Recap of Superman & Lois
Season 1, Episode 3
The Perks of Not Being a Wallflower
Tropes:
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents:
- Clark pulls it off yet again when he joins Smallville High as an assistant coach to keep an eye on Jordan. He comes up to Jordan and Sarah pretending that a cooler is too heavy for him and dorkily gushes about his new jacket and hat.
- Clark randomly shows up in the hallway of their high school just as Jordan is about to be beat up. Even with no one knowing about Clark's secret, having your parent show up in the middle of the school day is awkward at best and having him show up as a crowd is watching your impending beatdown is even more so.
- Upset about Sarah's earlier refusal to talk about her therapy session, Lana chooses to confront her daughter about her attitude in front of the entire cheerleading squad. Sarah is visibly mortified and chooses to publicly quit the squad to get away from the confrontation. Later, Lana again confronts Sarah in the middle of the town diner, leading Sarah to begin throwing out embarrassing facts about her parents' marriage to make her mother feel equally uncomfortable.
- Anger Born of Worry: Jonathan chastises Jordan for joining the football team and flaunting his powers to get even with Sean and his friends, after Clark had just lectured them on why they should keep their secrets hidden. As shown below, this at first seems like Jonathan lashing out out of envy, but he's genuinely annoyed by Jordan taking their father's words for granted.
- Bad to the Bone: As Jordan steps on the field to give the football bullies a taste of their own medicine, "Ooh la la" by Run the Jewels starts playing, followed by a montage of Jordan delivering a series of devastating tackles.
- Bait-and-Switch: Much of the episode revolves around Jordan joining and getting high praise on the football team while Jonathan is once again left in the dust. After a good amount of Jonathan seemingly being jealous, a private talk with his dad reveals that he's actually hoping that Jordan continues to enjoy himself on the team, noting that it's the happiest he's seen his brother in a long time. By the end of the episode, he shows little to no problem with being a backup quarterback.
- Brick Joke: A quick one. When Clark rushes off to save the collapsing bridge after getting into a paint fight with the family, he waves to a fisherman without realizing he still has blue paint on him. Both get a good laugh out of it.
- Brutal Honesty: Both Sarah and Jordan snap at Lana and Clark respectively during the course of the episode.
- The Bully: Sarah casually mentions that her sister Sophie bullies everybody in her class.
- Defeat Means Friendship: After Jordan knocks Sean down during training, but then apologises for kissing Sarah and helps him up, they seem to become friends.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: The paint fight in the opening immediately stops when Clark's super hearing picks up an emergency. A second later, Clark dashes off to deal with it, and Lois comments to her kids that they have no need to hide his actions now that they both know that he is Superman. Then, for just a second until the scene transition, she suddenly resumes the paint fight.
- Gory Discretion Shot: We don't see precisely how badly Subjekt-11 is hit by Leslie Larr's heat vision fares, but it's safe to say he isn't going to be walking away from it.
- Heroic Second Wind: After Subjekt-11 initially No-Sell's several of Clark's punches and brutally knocks him down, Clark quickly get's back up and uses his Cold Breath and Super Speed to decisively defeat his opponent.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Facing off against even more crap from Morgan Edge results in Clark preemptively bringing Lois a glass of wine, noting that he figured she needs it.
- Literary Allusion Title: The title is a play on the well known young-adult novel and the film adapted from it.
- Missing Child: Sharon Powell's son Derek went missing and she thinks Morgan Edge might have something to do with it.
- Molotov Cocktail: Lois' car gets bombed by one of these outside of the Gazette office.
- Muscles Are Meaningless: Jordan may not be a superhero like Clark, but he can still tackle with the strength of a man twice his size.
- Noodle Incident: Lois apparently got attacked with a molotov cocktail once.
- Not Helping Your Case: When his sons are angry at him after realizing that he spied on them with his Super-Hearing, he tries to excuse himself by saying that he doesn't always do so.
- Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Chrissy's resigned to the fact that Smallville's biggest news are usually just Harvest Festivals or some other community-driven event. So she's not used to something big like Morgan Edge's corporate schemes targeting an innocent small town and doing crazy things like blow up Lois's station wagon.
- Oh, Crap!: Jordan and Jonathan, the latter especially, grimace like crazy when Sarah finally snaps at her mom in the diner and starts airing out personal details in front of everyone.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Jordan's eyes briefly glow red when Sean and his friends are bullying him, but he reins it in before it anything bad happens.
- Seen It All: Neither Clark or Lois seem too perturbed by Lois's station wagon being blown up, with Clark even snarking that it's not Lois's first experience with a molotov cocktail.
- Shout-Out: When discussing the matter of 'rules' that go along with having powers, Jonathan jokingly states the rule of "Don't feed him after midnight!"
- Slice of Life: The cold opening focuses on the Kent family engaging in the mundane task of deciding on a paint color for their living room.
- Stealth Hi/Bye: Clark suddenly shows up in Smallville High just as the conflict between his sons and Sean are heating up. You can see the students around him wondering how the hell he appeared out of nowhere.
- Stepford Smiler: Lana eventually opens up to Sarah that she's not as happy as she shows herself off to be, noting that she'd been raised to "not show the hurt inside."
- String Theory: Chrissy reveals that she's created one while Lois was meeting up with Sharon.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Subjekt-11, who attempts to kill Sharon Powell, is killed by Leslie Larr via heat vision after Sharon survives the attempt.
- Wham Shot:
- Superman is clearly as thrown as the audience when this seemingly random mook is not only able to stand up to his punches but packs a good wallop of his own.
- That same mook being killed by a woman with Kryptonian-like heat vision.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Both Jordan and Jonathan are not happy to learn that Clark essentially spies on them with his super hearing. They're particularly not amused when Clark pulls a You Didn't Ask when confronted about how he keeps track of them.
- The Worf Effect: Downplayed. Superman is caught off-guard by the mook's Super-Strength in a straight fight, but quickly recovers and defeats him by applying freeze breath to stun him then rapidly hitting him from multiple angles using his Super-Speed.
- You Have Failed Me: Subjekt-11, who fails to knock off Sharon, gets his chest melted by Leslie Larr with heat vision.
