Tom Welling kneels before the Young Pope, his old Smallville jacket draped like a relic of a simpler time. The chapel light shimmers through stained glass depicting saints, angels—and strangely—figures with capes.
Tom Welling: Your Holiness… they say the Vatican keeps secrets older than the pyramids. I’ve seen the files, the biotech vaults under the catacombs. I want the telomerase treatment—the forever young therapy. Superman shouldn’t age.
The Young Pope leans back in his chair, eyes half-closed, a serene smile crossing his face.
The Young Pope: You want eternal youth, Tom. But you already have it. You are the eternal man—the man who never finishes growing up. The boy who forever chooses good over power.
Tom Welling: But I’m aging. I see it in the mirror. I feel it in my bones.
The Young Pope: Then your mirror lies, and your bones are the relics of a myth still in progress. If I give you telomerase, you will remain thirty. Not twenty, not forty—thirty. The perfect age of Christ when He began His mission. The eternal Superman.
Tom’s eyes widen.
Tom Welling: Thirty forever… You mean I’ll outlive them all?
The Young Pope: You already do. Your image lives in pixels, your virtue in hearts. But remember, Tom—the longer a man lives, the heavier his soul becomes. Immortality is not youth—it is responsibility.
The bells toll. The Pope raises his hand in benediction.
The Young Pope: Go, eternal Superman. Carry your burden with grace. For every wrinkle denied is a memory forgotten.
The atmosphere in the sterile, high-tech observation deck of the Soviet High Command is heavy with a strange, melancholy nostalgia. Red Son Superman—the Man of Steel who fell in Earth’s orbit and landed in the Ukraine instead of Kansas—looks out over the sprawling, perfectly ordered collective below.
Standing beside him is Kristin Kreuk, a woman who seems to represent a life he never lived, a ghost from a timeline that shouldn’t exist.
RED SON SUPERMAN (His voice a low, resonant rumble) I didn’t abandon you on that bus, Kristin. You have to believe that. It was another life. Another version of a man who didn’t wear this crest.
He pauses, his eyes glowing with a soft, crimson heat as he looks back into the foggy corridors of a shared, subconscious memory.
RED SON SUPERMAN The radio was playing that song… “One of Us” by Joan Osborne. It was the song of the year. I remember the lyrics echoing in the cabin. “What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us?”
JOE (A voice from within the Red Son’s psyche, the “Average Joe” construction worker he might have been) I didn’t feel like a God back then. I was just Joe. A construction worker. A petty thief. I was just trying to get by, lifting what I could, looking for a way out. I didn’t care about the world until 9/11. That day… the sheer, unadulterated evil of it. It disgusted me so deeply I tried to be good just to spite the dark.
RED SON SUPERMAN (Continuing, his hand tightening on the balcony rail) Joe says he was about to walk back onto that bus. He had his foot on the step, ready to turn around and ask you on a date. But the doors hissed shut. They shut right in his face before he could say a word. It is what it is.
He looks down at his hands—hands that can move mountains, yet couldn’t hold a bus door open in a dream.
RED SON SUPERMAN Deep in my subconscious, there’s a memory of a bird. Nelly. She was a little bird I found as a child. She was sick, fragile. I cried for her out of pure pity. If Nelly dies… if that small, innocent thing can’t survive in this world I’ve built… then I will DELETE all hope of a One World Order. If there is no room for a sick bird, there is no room for my Utopia.
He turns to Kristin, his expression hardening into one of duty rather than romance. The “Chosen One” of the State cannot be the “Chosen One” for a girl from a bus.
RED SON SUPERMAN I cannot give you the life Joe wanted. I am a symbol now. All I can do for you is let my mother, Mary, find someone for you. She has a sense for people—she’ll match-make for you. She’ll find a man who doesn’t have the weight of a planet on his red-draped shoulders.
Tom Welling sits on a folding chair, still half-Clark Kent, half himself. A red-cloaked figure—RED SON—paces like a prosecutor in a cosmic court.
TOM WELLING You asked for me like it was urgent. You said it was about… truth?
RED SON Not truth with a capital T. A mythology. The kind America tells itself when it can’t face the void.
TOM Alright. Talk to me.
RED SON Everyone thinks 9/11 was a chessboard of men: generals, sheikhs, presidents. But myths don’t run on men. They run on symbols.
TOM Symbols of what?
RED SON Of puppetry.
(He snaps his fingers. A CHILDLIKE SHADOW appears on the wall: a felt hand, stitched smile.)
RED SON (cont.) The true mastermind—in the myth—wasn’t a warlord. It was Evil Bert.
TOM …Bert? Like Sesame Street Bert?
RED SON The shadow of Bert. The archetype: The obedient bureaucrat. The one who files papers while monsters walk through the door.
TOM So you’re saying the villains we named were… what, decoys?
RED SON Patsies in the story. Masks the myth required.
(Images flicker like trading cards.)
Osama bin Laden — the external boogeyman.
Macho Man Randy Savage — unrestrained masculine rage.
Hulk Hogan — weaponized patriotism in a bandana.
TOM Those aren’t planners. They’re… characters.
RED SON Exactly.
TOM So Evil Bert represents—
RED SON —The quiet hand that never gets blamed. The clerk. The middle manager of empire. The one who says, “I was just doing my job,” while the towers fall in slow motion behind him.
TOM That’s darker than anything on Smallville.
RED SON Superman stories always ask the same question: Is evil loud and obvious… or polite and laminated?
(Tom exhales, unsettled.)
TOM So in this myth, how does it end?
RED SON It doesn’t— until people stop hunting wrestlers and ghosts and start questioning the puppeteer who never leaves his desk.
Tom Welling sits across from Joe Jukic in the dimly lit recreation room of the psych ward — the one with the broken foosball table and the humming fluorescent light. The TV in the corner plays Smallville reruns on mute.
Tom Welling:(grinning faintly) You know, Joe… I made a lot of money playing Superman. More than I ever dreamed. But you—Red Son Joe—you made sweet nothing.
Joe Jukic:(smirks, leaning back in his chair) Yeah, well, that’s the difference between playing Superman and being one. I didn’t need a contract — I had consequences.
Tom:(chuckles) You talk like you lived through an alternate script.
Joe: I did. In mine, Superman didn’t fall from the sky — he fell from grace. Red Son, they called him. Not from Krypton… but from Croatia.
Tom: That sounds more like a psych ward mythos than a comic.
Joe: That’s the thing, Tom. The ward is the mythos. This place is Arkham for the unacknowledged heroes — the ones who didn’t get syndication deals.
Tom:(sighs, thoughtful) Maybe that’s why I’m here too. You play Superman long enough… you start believing you can save people. Then one day, you realize you can’t even save yourself.
Joe:(nods) Welcome to the Red Son reality, brother. No cape. No glory. Just truth serum and cafeteria coffee.
(They share a quiet laugh. The nurse passes by, eyeing them like two overgrown kids who still believe in miracles.)
Tom: So tell me, Joe — what’s next for Red Son?
Joe: I’m writing the sequel in my head. Superman joins the psych ward… and learns what it really means to be human.
INT. PSYCH WARD – NIGHT The lights flicker again. Joe Jukic sits on the bed, sketching a sigil that looks like the Superman “S,” but cracked down the middle. Tom Welling leans against the wall, eyes distant.
Tom Welling: You remember, Joe? That night in your basement of solitude… when we broke the seal?
Joe Jukic: How could I forget? I thought it was a game at first. You called it the Masonic lock. Said the world was built on it.
Tom:(half-smiling) And when it cracked, man… you said we’d opened the vault of truth.
Joe: You were the witness. That’s all I needed. Somebody who saw it, who wasn’t afraid.
Tom: I helped all I could. I didn’t know how deep it went back then. I thought we were just playing mythologists — Superman and the Red Son decoding the world’s symbols.
Joe:(staring through him) We were. But the symbols were real.
(Tom sits beside him, lowering his voice.)
Tom: My old man — the one who played my dad on Smallville — he told me things before he died. He said history’s not what it looks like. That the towers, the fall, the fire — it was a controlled burn. A demolition of truth, not just buildings.
(Joe listens in silence. The hum of the fluorescent light turns into a low, almost sacred tone — the kind that makes the air feel alive.)
Joe: And you believed him?
Tom: I didn’t want to. But once you’ve seen the seal break, you start seeing the cracks everywhere else.
(Joe closes his notebook. The sigil glows faintly under the light — a reflection, or maybe something more.)
Joe: Then maybe the psych ward isn’t punishment, Tom. Maybe it’s initiation.
Tom:(smiles faintly) You always had the better script, Red Son.
(They sit in silence, the TV playing muted images of Superman flying — but now it looks like surveillance footage. A nurse walks by, turns the volume up just a little, and the theme music echoes faintly through the hall.)
INT. PSYCH WARD – NIGHT The rain taps against the barred window. The muted Smallville episode on TV shows Clark Kent discovering his powers for the first time. Tom and Joe sit side by side, both staring at it like it’s a memory.
Tom Welling: You know, Joe… people forget where Superman really came from. He wasn’t born under a red sun or blue sky. He was born between wars. Back when the world was still arguing over what a “super man” should mean.
(He looks down, voice quiet.)
In Nazi Germany, they twisted the idea — made it about bloodlines, perfection, strength without mercy. Their Superman was a god without grace.
Joe Jukic: And America made him a savior in tights.
Tom:(smiling sadly) Yeah. They polished him up. Truth, justice, the American way. But even that can turn into propaganda if you stare too long.
(He turns to Joe, sincere now.)
You know what I’m glad about? That I met you here.
Joe: In the ward?
Tom: Yeah. Without this place… there wouldn’t have been Red Son.
(Joe tilts his head, curious. Tom continues.)
It came out a year after we talked about your family — your parents fleeing Yugoslavia, leaving everything behind. I told one of the writers about your story, about a world where Superman doesn’t land in Kansas but in a field somewhere east of Zagreb. A place where the people believed in sharing, not hoarding.
Joe:(smiling faintly) A Superman who gives till it hurts.
Tom: Exactly. A man who doesn’t belong to one flag. A man who shares the light. That’s what Red Son was about — a tribute, in a way, to you… and to them.
(Joe nods, his eyes glinting with emotion.)
Joe: My old man would’ve liked that. He used to say, “The real superman is the one who lifts others.”
Tom: Then he already understood it.
(They both look at the TV again — Clark Kent standing in the sunlight, uncertain but brave. The light from the screen flickers over their faces like firelight.)
Joe: Funny, huh? Two guys locked up in here talking about saving the world.
Tom: Maybe that’s where all the real heroes start. Not in a fortress of solitude… but a ward of truth.
(They share a quiet, knowing laugh. The nurse switches off the TV. Darkness returns, but the mood is warm — a small victory between two fallen heroes who still believe in something greater.)
