As Season 3 of HBO Max and Adult Swim’s My Adventures with Superman proceeds, Clark Kent (Jack Quaid) is facing an existential crisis. He lost his powers but, thankfully, he has Lois Lane (Alice Lee) to back him and help him regain his confidence. Clark may not be the Man of Steel anymore, but he’s still her man. And he realizes it’s the little things: he’s more than enough for his soulmate. However, Clark’s life gets shaken up in a massive way come Episode 8, “It’s Reigning (Super)Men.”
As the name implies, this arc is all about various Supermen, or well, superheroes getting involved. Usually, Superman can take care of things, as seen when he broke Task Force X in Season 1 and got General Sam Lane (Joel de la Fuente) to believe in him. Kal-El then convinced his cousin, Kara Zor-El (Kiana Madeira), to abandon Brainiac (Michael Emerson) in Season 2 and become another beacon of hope for Earth, aka Supergirl.
But while they exorcised Brainiac and threw him into the abyss at the Fortress of Solitude to start the season, even Kara knows protecting the planet isn’t a solo job. Now, all Clark can do is be a mentor. It has worked so far, allowing Team Kent to defeat Mxyzptlk in a cosmic game in Episode 7. However, the return of Lois and Clark’s offspring from the future rocks their world once more.
Earlier this season, Jon Kent (Darren Criss) came back to save Clark from dying fighting Cyborg Superman/Hank Henshaw (Max Mittelman). While they succeeded and shut Hank down, Clark burnt his powers out and Jon went back to a future that got rewritten in a dystopian manner. This chapter finds Jon (well, a darker variant) returning to the present, along with a sibling. No, it’s not a twin son — sorry, Jordan — per the CW’s Superman & Lois.
This time, they’re rocking Lois’ last name and on a darker mission. It results in a high-octane, action-packed episode that reminds them that without unity, they’ll always be doomed for failure. Especially against a new godlike, unpredictable threat of disastrous proportions.
My Adventures with Superman Confirms the Super Siblings’ Harrowing Mission
This calamitous episode begins with Jonathan (not Jon) Lane making it clear they’re here on serious business. The them? Ahem, his sister, Lara Lane (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) is accompanying him, nodding to Clark’s Kryptonian mother. Lois and Clark deduce that the timelines shifted due to Jonathan not remembering ever being in the present.
They realize that after the Cyborg Superman ordeal, a butterfly effect resulted in the macabre future the siblings are trying to prevent. That tease a couple of episodes back showed robotic beings enslaving Jonathan, now bearing a scar, and under the rule of a Lex fused with unique technology. More on that later.
Anyway, the job is simple. The Super Siblings are here to kill, you guessed it, Lex. They need to stop him from taking over their reality with his army of Eradicators. We usually know the latter to be Kryptonian death machines. Here, it seems like Lex has conjured them up on his own. But, as mentioned, this will be detailed in full. And it’s quite a doozy.
My Adventures with Superman Reveals a New Eradicator
The cartoon finally has Lex in his bald state. But it’s more than just a fashion statement or hair loss. Lex can be seen monitoring the headpiece that his evil future ’emperor’ self would wear in the time-jump. Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke (Chris Parnell), is with him, haranguing him about the new science project.
In steps Amanda Waller (Debra Wilson). She ran the Checkmate project and brought Lex into the fold full-time on Task Force X. Waller lost the plot thereafter. She betrayed Sam and tried to use her military to kill Superman and Supergirl in Season 2. As it turns out, she isn’t as sadistic anymore. She’s, in fact, grateful for what Kal-El did against Brainiac’s forces.
The truth comes to light when Slade forces Lex to reveal the Eradicator project. Lex has harnessed Superman’s DNA, created a clone and implanted his own brain material into the being. Lex’s brain matter and the helmet are supposed to allow Lex to control the Eradicator (Steve Blum). Now fans see why Lex was interested in the Bizarro project earlier this season. After failing with the hybrid Hank, Lex thinks growing his own Man of Tomorrow will make him Earth’s savior.
Granted, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Iron Man, he does want to form an armor around the world and shield it from future invasions like the Brainiac one. The thing is, Waller can sense Lex’s insecurities and his Superman vendetta. She dispels this revolution. She doesn’t trust an Eradicator that can self-repair, learn, evolve and became a scarier Superman. It doesn’t matter if Lex is hooked into its mind.
A panicking Waller shuts it down. She decommissions the project and on the advice of Slade, she has Lex arrested for this treasonous act. She lambastes him for spitting on the image of Superman: someone she now firmly thinks makes Earth more secure. She’s even more appalled that Lex has a time-travel gauntlet prototype. He’s playing God and she knows it’ll backfire again.
She did create his experimental monster and give him free rein with LexCorp. This is her way of atoning. Slade doesn’t mind repenting, too, because every time he sides with Lex, he gets beaten to a pulp.
My Adventures with Superman Makes Team Kent a Vulnerable Target
Kara and Jimmy (Ishmel Sahid) fly over to the Kent farm. They have their own trust drama to sort out. Kara loves Jimmy but she isn’t sure she can depend on him. He hasn’t been honest or mature. All he’s been is a toxic jerk to her. But they have to put their egos aside once they meet the surly Jonathan.
He hates Clark. He blames Superman for being absent from their lives. It’s quite petulant because Lex’s militia killed Superman. So he shouldn’t blame the man. But it illustrates how Jonathan is conflating anger and grief. Clark tries to confer wisdom at the same time Lois interacts with Lara. That conversation doesn’t go well, too.
Lois thinks her father sent the siblings back. Lo and behold, she’s the General Lane who did so. It’s a nod to John Connor from the Terminator franchise going from an innocent to a cold leader. Ironically, Lois saw this kind of variant in Mxyzptlk’s galactic contest of champions, so she doesn’t deny it. She can tell she has that thread of survival inside: ready to do whatever it takes.
Things go off the rails when Lara speeds off secretly to murder Lex during the Waller meeting. Lex freaks out and releases the Eradicator to defend himself. The latter has been listening to the chat about keeping him on ice, so it’s quite predictable what he does. He becomes sentient and locks Lex out the system.
The Eradicator proceeds to pummel Lara, while inflicting fear into everyone else. Clark, Kara, Lois and Jimmy show up at LexCorp. Jonathan is annoyed, making it clear he doesn’t want anyone standing in his way. The Eradicator cracks the ground from the sub-levels, causing Lois and Clark to fall into the sewers. He then stalks them like a horror movie. Jonathan and Kara try to help out but he slams a train into Kara and bashes Jonathan’s head in.
At this point, the Eradicator is growing hair, floating around like a Naruto or Dragon Ball Z villain. Yup, there’s the show anime influence yet again! The place is lined with lead, disrupting everyone’s X-ray vision and making the Kryptonians as vulnerable as ever. The Eradicator is very much an apex predator showing his prey what it means to be alpha. Sigh, Lex… what wrath have you wrought?
My Adventures with Superman Almost Kills off Supergirl
The Eradicator keeps getting stronger. To the point, he grows extra arms. Body horror fans, this is the kind of Doomsday DC should have given us already! He even mimics the heroes’ voices to bait them in. It’s quite demonic seeing him doing this in the dark catacombs.
This pushes Kara to do two things. Firstly, she reams Jonathan and lets him know they need to stick together and cooperate. That’s what a real family does. Secondly, Kara digs deep and unleashes more of her latent power. She roasts the Eradicator with her heat vision and breaks up its arms after it pulverizes her niece and nephew. However, the Eradicator blasts her in the eyes and then tries to fry the siblings.
Kara flies in, however, and takes the blast. She lets Jonathan know that protecting them is what will make her “tomorrow” come to life. It’s quite a heroic sacrifice. Surely, she must be dead?
No.
Jimmy — hey, he finally reappears and gets something to do — says she’s barely alive and not waking up. With Kara and Lara incapacitated, Jonathan tries to battle the Eradicator. Only for the entity to grab Jonathan’s time gauntlet and teleport to the future. Yeah, that can’t be good.
Jonathan learns the hard way the consequences of his immature actions. With the Eradicator loose in the timestream, it may well be that this creates a closed loop (aka the Bootstrap Paradox) that breeds the dark future the siblings came from. Clearly, I’m a fan of Netflix’s Dark.
My Adventures with Superman Gives Clark Kent a Solution – and A Nasty Betrayal
Clark feels helpless as all this transpires. He’s once more reminded of his supposed fall from grace as Superman. He does catch some falling debris to protect Lois down below. But up top, he can’t do anything when the Eradicator throws down and bloodies his family.
There is a twist, though. Throughout this season, Clark kept getting weird, apocalyptic visions. In this episode, when he tries to quell Jonathan’s rage on the farm, he sees two suns and what appears to be Krypton. During the melee later on, he sees himself suited up and the Fortress of Solitude. Strange voices are luring him ‘home,’ teasing maybe this fiery entity could be Rao (the Kryptonian Sun God).
With the Eradicator gone, Clark tells Lois he thinks going to the Fortress is a solution. He’s adamant he can re-power there. How does he get there? Well, Bizarro arrives once he hears the commotion wrecking Metropolis. He thinks he’s too late but he proves to be of service when he flies Clark to the Fortress.
But as one door opens, betrayal occurs. The robotic drones there are corrupted. Bizarro’s eyes glow red and he sucker-punches Clark from the back, knocking him out. It appears that Brainiac may well have hacked the Fortress, infected it like a virus, and that he has indeed been alive all this time. Waiting, scheming and salivating at the chance to break Kal-El.
It’s not revealed why Brainiac has been giving Clark all this leeway, biding time and whatnot. What’s clear is there’ll be carnage to come. The House of El’s legacy is crumbling. Doubt has entered into everyone’s minds, shattering their psyches and mangling their bodies. It remains to be seen what will be Brainiac’s creepy endgame (if this really is him) and if Clark can claw his way back to his kin.
With so much turbulence in the now and the future, the House of El needs their sigil (i.e. hope) more than ever. With two episodes left, it’ll be intriguing to see where that optimism, inspiration, faith and belief can emerge from.
Is My Adventures with Superman Season 3, Episode 8 Good?
This episode is a mixed bag. It has tremendous fight sequences that Zack Snyder fans would love. Seeing the House of El battling the Eradicator in the city feels like the desperate moments Snyder painted when General Zod (Michael Shannon) breached. The animation and combat style are deftly finessed, cementing the cartoon’s identity and galvanizing it as a subversive story even more.
But it doesn’t honor its episodic title that much. Leaving Bizarro out until the end feels weird. Clark seeing an innocent clone bruised would have given him more impetus to power back up. This could also have broken Bizarro’s mind for possession, while really making him feel like part of the clan.
Jimmy is also mistreated. Seeing as Kara has such a big role as a protector, more should have been done to show her True North and bedrock. She wants to teach Jonathan that love matters most, so why not have the teen seeing her and Jimmy there for each other? It’s even more questionable that Lara gets iced and is out cold for most of the brawl against the Eradicator. She should be there witnessing Kara’s sacrifice.
On that note, Jimmy actually telling the audience Kara’s alive is so underwhelming. You want a cliffhanger to raise the emotional stakes. Her fate should have been left vague. Or she should have been taken to the Fortress, too, either for healing or for Brainiac to punish as well. He did consider her a daughter, after all, leaving room for him to redeem himself by watching her wither away, or using her as a pawn; leverage to castigate Kal-El for rebuking his Kryptonian crusade of conquering.
One also has to wonder where is Steel? John Henry Irons played such a pivotal role in the source material as a replacement Superman. There’s no reason he couldn’t have levelled up his war machine suit and joined the battle, as well as the Suicide Squad members that switched to Clark’s side in Season 2. What’s the point in having them as allies if Clark can’t call on them?
The scope should have been bigger on the ground to make the Eradicator feel more threatening. These extra characters being dusted would have accomplished just that. That said, the tyrant is very daunting. Blum’s voice fits the few lines the villain delivers, teasing over the death and destruction he wants to enact. This intimidation makes up for the more absurd sub-plots.
In the end, enough is done creatively to keep fans hooked on the mysterious being Clark may have to venerate, as well as the roots, rites and rituals Brainiac may be playing at. All in all, the physical prowess of the the Eradicator keeps him in a rarified air in terms of this cartoon’s pantheons of villains.
But it’s this season’s theme of “the present is a gift” that complements Clark’s human angle and presents an interesting path forward. One fans of Christopher Reeve’s Superman II can appreciate as the season sets up its final two episodes.
My Adventures With Superman Season 3 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
My Adventures With Superman Season 3 will officially premiere Saturday, June 13 at midnight ET/PT on Adult Swim (technically Sunday at Midnight, but whatever), and later that day on HBO Max — meaning Sundays, likely at 3am ET. The season will be 10 episodes long, with one episode dropping per week until the finale.
Here’s the full list of episodes in My Adventures With Superman Season 3, with premiere dates (and as a note, we’ve included the Adult Swim premiere date; once again, it technically debuts Sunday on Adult Swim at night, and debuts on HBO Max on Sunday morning).
- Saturday, June 13, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 1
- Saturday, June 20, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 2
- Saturday, June 27, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 3
- Saturday, July 4, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 4
- Saturday, July 11, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 5
- Saturday, July 18, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 6
- Saturday, July 25, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 7
- Saturday, August 1, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 8
- Saturday, August 8, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 9
- Saturday, August 15, 2026: My Adventures With Superman Season 3, Episode 10 *Season Finale*
Where To Watch My Adventures With Superman:
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