The character will help Lex Luthor navigate the fallout of Superman's death.
Superman & Lois fans this week were shocked and delighted when Lex Luthor (Michael Cudlitz) referenced working with Brainiac during the two-part series premiere. In the course of the story (even more spoilers ahead), Lex receives a fancy technological box, in which he plans to keep the heart of the recently-dead Superman. It's a transparent box with a metal frame and a UV-looking light shining in on it, which leads us to believe it's probably designed for bombarding the heart so that it can be weakened. In any case, he's promised that its designer, "Milton," promised it would work. When Lex praises the work, Amanda McCoy (Yvonne Chapman) cautions against inflating the "brainiac's" ego.
In the comics, Milton Fine was a sideshow mentalist who performed as "The Amazing Brainiac." First appearing during John Byrne's 1980s run on the Superman titles, there was no direct tie to the planet Colu or the traditional Brainiac alien at first, since the 1986 Man of Steel reboot had rewritten Superman's history following Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Fine was chosen as the host of the Coluan Vril Dox and became a villain -- one who needed a body to host his mind and ultimately set his sights on Superman more than once. The premise delivered some interesting stories -- including one where he successfully took on the body of Doomsday for a time.
"Considering what we needed for our story, when the opportunity presented itself to use Milton, it worked out great," executive producer Brent Fletcher told ComicBook. "This is a completely different version of this guy, so that was exciting. We always like to tell our own version of [the story], and it ends up being pretty fun."
The decision to use the Milton Fine version of Brainiac makes a lot of sense for Superman & Lois, a show that has been steeped in the mythology of what fans call the "Triangle Era" of Superman.
The Triangle Era began in 1991 with Superman #51. It's called the Triangle Era because, during that time, there were four monthly Superman comic books, and they had an intricate, interwoven continuity. In addition to the standard issue numbers in the corner box, each cover would feature a triangle on the cover, which would correspond to the book's publishing/reading order in the year of its release. You can see an example below courtesy of Michael Bailey, a Superman scholar and podcaster who has a great breakdown of the Triangle Era at his blog.
During the Triangle Era, Superman comics introduced fan-favorite characters including The Eradicator, Steel, Doomsday, and others who have appeared in Superman & Lois.
That said, don't expect a 1:1 recreation of Brainiac's -- or Fine's -- story on Superman & Lois. There simply is not enough time for that in a ten-episode season that also has to tackle the death and return of Superman.
"I don't know if I would say 'Triangle era,'" Fletcher said of their version of Milton. "I felt like he was pretty specific to the show."
Helbing chimed in to say "I totally agree," and then Fletcher finished, "It's just time and space. We have ten episodes. We don't have a ton of time to really develop the full Triangle Era brainiac, you know? But the one we have, I think, is pretty enjoyable for where we used him."
The arrival of Brainiac in the story solves one of two major lingering mysteries that have been hanging over the final season of Superman & Lois since Comic Con International in San Diego this summer. The first was the identity of a mystery DC character that showrunners had said they were surprised they got permission to use -- and that's Milton/Brainiac.
The second mystery is the role being played by Tom Cavanagh, best known to comic book fans as the Reverse-Flash and Harrison Wells on The Flash. The actor will appear in some season four episodes of Superman & Lois, but his role has been kept under wraps. Is he, famous for being a smart, smarmy villain, going to play Brainiac?
"No, it's not," both Fletcher and his co-showrunner Todd Helbing told me in unison.
"I won't even give that a no-comment. I don't want to set the expectation," Fletcher added, while Helbing promised "We have a fun thing for Tom."
So, without Cavanagh as a candidate, we don't know yet who will play Milton Fine/Brainiac -- but if he's actually a Coluan energy cloud looking for a body, it could be more or less anyone.
The half-human Brainiac appeared only a few times before taking on the collective might of DC's heroes in the crossover story Panic in the Sky. During a relatively short span, he went from a pudgy guy with bad hair to a svelte, modernized take on the Brainiac character -- and then he spent a few years in a vegetative state, being watched over by Earth's best scientific minds.
Years later, the half-human Brainiac would be retconned into being a pale imitation of the real Vril Dox. Supposedly, he had downloaded his consciousness into a cloud of nanites, and it was those -- not the "real" Brainiac -- that Superman fought for years.
The Fine Brainiac appearing during Superman & Lois's take on "The Death of Superman" is an interesting bit of serendipity. A few years after Superman died and returned, the comics were gripped by a story called "Dead Again," in which everyone in the world was being convinced that Superman was still dead, that there was a verifiable body in his grave, and that the real Superman's DNA didn't match what S.T.A.R. Labs had on record. Superman, driven half-mad by the fraud, eventually figured out that it was Brainiac behind the trickery.
This is not Brainiac's first live-action outing, either. The character most recently appeared in Krypton, where he was the full-on Coluan monstrosity, riding around the universe in a skull-shaped spaceship. This is also not the first time Brainiac has been tied to the Death of Superman story -- that honor goes to Superman Lives!, an unproduced 1990s screenplay for a Superman movie written by Kevin Smith.