The Time Thief

Clark stopped a subway collision for the 27th time when he found his press card embedded in a gap in the tracks. The back of the document reads in Kryptonian script: "This is your 316th filing." When he looked up, every passenger in the carriage held up the latest edition of the Daily Planet, the front page of which showed him planting a bomb on the tracks.

Lois emerges from the smoke of the explosion, her news camera flashing kryptonite green: "Tell me, Clark, why are you always within 300 meters of every big story?" She tore open her collar to reveal a bar code on her carotid artery - exactly the same as the bank robber who had been rescued three days earlier.

chronocyst

The ice crystals of the Fortress of Solitude began to seep blood. Clark uses his thermal vision to cut through the walls, where hundreds of Kryptonian corpses curl up, all with his face on them. When X looked through the Earth's crust, he saw the entire American continent suspended beneath the giant hourglass, the top half containing the remains of Krypton, the bottom half is the 20th century image of the Earth.

When Martha calls, Clark's super hearing picks up both versions of the conversation. The real mother was baking an apple pie while the voice on the phone screamed, "They're planting purple SUNS in my head!" The moment he hung up, the Krypton probe's distinctive green beam rose in the direction of the farm - the one he should have destroyed 30 years ago.

Mirror hunt

The countdown to Lex's bomb stops at 00:07, when Clark's fist goes through his partner's body and shatters the pillars of the Parliament building. Lex's shadow raises the kryptonite dagger: "You stole my life." As the dagger penetrates, Clark sees an alternate timeline in which Lex becomes the savior and himself is reduced to ashes in the explosion.

As Lois leads the protesters around the Fortress of Solitude, Clark is deciphering hidden messages from the Krypton Repository. The cover of each book was an old edition of the Daily Planet, and when he turned to his Pulitzer Prize-winning issue, hundreds of photographs of his mother's dead bodies of different ages fell from the inside pages - the earliest of which were taken long before he came to Earth.

Cyclic truth

As Clark crashes through the atmosphere, Jor-El's face appears on the surface of the sun: "Krypton never existed." His biological force field suddenly enveloped the entire solar system, and the Kryptonian crest appeared on all planets. When the last rays of sunlight die out, humanity finally sees the universe for what it really is - each star is a Clark in a different timeline burning a self-sustaining illusion.

When Lois' bullet went through Clark's heart, the kryptonite bullet exploded with memory crystals. Each fragment shows him stealing important moments from someone else's life: the night Bruce's parents survived, the moment the Flash's particle accelerator exploded, the dawn of the Deep sea when Aquaman discovered the Trident. Before his consciousness dissipated, Clark saw Earth transformed into a giant crystal, reflecting all the possibilities he had erased.