'Superman & Lois' director breaks down this week's 'beautiful death sequence' & unlikely team-up

This week on Superman & Lois, one of the show's most testy character dynamics took a turn for the worse, and eventually gave us a major death scene. So, how do the star who did the deed and the director who showed it all to the audience feel about that, and what's next on this dark path? Let's take a closer look. 

**Spoilers for Superman & Lois Season 2 Episode 7, "Anti-Hero," below.**

It's been hard for Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) to relate to Lt. Anderson (Ian Bohen) all season long, even as Anderson assumed a greater leadership role at the DOD and pushed his own misunderstanding of Superman and his role on Earth just a little further into tense territory. That all came to a head in this week's episode, when Anderson went full villain, inhaled some X-Kryptonite, and went after Kal-El, his fellow Kryptonian and half-brother Tal-Rho (Adam Rayner), and Bizarro (also Hoechlin), who was just revealed as the mystery figure living in the mines earlier this season. 

Sadly, Anderson was in full-on war path mode, and with the added strength from the X-Kryptonite, he managed to choke the life out of Bizarro, leaving the childlike villain dead and Anderson himself on the run from the authorities he represented earlier in the same episode. 

“Yeah, I felt bad!” episode director Elizabeth Henstridge told TVLine. “But what an amazing opportunity, what a cool thing to be given to do. I think Amy Jo Johnson did such a brilliant job [directing] 206 where we get to know [Bizarro] a bit more. I was sad, but this is also the sci-fi world, so you never know!”

For Bohen, who noted to TVLine that the death is a sort of revenge for Hoechlin killing off his Teen Wolf character back in 2011, the question of exactly how Anderson would gain the strength and drive to take Bizarro out was the big looming question going into the season, when showrunner Todd Helbing let him know he'd be the one to do the deed.

"First I was wondering, 'How in the world are they going to script this out where it's believable that a person could be powerful enough to destroy this character that we've seen punching through the mantle of the Earth to get out?' That is terrifying! I'm going to go up against him? Uh-huh," Bohen told EW. "So how are we going to do that? But the way they got through it with the X-K, and the last sequence of the back-and-forth and Anderson's clearly so outmatched, the way they then made it so brutally simple of choking the life out of somebody, was so satisfying to me. You could see how gratifying it was for Anderson to win the greatest battle of his life. It was a beautiful death sequence, if there is such a thing."

But killing Bizarro wasn't the only big move Anderson made in the episode. By the end of "Anti-Hero," he's a wanted fugitive who's gone AWOL from the DOD, and he takes all of his newfound power straight into a meeting with Ally Alston (Rya Kihlstedt), the leader of the Inverse Method cult and the person who just might end up being the real Big Bad of Season 2. 

So, how does Bohen see his character now that he's decided to present himself as a potential ally to the Inverse Method? Even now, it seems he doesn't see Anderson as beyond redemption. 

"He's fighting to do what is right for the American people. He's benevolent and able to sacrifice himself and to do bad things for the greater good, as he sees it," Bohen said. "But if the ends justify the means, you have to be right. And if you're wrong and you've done all of these things, looking backward then you are truly a villain. He's not a villain at this point, he's just at odds with our protagonist, which makes him kind of a bad guy. But he hasn't quite gone full villain. He hasn't crossed a line that he can't come back from yet and I hope he doesn't, because we always want to be able to reel it in."

Superman & Lois airs Tuesdays on The CW.