudly talking about how the attempt to sell their stolen goods fell through in front of all the potentially violent muscle they hired for the job or unleashing a gigantic, conspicuous killer robot on the nosy reporters snooping around.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Episode 9, she discovers that she can now generate electricity without the need of her suit. And with some help from Waller, she wastes no time putting them to use by breaking her and the other criminals out of jail and even getting some payback on Slade for their earlier fight, defeating him handily and even taking his right eye.
• Volcanic Veins: After the power source of her suit is damaged, she gains blue, pulsing veins that remain even after she's separated from it. Episode 8 reveals that this was foreshadowing her gaining the ability to use electricity without her suit.
• You Don't Look Like You: In addition to a huge personality change, Leslie looks practically nothing like her usual blue haired, white skinned, and leotard-wearing self. Just about the only things reminding you that she's Livewire are her name and her using electric powers.

Dr. Anthony Ivo / Parasite

Dr. Anthony Ivo / Parasite

"Remember these faces. Because these are the people that you'll witness history with."

^{Click here to see him in his debut}

^{Click here to see him as a member of Task Force X}

^{Click here to see the Parasite 2. 0}

Voiced by: Jake Green

A shady tech entrepreneur and CEO of AmazoTech.

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• Achilles' Heel:
  • The Parasite armor can convert energy into mass, growing larger and stronger, but it also needs a consistent source of power to maintain itself. The first iteration feeds on Ivo when Superman deprives him of energy, and while the improved version seemingly has a "base" state that eliminates that risk, it still requires energy to maintain larger forms.
  • Ivo himself becomes the suit's achilles heel whenever he's wearing it, as the technology is borderline-invulnerable to outside attacks, growing stronger every time it's hit, and later on features a Power Parasite feature that allows it to directly sustain itself in the field, but every time Ivo is defeated by being attacked directly instead of his suit. His first fight with Superman ends when the suit starts painfully and near-lethal draining him an an emergency source of power. Despite its Energy Absorption features, Task Force X's Shock Collar measures are still effective in restraining Ivo using the Parasite suit because the collar is directly on his neck underneath the armour, where it can't drain the electricity. And his massive Kaiju form is practically unstoppable, until Superman directly targets Ivo's actual body within the bio-organic construct, removing him from it by aiming his charge at the unarmoured neck of the suit from the right angle, which near-instantly shuts the monstrosity down.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Professor Ivo in most continuities is either physically deformed from his experiments or fairly old, while Parasite is almost invariably a hideous monstrosity. This version is a well-dressed yuppie-ish man in his prime though the flaws in his Parasite suit do turn him into a shriveled-up husk. He's later reintroduced having been stabilized somewhat by Task Force X, and although he's significantly uglier than he used to be, he still looks like a human being with a bad drug habit and some tattoos rather than a monster.
• Adaptational Badass: Anthony Ivo in the comics and other adaptations is notable for being able to create powerful Justice League-level threats like Amazo. However, he typically isn't known for empowering himself or becoming a Composite Character with a powerful A-list supervillain from Superman's Rogues Gallery. In thie show, Ivo is the Parasite, with all the power and dangerous abilities that come with becoming a notable Superman rogue.
• Adaptational Job Change: In the comics, Ivo is just a Mad Scientist. In this show, he's an entrepreneur and CEO of his own tech company.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: Downplayed. Traditionally, Parasite has the ability to directly drain the life energy from his victims and gain their memories in the process. Here, his power instead comes from absorbing the kinetic energy of Superman's physical blows with his armor but doesn't seem to drain Superman himself, and he lacks the ability to gain his victims' memories^note though given the ability was used in past media to learn Superman's identity, this change was probably necessary given Ivo, unlike other versions of Parasite, had no reason to keep it secret. Moreover, Parasite in the comics was a metahuman, whereas Ivo, like Livewire, instead uses alien technology that grants him his powers, though also like her, it's implied that misusing that technology had some permanent side effects. This is largely rectified with the "Zero Day" two-parter, where the Parasite 2.0 suit has obtained the ability to drain targets directly, likely due to the fact that Ivo lost his first fight with Superman because he had no way to refuel if Superman stopped attacking him.
• Adaptive Armor: The Parasite armor grows larger and changes form as it absorbs more energy from Superman, even growing a tail at one point.
• Alternate Company Equivalent:
  • He is very much inspired by the Marvel Cinematic Universe's portrayal of Tony Stark — a bearded, yuppie-ish tech genius with a high tech suit. The key difference is that while Stark fought to protect people, Ivo is just a selfish psychopath.
  • His general plotline, using a prototype Powered Armor and facing Sanity Slippage upon being removed from his own company, calls to mind the portrayal of Norman Osborn/Green Goblin from the first Raimi Spider-Man movie.
• Arch-Enemy: Ivo currently stands out as Superman’s most hated foe. Ivo is obsessed with creating Bio-Armor that can surpass Superman's capabilities while growing to hate Superman after blaming him for Ivo's own deformity caused by his own suit, so killing Superman becomes his primary obsession. Likewise, Superman deems Ivo to be the one person Beyond Redemption and desires nothing more than to take him down before he hurts innocent people.
• Ax-Crazy: Ivo starts off as being merely an unethical and impulsive, but psychologically stable Jerkass. However, his use of the Parasite armor strips him of any inhibitions he had while also amplifying his aggression, making him increasingly violent and unhinged. By the end of the first season, he's degenerated into a violent, near-feral berserker capable of no strategy other than brute force.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Parasite suit is fully capable of matching Superman blow for blow, and that's before it absorbs enough energy to outright overtake him strength-wise. The problem? Without energy to absorb or an external power source, its own energy supply runs out in less than a minute… at which point it'll use the user as a power source instead. And it doesn't help that the suit has some psychological side effects that make it harder and harder for him to control himself the longer he wears it.
• Beneath the Mask: Ivo is a bad man from the start, but he hides behind a mask of charm and refinement, and comes across as mostly rational. His use of the Parasite armor gradually strips him of any of his pretenses as he physically and mentally degenerates to reveal the monster beneath. By the end, it's clear he's little more than an entitled Psychopathic Manchild entirely motivated by his infinite desire for more.
• Beyond Redemption: Throughout the entire series, Superman has pretty much always opened a battle attempting to reason with his foe (unless his foe is non-sentient like the OMAC robots), and his first battle with Ivo is no different. But by the time of their rematch, Ivo has become so deranged and vengeful that it's clear he won't listen. While Superman still opens the fight by asking Ivo to stand down, he follows it by declaring that he won't let Ivo harm anyone ever again, making it less of a plea to his humanity and moreso a warning that he won't like what happens if he continues fighting. Near the end of the fight, Superman remarks that Ivo chose to be a monster, accepting for the first time in the show that his foe is too far gone.
• Big Bad Wannabe: He remains the second-most-active antagonist after Task Force X, eventually betrays the group once they've given him everything he needs, and becomes a massive Kaiju who threatens the entirety of Metropolis. But despite talking a big game, he's quickly defeated once Metropolis stops supplying him with power, and Superman takes him down in only the penultimate episode of Season 1, whereas the comparatively less-dangerous Task Force X sticks around to menace Superman in the finale.
• Body Horror: When the Parasite suit malfunctions and starts draining from Ivo instead of Superman, it twists his arms and legs at unnatural angles as it contracts and constricts itself. After Superman pulls it off him, Dr. Ivo is left an elderly, shriveled husk of a man with a blackened eye and Tainted Veins. Even after Task Force X somewhat restores and stabilizes him, he still looks like he's aged badly, covered in ugly purple markings and with a darkened eye.
• Boxed Crook: Task Force X is revealed to have brought him as a scientist after his battle with Superman, though the collar he wears suggests that he is being kept on a short leash.
• Bullying a Dragon: Ivo thought he could use Superman as a punching bag and walking battery to demonstrate his Parasite technology. Needless to say, it backfires dramatically on him.
• Composite Character: He is a composite of his original comics self, his android Amazo, wearers of the Amazo Armor such as Kid Amazo and the various incarnations of Parasite, with a physical appearance akin to T.O. Morrow until his suit deforms his body, making him look like his comics self, and just a hint of Lex Luthor.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He allegedly has ties to criminal gangs who sabotage competitors and displace neighborhoods on his behalf. He more openly attempts to kill a dissenting member of his board, or at least throws him out the window to draw Superman's attention.
• The Corruption: The Parasite armor amplifies aggression and causes mental instability, and prolonged use of it causes Ivo to degenerate into a raving, uncontrollable brute. However, it's implied that, since he was always an entitled and immoral Jerkass, the suit simply stripped him of his inhibitions and self-control. Whatever thoughts he was previously able to keep under control, he now does the instant they occur to him.
• Corrupted Character Copy: This version of Ivo seems to take a fair bit of inspiration from Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, who is similarly a dramatic, fashionable, and flashy CEO of a billion-dollar company that develops a combat suit to protect the world from harm. He's even referred to as "Tony" instead of Anthony. However, Marvel Tony only made the Iron Man suit as a response to his experiences with war and the life-threatening heart injury he attained in the process, is very careful of who has access to the technology, and despite some narcissism, is a genuinely heroic man. Ivo is an amoral jerk more akin to Lex Luthor, who picks on anybody he sees as beneath him and intends to sell his evidently dangerous invention to anybody who can pay enough cash, despising Superman for gaining the attention and love of Metropolis. Also, before he became Iron Man, Tony Stark was clean with no criminal record or interest in making money through crime despite his flaws and was a very successful businessman. Dr. Anthony Ivo had illegal collections before he became the Parasite and was immoral enough to make money through crime, and then we learned that the board of directors of his company was going vote him out as CEO with one of the board directors telling him that he's broke, it's all the stated that he hopes that his new power suit would save his wealth and company with him being too delusional and narcissistic to see that even if his presentation is successful it will not save his company.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: Becomes increasingly hostile and more power-hungry the longer he wears the Parasite suit, even attacking his "audience" of investors while ranting angrily.
  Dr. Ivo: You know, I built this company myself. And I deserve more. MORE!
• Drunk with Power: He's warned right off the bat that the Parasite suit will mess with his head. Later, after sucking the life out of Superman as part of Task Force X, the trope becomes almost literal, drooling purple goo and cackling before the General electrocutes him into submission.
• Dumb Muscle: His use of the Parasite armor causes him to degenerate into this over time. It gives him strength on par with Superman's, but it also gradually causes him to go insane as it shaves away at his self-control and rationality. By the end of Season 1, he's a borderline-feral, raving madman who relies entirely on brute force, and is easily out-stratigized by the main trio.
• Entitled Bastard: Ivo's rants as a result of the suit making him Drunk on the Dark Side only confirm what he's shown by his actions throughout the episode—that he's a selfish egotist who feels he deserves to get whatever he wants.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: He's a selfish egomaniac who can’t understand that Superman would help people with no ulterior motive except helping people. After seeing Superman's heroics in-person, Ivo confronts him and asks what his endgame is, genuinely unable to grasp that he doesn't have one even as Superman point-blank tells the man he just wants to help people. Even after his Sanity Slippage by the "Zero Day" two-parter, he still thinks Superman must have an ulterior motive.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: He's warned that the Parasite armor might have psychological side effects, but brushes off warnings on the way to show it off to investors. Within minutes he's gone off the deep end and thrown one of them he has a grudge against out the window so he can show off what it can do against Superman. He also failed to consider what would happen if the suit ever ran out of energy if he was still wearing it. When it's forced to feed on him to sustain itself, he's reduced to a hideous, shriveled, living corpse of a man.
• Evil Is Visceral: While the Parasite 1.0 suit had certain reptilian features like a tail that became more enhanced with power drained, Parasite 2.0 is borderline Organic Technology that grows so massive and beyond control during its rampage that it ceases being bipedal or humanoid altogether, looking more like a giant, living saurian isopod. When Clark uses his X-ray vision to look into the thing's chest, he sees that it's developed a skeletal structure, and Ivo is suspended within a web of living tissue.
• Evil Laugh: Lets one out as he drains Superman of his powers at the end of episode 8.
• Evil Makes You Ugly: Perry sends Clark, Lois, and Jimmy to Ivo Tower for the sake of writing a puff piece on Ivo, Metropolis' "most eligible bachelor". After the Parasite armor starts draining the life out of Ivo, the man is left a shriveled, hairless husk of his former self.
• Fantastic Racism: Engages in this once he finds out Superman's origins.
  Superman: You chose to be a monster, Ivo!
  Ivo: THEN WHAT DOES THAT MAKE AN ALIEN FREAK LIKE YOU?!
• Fatal Flaw: Ivo has plenty of flaws, but his most self-destructive actions are borne out of his entitlement and refusal to take responsibility for his actions. Ivo starts off the series as an incredibly wealthy and beloved businessman, but his insatiable need for more leads to him ruining everything for himself, and his refusal to own up to that means he shifts the blame onto everyone else while doubling down on his terrible decisions.
• Faux Affably Evil: Ivo's public persona is that of a playful, charming tech genius. In private, he is a short-fused, ego-maniacal jerk, who quickly resorts to threats and force when displeased, to say nothing of the skeletons in his closet. Of course, the mask is dropped completely while wearing the Parasite suit, which his assistant warned him enhances aggression.
• Genius Bruiser: Actually Subverted Trope. Ivo starts as a Tech Bro owner of a multi-million dollar company, and personally invented several of its revolutionary technology, but when he puts on the parasite suit, it starts to shave away at the "Genius" part the more it leans into the "Bruiser" when drawing on greater power to fight against Superman. Superman easily outwits him in their first fight merely by refusing to strike back, and Ivo completely fails to think of another tactic beyond "keep trying to punch him" thanks to the suit affecting his mind. Despite being conscripted to help arm Task Force X with weaponry specifically designed to be effective against Kryptonians and their technology, in an actual fight, Ivo is little better than a rampaging beast that barely responds to orders, and has to be shocked into submission by the General. Waller outright says that his mind is rapidly deteriorating to the point they soon won't be able to even use his smarts anymore, and the Omega Cannon is likely to be the last invention Ivo could create whilst he was still coherent.
• Genius Burnout: Hinted at — while Amazotech has revolutionized various fields thanks to his inventions, the company has been losing money recently, and Ivo is close to broke personally, causing him to risk everything on the Parasite suit, which was developed from alien technology and appears to be largely the work of his subordinate, Alex.
• Greed: At Ivo's core is the belief he needs "more", despite being wealthy and a beloved celebrity. His use of the Parasite armor gradually strips him of everything except his greed, transformed into a literal and figurate hunger for power.
• Hate Sink: He stands out among the show's villains by being just about the only one without any redeeming or even sympathetic qualities. Even at his best, he's an obnoxious and domineering asshole who makes everything about himself. And then he endangers several people (who he invited to his party nonetheless) to show off how the tech he developed is superior to Superman, all with no concern for casualties he could inflict. He gets worse as Season 1 continues, until "Zero Day, Part 2" has him endanger the entirety of Metropolis out of a petty bid for revenge against Superman. Notably, Ivo is the only foe Superman comes to consider outright irredeemable, with Superman telling him that he chose to become a monster.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Dr. Anthony Ivo's character arc in a nutshell. In his first appearance, he starts off as the CEO of a successful company, AmazoTech, which has revolutionized various fields thanks to Ivo's inventions; then, in a gala Ivo hosting, it is revealed that the company has been losing money recently, The Board of Directors plans on voting Anthony Ivo off as CEO, and he is personally broke. Ivo hopes that his presentation will save his place in his company; it is heavily implied that he's just deluding himself and would've still been voted off if he was successful. His presentation failed in the worst way imaginable when he presented his parasite suit; he went insane and attacked the people at the gala and had to be taken down by Superman during the struggle, but when the Parasite armor malfunctions and drains his energy, it leaves him as a disheveled husk of his former self. A later episode revealed that AmazoTech became bankrupt and closed down, showing that Anthony Ivo lost his position as CEO and destroyed his company. Anthony Ivo's is captured and conscripted into Task Force X. As the series progresses, his sanity decays as his desire for vengeance against Superman grows until by Episode 9, he's little more than a raging monster both literally and figuratively.
• Hypocrite: He whines about how Superman cheated when Lois and Jimmy managed to turn off the electric cage that was making things unfair for Superman during their fight. He does it again when a city-wide blackout deprives him of the energy he needs to maintain his suit, accusing Superman of cheating even though Ivo himself was hardly fighting fair.
• I Am a Monster: During the second half of "Zero Day", Ivo accuses Superman of turning him into a monster after transforming himself into a monstrous Kaiju in a last-ditch effort to kill him. Superman rightfully points out Ivo only has himself to blame.
• I Reject Your Reality: Ivo blames Superman for ruining his life and believes that he's evil, and rejects any idea to the contrary. Unlike the General, Deathstroke., and Waller, Ivo believes this even without knowing about Nemesis Omega and when all he knew about Superman was that he was saving people with no clear motive. Even when Superman heroically puts himself at risk to stop Ivo from killing civilians while he rampages across Metropolis, Ivo still insists that Superman is the villain and that he's trying to stop him.
• Insufferable Genius: Ivo describes himself as the "boy genius" who revolutionized the technology used every day in Metropolis. He's also an insufferable blowhard who threatens his board of directors before trying to murder someone solely to provoke a response from Superman. Ivo clearly doesn't care much for his own assistant, Alex, who helps him behind the scenes.
• Kaiju: After being powered-up by Livewire's electricity and absorbing energy from Task Force X's base, the Parasite 2.0 grows to the size of a skyscraper.
• Karmic Transformation: Ivo's debut episode portrayed him as a man whose good looks and charm masked his true, ugly personality. When donning the Parasite armor, it enhances his aggression, effectively bringing the monster within him to the surface. And when the Parasite armor malfunctions and drains his energy, it leaves him a heavily deformed and shriveled husk of his former self, making him as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside.
• Laughably Evil: Ivo is a vile, loathsome man, but his sarcastic and eccentric personality makes him quite funny as well. However, he becomes progressively less funny with each subsequence appearance, as his diminishing sanity erodes away everything except his endless hunger and cruelty.
• Logical Weakness: Ivo's Parasite suit is powered by attacks, absorbing the kinetic energy as fuel. Superman ultimately wins their first fight by not attacking him at all. Without an external energy source, the suit runs out of power within a minute. Their final fight in "Zero Day, Part 2" goes a similar route — Lois and Jimmy get Metropolis to shut down their power, causing a city-wide blackout that deprives Ivo of the electricity he needs to maintain his Kaiju form.
• Meaningful Name: Of the Double Meaning variety — Parasite refers to Ivo's toxic personality and leeching success off the hard work of his assistants just as much as it refers to his Power Parasite abilities.
• More Despicable Minion: He serves as this during his time in Task Force X. The General, Waller, and Slade are all Well Intentioned Extremists despite the latter two's extreme ruthlessness, and the rest of the rogues gallery have some sympathetic traits. Ivo on the other hand is just a selfish Jerkass who refuses to take responsibility for his actions and is utterly sociopathic.
• More than Mind Control: While the Parasite armor amplifies aggression, Ivo already had a history of corruption and engaging in illegal activity even before putting it on. It's implied the armor only affects him in that it removes his self-control, and he willingly uses it repeatedly despite the side effects.
• Never My Fault: He blames Superman for his own Parasite armor draining and deforming him. Never mind that Ivo used the armor despite ample warning it wasn't safe to use, deliberately tried to get Superman involved and attack him as a marketing ploy, or that Superman removed the armor to prevent it from killing him. He only gets worse over the course of Season 1, ranting that Superman turned him into a monster as he willingly endangers the entirety of Metropolis for the sake of revenge. By now, Superman is fed up and retorts that Ivo chose to become a monster.
• Not Helping Your Case: He tries to sell his tech as a means to counteract the growing crime (and Superman) to the public, but it doesn't help that he holds everyone at his gala hostage, that he outright attempts to kill one of his company's board members with a lethal fall (or at least, to threaten him so severely that he'd draw Superman's attention by putting the man in extreme danger), and that he also attempts to injure said innocent hostages as a showcase.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Ivo genuinely believes Superman is a threat whose seemingly-unclear motives make him untrustworthy, and creates the Parasite armor to be able to stand up to him—while he's wrong about Superman, he at least seems to have Metropolis's best interests at heart. But as his fight with Superman carries on, it becomes clear that he's just an egomaniac who won't stop at Superman, instead taking out anyone he deems a threat to his own selfish goals. By the time of "Zero Day, Part 2", he's become the very threat to Metropolis he claimed Superman was, endangering thousands if not millions just for one final attempt at revenge on Superman.
• Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: Played for Horror. Ivo starts off as an eccentric genius and a revolutionary inventor, but prolonged use of the Parasite armor gradually reduces him to a near-feral, uncontrollable berserker who isn't capable of much more than brute force.
• Power Parasite: The Parasite 1.0 seen in Ivo's debut lacks this ability, being unable to absorb energy without first being attacked or supplied via an external power grid. This contributes to his defeat, as once Lois takes out the power grid Superman realizes Ivo has no way to refuel his suit if he stops attacking him. The Parasite 2.0 seen in the "Zero Day" two-parter has been upgraded with this ability to allow the Parasite to refuel even if an opponent refuses to actively fight, almost certainly to prevent a repeat of the battle at Ivo Tower. It allows him to absorb Superman's Heroic Second Wind, turning the tide from a near-guaranteed win for the Man of Steel into Ivo nearly killing Superman and only being stopped by the General, who needs Superman alive for purely pragmatic reasons.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: As the Parasite suit absorbs more energy, it grows larger and more reptilian. In episode 9, Ivo goes on a rampage and begins draining energy from the entire city, growing into a gigantic Kaiju that has lost nearly all resemblance to a humanoid.
• Psychopathic Manchild: His craving for more sounds like a greedy child, and he whines petulantly that Superman is "cheating" whenever he loses an advantage. He's like an immature bully in behavior.
• Revenge: His primary motivation after his debut episode. He's sullen and recalcitrant about being held hostage by Task Force X when first re-introduced, but once he learns that the General wants him to destroy Superman so thoroughly that his legacy will be erased, Ivo warms to his captivity immediately. This stops, however, when the General denies him the chance to kill Superman, leading him to break out of captivity and go on a rampage through the city.
• Sanity Has Advantages: Ivo is a legitimate genius, but his brilliance is only of use when he isn't a raving lunatic, something Waller makes note of. After he is captured following his full breakdown in "Zero Day, Part 2", Waller mentions his "last" invention, implying his insanity had gone too far to be of use to anyone anymore.
• Sanity Slippage: As the season goes on, whatever remains of Ivo's sanity erodes until he's left as a raving lunatic. Waller discusses it in "Zero Day, Part 2", noting that they have a limited window of time to benefit from Ivo's genius before he becomes far too insane to use it to their benefit.
• The Sociopath: A corrupt businessman with superficial charm who takes no accountability for his actions and is willing to endanger innocent lives for his own selfish cause.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: Ivo feels he has nothing else but his revenge on Superman, who he blames for ruining his life, and thus continues to use the Parasite armor despite the fact it's gradually transforming him into a monster, physically and mentally. He too blames this on Superman, ignoring it was his own choice.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: A technological genius whose business seems to run a great deal of Metropolis, who has numerous shady, illicit connections, a distinct lack of morals and goes on to fight Superman wearing a purple armored suit... and it's not Lex Luthor for once. With that said, his redheaded assistant known as Alex might pick up a thing or two from him...
• Tautological Templar: Ivo genuinely does believe Superman is a threat, but it's mainly because Ivo can't understand someone can be genuinely selfless and altruistic with no ulterior motive, and he's also too arrogant and self-obsessed to view himself as anything but a hero. As he descends into unhinged savagery from prolonged use of the Parasite suit, Ivo continues to insist that Superman is evil and that he's the hero, even as he endangers innocent people while Superman tries to stop him.
• Tech Bro: Ivo definitely presents himself as this, though it's arguable that at least some of it is a persona he inhabits more than his fundamental personality.
• Unwitting Pawn: His (very) brief Villain Team-Up with Leslie Willis/Livewire to escape their confinement by Task Force X has him turned into this, as Leslie only frees the unstable madman purely to use his Roaring Rampage of Revenge as cover whilst she flees with the more reasonably-minded conscripts.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Shares this spot with the show's resident Knight of Cerebus Slade Wilson down below. Ivo is the most openly malevolent of Superman's rogues gallery, and often deliberately tries to murder innocent people. Waller uses his rampage in "Zero Day, Part 2" as a counter to the General's argument that he refuses to kill Superman at the cost of civilian lives, hammering in just how much of a danger he was to Metropolis (even if it's unclear whether Waller was referring to actual fatalities or the potential for them).
• Villain Team-Up: The final scene of "My Adventures with Mad Science" shows Ivo working with the General to get revenge on Superman. He forms another one with Leslie Willis once the General stops him from finishing off a weakened Superman, but she only does this to use his rampage as a cover for her and the rest of the super-criminals to escape whilst Ivo is too consumed with wanting his revenge to notice or care.
• Villainous Breakdown: Suffers a protracted one across the first season. With Amazotech already faltering and his own personal finances near gone, he sinks everything into the Parasite suit in a doomed effort to target Superman for publicity's sake; the fallout destroys the company, his reputation and his good looks and health forever, and nearly costs him his life. From there, he becomes slowly more untethered as he goes, with the side effects of the suit and his all-consuming hatred of Superman eating away at what sanity he has left, to the point that Waller remarks how Task Force X may have a limited window of time to get what they can out of him. By "Zero Day, Part 2", he's cackling, raving madly and shrieking death threats while he rampages through Metropolis, and he breaks down sobbing after Superman defeats him again.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Whatever self-restraint he had goes out the window after he puts on the Parasite suit, due to the suit having the side effect of amplifying his aggression.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Ivo sincerely believes he's in a Beware the Superman story and battling a Villain with Good Publicity, rather than a reconstruction of the superhero genre centering around the sincerely kind and altruistic Superman. Unlike with Waller and the General, this isn't portrayed sympathetically; Parasite only really believes Superman is a threat because he doesn't believe someone so powerful would just be satisfied helping people with no ulterior motive.

Rory / Heat Wave

Rory / Heat Wave

"Come on! Come on! Why does it need more time?"

Voiced by: Laila Berzins

A small-time criminal with a suit that lets her create fire.

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• Adaptational Dumbass: Her firepower isn't unimpressive but this incarnation of Rory apparently isn't very competent at maintaining her own tech and gear (and likely isn't even the creator of her own suit), whereas malfunctioning gear isn't a problem for most other incarnations of Heat Wave.
• Adaptational Hairstyle Change: Heat Wave is usually bald, but here has hair.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: After Superman defeats her goons — who promptly abandon her and run away — and she still can't get her tech to work, Heat Wave gets on her knees and begs Superman not to take her away under the mistaken belief that a Powered Armor wearing Deathstroke was Superman.
• Boyish Short Hair: She's very muscular and has a butch hairstyle to compliment it.
• Brawn Hilda: Rory is a gigantic, muscular woman with a rough, masculine voice and features. Although she isn't hideously ugly, it does serve to make her look less cute and appealing, since she's a petty, thuggish criminal.
• Composite Character: She has at least part of the real name and alias of the comics Heatwave along with a pyrotechnic suit, but her gender, orange hair, and being part of Superman's rogues gallery are more evocative of Volcana.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Her armor leaves the arms exposed and blasts huge plumes of fire without any harm to herself. It has a retractable helmet when she turns up the heat but that's it.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Of Episode 5. Despite appearing to be the Villain of the Week, she ultimately takes a backseat to Slade.
• Enhanced Punch: The direction of her flamethrowers can be reversed to give a Recoil Boost to her punches.
• Gender Flip: This version of Heat Wave is a woman, unlike the comics (and previous adaptations) where the character is a man (the unnamed Heat Wave Jr. also from the comics is female though). Thus she can also be considered a loose stand-in for Volcana, who like Livewire was created for Superman: The Animated Series.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: When her tech starts to malfunction she stops making an attempt to fight back against Superman, merely asking him to show mercy.
• Invulnerable Knuckles: Her hands are left completely uncovered by her blasting gauntlets, but she never ends up hurting them as a result of either the streams of superheated energy flying right over her fingers or punching invincible aliens in the face, after employing the energy for a Recoil Boost.
• No Name Given: Neither her full name nor her criminal alias are used in her debut episode. One member of her gang refers to her as Rory while calling for help, and Lois calls her weapon a 'heat wave' weapon. Rectified as of "Zero Day, Part 1", where Superman calls her Heat Wave.
• Playing with Fire: Her Kryptonian weapons generate and shoot fire, as well as use their Recoil Boost for super-powered leaps and punches.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: Heat Wave is traditionally an enemy of the Flash, but here fights Superman with no indication that she's run into the Flash.
• Team Member in the Adaptation: Inverted. Despite having criminal allies, they're unnamed and don't appear to be the Rogues at all.
• Unluckily Lucky: Her tech has a bad habit of malfunctioning at inopportune moments, including during her fight with Superman... but it doing so before a robbery results in her staying back trying to get the suit to work again, which saves her from being captured by Slade along with the rest of her gang. Later, a similar malfunction while trying to jack a getaway car means that she runs into Superman and talks with him while she tries to get it working, meaning Superman is later able to confront Deathstroke during his attempt to kidnap her too.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: She surrenders to Superman during their first encounter, but also works to get her heat ray gauntlets working again while talking to him so she can use them to escape.

Mister Mxyzptlk

Mister Mxyzptlk

"I have seen countless yous, and it is your fate to always be different, and weird, and alone."

Voiced by: David Errigo Jr.

A diminutive, imp-like being self-described as an "interdimensional peacekeeper", he shows up on Clark's doorstep begging Superman for help.

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• Adaptation Deviation: Mxyzptlk typically has a bowler hat on his head that doesn't do anything besides look neat. In this iteration, the hat is actually a tiara that amplifies his powers, and which take on the bowler hat form when it's not worn. That being said, it's implied that the hat is less of a piece of equipment and more of a manifestation of a part of his powers that the League of Loises somehow took away, considering his remarks about how he's missing a part of himself.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Most iterations of Mister Mxyzptlk have him look like a crochety old man with a bowler hat. This one looks like a genie or a character from Dragon Ball.
• Adaptational Villainy: Mxyzptlk has for the most part usually been a trickster and an irritant, whose main challenge is pulling big, elaborate pranks that have the risk of running high collateral damage and forcing Superman to control them. Rarely would you see a version that describes himself as a "chaos god" (in the most destructive sense), cruelly mocks Clark by saying he'll never be normal, or sows the seeds of doubt between Clark and Lois by showing her the Supermen who've turned bad.
• Adaptational Wimp: Very Downplayed. While the usual Mxyzptlk has his godlike power without any restrictions to it, and typically needs to be beaten through wits, this Mxyzptlk, while still quite strong, needs to wear his trademark bowler hat — actually a tiara — in order to assume his godlike capabilities.
• Amplifier Artifact: Mxyzptlk has a tiara that amplifies his powers. When not on his head, it takes the form of the bowler hat his comic counterpart wears.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": While it normally looks like his usual bowler hat, when he has the hat equipped it turns into a tiara. Despite this, it's still called a hat by the League of Loises even when he has it on.
• Cool Crown: A power-strengthening tiara that takes the form of his typical bowler hat when not on his head.
• Cute Little Fangs: He has a pair of small fangs, with at least one of them usually being visible when he opens his mouth. They highlight both his trickster personality and his inhuman nature.
• Expy: While Mxyzptlk has usually been designed consistently in previous iterations — an impish Caucasian man dressed in dapper suits or spandex in secondary colors, bald or balding hair and a bowler hat — here his design evokes the Supreme Kai from the Dragon Ball franchise.
• Figure It Out Yourself: He knows everything there is to know about Clark and Superman and happily rubs that in Clark and Lois's faces, but he thinks watching them desperately seaching for answers is far more entertaining than just telling them.
• For the Evulz: He comes to Clark for "help", but mainly to gauge how this Superman stacks up to the others in the multiverse. The Bowler Hat he's after to boost his power is the episode's macguffin, but causing problems for everyone around is his primary motivation. As he says himself, he lives for the drama.
• God of Chaos: He openly identifies as one, using his Reality Warper powers for nothing more than his own amusement... and revenge against the various Lois Lanes for de-powering him.
• Greater-Scope Villain: His appearance is a one-off involvement in the plot, but the after-effects of his actions continue to influence it even past his encounter with Clark. The file X he gives to Lois undermines her attempts to defend Superman's good character from his public detractors, and whilst she eventually gets over it, the Kryptonite shard contained within kick-starts the season finale's conflict. The rock's presence negatively effects Kryptonitan technology as well as their organic bodies, and when the sphere is accidentally opened on the Kent farm, Clark's ship detects it and triggers a failsafe, which apparently allows an AI of Brainiac to take over the ship, trying to use it to initiate another Zero Day. Whilst Clark stops this, the event alerts Brainiac to Earth's location, leading him to direct the still-living Kryptonian forces initiating a violent conquest on the galaxy towards it. A fitting outcome from a self-described "God of Chaos".
• Jerkass: In addition to being a self-appointed force of destruction, this version of Mxyzptlk is just a colossal dick to everyone once he doesn't have a reason to hide his intentions, as he takes time to mock Clark for wanting normalcy in his life and shows Lois alternate versions of Superman who went bad just to see her reaction.
• Just Toying with Them: Highly ambiguous but it's implied all his apparent limitations in his debut episode is just him playing by rules of his own making to maintain tension in what amounts to a game for him. He transforms Clark on their first meeting with a snap of his fingers but never does that again and only uses portals, duplicates and blasts while apparently fully powered by an obvious weak point. He casually escapes confinement afterwards and admits to visiting Lois only so he can directly witness the drama of her discovering universes where Clark turned evil.
• Large Ham: When fully powered up, he considers himself a god.
  Mxyzptlk: Goodbye, dependable Clark! Hello Mxyzptlk! God of Chaos!
• Laughably Evil: He's an actively malicious God of Chaos, but his reality warping antics and hammy personality make him a source of comedy.
• Manipulative Bastard: As with all his incarnations, you've got to take everything Mxyzptlk says with a grain of salt. He tricks Superman into helping him break into the Museum of Superheroes on Earth Prime by claiming that Lois is in danger, and later uses Lois' curiosity over what the League of Lois Lanes is hiding to get her to help him break into their base. At the end of the episode, he intentionally feeds into Lois' horror over learning of the existence of evil Supermen for apparently no other reason than for his own amusement.
• Motor Mouth: This version of him has a penchant for speaking quickly and in run-on sentences. In some instances, he'll even throw in a rapid series of voice impressions while he's at it!
• Mythology Gag: He regains his full power after putting on a bowler hat, which is what his previous incarnations usually wear.
• The Nicknamer: Assigning nicknames for the people he meets is another of his habits, each one seemingly based on the core aspect of their personality. Mxyzptlk refers to our Earth's Clark as the "dependable" one (i.e. "dependable Clark") and upon Lois revealing her suspicions of the League of Loises, he calls her the "fun one".
  Mxyzptlk: And now I know which "Lois" you are. You're the fun one!
• Playful Cat Smile: He tends to sport one whenever he's being particularly smug.
• Self-Duplication: Once he returns to full power, Mxyzptlk is able to create duplicates of himself, each capable of firing magical laser beams.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He shows up in only one episode as of typing, but he basically sows seeds of doubt into Lois's mind when she sees images of alternate versions of Superman who went evil, which carries on into the Zero Day two-parter.
• Spanner in the Works: In "Hearts of the Fathers", his indirect influence completely upends the status quo. The Kryptonite shard he gave lois triggers failsafes within Clark's ship that apparently allow Brainiac's AI to infect it and nearly enact another Zero Day. Whilst thwarted, the event puts Earth on Brainiac's radar and has him directing the still-living Kryptaonian forces in the galaxy towards it. The Hologram of Jor-El expresses shock when the ship reacts to the presence of "the poison", indicating that an additional reason he chose Earth as a safe haven for Clark was because there was no trace of it anywhere on the planet. Given that the Kryptonite shard was provided from other dimensions, this would never have happened if Mxyzptlk hadn't left a sample behind for Lois, fitting with him self-stylising as a "God of Chaos" who lives for the drama.
• Thinking Up Portals: Mxyzptlk can open portals to other dimensions on a whim.
• Third Eye: After retrieving his hat and the rest of his powers, he obtains a third eye.
• Troll: As he puts it, he lives for the drama, and that means complicating everyone else's lives for kicks through either direct interference or by sowing seeds of doubt. case in point, the season finale has the Kryptonite he gave Lois becoming the trigger that puts Earth on the radar of an ongoing galactic conquest, spearheaded by Brainiac and what appears to be General Zod himself, whereas beforehand the planet was apparently Beneath Notice to them.
• Trickster Mentor: Despite being more of a Jerkass in this universe compared to others, he has a bit of a soft spot for the show's Lois, comparing her positively to Lois Prime. He encourages her to figure things out herself. Even in his final scene (where he sows seeds of doubt regarding Clark/Superman in her mind), when she asks about the piece of Kryptonite in the Superman — File X orb, Mxy decides to let her discover that on her own rather than further fuel her doubts by identifying it as a weapon.
• Villain Respect: While he has very little respect for the League of Lois Lanes, he grows a liking for the show's Lois when she disregards her alternate selves in search for the truth. Even when it's all over, he shows up in her universe just to watch what's going to happen next.
• Vocal Dissonance: His face is rather child-like, but he speaks with a deep adult man's voice.
• Willfully Weak: While he makes a show of running out of power without his Cool Crown, it's heavily implied that he's holding back way more power than anyone in the story is aware of. For instance, he turns Clark into a crab momentarily as a demonstration, but doesn't do so when they're fighting in the headquarters of the League of Lois Lanes. He also slips out of confinement effortlessly to appear in Lois' apartment just to watch her reaction to learning about the existence of evil versions of Superman.
• You Don't Look Like You: He doesn't at all resemble the little man that almost all versions of Mxyzptlk have taken the appearance of, which look like cartoon characters who almost always clash with the rest of the DC universe in all animated or print media. The one thing he has in common with most of them is the bowler hat, and even that doesn't stick as it takes the form of a crown as soon as he wears it.

The League of Lois Lanes

The League of Lois Lanes

Voiced by: Lauren Tom (Leader Lois), Alice Lee (Grizzled Lois, Robotic Lois), Osric Chau (Lewis Lane), and Kimberly Brooks (Jalana Olsen)

A group of multiversal peacekeepers who all happen to be a version of Lois Lane (and sometimes Jimmy Olsen). Five of them bring Lois and Jimmy aboard their shuttle when they catch Superman helping Mxyzptlk break into a portal-proof vault designed to keep Mxyzptlk out.

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• Alliance of Alternates: Alternate Loises and Jimmys, in this case.
• Alternate Self: They're all versions of Lois Lane from different universes (and sometimes versions of Jimmy Olsen). Some of them are older than the main story's Lois, one of them seems to be from an apocalyptic future, and all of them are apparently more successful than our Lois. While many of them that we see closely resemble our Lois, differing mainly in hairstyle, others appear to be different ethnicities. Some Loises seen only through images are referred to by numbering their Earths, and there's a Lois of Earth-1 distinct from a Lois Prime who founded the League.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: As noted by our Lois while she's sifting through their files, the League of Lois Lanes are largely successful reporters who achieved fame and recognition for their efforts even though our Lois is still struggling to get promoted above an intern. This eats at our Lois, who feels inferior next to these other Loises, and has Mxyzptlk call her "Participation Trophy Lois".
• Beware the Superman: None of the other Loises that our Lois and Jimmy encounter trust Clark, and for good reason. A number of Clarks from other worlds turned evil, including their own, so now they no longer trust any Clark even if they're genuinely good.
• Canon Foreigner: The organization as a whole is an original creation for the show.
• Commonality Connection: Among the League of Lois Lanes that Jimmy and our Lois meets is one Jalana Olsen. Although standoffish at first, she bonds with Jimmy over both of them being the only Jimmys to also be Flamebirds and covertly helps them escape at the end.
• Gender Flip: Lewis Lane is a male version of Lois and Jalana Olsen is a female version of Jimmy.
• Good Is Not Nice: The other Loises who appear in person are ostensibly protectors of the multiverse, but they are also a very curt and condescending bunch who have clearly let their achievements go to their head and have a very dangerous shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to dealing with perceived threats.
• Hero Antagonist: The other Loises are after the legitimately dangerous Mxyzptlk but are willing to use violence against anyone they even remotely perceive as a threat, putting them in conflict with Lois and Jimmy when they open fire on Clark.
• Improperly Paranoid: Their Kryptonite blasters make clear that they have plenty of experience dealing with evil Clark Kents/Supermen. They also use them as their primary weapons and are quite Trigger-Happy with them, to the point that they attack our Clark on sight when he arrives to subdue Mxyzptlk. Anybody who is not part of their group is treated as "this is need-to-know information, and you don't need to know" at absolute best.
• Jerkass: They're generally curt and dismissive to most people they talk to and swift to turn their weapons on anyone who tries to stand up to them, as seen with how they deal with this universe's Lois and Jimmy. They also have a "shoot first and ask questions later" attitude towards Clark, despite him never showing any previous malicious intent.
• Mythology Gag: The founder of the League, called Lois Prime and only seen though archive photos, looks like the Lois from the Fleischer Superman Theatrical Cartoons. A hologram of Lois who resembles that of Superman: The Animated Series is also seen in the background of some scenes.
• Non-Indicative Name: Their organization is called the League of Lois Lanes, but there are also a few Jimmy Olsen counterparts in their number.
• The One Guy: Lewis Lane is the only male alternate Lois among the members that we see.
• Parental Issues: There's an implication that, like our Lois, many in the League also have icy relationships with their own fathers; one alternate Lois is listed, with no further elaboration, as "ready to meet with Dad again", suggesting that estrangement is the norm and this is a rare accomplishment.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: It's all but stated that the five that we see are this to the larger League, as the rest are only seen through holograms and footage and such, the five are working all on their own despite there being an infinite number of Earths, and their motivations point to them being special cases in the multiverse.
• Situational Sword: Subverted. The other Loises are all armed with Kryptonite blasters in order to "neutralize" Superman, but they're happy to turn them on anyone else who stands in their way.
• Token Good Teammate: While Jalana Olsen was standoffish at first, she shows her softer side after learning that Jimmy is also Flamebird like her which they bond over. After the Loises neutralize Clark with their Kryptonite blasters and Jalana stops Jimmy from interfering, she apologizes to him for betraying his trust. And after Mister Mxyzptlk is dealt with, Jalana secretly teleports Clark, Lois, and Jimmy back to their universe without the other Loises noticing.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: These other Loises are trying to preserve the multiverse but are incredibly dogmatic and inflexible when it comes to actually dealing with presumed threats. And then there's their zero-tolerance shoot-first policy towards Superman variants crossing universes for whatever reason due to the existence of evil variants.

Intergang

Overall Tropes

"Intergang forever!"^note Left to right: Silver Banshee, Mist, Rough House

A small time criminal group turned into a significant threat thanks to the technology they got from Livewire.

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• Adaptational Wimp: Intergang in the comics and other adaptations is a formidable and large-scale gang of high-tech criminals and/or terrorists. Here, they are a three-person group focused on small time crimes like robbing banks and not very competent at all. Further, two of the three supervillains it is comprised of have undergone power downgrades.
• Affably Evil: They're a trio of crooks who act more like dumb, friendly teenagers than murderous robbers; while they recklessly endanger people around them, it has more to do with lack of understanding their technology than actual malevolence.
• Boisterous Weakling: A trio of low level, incompetent crooks whose leader was planning to rob the biggest bank in Metropolis while in prison even before she found out about their Upgrade Artifacts. It doesn't take long in their fight to demonstrate that the three are no match for Superman even with their new powers, but instead of fleeing, they still try to take him down. Ultimately, the crisis they unleash is by some of their tech malfunctioning rather than anything they deliberately do.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: For all they're a bunch of thoughtless criminals who don't hesitate to threaten and harm others to get what they want, the three clearly are quite fond of each other, with Siobhan and Kyle's affection as siblings being quite obvious. The group acts more like a club in their offtime than any sort of criminal organization.
• Oddly Small Organization: Their name suggests an international crime organization. They are two siblings and their lunkhead friend who have, up to this point, robbed convenience stores. Implicitly, the name is about broadcasting their ambitions, rather than their present reality.
• Stupid Crooks: Intergang is comprised of three of these now armed with alien tech that they barely understand. The audience is shown footage of the trio prior to getting the tech, robbing a store and only realizing that there is a camera filming them in the middle of the act.
• Team Hand-Stack: The group appear to regularly do this before their heists, complete with a declaration of 'Intergang forever!'. Kyle appears to find it somewhat silly.
• Terrible Trio: A pretty classic example, two male subordinates with contrasting builds, powers and personalities, with a female leader who holds the position more by force of personality than any real ability.
• Upgrade Artifact: The alien tech functions like this, turning three inept thieves into genuine threats for normal law enforcement, with no preparation or practice on their part. Indeed, they provide an object demonstration that these devices must be exceedingly intuitive, as these three can manage to use them.

Siobhan McDougal / Silver Banshee

Siobhan McDougal / Silver Banshee

"Boys, they've looked down on us our whole lives. But now, with this, we are about to get the respect we deserve. What do you say?"

^{Click here to see her without her mask}

Voiced by: Catherine Taber

The leader of the small-time criminal group Intergang. Uses an alien helmet to turn her voice into powerful sonic waves.

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• Adaptation Dye-Job: Her hair is now a bluish gray, rather than stark white.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Zig-zagged. In the comics she wears a low-cut revealing outfit with thigh-high boots and long gloves, yet her face has a skull pattern and her body is ghoulishly white and black; still she's often drawn as attractive in a dangerous monster girl way. In the show she's a normal-looking woman in a long coat, and conventionally attractive within the animesque art style, even leaning towards "cute" with her making starry-eyed faces.
• Adaptational Hairstyle Change: Her hair in this series is much more messy compared to the relatively straightened out hairstyle that she has in the comics.
• Adaptational Modesty: She wears a long coat and pants instead of her more revealing comics outfit.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: In the comics, her powers are mystical in nature and include a sonic scream, super strength, and flight. Here, she lacks the latter two abilities and the super scream instead comes from an advanced tech mask. While her second appearance does have her gaining the flight powers, they still come from tech rather than being a natural ability of hers.
• Adaptational Wimp: The comic version of the Silver Banshee was a mystical type supervillain with a bunch of superpowers including a sonic scream, super-strength, and flight. This version only has the sonic scream and that only came from a tech mask. She does get her flight powers in her second appearance, however, though they still come from tech instead of her having the power naturally.
• Cute and Psycho: Her design in this adaptation is much more cute and stylized compared to her more ghoulish comic appearance. She's also just as remorseless towards endangering citizens and pulling off dangerous heists.
• Mythology Gag: She's been given a skeleton motif to her wardrobe instead of having her face look like a skull. Her black pants have leg bone designs and she adds a skull design to her (already slightly skull-like) mask by her second appearance.
• Related in the Adaptation: She is Mist's sister here, which is not a relationship she has with any character who has born the Mist name in the comics.
• Small Name, Big Ego: While all the members of Intergang show signs of this, Siobhan is the worst. Despite being in prison for a series of incompetently-done smash and grabs of bodegas and convenience stores, she spent her time there constantly boasting of her plans to make a 'big score' and once out leads Intergang on a heist of one of the biggest banks in Metropolis that is only remotely practical because of the gang's new tech, hoping to finally get the respect they "deserve".
• Super-Scream: Able to emit a super sonic scream with the use of a mask.

Kyle McDougal / Mist

Kyle McDougal / Mist

"Stop using OUR REAL NAMES!"

Voiced by: Lucas Grabeel

A member of the small-time criminal group Intergang and Siobhan's brother. Uses alien tech to render himself invisible.

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• Adaptational Superpower Change: In the comics, Mist has the ability to transform into vapor, granting him invisibility and intangibility, with said powers coming from exposure to a chemical. Here, he's only capable of turning invisible, and said power instead comes from advanced technology.
• Adaptational Wimp: Comics Mist is a criminal mastermind whose powers allowed not only invisibility but intangibility as well through transforming into a vapor. This Mist is a low-level crook who can turn invisible with alien tech.
• The Bait: He's not shown among the captured supervillains in the beginning of "Zero Day, Part 1", and is even absent from the Evil Overlooker shot in the opening (whereas both his sister and best friend are present). It turns out he's being used to lure Superman in a trap, pretending he avoided capture and wants to rescue Siobhan and Albert to get Superman to fly straight into Task Force X's base, where the General has prepared an ambush.
• Big Brother Instinct: He's introduced trying to get his sister out of prison with Albert and when caught by Superman on his own he claims he's trying to do the same for both of them after being brought in by Agent Wilson.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Tries repeatedly to defy this, insisting that Intergang not use their real names while on the job. It doesn't quite stick.
• Composite Character: A composite of Bevan McDougal^note Siobhan's brother in the comics, who like Kyle is responsible for her powers, albeit accidentally in Bevan's case and the Golden Age villain Mist^note Who is unnamed in the original comics but has twice been named Kyle Nimbus in adaptations due to being composited with his son Kyle. His connection with Silver Banshee might also make him a reference to Silver Mist, an obscure Steel villain.
• The Creon: Despite being the most competent member of Intergang — which is, to be fair, damning him with faint praise — Mist is perfectly fine with taking direction from his charismatic and grandiose sister.
• Invisibility Cloak: Mist is in possession of a piece of stolen technology that allows him to become invisible.
• Logical Weakness: Mist can become invisible, but that only prevents people from seeing him—it doesn't hide any noise he makes. Once Superman develops his super-hearing, he's able to track Mist's exact location just by the sound of his footsteps, even though Mist never uncloaks himself once.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In "Zero Day, Part 1", Mist takes advantage of Superman's unwavering kindness to bait him into an ambush set up by the rest of Task Force X. But after Ivo nearly kills Superman and the General takes him into captivity, he can only watch in horror over having done so. Whereas the other villains treat Superman's capture with triumphant glee or unwavering seriousness, Mist looks genuinely remorseful. This continues into "Zero Day, Part 2", where Mist is shown sitting in his cell, burying his head in his hands over his actions.
• Noiseless Walker: Inverted — Kyle's splashing through puddles is how Superman is able to track him down using his super-hearing.
• Only Sane Man: Downplayed, but he is the Intergang member who tries to keep things professional, the most adept at using his powers in clever ways and the only one who shows any awareness of the risks they are taking in their robberies. He's also the only one who thinks the name 'Intergang' is silly. He's still ultimately foolish and heedless, just not as much as Silver Banshee and Rough House.
• Related in the Adaptation: He's Silver Banshee's brother here, which is not a relationship she has with any character who has born the Mist name in the comics.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: All of the characters to have held the name Mist in the comics are associated in some way with Starman, usually as a villain. Here he's fighting Superman.
• Visible Invisibility: Averted in his debut episode; Kyle is completely invisible to the audience unless he willingly uncloaks himself. Played straight after Superman develops super hearing; he can detect Mist's exact location despite using his tech, so he's shown this way to the audience.

Albert / Rough House

Albert / Rough House

"I got it!"

Voiced by: Vincent Tong

A member of the small-time criminal group Intergang. Uses alien gauntlets to increase his strength.

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• Affably Evil: He is easily the cheeriest of the three, acting like a goofy teen even as he commits crimes.
• Dumb Muscle: Is the bulkiest of the trio, has strength enhancing gloves, and constantly needs to be reminded to use codenames.
• Named by the Adaptation: No real name was ever given for him in the comics.
• Power Fist: His gauntlets gives him enhanced strength which he mostly uses to punch things.
• Race Lift: He was white (presumably) in the comics, but here has dark skin^note A production bible sheet that was leaked suggests he may be Samoan or South Asian
• Saying Too Much: Has a bad habit of calling his teammates by their real name when he's supposed to use codenames.
• Smash Mook: As opposed to the McDougal siblings, his equipment doesn't do anything besides let him hit things harder and that is what he does for Intergang. Even his favored method of fixing the group's unreliable Freeze Ray is hitting it. This eventually goes disastrously when he hits it while using his Power First.

Task Force X

Overall Tropes

A secretive government project seemingly dedicated to recovering Kryptonian technology and repurposing it for unknown reasons. This includes abducting criminals who get their hands on the tech.

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• Adaptational Nice Guy: In regards to how they treat their Boxed Crooks compared to the Suicide Squad in the comics at least, with the members each having a Shock Collar instead of the usual Explosive Leash. Presumably this is due to The General being in charge of this version instead of Waller.
• Arc Villain: Appear to be this for Season 1, intending to hunt down Superman and utilize alien technology for their own ends.
• Boxed Crook: After capturing all the people that used their stolen tech weapons they conscript them in their war against Superman, keeping them in line with shock collars. This highlights their pragmatism to the fault of cruelty, as they could simply take back the weapons from these untrained civilians and give them to willing and obedient soldiers, but according to the General, they instead force said criminals to do their work as a warped form of "atonement" for their crimes against society. Deconstructed further as these criminals they tortured into working for them hold no loyalty and will seize any opportunity to escape, harming any soldiers on their way out and going on to continue threatening the general public, undermining the point of their mission statement to safeguard the public.
• Create Your Own Villain:
  • A rather twisted example. The Kryptonian technology they weaponized to fight potential alien invaders gets stolen by Leslie Willis/Livewire and distributed around the city, resulting in several small-time criminals getting their hands on dangerous tech and becoming above-average threats that Superman is forced to confront. However, once they've all been locked up, rather that distribute the technology back to willing soldiers (discounting examples like Ivo and Livewire, whose technology appears to have been fused into them from their misuse of it) the General instead has them outfitted with Shock Collars and "forced" to fight Superman, his dialogue making it clear that it's to be their "atonement" for their crimes against society. This warps it around to almost being a case of Create Your Own Hero, except it's also made very clear that the "volunteers" are disposable in a battle against a super-powered individual like Superman, showcasing their brutal pragmatism.
  • Played straighter in "Zero Day, Part 2". Waller allows Leslie Willis to exploit her newly-developed meta human ability to manipulate electricity directly to cause a breakout and demonstrate The General is unfit to properly lead Task Force X, so she can take over and make the "proper" calls when she thinks he's going soft. This allows Leslie to empower Ivo into a destructive rampage that threatens the whole city whilst she escapes with the rest of the conscripted criminals, now better armed and experienced with their technologically advanced weaponry thanks to Task Force X. Furthermore, it was precisely because they upgraded Ivo's parasite suit to allow it to absorb energy by touch that he's able to directly drain the city's power grid and transform into a bio-mechanical Kaiju.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: "Zero Day, Part 2" shows why conscripting unstable supervillains to work for a supposed greater good ultimately wouldn't pan out. The moment they figure out how to circumvent their superiors' control, they immediately go on a rampage through the very country they were forced to defend.
• Government Conspiracy: A government agency that is studying alien tech, kidnapping people who have gotten their hands on the tech, and preparing to assassinate Superman.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Their mission statement is to safeguard the Earth from a potential alien invasion but their unscrupulous actions towards that goal gradually twist them into a more direct threat against the general public, all the while fully convinced of their righteousness. First was, allegedly, purging Cadmus because they decided to use the advanced technology for altruistic purposes instead of weapons. Then, instead of confiscating their stolen technology, they torture the criminals that used it to work for them instead of employing loyal soldiers. This backfires by giving training and upgrades to said criminals, before they inevitably betray the organization to escape at their earliest opportunity. Not to mention the implication that the heads are more motivated by revenge as the sole survivors of the inciting incident, which clouds their judgement to "make the tough call" that lead to these outcomes.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Waller wholly justifies themselves as not making mistakes, as all collateral is excused by the level of threat they're attempting to combat. It's clear the excuse is paper-thin and shortsighted, and does far more harm than any potential good on the long term.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: For 22 years, Task Force X and their government sponsors have been reverse-engineering the Kryptonian technology left behind after Zero Day to make weapons to defend Earth from an alien invasion. Unfortunately, Leslie Willis and her gang managed to steal a large amount of their weaponry and distribute it to crooks all over Metropolis, setting off the events of the series.
• Improperly Paranoid: The General and Waller see a Human Alien helping people and their immediate reaction is "threat to eliminate by any means necessary". One of the General's first lines in the show is even telling Superman to "drop the act". The only character who does not have this issue is Deathstroke, who is in it for an entirely different reason. That said, the various visions Superman experiences and the mysterious "Zero Day" event which the General was present for suggest the General's paranoia, while still misplaced, comes from a genuine experience that the audience has thus far not been privy to.
  • Further more, their antagonism against Superman is primarily going off the idea that he is the vanguard for an invasion from the rest of his kind. Of course, as the audience knows, not only has Clark been raised on Earth all his life, but an invasion from Krypton isn't exactly possible anymore.
• Irony: They created super-powered weaponised technology in preparation for humanity to fight off what they think is an impending Alien Invasion, most of which would go on to create Superman's Rogues Gallery. However, despite all the advantages the weapons grant against Superman in a fight, their greatest deterrent against him is the fact that all members of Task Force X's attack squad are fragile humans. They appear to be making headway against Superman in an ambush (aided by the fact he's been exhausting himself with his Chronic Hero Syndrome) only for Superman to get a Heroic Second Wind that allows him to easily knock them all down, with it being implied he was still holding back out of fear of killing any of them, which gave Ivo an opening to drain his power.
• Knight Templar: While it's particularly pronounced with Slade Wilson, Task Force X has shown no compunctions about kidnapping its targets, holding them without trial, and in at least one case, torturing them.
• Mecha-Mooks: Their OMAC robots.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Invoked by the Brain, whose recollection of them depicts them all with red Glowing Eyes of Doom to emphasise the lengths they're willing to go to in pursuit of their goals.
• Revenge Before Reason: The two heads have a personal stake in their mission, avenging their peers lost on Zero Day. This gives them tunnel vision to ignore the fact that their suspicions of Superman makes little sense under scrutiny, take more and more unscrupulous action for an edge, and empower criminals they can barely control, no matter the collateral damage left in their wake.
• Shock Collar: In lieu of the Explosive Leash used on the Squad in other iterations, the criminals forced to join Task Force X are equipped with collars that electrocute them for disobeying orders. Leslie's interaction with Kryptonian technology eventually turning her into a lighting-slinging meta human makes her directly immune to this and allows her to free the rest of the conscripts from their restraints, with it being implied that after assuming control of Task Force X, Waller intends to switch to the traditional method to prevent any repeat breakouts.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: A government agency indulging in torture, secret arrests, and assassination, all to help them with their ultimate goal of killing Superman and all conducted with an utter conviction of their own righteousness. The show darkens considerably whenever they take center stage.
• We Have Reserves: In addition to it being framed as their "atonement" to society for the crimes they've committed, it's made very clear that the main reason the criminals are allowed to keep their stolen tech for Task Force X's benefit instead of it being distributed to willing volunteers is because they're ultimately disposable in the likely event that Superman's immense might proves too much for them, with it being only Clark's goodwill and restraint that prevents them getting killed when he starts fighting back seriously against them.

The General (UNMARKED SPOILERS)

General Sam Lane

"I created Task Force X. I took the technology you left behind and made it our own. I made the tough calls, so that when your kind returned, we would be ready.

Voiced by: Joel de la Fuente

A high-ranking member of the military, the leader of Task Force X, and Lois Lane's estranged father. Charged with defending Earth from alien invasions, the General will stop at nothing to keep it safe, putting Superman in his sights as a suspected alien.

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• Acrofatic: While gunfighting with some Kryptonian mechs in Episode 10, he turns out to still be pretty spry despite his weight, even busting out an Unnecessary Combat Roll.
• Adaptation Personality Change: Proves to be far more reasonable and far more concerned with protecting civilian lives than either General Eiling or General Lane tend to be.
• Ambiguously Brown: From his debut in Episode 2 his tan skin and facial features point to him not being white, but the specifics are yet more ambiguous. With the confirmation in Episode 9 that he is in fact Sam Lane, he has been confirmed as at least partially Korean (due to the out-of-universe confirmation that Lois herself is Korean).
• Ambiguously Evil: While his desire to protect Earth against a potential Kryptonian invasion is at least well-intentioned, a lot more ambiguity surrounds what exactly happened during his purge of Cadmus. Did he order Cadmus's extermination because they were researching peaceful applications instead of building weapons, like Mallah and Brain say? Or was there something far worse secretly happening at Cadmus that he razed the entire place to the ground to stop? It is at least worth noting that the Brain is a biased source, and Episode 9 ultimately clarifies he's not incapable of empathy or questioning his own judgement.
  • Waller's actions in episode 9 suggest another possibility: she somehow manipulated the stand-off between the General and Cadmus so he thought they were a genuine threat and ordered them killed.
• Anti-Villain: At his core, the General is ultimately more Wrong Genre Savvy than a true Knight Templar, having confused Superman for the genuinely malevolent Nemesis Omega, who probably would be a Villain with Good Publicity ultimately working towards hiding a Kryptonian invasion if he pretended to be a hero. When Clark breaks down in horror at what Nemesis did, he is the only one of Task Force X's leaders to step back and wonder if they're working off flawed information, and even before then he's willing to pull rank to avoid being worse than the monster he's fighting.
• Combat Pragmatist: During his first meeting with Superman, the General uses holograms of himself to distract Superman while deriding him, splitting Superman's focus while the Kryptonian robots pound Superman into the ground. He then has the robots continue to beat Superman while he's already down, refusing to let him catch his breath. Amanda's comment about how "Nemesis Omega" is weaker than they expected implies that he was expecting Superman to be on par with the abilities other versions of him have possessed, and thus believes he needs every advantage he can take in neutralizing him. "Zero Day, Part 2" further clarifies that he has first-hand experience of the damage a being with Superman's power can do, further explaining his pragmatic tactics in combatting him.
• Composite Character: He's the show's version of General Sam Lane, but his moniker "The General" and apparent willingness to do whatever it takes for his country stem from General Wade Eiling.
• Cynicism Catalyst: As shown in his flashback, as a younger soldier he was more carefree and even somewhat of a rule-breaker, ditching his fellow soldiers to take a minute to call his family. Zero Day happens immediately after, and that event completely changed him into the cold, unrelenting man he is today.
• Education Mama: When Martha praises Lois for making front-page news, Sam brushes it off, stating that excellence is expected for Lanes.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • He may have a grudge against Superman, but he draws the line at innocent civilians being hurt. When Slade nearly collapses a highway during his fight with Superman, the General orders him to retreat to allow Superman to save people, even overriding Amanda Waller when she tries to argue otherwise.
  • Later on, the General tells Ivo to stop torturing Superman because it's clear that a line was crossed a while ago. When his order is ignored, the General shocks Parasite into submission.
  • Finally, after Lois Lane talks him down from shooting Superman, the General calls off Task Force X and tells them it was a false alarm.
• Evil Overlooker: The opening depicts him this way, as a red-eyed silhouette looming over the rest of Superman's Rogues Gallery, recognisable by his army cap, symbolising how his actions in weaponising Kryptonian technology, whilst well-intentioned, are ultimately the reason why every one of them becomes a bigger than average threat that requires Superman's intervention.
• Fantastic Racism: He calls himself a protector standing between Earth and Superman's "kind". He refuses to let Superman explain himself and clearly shows disdain for the Man of Steel not being from Earth, to the point of engaging in "It" Is Dehumanizing. Even after he realizes Clark was way too young to have been part of the Kryptonian force that attacked Earth, he only begrudgingly thinks of Superman as an enemy noncombatant rather than a direct threat, though he eases up on the aggression.
• Fat Bastard: He's a heavy-set looking man who has zero tolerance towards anything foreign that he can't control. Downplayed, as he's also a Token Good Teammate to Task Force X and the only one willing to consider he might have been mistaken.
• Fatal Flaw: The General's Fantastic Racism and paranoia lead to him unnecessarily hounding Superman and accidentally creating the actual threat to the country he wants to protect. Because of what he experienced on Zero Day, he stubbornly clings to the belief that Superman is a remnant of the invaders from the titular day who's there to finish the job, and his fears of that day repeating lead him to recruiting and cutting deals with unstable supervillains and generally dangerous sociopaths out of a desperate need to give his side of the conflict an edge. The results are him hindering Superman in his efforts to save people and giving a whole bunch of lunatics the means to wreck havoc on a large scale.
• Forced into Evil: Shortly after he realizes that Superman might not be a threat, Waller usurps him as the head of Task Force X and forces him to kill Superman personally.
• Formerly Fit: Back in his days as an army grunt he was as fit as you'd expect a soldier in his physical prime to be. He's put on a lot of weight in the 22 years since, likely due to aging and the stress of his administrative position.
• Four-Star Badass: He's a general in the U.S. military and more than willing to face Kryptonian weaponry if it means protecting his country and the people he loves.
• Freudian Excuse: Zero Day was an event where first contact with Kryptonian forces wiped out Lane's entire military division except himself and Waller. Having barely survived the event, the General is devoted to preventing Kryptonians from ever getting the chance to attack Earth again.
• General Ripper: He's a general of the United States military and he's willing to commit atrocities out of a paranoid belief that Superman and "his kind" are threats to humanity. That being said, his paranoia turns out to have some basis due to his prior encounter with Kryptonians on Zero Day, and he does eventually soften slightly towards Superman after realizing how unlikely it is that he's associated with the Kryptonians that nearly conquered the planet. Even earlier than that, he was also against getting civilians caught in the middle of Task Force X's battles with Superman.
• Given Name Reveal: He goes solely by "The General" in both dialogue and the end credits until "Zero Day, Part 2", where Waller refers to him as Sam in a flashback.
• Good Is Not Nice: For a very broad definition of good. The General genuinely wants to protect his nation and its citizens, to the point of calling off a guaranteed victory against Superman because it'd kill hundreds of innocent people. He's also willing to torture criminals, send kill squads to eliminate scientists, and attacked Superman in the first place because he might be a threat.
• Hand Cannon: After Waller takes over the Task Force and turns him into one more of her minions with orders to hunt down Superman, she hands the General an energy pistol named the "Omega Cannon", which its inventor Dr. Ivo swears is powerful enough to kill Superman. The fact that this is all the gear she supplies probably says something about what she expects of him.
• Heel Realization: In "Zero Day, Part 2", when his interrogation of Superman and revelation of what Zero Day really is causes Superman to break down crying in horror at what his people tried to do to Earth, he realizes that Superman may not have been involved in the event after all. He also does the math on events and realizes that, if Kryptonian aging is anywhere close to human aging, Superman would've been far too young to participate in Zero Day.
• Horrible Judge of Character:
  • The General sees the benevolent Superman as a dangerous threat, and thinks allowing Ivo to work with the dangerous tech left behind at Cadmus is a good way to deal with him, trusting in their mutual hostility to Superman and Task Force X's countermeasures to keep Ivo in control. Never mind that the last time Ivo worked with tech of this nature, Superman was the only thing that kept his rampage from going much, much worse. It's later revealed that he at least took precautions with having Ivo outfitted with a powerful shock collar to keep him in line, so he's not completely blind to the risks, but it's implied that he judges Kryptonians, and specifically Superman, to be a much greater threat worth allying with Ivo against.
  • "Zero Day, part 2" clarifies that the General's opinion is not unfounded, as he's been personally witness to the devastation a being with Kryptonain abilities can unleash in an unprovoked Alien Invasion. Instead, his attitude towards Superman was mistakenly believing he was that being trying a different tactic where it failed before. Were Superman actually Nemesis Omega, then his actions in "recruiting" Ivo and the other super-criminals would indeed be the bare minimum needed to inconvenience it. It only takes a single conversation with Superman and seeing his genuinely crestfallen reaction to learning about Zero Day to make Sam reconsider whether or not he's really the enemy they've faced before, in contrast to Waller, showing that he's really an Excellent Judge of Character.
• Hypocrite: Just like his daughter, he hugely distrusts anyone keeping secrets from him but has no problems hiding things from his own loved ones, including the fact that Lois' mother was terminally ill.
• I Did What I Had to Do: He says that ordering the deaths of nearly everyone in Cadmus was the first "hard call" he had to make.
• Improperly Paranoid: He causes a lot of trouble for the people he's supposed to be protecting because he assumes Superman is a villain. That said, there's also a lot of hints that Kryptonians are actually a threat and the only reason he's wrong about Superman is because he's the exception to the rule. "Zero Day, part 2" further clarifies that he was actually attacked by a hostile being with Kryptonian powers before, further justifying his caution and paranoia towards Superman as he's revealed to be under the impression that he was that same being in a different disguise. Had that been the case, then all of his Knight Templar actions towards him really would have been the bare minimum necessary to protect Earth.
• Inspector Javert: He ruthlessly hunted down Superman and refused to buy that he's a hero under the belief that he was a remnant of the Kryptonian invaders that nearly took over the planet on Zero Day sent in to finish the job. However, he begins to reevaluate his views on Superman after witnessing Superman break down in horror over what his people apparently did.
• Irony:
  • Superman's (current) greatest enemy is just as obsessed with saving innocent lives as he is. Superman ignored his fight with Slade to keep a highway from collapsing, and the General commanded Slade to stand down to let him, even if it meant losing this chance to stop a threat to the world.
  • Superman's traditional tagline is "Truth, Justice, and the American Way". The General shows aspects of all of these in episode 9: he insists on discovering the Truth about Superman when he realizes his assumptions might be wrong; he refuses to kill Superman if he's innocent of Zero Day, showing a sense of Justice; and he's a loyal American soldier that's devoted 2 decades of his life to protecting the world from an alien threat. He even fits the reworked tagline (replacing "the American Way" with "a better tomorrow"), as his actions are all devoted to preventing a repeat of Zero Day—giving civilians a better future than the past events he went through.
  • Everything Sam's done has been a desperate attempt to find a proper countermeasure against the kind of immense power that Nemesis Omega showcased on Zero Day, with the unspoken concern being that nothing Earth can prepare would be capable of stopping it should it ever return. Yet throughout the series, he puts the same countermeasures —the weaponised kryptonian technology, utilised by disposable "volunteers" — to use in antagonising the best possible deterrent against Nemesis.
• Jade-Colored Glasses: The General's cynicism is so complete he assumes that Superman is just pretending to be a benevolent superhero for sinister reasons. He doesn't realize that Clark is exactly who he appears to be: a Nice Guy who wants to use his powers to help people. "Zero Day, Part 2" elaborates on this by revealing that the aliens who invaded during the titular event were Kryptonians. He isn't naturally cynical about everything. He just believes that Superman was sent by the invaders to finish what they started. When he actually properly interrogates Superman and witnesses him breaking down in horror over what his people did, the General begins to reevaluate his judgment.
  General: Drop the act, Superman. There's no one here to swallow your lies.
• Jerkass: Although the General is well-intentioned, he comes off as cold, humorless and brutal when it comes to protecting his country. Even when he meets Clark and his family, the General doesn't even try to be civil towards him and coldly tells the young man to address him as General Lane.
• Missed Him by That Much: With the reveal in "Zero Day, Part 2" that he's Sam Lane, the trope is revealed to apply to Part 1. Lois is mere seconds too late to catch a glimpse of her own father abducting Superman, and likewise the General has already begun to take off by the time his daughter arrives on the scene, leaving both unaware of each other's presence.
• Moral Myopia: The General believes that everything he does is supposed to protect human lives. But he's sometimes blind to the moral implications of what he does because he feels he's justified. For instance, he screams at Superman for "daring" to "pretend" to be innocent while interrogating him under severe Electric Torture. This gets subverted when Sam sees Clark's horrified reaction to Zero Day and quickly begins to question if he's the same Kryptonian who was supposedly leading an invasion force, explicitly refusing to hand him over to Ivo for interrogation.
• My Country, Right or Wrong:
  • The Brain describes him as a man who would blot out the sun if his country demanded it. While the General has some scruples, he's been a threat to the Brain and Mallah for 22 years and had most of Cadmus murdered by a kill squad for daring to develop peaceful inventions instead of weapons for the government, according to Brain. This speaks volumes about how far the General will go to protect his country's interests.
    • Played with. The Brain isn't exactly unbiased towards the General, and the General ultimately proves to be a better man than his cohorts, choosing to reevaluate his views of Superman after putting it together that he couldn't have been part of the Kryptonian force that invaded Earth on Zero Day. He is so intent on determining whether Superman is innocent instead of just executing him that his superiors remove him from Cadmus leadership and place Amanda Waller in charge instead.
  • Ultimately subverted. The General is willing to disobey orders and lie to his superiors for one person: his daughter, Lois. It's also heavily implied everything he does is not to keep his country safe, but his daughter.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Implied in "Hearts of the Fathers", where he struggles to keep his composure as he tries to rationalize to Lois why he's trying to kill Superman. When she completely talks him out of taking the shot, he immediately leaves without a word to the Kents or Lois, suggesting he feels so guilty he can't even bear to face them.
• Mysterious Past: For much of Season 1, his identity and whatever Zero Day was were both a mystery. "Zero Day, Part 2" confirms both, but leaves several questions open (such as what exactly happened to his wife).
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In "Zero Day, Part 2", he decides to keep Superman for interrogation rather than kill him, and even voices the possibility that he might not be Nemesis Omega because he's too young to have been involved in Zero Day. Waller turns on him for it, releasing Task Force X to make him look bad, taking his position, and ordering him to terminate Superman on sight.
• Non-Action Big Bad: He's the Arc Villain of (most of) Season 1, as it was his weaponisation of Kryptonian technology (subsequently stolen and distributed by Livewire) that leads to all of them becoming so dangerous, and it's his cynical belief that Superman is nothing less than a dangerous threat that must be neutralised at all costs that drives Task Force X's opposition of him. However, despite his military training, he has yet to engage Superman in combat, and only directly confronts him whenever Superman is completely incapacitated by other threats.
• Not So Stoic:
  • He's normally very calm and composed, and even when he gets angry its mostly Tranquil Fury. But in "Zero Day Part 2", he starts to become increasingly and loudly angry over Superman's continued insistence he wasn't involved in the titular event.
  • His daughter Lois being in danger gets him to talk more than he has their entire Thanksgiving visit at the Kent residence in a desperate attempt to convince her to flee.
• Papa Wolf: His mission to destroy any potential Alien Invasions of Earth is motivated not by his loyalty to his country but out of a desire to keep his daughter safe. He begs Lois to stand aside so he can shoot Clark dead and visibly struggles with the decision to shoot him or not when she insists on making Sam go through her. He is normally taciturn with everyone, including his daughter. But the moment she's in danger, he's running off his mouth trying to get her to run.
• Parents as People: Sam loves his daughter Lois and wants to keep her safe. But the enormity of the secrets he holds, the fear of another alien invasion like Zero Day, and his unwillingness to allow Lois to come to harm means that he keeps her at arm's length constantly. He's so engrossed in his work that he never bothers to read anything she writes and struggles to be emotionally open with her because of his secrets.
• Pet the Dog:
  • In spite of his lack of effort in getting along with the Kents, once he sees the alien spaceship rise from the ground, the General breaks protocol and warns the Kents about the alien invasion and tries to protect them.
  • While he still believes Superman is a threat, he reluctantly stands down from killing him out of respect for his daughter.
• Poor Communication Kills: His inability to be open with his daughter, whether it be about his job or her mother's terminal illness, has completely ruined their relationship. While Sam tries to maintain contact, Lois has no interest in talking to him and actively ignores his calls.
• Race Lift: General Lane in the comics is white, as is General Eiling (the character his title comes from). The show's version of General Lane is Ambiguously Brown and confirmed out-of-universe as Korean.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: After seeing how horrified Superman is at the holographic recreation of Zero Day, he questions whether his assumptions about him are wrong, even noting it's possible Superman was just a baby during Zero Day and is thus completely innocent. While he doesn't immediately pull a 180 and acknowledge Superman as a hero, too much doubt remains for him to feel comfortable executing Superman until he figures out the truth.
• Shadow Archetype: The General is the logical corruption of all of Superman's good qualities. Superman is dedicated to doing the right thing, and so is the General — but where Clark is filled with self-doubt, the General is firmly stationed within his biases and refuses to compromise his worldview. They swap roles in "Zero Day, Part 2"; while Superman becomes more confident in his abilities and role as a protector of Metropolis, the General begins to doubt everything he's believed for the past 22 years.
• Shared Family Quirks: Like his daughter, General Sam Lane tends to assume the most selfish motive possible for keeping secrets from him, hence his Well-Intentioned Extremist Inspector Javert attitude towards Superman.
  • On a lighter note, in his "Zero Day, Part 2 flashback", he also made finger guns when talking, just like Lois did in "Adventures of a Normal Man".
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Everything he does in the present is spurred by his unresolved trauma over Zero Day. During his Motive Rant to a captive Superman, he reveals he has flashbacks to the event every time he closes his eyes.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: He responds to every attempt Superman makes to protest his good nature with curtly ordering anybody strong enough to beat him into the ground until he's got no breath left to talk, so adamant in his fervor that Superman is dangerous that he refuses to even entertain any counterarguments. It takes actually interrogating Superman and witnessing him breaking down in horror over how his race apparently were the perpetrators of Zero Day that finally convinces Sam that Superman might not be the threat he thought he was.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: The General's deeply cynical outlook has seen him regard well-meaning people as threats, while partnering with destructive sociopaths. For all that Task Force X talks of protecting the planet, they've proven more of a threat to it than Superman so far, something the General seems blind to. "Zero Day, Part 2" contextualizes this more as him considering Kryptonians that much of a threat that he considers his partnerships with supervillains to be Necessarily Evil, as the Kryptonians nearly overtook the entire planet effortlessly on the titular day and were only halted by the destruction of their planet. That being said, his questionable partnerships bite him hard by this time he finally gets it through his head that Superman might not be the threat he thinks he is, as he's removed from his position and forced to watch the organization he helped form tear apart his own country to continue their hunt against Superman.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: When meeting Clark in their civilian identities over Thanksgiving, Clark calls Sam "Mr. Lane". Sam bitterly tells Clark to call him General Lane, erasing whatever doubt could possibly remain over him being the General.
• Token Good Teammate: Though his violent disbandment of Cadmus downplays things, he's still the most moral member of Task Force X, being concerned the most with civilians and intervening to force Waller and Slade to break off the fight with Superman to save civilians they endangered, and he's the only one to consider Superman's innocence in Zero Day. Unfortunately for him, Waller perceives his moral standards as weakness, and gets the government to relinquish control over Task Force X to her because, unlike the General, she's willing to get her hands dirty.
• Tranquil Fury: His tone is seething with this towards Superman, in part because he genuinely seems to be angered by his "deception" in trying to present himself as a selfless hero to the masses, whereas his unspoken past experience with Kryptonian tech has convinced him their species is nothing less than The End of the World as We Know It when the rest of their species invades.
• Two Aliases, One Character: Lois's father is mentioned in Episodes 4, 6, and 7, with the General appearing in Episodes 2, 5, 6, and 8. Episode 9 reveals they're one and the same.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Superman was willing to sacrifice himself to destroy his ship and stop the invasion at the end of Season 1. Once he falls back to Earth barely alive, the General still tries to kill him even after witnessing his Heroic Sacrifice. Lois even calls him out on how insane he is for thinking Superman is an "alien invader" who risked everything to protect them. Although he reluctantly spares him, it's clear he still thinks Superman is a threat.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: He used to be Mildly Military, sneaking into the communications tent for a mushy call home and joking around with "Mandy" when she catches him on it. Zero Day and the death of his wife hardened him into the man he is today.
• Virtue Is Weakness: Is on the wrong end of it by the closing episodes of the season, with Waller thinking he is weak for not being an amoral maniac willing to kill anything that is an obstacle (even innocent civilians) to achieve a goal and putting a bullet through Superman's head the second he's been captured and so decides to usurp his position as leader of Task Force X.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: When Superman asks who he is, the General replies, "I'm the one keeping the earth safe." Though he's willing to do some really unsavory things to accomplish it. In the past, he sent a kill squad to completely wipe out Cadmus because the group was more focused on using the Kryptonian tech to benefit the world through scientific advancement instead of weaponizing it like Task Force X did. The General calls it the first time he had to make a "hard call."
• You Remind Me of X: Waller notes that Superman reminds the General of someone from his past, which she believes is contributing to his refusal to condemn Superman for Zero Day. It's never stated who this someone is, but it's implied to be either Lois or her mother.

Amanda Waller

Amanda Waller

"When everyone dies on the next Zero Day, will they thank you for sparing a handful now?"

Voiced by: Debra Wilson

One of the leaders of Task Force X, alongside the General. Waller shares the General's overall goals of defending Earth from alien threats, but lacks his moral restraint.

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• Adaptational Badass: Most portrayals of Waller have her simply as a government bureaucrat with no mention of a military background. Here, she's shown to have been a soldier and was very physically fit.
• Affectionate Nickname: The General calls her "Mandy" while arguing over what to do when Slade accidentally cuts down an entire highway while trying to kill Superman. "Zero Day, Part 2" confirms the two have been close friends for at least two decades.
• Broken Pedestal: She initially respects the General as her friend and military supervisor, but gradually loses her faith in him when his refusal to kill Superman and Heel Realization that he might not be involved with Zero Day causes her to believe he's unwilling to do what it takes to defend Earth, and eventually orchestrates a plot to remove him as leader of Task Force X.
• Dragon with an Agenda: Officially she's second in command of Task Force X, under her old friend General Lane. However, once the General's resolve starts to waver in "Zero Day, Part 2", she engineers a breakout of the captured super-criminals and pins the blame on Sam, resulting in his being relieved of command with Waller taking his place. She immediately orders Lane to go kill Superman by any means necessary.
• Eviler than Thou: The General has some amount of scruples, such as not keeping his subordinates in line via death threats, not risking civilian lives as acceptable collateral damage, and beginning to give Clark the benefit of the doubt after a few hours of Cold-Blooded Torture. Waller has absolutely none of this and takes over Task Force X the moment she is able to, issuing a Kill on Sight order on Superman.
• Fat Bastard: While not as wide as the General, she is still heavyset and even more amoral.
• Formerly Fit: Back when she was a soldier she had a very muscular build.
• He Who Fights Monsters: In her obsessive drive to kill the being she believes slaughtered her team on Zero Day, evidence to the contrary be damned, she ends up intentionally creating a group of very dangerous and now trained super criminals all just to gain control over Task Force X and pursue her vendetta against Superman unopposed. Needless to say, she's a far bigger danger to the planet than Superman ever was.
• Knight Templar: As per usual. She's willing to let dozens of innocent people die while claiming it'll save hundreds or even millions in the future. She is absolutely assured of her own righteousness and is enraged when the General concludes that he may have been wrong about Superman being Nemesis Omega, with Waller insisting that Task Force X doesn't make mistakes.
• Moral Myopia: To an even greater extent than the General who was willing to admit that Superman was possibly not a threat after seeing him break upon finding out about Zero Day. While calling Superman a threat to the world, she intentionally orchestrates a jailbreak for a group of supervillains, a very real and immediate threat to the world she claims to want to protect, just to pull a Frame-Up on the General so that she can replace him as the leader of Task Force X.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: She admits that she joined the military to serve her country without question and sees Sam's willingness to humor the idea that Superman isn't an enemy as a sign that he might be emotionally compromised.
• The Needs of the Many: She tries to invoke this when the General orders Slade to stand down when Slade delivering a kill shot to Superman would've resulted in the deaths of civilians. Waller tries to convince him to let Slade take the shot, saying sparing a handful of lives won't mean anything if Superman lives to endanger more later on.
• Never My Fault: As she so succinctly puts it, Task Force X never makes mistakes.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: She argues The Needs of the Many in Task Force X's mission to eradicate Superman, but her willingness to endanger civilians proves the lie that she simply has tunnel vision on Revenge against the being she believes slaughtered her entire team on Zero Day. Her actions end up threatening Metropolis and unleashing the empowered and now trained super criminals back onto the streets, really showing how shortsighted ends justifying the means can be.
• Number Two: She seems to be the second-in-command of Task Force X since the General is able to pull rank on her by reminding her he's in charge of their operation. After seeing his morals will always compromise his willingness to make tough calls, she orchestrates a gambit to get the General removed from power by freeing the captured supervillains and using him as a scapegoat for Parasite's ensuing rampage.
• Revenge Before Reason: She is determined to make Nemesis Omega pay for the events of Zero Day, even when it might be detrimental to her overall goals. When the General starts to wonder if Superman isn't Nemesis Omega and decides to keep him alive to question him more, she's so angry she stabs him in the back so she can take control of Task Force X from him and force him to kill Superman.
• Sole Survivor: She and the General were the only two to make it out of Zero Day alive.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: "Zero Day, Part 2" ends with her taking over Task Force X and beginning to turn it into the regular Suicide Squad she handled, as well as issuing a Kill on Sight order on Superman.
• The Unfettered: Wouldn't be Amanda Waller if she wasn't. She's perfectly willing to let innocent civilians die on a collapsed highway if it means capturing Superman, whom she views as a threat to all life on Earth. The General has to pull rank to convince her to stand down.
• We Used to Be Friends: She and the General were close friends for at least two decades, dating back to when they served in the military together if not even earlier than that. However, the General's increasing scruples when dealing with Superman, who she almost obsessively desires the death of, lead her to orchestrating a Frame-Up to have the General removed as the leader of Task Force X so that she can carry out her vendetta unimpeded.

Agent Slade Wilson / Deathstroke

Agent Slade Wilson / Deathstroke

"We're the good guys..."

^{Click here to see him as Deathstroke}

Voiced by: Chris Parnell

A black ops agent who works for a mysterious government group known as Task Force X. He leads the group's field operations, though he still has to answer to Waller and the General.

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• Abled in the Adaptation: Unlike his comic counterpart, Slade starts the show with his right eye. He loses it in "Zero Day, Part 2" when Livewire attacks him.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The two superheated swords he wields in the fifth episode are sharp enough to cleanly slice through the supporting pillar of the highway behind the hero, and while not sharp enough to cut Superman, they're still hot enough to burn him.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Is much younger-looking, clean-shaven, and generally Pretty Boy-like than most versions of the character, and he still has both eyes (until Episode 9).
• Adaptational Badass: Played with. The comic version of Deathstroke is already one of the most formidable assassins in the DC universe, but he's usually on the more human scale of things. Even when he does face off against characters like Superman with technology to match them, they usually consist of forcefields and specialized weapons. This version of Slade has a suit enhanced with alien weaponry that effectively makes him Superman's equal in speed and power... but not durability. In Episode 5, Slade is able to deal noticeable damage to Superman, to the point that Superman still has visible injuries after their fight. But he remains just as frail as a normal human; in both their one-on-one duel in Episode 5 and Task Force X's ambush in Episode 8, Superman takes him out in a single hit—the difficulty comes from landing said hit in the first place, as Slade compensates for his fragility by using hit-and-run tactics.
• Adaptational Hairstyle Change: From comic to other depictions, Slade always had short hair, usually a buzz cut or a clean undercut with bangs over his forehead. Here, he sports a mullet and bangs covering his right eye.
• Adaptational Heroism: Nominally, since he's not introduced as a criminal freelance mercenary but as a government agent who helps take down Livewire, but he's still being set up as an antagonist for Superman with him and his bosses having their own agenda. He appears to be working with Task Force X, better known as the Suicide Squad, akin to Rick Flag (thus not as a criminal like most of its members). When Livewire threatens to detonate a bunch of bombs in the city sewers Slade prioritizes stopping her out of what seems to be legitimate concern for preventing collateral damage as much as self-preservation. He even briefly saved Jimmy from getting hit with one of Livewire's blasts, albeit it seemed somewhat incidental to his attempts to take her out.
• Adaptational Job Change: Has been changed from a military veteran turned self-employed criminal mercenary in the comics to a black ops agent working under Task Force X here.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: He's still an Empowered Badass Normal granted enhanced physical abilities, but this show has those abilities granted to him via Powered Armor, rather than having them naturally as the result of an experimental Super-Soldier drug like his comic counterpart.
• Age Lift: Most versions of Deathstroke are well into adulthood if not outright past middle-aged. This version, at least visually, looks like he's in his early 30's at most.
• All There in the Script: His name is never stated during his debut in Episode 2, only being revealed in the end credits. Episode 5 finally changes this, as his superiors directly address him as Agent Wilson.
• Badass Normal: He seemingly has no powers, but he can still hold his own against Leslie Willis with nothing but a pair of Shock Sticks.
• Beauty Is Bad: Thanks to his Adaptational Attractiveness as listed above, he's much more youthful and handsome than most versions, but he's still Deathstroke the Terminator. The last scene of Episode 2 features him smirking as he and his co-workers interrogate Leslie via Electric Torture.
• Blood Knight: While Slade hasn't come out and stated that he loves fighting, his undisguised glee in battle speaks for itself. He's noticeably annoyed when the General tells him to retreat in Episode 5, though he knows better than to argue about it.
• Can't Catch Up: He puts on a good showing in combat against both Leslie Willis/Livewire and Superman himself, taking on the former with just a pair of stun batons and holding his own against her lighting-controlling battle suit, and fighting Superman directly in a suit of Powered Armor, even wounding the Man of Steel directly with a specially-designed Hot Blade. However, over the course of the "Zero Day" two-parter, his inability to close the natural power gap gets made clear. Superman easily knocks him down with an indirect AOE attack to exploit his relative frailty, even when Slade attacks him alongside all of Task Force X and Superman is off his game. When he confronts Leslie again out of his suit when she organises a mass breakout, her newly-developed metahuman powers enable her to out-speed Slade and give him a permanent reminder of their encounter.
• Character Catchphrase: When asked who he is by whoever he's fighting, he typically responds with "We're the good guys."
• Combat Parkour: After being lifted and thrown into the air by Leslie's electromagnetic powers, Slade gracefully lands with a series of backflips and acrobatics. He's just as acrobatic and deadly during his battle with Superman in the fifth episode.
• Combat Pragmatist: He brings in every advantage he can during his fight with Superman. Despite already donning Powered Armor and wielding superheated swords that can cut through Superman's flesh, he relies mostly on hit-and-run tactics while distracting Superman with two Mini-Mecha and later by weakening the supports of a populated freeway. It works, as Superman is left wide open by the end, with Superman only coming out in one piece because Slade was ordered to stand down and allow Superman to save the civilians Slade endangered.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: At least not yet. As a black ops agent and not an independent mercenary, he's referred to exclusively as Agent Slade Wilson in both credits and dialogue.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Fitting, given he's basically a techno-ninja. Deathstroke almost kills Superman one-on-one, but gets wrecked along with the rest of the non-Parasite members of Task Force X when they all jump him together. Justified; rather than directly attack Slade close-range where he's in his element and more skilled than him, Superman instead goes for an AOE Ground Pound nearby him to catch him in the shockwave, exploiting his (relative) frailty against his greater strength to temporarily knock him down, showing how Clark's learned and adapted since their last fight
• Deadpan Snarker: While he's mostly no-nonsense, he lets out the occasional quip, such as when Superman audibly realizes Task Force X's connections to the alien tech and abductions of criminals.
  Slade: Looks like he's got a super brain, too.
• The Dragon: To Waller and the General, as their top field agent and wetwork guy.
• Dual Wielding: He wields two shock batons while meeting Leslie in the middle of Metropolis. While ambushing Superman, he instead wields two curved, katana-like blades hot enough to burn Kryptonian skin.
• Empowered Badass Normal: He's already a nightmare to deal with for most people with just his training and gadgets. Then he dons Powered Armor, giving him the ability to harm Superman.
• Eye Scream: It was practically inevitable given the character. He loses his right eye midway through "Zero Day, Part 2" when Livewire attacks him, and reappears at the end of the episode with an eyepatch.
• False Reassurance: When asked who he is, Slade tells others that, "we're the good guys", all while showing grievous disregard for the wellbeing of others. Worth noting he says this to Livewire while subjecting her to Electric Torture, and to Superman while actively trying to murder him.
• Faux Affably Evil: He has a perpetually cheerful, amiable attitude that he keeps up even when he's engaging in torture and attempted murder.
• Fragile Speedster: Played with. He's a normal human going toe-to-toe with a Flying Brick, so understandably, even decked out in a suit of Powered Armor that allows him to match Superman in speed and reflexes, he's just not capable of withstanding the full force of Superman's blows, using hit and run tactics to fight him and getting blown away easily even with a single (pulled) punch, and temporarily knocked down when Superman catches him in a shockwave attack. Against anybody else though, the suit makes him a Lightning Bruiser on the field.
• The Heavy: Amanda Waller and the General are his superiors, but since he's an active field agent while the other two merely give orders he's the most prominent antagonist of the three and the one Superman directly encounters the most.
• Hero with an F in Good: He and his co-workers seem to be trying to defend Earth from the threat of alien invasions. He also has no qualms with interrogating others via Electric Torture and trying to injure and/or kill Superman. Even when he slices through a highway's support pillar during their battle, either as collateral damage or as part of a ploy to distract his quarry, he continues attacking Superman until he's called off by his superiors. For all his ostensibly good intentions, Slade clearly doesn't care about what means he uses to achieve them.
• Hiding Behind Your Bangs: One of Slade's eyes is always covered by his bangs. In addition to serving as a Mythology Gag to his comic version's missing eye, it emphasizes Slade's shiftiness and amorality. With the loss of his right eye in "Zero Day, Part 2", the bangs now serve to cover up his new eyepatch.
• Hot Blade: His swords aren't just super-sharp but extremely hot, leaving Superman with visible burns on his neck.
• Irony: Slade's fighting style is based primarily around him acrobatically outmanoeuvring the opponent and lethally striking from their blind spots when they are vulnerable. This gets turned against him by Leslie Willis, when her newly-developed ability to naturally generate and control electricity enables her to Flash Step, getting Slade's weapons stuck briefly in the wall and allowing her to create a lasting blind spot in the hyper-competent agent. Furthermore, said power was developed in the first place thanks to Slade's own actions in trying to neutralise Livewire's power source with stun batons.
• Knight of Cerebus: While every other villain Superman faces early on has at least one display of incompetence, Deathstroke is always shown as frighteningly capable and, as The Heavy of Task Force X compared to his non-action superiors, is the face of Season 1's Arc Villain, meaning his entrance into the fray is when the plot starts getting serious. He's also the first villain to not only deal Superman injuries that still affect him after the fight but almost kill him.
• Knight Templar: He insists that Task Force X are the good guys, but Slade has no issue with using torture, kidnapping, and the death of civilians to get his way.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After almost killing and later torturing Leslie/Livewire in "Adventures of a Normal Man" she pays him back for it by shocking his eye out when she escapes Task Force X in "Zero Day Part 2".
• Made of Iron: Comparatively. He's a Fragile Speedster against a Flying Brick like Superman, but demonstrates a respectable level of durability against opponents that can't break buildings with a single blow. Leslie Willis wasn't holding back when she blasted him full-force in the face with electricity, and whilst it's hinted that her evasive manoeuvre weakened her attack as a result from her drained energy resources, Slade still survived getting badly electrocuted with only the loss of a single eye to show for it.
• Mythology Gag:
  • One of his eyes is covered by his hair, as a nod to or foreshadowing of his missing eye, including a one-eyed helmet and an eyepatch when he's unmasked. His military outfit is part blue and orange akin to his usual costume.
  • His use of dual Shock Sticks and Pretty Boy appearance seems like a nod to his usual Arch-Enemy, Nightwing.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: For a very forgiving definition of hero. He tries to subdue Leslie by slamming his Shock Stick into her suit's backpack, which causes it to overload and nearly take out the whole plaza before Superman can stop her. Near the end of the fifth episode, he tries to attack Superman with an Absurdly Sharp Blade, slicing down a highway in the process and endangering hundreds of lives. This leads his superiors to call off the attack.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: While he banters with Leslie, Slade is all-business once he's in the thick of the fight. He wastes no time trying to subdue her once it's clear she's a threat. Once he's given the clear by Waller, he quickly kidnaps every single person still using the technology that Livewire stole so effectively that the city's criminals assume Superman himself is after them. He soon proves to be the most formidable foe that Superman has faced yet, decisively defeating him and only sparing him because he's ordered to allow Superman to handle the collateral damage caused during their fight.
• Powered Armor: The show's rendition of his Deathstroke outfit is a suit of Kryptonian armor that grants Slade comparable strength, speed, and durability to Superman. He uses this to kidnap anyone who got their hands on the technology distributed by Leslie.
• Pretty Boy: In contrast with his usual depiction, he has fairly delicate youthful features and even hair that looks quaffed.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: Normally, Deathstroke is an antagonist for Nightwing or the Teen Titans. Here, he’s going up against Superman.
• Sarcastic Confession: He refers to the himself and the people he works for as "the good guys", as they're a government sanctioned group attempting to avert an Alien Invasion, but his tone is dripping with sarcasm given the sinister undertones of Task Force X and his own zeal for combat that is callous to the well-being of anyone in their way.
• Shock Stick: In contrast to his usual depictions wielding swords and guns, Slade wields two shock batons while trying to subdue Leslie. It turns out these are primarily for subduing targets non-lethally; when he's out for blood, he swaps to two katanas that can merge into a gun, reflecting his usual arsenal.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: As Deathstroke, his twin superheated swords can apparently also be slapped together, side-by-side, to form some kind of ranged weapon. He first uses this to line up a shot on Superman while he's holding up a highway unable to defend himself, only not firing because he's ordered to withdraw.
• Token Evil Teammate: Of Task Force X. While the General and Waller are hardly heroic, they at least act out of a desire to protect the world from alien threats. Slade, on the other hand, seems more interested in exploiting his status as a government agent to satiate his bloodlust, with protecting the world being secondary at best.
• Token White: He's the only Caucasian member of Task Force X's leadership.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: The show, which focuses on the budding romance between Lois and Clark, is fairly-lighthearted for the most part. But the tone darkens whenever he shows up.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: During Task Force X's ambush in Episode 8, Slade uses the same hit-and-run tactics that worked so well for him in Episode 5. However, Superman has learned to adapt to said strategies, avoiding getting close to Slade in favor of taking him out with a single AOE attack, resulting in Slade having a far less impressive showing than in their first battle.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: When he enters the fray in Episode 5, Slade quickly proves himself to be the Man of Steel's toughest foe yet, lacking his past enemies' weaknesses (Intergang and Heat Wave's faulty tech; Livewire and Parasite's reliance on a power source) and forcing Superman to rely solely on his combat skill. By the end of their battle Slade basically has Superman at his mercy, only relenting when called off by his superiors.
• Weak, but Skilled: A downplayed case, but given his usual Badass Normal credentials, he's this by default given he's being matched against the codifier for Flying Brick. When he finally does fight Superman in a Powered Armor suit, he holds a decisive advantage against him in close-range skills, armed with superheated swords capable of burning Superman's skin, but can't quite match the Man of Steel in a physical contest. He needs to be backed up by two Mini-Mecha to have Superman get knocked around whilst he acrobatically engages him, and he makes sure to run clear every time it looks like Superman's winding up with the heat vision rather than risk tanking a hit from it. When Superman is able to anticipate one of his attacks, Slade is easily blown away with a single punch, and even then it's hinted that Superman still pulled the punch because he just wanted to get Slade off his back so he could help the civilians Slade endangered. Against anybody else, however, he's a clear-cut Lightning Bruiser with multiple tricks up his sleeve.

OMACs

OMACs

Task Force X's robot army.

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• Adaptation Species Change: Are robots in this show rather than humans transformed into cyborgs like they are in the comics.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: OMAC in comics is a cyborg creation of Brother Eye, used as its army. Instead, they are now the foot soldiers of Task Force X, with Brother Eye apparently being Adapted Out.
• Adaptational Ugliness: The OMAC robot had very human-like bodies in the comics, as opposed to the giant sized version with longer arms seen here.
• Canon Character All Along: They went unnamed until "My Adventures with Mad Science", where they're revealed to the an adaptation of OMAC once Mallah namedrops them.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: "Zero Day Part 2" shows they are human-built copies of Kryptonian robots (heavily implied to be controlled by a version of Braniac, based on the 3-dot triangle pattern on their chests) that came through a portal and attacked Earth during Zero Day.
• Mecha-Mooks: They're Task Force X's robot soldiers.
• You Don't Look Like You: They have very little in common when it comes to appearance to the comic versions. While they each have one eye, that eye doesn't always look like the red circle seen in the comics.

Others

Alex

Alex

"With how powerful Superman is, just him having a bad day could spell the end for us. Can you really say we're safer with him overhead?"

Voiced by: Max Mittelman

Dr. Ivo's assistant, and involved in creating the technology his boss derives his success from. Not much else is known about him.

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• Angry White Man: Inferred, but downplayed. He's shown to hold Fantastic Racism fueled dislike for Superman, even scapegoating him for something that was blatantly Ivo's fault, and is framed in shot when Lois's rallying speech brings up that the growing anti-Superman sentiment is just the latest in humanity's tendency to discriminate against anything different. But, his reaction to this, where he appears particularly put off and dismissive of this point, indicates that he's not particularly sympathetic to victims of bigotry and discrimination.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Dr. Ivo's right-hand, which is just as insufferable as it sounds.
  Lois (immediately after punching him out): Sorry! Your life seems hard.
• Canon Foreigner: At least currently, he doesn't appear to be a character from the comics, however his given name of "Alex" could point to him being the show's take on either Lex Luthor or Alex Allston.
• Fantastic Racism: He highly detests Superman, largely because he brought down Amazotech and inadvertently caused him to lose his job, but also believes that because he's "not normal” with the power he possesses, so the Superman having as much as one bad day could mean the end of the world. Lois calls him out for this via livestream in "Zero Day, Part 2", noting that people hate Superman for, among other reasons, the fact that he's different—while she never once namedrops Alex, it's pretty clear she's referring to him, helped by the fact that the screen cuts to Alex at the same time.
• Gadgeteer Genius: While only Dr. Ivo's assistant, he knows what he's doing when it comes to dealing with the highly advanced technology Amazotech peddles, and it's all but stated that he helped create the Parasite suit.
• Hidden Depths: "Zero Day, Part 2" suggests he watches Flamebird, as he's present for Jimmy's livestream.
• Ignored Expert: He was deeply involved in creating the Parasite suit and understands the dangerous side effects, but that doesn't stop Ivo from blatantly ignoring his warnings about using it in a prototype stage — for which Ivo is almost killed and permanently disfigured.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While his Beware the Superman argument in "Zero Day Pt. 1" has a lot of personal bias due to Superman costing him his job by taking down Ivo and some Fantastic Racism due to the hero being "not normal", he points out that even if Superman might have good intentions now, if he ever did become a threat there wouldn't be much anyone could do to stop him, and the power he wields could be utterly catastrophic if ever turned against the world. Even Lois can't come up with a rebuttal, given she's seen an alternate timeline where Alex is correct.
  Alex: What happens when he decides that having powers means he doesn't have to follow our laws anymore? If he really wanted to hurt us, what could we do about it?
• Lack of Empathy:
  • Though he initially appears to be just a typical assistant who even earns Lois' sympathy because of how Ivo treats him, his scathing remarks about Superman make it clear he had no empathy for the people Ivo endangered with his technology and instead holds Superman responsible for stopping him, and in doing so, causing the company to go bust and Alex to lose his job. It's pretty clear his only complaint about the ordeal is that he was negatively affected by it.
  • In "Zero Day, Part 2", when Lois and Jimmy call on Metropolis to help Superman defeat Parasite, Alex is shown watching the livestream with a somewhat indifferent expression; as Lois says that humans are just as capable of hurting each other, including punishing those "who don't look or act like us", he turns away from the phone screen and gives a "you've got to be kidding me" eyeroll.
• Never My Fault: When describing Superman's fight with Parasite/Dr. Ivo to Vicki Vale, Alex conveniently leaves out the part where Ivo started the fight after throwing a board member out of a window to lure Superman in, including the part where Alex operated the force field that powered Ivo's suit and boxed Superman (as well as many of the party’s guests) in, even planning to electrocute Lois and Jimmy to prevent them from turning it off.
• Punch-Clock Villain: He's Ivo's assistant, which means he's likely been present during the shadier activities that the company has been responsible for, and also aids his presentation of the Parasite suit, even when Ivo starts taking things too far. It's likely he was thinking along the lines of just doing his job in these instances, but he doesn't seem to have any better sense of morality when left to his own devices either.
• Revenge Myopia: While the extent of the "revenge" is to give him a scathing and negative testimony when interviewed about him, he goes out of his way to trash Superman for the fight with Ivo's Parasite suit that caused Amazo Tech to go under and cost Alex his job. Except all Superman did was respond to Ivo's blatant attack on his own chairperson, and then be attacked by Ivo. Had Superman not intervened, Ivo would have committed mass murder and gotten himself killed by his own tech, leading to Amazo Tech being shut down and Alex losing his job anyway. All his anger should be on Ivo, but instead he blames Superman for it.
• Servile Snarker: He doesn't seem to respect Dr. Ivo all that much and quietly snarks back to him when the latter tells him to shut up when he tries to warn him about the Parasite suit. That said, he still helps Ivo even when he starts risking lives and beating down Superman just to show off his tech, and even seems pleased by the results (if only because the Parasite suit was at least partially his creation).

The Brain and Monsieur Mallah

The Brain and Monsieur Mallah

"You are different. Strange. Like us. And this world... It's not so forgiving of that."

Voiced by: Jesse Inocalla (Brain), André Sogliuzzo (Mallah)

A couple consisting of the brain of a Cadmus scientist and a super-intelligent gorilla who live together in the remains of a Cadmus laboratory. While not evil at all, they are terrified of discovery and kidnap Jimmy when he discovers Mallah on a Bigfoot hunt.

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• Adaptational Attractiveness: The Brain's mechanical body lacks the skull motif common in other incarnations, with the design also being rounder and friendlier looking. And before the accident that left him trapped in his current state, Brain was a buff scientist.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: In the comics, the Brain wound up in his state after getting caught in an explosion caused by Niles Caulder. In this continuity, he lost his original body in a Task Force X raid on the Cadmus compound.
• Adaptational Heroism: They're supervillains in the comics. They aren't in this one. Yes, the Brain's a bit of a jerk, and yes, their creations have a few Inventional Wisdom issues, but they're just a reclusive-but-kindly Mad Scientist couple who only have a brief scuffle with Superman over a misunderstanding before Jimmy breaks it up, and they're perfectly willing to swing into action (in Mallah's case, literally) alongside our heroes against Task Force X's leftover robots.
• Adaptational Nationality: While the Brain is usually French like Mallah, here he is German.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: The two of them lack the overt psychopathy of their mainline counterparts, with more focus placed on them being a loving couple who want to live a peaceful life. That isn't to say they're wholly harmless when left to their own devices, as they've made a miniature black hole and a bunch of mutants, explicitly out of boredom in the latter case.
• Ambiguously Evil: Much moreso for the Brain than Mallah, who is consistently nice and understanding. They're certainly the most polite and friendly versions of the pair that we've seen, and the main characters don't seem to take any issue with them and respect them. However, they did kidnap Jimmy and nearly killed him. It's not entirely clear how serious they were about it, but Brain was much more insistent on it, and it's implied they might have done this in the past. They almost build dangerous machines with no clear good purpose, such as their Blackhole generator, which ended up killing a lot of people (with Mallah also revealing they overloaded it on purpose, so this wasn't an accident) and a robot army.
• Anti-Villain: They only come into conflict with Clark and Lois because they kidnapped Jimmy due to him uncovering their hidden base, and even then they immediately let Jimmy go once it's clear he's not a threat. Otherwise, they're perfectly benign and just want to live a simple life of peace… barring the occasional miniature black hole and army of mutants.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Narrowly subverted; they nearly killed Jimmy to conceal their existence before they realized he wasn't a member of Task Force X.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Initially, both Jimmy and Clark mistake Mallah for Bigfoot.
• Cyber Cyclops: The Brain's robotic body has a single ball camera "eye".
• Dark Is Not Evil: They're a Brain in a Jar and a sapient black-furred gorilla, but they're nobly intentioned refugees from Task Force X who part with Jimmy and Superman on good terms.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After everything they've been through, including Brain losing his body and having to live in seclusion for 22 years lest they be hunted by Task Force X, the Brain and Mallah are able to create a wormhole to a dimension where they can live in peace.
• Foil: To Superman. They're all set apart from human society by nature of what they are, but while Mallah and the Brain aim to make a place for themselves away from humans, Superman wants to help the world become a place where everyone's accepted.
• Genius Bruiser: Mallah is almost as intelligent as the Brain, he just lacks as much technical know-how. He is also an enormous gorilla.
• Gentle Gorilla: In this show, Mallah is drawn to look like and additionally behaves like a kind, benevolent gorilla rather than the Killer Gorilla he's normally presented as in other portrayals.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: Since they're respectively German and French, they both tend to pepper their dialogue with words from their native languages.
• Herr Doktor: The Brain speaks with a heavy German accent and peppers his dialogue with German words.
• Interspecies Friendship: They develop one with Jimmy Olsen after learning that Clark and Lois ditched him.
• Interspecies Romance: A human brain and an uplifted gorilla in a happy romantic relationship together.
• It Amused Me: The reason they have a small army of mutants at their beck and call? They got bored one day after a year of hiding.
• Lighter and Softer: Going along with them not really being villainous in this continuity, the two of them have much less threatening designs, with Mallah trading out his military fatigues for a sweater and the Brain's, well, brain being hidden inside of a round floating android body rather than put fully on display on top of a tall mobile holding jar with a skull design on the front.
• Mad Scientist: On the less malevolent end of the spectrum compared to their comic book counterparts, but they have dabbled in creating mutants and unstable miniature black holes. Basically, they're at their most dangerous whenever they get too bored and start messing around For Science!.
• Maker of Monsters: They created a small army of mutants in their spare time, which comes in handy when the OMACs break into their compound.
• Manchild: The Brain is a bit more impulsive and less mature than Mallah. When Mallah suggests that the two of them give Jimmy, Lois, and Clark some space to work out their issues, the Brain whines that he wants to watch them fight in a very childish manner.
• Oculothorax: The Brain's spherical body is dominated by a large central eye.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Shortly before leaving with Mallah, the Brain, without his usual angry histrionics, uses simple deduction and analysis to point out that Clark is probably an alien tangled up in all the technology they've been fiddling with, offers to let him come along with the two of them since he doesn't believe the world will ever accept Superman either, and when Clark instead chooses to remain, and try to make the world into a better, more accepting place, the Brain seriously warns him about what kind of enemy he'll be dealing with.
• Pygmalion Plot: It was the Brain's experiments that uplifted Mallah into genius intelligence, and they soon fell in love with each other.
• Reluctant Mad Scientist: The Brain is a genius inventor and used to be one of the heads of Cadmus, but the very reason he's a Brain in a Jar now is because he refused to become a developer of weapons.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: They're enemies of the Doom Patrol in the comics, but there is no mention of them having ever met the Doom Patrol in this continuity.
• Was Once a Man: The Brain was an ordinary human before a haywire black hole destroyed most of his body, forcing his brain to be relocated to a robotic shell to survive.
• Your Answer to Everything: Mallah argues with the Brain about his method of dealing with intruders is his answer for everything when they discuss what to do with Jimmy.

Vicki Vale

Vicki Vale

"I've got that award feeling about this. We'll interview people. Get the dirt. Show everyone Superman isn't to be trusted."

Voiced by: Andromeda Dunker

A famous reporter and Lois's idol who works for the Gotham press, but comes to Metropolis hoping to "expose" Superman as a threat to Earth.

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• Accentuate the Negative: Her entire journalistic viewpoint is based on the assertion that "hit" pieces sell more than real news. So she isn't interested in facts, she wants dirt and gets it from biased sources that align with whatever narrative she's spinning. When Lois calls her out on it, Vicki doesn't deny it and cynically replies that if you want to be number one, you don't get there by writing fluff--you go for blood, a lesson she says Perry failed to learn.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Vicki is often drawn as a redhead or on occasion as a blonde, following her most famous media appearance in Batman (1989). Here she has black hair and - perhaps intentionally due to her being a veteran reporter Lois wants to emulate - her design harkens back to a classic Lois Lane look.
• Adaptational Jerkass: No other version of Vale — even the Silver Age Vicki, who, like Lois at the time, was a jealous woman with a sometimes misplaced competitive streak — has been quite such a vindictive careerist as this one.
• Age Lift: Lois and Vicki generally don't meet in the comics since they're in different cities and circles, but they're generally depicted as around the same age. Here Vicki is a veteran and peer of Perry and Lois is still just an intern, so Vicki is older than her.
• Alliterative Name: Vicki Vale.
• At Least I Admit It: She doesn't deny that she's perfectly willing to lie, use biased sources, or omit any factual information that undermines whatever angle she's going for. Peddling salacious news stories to further her career is the only thing that matters to her.
• Beware the Superman: Vicki believes that Superman is a menace because "no one puts on that big a show of being good unless they're hiding something." She seeks out biased sources in order to justify her hypothesis, then publishes a big hit piece on Superman based on her "research."
• Broken Pedestal: Quickly becomes this to Lois, who used to idolize her until Vicki makes it clear she wants to write a negative article on Superman and is willing to ignore all evidence in Superman's favor to smear his reputation. Whatever pedestal remained after that was thoroughly shattered once she realizes that Vicki was not only using her and Jimmy but the entire Daily Planet to secure a promotion over in Gotham.
• Deliberately Bad Example: She is there to show an utterly no-holds-barred Immoral Journalist with destructive consequences, when even the Scoop Troop at their worst (so far) just steal the scoop, don't twist it.
• Disabled in the Adaptation: Unlike her comic portrayal, this Vicki requires glasses.
• Foil: To Lois. Like Lois, she's a journalist who's determined to rise above her station and seeks real scoops over puff pieces in order to do so. Unlike Lois, who is a rookie genuinely passionate about uncovering the truth, Vicki is a veteran who's more interested in writing salacious stories to weave a narrative she can sell, and completely ignores any evidence that would counter said narrative. In essence, she has all of Lois' drive and passion, but none of her morals and ethics, despite having more professional experience. The fact that her appearance more closely resembles the Lois Lane of the comics than Show!Lois does serves to drive the comparison home.
• Hate Sink: Vicki is an unashamed Immoral Journalist who's willing to use biased sources just to "prove" her pre-selected opinion, while ignoring statements that contradict it (and dismissing said statements as biased). By the end, it turns out that it was all to get herself promoted, meaning that her research about Superman was motivated by her selfish desires.
• Hypocrite: When Lois and Jimmy point out that Alex is a biased source against Superman, Vicki points out that all of their previous sources were biased for Superman, and that Lois and Jimmy chose these sources because of that. While she's completely correct, that doesn't change the fact that Alex is still a biased source, and even if he weren't she ignores all of the pro-Superman sources in favor of writing a hit piece using the one anti-Superman source (the exact thing she called out Lois and Jimmy for doing, just with reversed motives).
• If It Bleeds, It Leads: She seems to believe the old adage that "there's no news like bad news," to the point where she seems less focused on getting the facts than on whatever she can use to make the target of her hit pieces look bad.
• Immoral Journalist: Even though she claims that her reasons for writing a hit piece on Superman are for exposing him as a potential threat to Metropolis, it becomes clear that she's primarily doing it for the sake of her own success. Rather than examine both sides of the argument and form a conclusion based on careful research, she picks a side at the very beginning and ignores all subsequent evidence that harms her side, on top of using a source she outright admits is biased just to play up the more salacious angle.
• Intrepid Reporter: Much like Lois, she's a journalist who looks for real scoops over puff pieces, which is the reason for much of her acclaim. However, she's not so much concerned with the truth as she is about weaving a particular narrative that she thinks will be a hit.
• It's All About Me: As she openly admits, she doesn't care about revealing any truth. All that matters to her is publishing a story that can further her career.
• Jerkass Has a Point: She was not wrong in pointing out that all the sources Lois and Jimmy had set up were biased in favor of Superman when they say that Alex is a bias source.
• Karma Houdini: As far as we know, she faced no actual repercussions for her smear campaign against Superman.
• Manipulative Bitch: Vicki approaches Perry under the guise of her being rumored to leave the Gazette, with Perry wanting her to join the Daily Planet. Later, it's revealed that this was a lie and that she was merely using the Planet to promote herself.
• Media Scaremongering: She uses Jimmy and Lois to publish a borderline libelous story deriding Superman as a menace, based on one extremely biased source and ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, the general public falls for it.
• Mythology Gag: Vale looks exactly like the 90s version of Lois Lane.
• Shadow Archetype: Vicki is what Lois would be if she had no journalistic integrity to temper her determination to get her next big scoop.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: There's no such thing as journalistic integrity as far as Vicki's concerned. For her, it's all about digging up dirt and promoting her agenda. The stunning realization leaves Lois disillusioned by her now former role model.
• The Unfettered: Vicki is a firm believer of "The ends justify the means" and is willing to do whatever it takes to get her next scoop, whether it means using biased sources, ignoring facts, or outright lying.

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