'My Adventures with Superman' Season 3 Episode 5 Review: One Beloved Voice Actor's Rage Finally Breaks the Whole City

‘My Adventures with Superman‘ has spent two and a half seasons building a found family out of Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and eventually Kara Zor El, letting their chemistry carry episodes that could have easily leaned on spectacle alone. Season 3 has pushed that formula further than ever, adding Jon Kent, a version of Superman’s own future son, into the mix as a time traveler with secrets he clearly did not want to share.

Episode 5 finally cashes in every bit of tension the season has been quietly stacking up. Titled “The Death of Superman,” it borrows its name from the most famous storyline in the character’s history, and it wastes no time signaling that it intends to earn that title rather than just borrow it for shock value.

What actually lands here is a genuinely tense hour built around Hank Henshaw’s full transformation into Cyborg Superman, and it is the strongest sustained action sequence this show has produced. Watching Clark get physically outmatched by an opponent who is not just powerful but personally furious with him gives the fight real emotional stakes instead of just noise, and the animation team clearly understood the assignment, throwing Hank and Superman through skyscrapers, an airplane, and a train with a level of scale the show rarely reaches for this long.

Jon’s arc finally clicks into place here too. His avoidance of Kara throughout the season gets a satisfying explanation once we learn how close the two of them became in his original future, and that emotional throughline gives the fight scenes a reason to matter beyond simply seeing if Superman wins.

Kara herself gets some of the episode’s best material, refusing to be sidelined and forcing her way into the fight even when Jon tries to protect her by keeping her out of it. It is a small character beat, but it fits the show’s ongoing interest in giving Kara agency rather than treating her as a supporting piece in someone else’s story.

Where the episode stumbles slightly is in how much narrative ground it tries to cover in a single half hour. Between the main battle, Jon’s flashbacks, Lois and Jimmy’s parallel storyline confronting Lex Luthor, and the closing time jump that reveals a much darker future, there are moments where the pacing feels rushed rather than earned, particularly in how quickly Hank’s arc resolves once his backstory gets revealed.

That said, the choice to make Hank’s ending genuinely tragic rather than simply a villain getting defeated is one of the smarter swings the show has taken this season. His final moments lean into pathos instead of spectacle, and it recontextualizes him as someone whose grievance, however violently expressed, came from a real place rather than pure malice.

The closing minutes, which jump forward into a noticeably bleaker future built around a version of Jon fans have not seen before, do a great job of resetting the stakes for the back half of the season without undercutting what just happened in Metropolis. Adult Swim programming chief Michael Ouweleen has said the show has been performing well enough that the network wants to keep it going, a note he shared during a panel appearance at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and this episode makes a strong case for why that confidence is warranted.

Taken as a whole, this is the show firing on nearly every cylinder it has built up over three seasons, using its cast, its stakes, and its willingness to actually change the status quo to deliver one of its most satisfying episodes yet, even if the sheer number of moving pieces occasionally outruns the runtime meant to hold them. I walked away from this one energized rather than exhausted, which is exactly what a mid-season turning point like this needs to accomplish, and I am giving it 8.5 out of 10.