But Kal-El had been so blasted obtuse. In fact, of all the varied versions of Clark Kent he’d met from various alternate time-lines, this one had to be one of the densest. Erasing someone’s memories? Give me a break.
I'm very glad that Clark is really angry at Kal-El. Maybe, like Olympe said, he should be even angrier.
“Why don’t you go talk to her now?” Clark suggested. Kal-El’s expression was bleak, defeated. He sighed as he stood and headed up the stairs to the main floor.
You really make me feel that Clark is the stern father who has just had a very serious talk with his errant son. Good!
Clark went up to the master bedroom and changed out of his suit into black trousers and a black turtleneck shirt. He refused to wear the black Kryptonian body suit that still hung in the back of the hidden closet with his other ‘suits’. His one concession tonight to signify his Kryptonian obligations was a blue enameled pendant with the sigil of the House of El.
I like this, too - Clark is showing Zara and Ching that he is no slave to their Kryptonian dress code. In fact, he is showing them that in a cultural sense, he himself is human, not Kryptonian.
“How did it go?” he asked his wife.
“Was I that galactically dense?” she wondered aloud.
Like Olympe said, this is really funny! I like it when Clark and Lois are able to reflect on their own behaviour.
Richard gave Penny a hug. Clark knew they had high hopes for tonight’s meeting. Like he and Lois before them, they’d been turned down by adoption agency social workers.
So Penny and Richard hope that they will be allowed to adopt one of Zara and Ching's children? Wow. That's a twist, to be sure. And it would, again, make this universe parallel the universe we saw in Superman Returns, where Richard is, of course, raising a Kryptonian - or at least half-Kryptonian - child.
Clark glanced out the French doors to the back deck. Kal-El and Wanda were still talking. Then, he leaned over and kissed her, a long tender kiss. He pulled away and Clark saw Wanda’s eyes widen. Then she slapped Kal-El. Hard.
Wow, what a scene! That one packs a punch - eh, a slap! A really hard one.
“We have to talk,” he said, head bowed, hands in his pants pockets. His posture was so familiar, so Clark-like. She almost had it . . . and it was gone again.
This is so interesting. Wanda
knows that Kal-El is Clark Kent, she just can't accept(?) acknowledge(?) remember(?) that fact.
“They’re happy,” Wanda said, looking at the clouds. “Married ten years, four kids, two cars, a mortgage. They’re in love and they’re happy.” She glanced at Kal-El. His head was still down, looking at his feet, not at her.
How sad and poignant this is. This scene moves me very strongly. This Lois and this Superman are more or less strangers to one another, and their lives are, in many ways, lives of regret and bitterness. Yes, that is what Superman's rejection of Lois in Superman II would have led to - because make no mistake, it was a rejection.
“Just one really. Who am I, really? And I don’t have an answer. I’ve spent seventeen years trying to be the person my birth father’s AI thought I should be. And in that time, the person I ought to be, the person I’ve been all my life, has turned into someone I don’t even like. He’s a clumsy, cowardly fool and I’m not even sure how it happened.”
Very interesting.
There was a long silence as she tried to put more pieces together. “I know, intellectually, that you’re also Clark. But I still can’t quite believe it.”
No, it must be like having a part of your memory surgically removed. People tell you that things have happened in your life, and you used to know certain things, and you have to take them at their word. But there is
nothing inside you that recognizes the truth of what they say.
“Can you undo it?”
To answer, he stepped closer, tipped her head up with his hand and kissed her. She remembered the sweetness of his mouth, the soft lips, the fervent promise of more.
So that's why he kissed her! I should have known.
He pulled back and the memories of that night, the night Jason was conceived, the night in the Fortress of Solitude came flooding back, overwhelming her senses. There was more than just that night – all the things she hadn’t put together afterwards, all the sly comments at work when it was discovered she was pregnant and Clark Kent, her partner, had disappeared to parts unknown, the understanding looks from Perry, the orders from Perry to go with Clark to do a story at Niagara Falls. Clark’s unconvincing arguments against it. It all came into focus and she was furious.
She slapped him as hard as she could.
She remembers! And she was certainly right to slap him.
“I remember Niagara Falls. And things I didn’t put together then, that didn’t make sense at the time,” she said. “We were set up. Somebody had a great laugh sending Mad Dog off on a honeymoon with her dweeby partner. Even if nothing had happened, they would have said it had. Only something did happen, and then you took off and they blamed me for it. Oh, nobody actually said it, and Perry was so understanding, and you hadn’t placed any blame on anybody for you needing to leave. And then when Jason was born and he looked just like you, only you didn’t come back . . .”
Oh, poor Lois!! How utterly humiliating and heartbreaking it would have been.
“I missed you. I missed my friend.”
“I missed you, too. I should never have left,” he said, resting his cheek on the top of her head.
She is forgiving him pretty fast. I hope she hasn't got some huge revenge scheme planned to get back at him.
“If I had stopped you, you would have ended up resenting it, resenting me,” she said. “We both know that.”
I think this is very true. When Superman had made up his mind to go to Krypton, Lois could not have stopped him. Or she could have, but he really would have ended up resenting her, blaming her for denying him the right to go seek out his birth world.
Very, very interesting, Dandello!
Ann
