Smallville |
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Smallville seems to be undergoing an (pardon the DC Universe pun), identity crisis. The show seems to be spinning its wheels and trying to figure out what it wants to be: superhero action drama, romantic comedy, or straight-up soap opera. In this Valentine’s Day-themed episode, Lois and Clark are up to their cartoonish hijinx in pursuit of a story, with Lois trying to sneak a peak at a RAO industries, corporate party with Lois standing on Clark’s shoulders. Seeing nothing, they carry on their merry way with Clark attempting to steer Lois in a much more romantic direction following a patented Lois Lane anti-Valentine’s Day tirade.
Along the way, they run into a perky chick dressed as a fairy, blowing (what we later discover is quarried Smallville meteor rock, AKA – The Smallville Writing Team’s Favorite Plot Device) fairy dust and peddling chocolates to the sorta happy couple. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the Continuity Fairy that sprinkled dust, but a fairy that somehow brought the powers of near-magical persuasion to Clark. When he tries to quell Lois’s Valentine rage and tells her that he wishes that they could have a more traditional relationship, the signifying glowing blue/green eyes on Lois and Clark’s part indicate that something goofy will happen as a result of this suggestion.
Said goofy thing really kicks into high gear the next day when Lois quits her job at the Daily Planet, saying that a woman’s place is in the home and her place is to support Clark’s journalistic career with a hot, homemade potroast.
While Lois is busy making with the June Cleaver back at the Kent Farmhouse, Clark is at the Watchtower, telling Chloe that he will be handing off fake passports and papers to everyone’s favorite female Kandorian, Alia the Assassin. Chloe is none too pleased with this, telling him that the solar tower will be completed in two days and that the Kandorians are likely responsible for killing Jor-El. And that Alia was responsible for killing her in an alternate future. Chloe tells Clark she thinks he’s making a major mistake by embracing the Kandorians and Zod and wishes they could send the whole crew of them to the Phantom Zone.
This week’s two-hour episode of Smallville borrows elements from several well-established comic franchises: A dab of Watchmen here, a smidge of Marvel’s Civil War there, and of course, the JSA. Things start off with Chloe blowing up Clark’s phone, telling him that they need to start taking their Super Clique more seriously when she runs into a man with a huge glowing staff named Sylvester Pemberton. Pemberton tells her that they are both trying to put together a team and that he knows all about Watchtower. He assures her that he’s a friend, right before he chucks her in a dumpster and fights off some sort of creature that sends atomic icicles everywhere, riddling him with holes. When Chloe hops out of the dumpster, she tries to tend to Sylvester who manages to squeak out some cryptic last words to her: Check.
Since it wouldn’t be an episode of Smallville without a trip to the hospital, Chloe is checked out and tells Clark what happened before she clones the data from Pemberton’s phone to her own Super Phone to get a bead on who Sylvester was. She discovers the last person he talked to (for 30 minutes… Sylvester must have a great calling plan!) was a Wesley Dodd.
Clark and Lois are coming off of a date at a Daily Planet-sponsored fund raiser. While the rest of the reporting staff are okay with their two “top basement reporters” dating, Ollie seemed to be standoffish. Granted, we don’t see Ollie being all sorts of awkward, we’re just given the details in between Clark and Lois’s stabs at PDA. When Clark offers to give Lois his personal “tour of the galaxy” (again, his words, not mine), Lois tells him that she really wants to take things slow. It doesn’t matter anyway, since Clark’s super hearing alerts him to a woman’s cries and he makes up some ham-fisted excuse to go home and go save the woman. Lois gets back in her car to go her separate way from their fifth official date and possibly give herself a tour of Lois Lane’s galaxy, when her car refuses to start.
A shadowy figure dressed in Oliver’s Green Arrow costume stands on a Metropolis rooftop and starts slinging arrows through Lois’s car when she goes to look under the hood. After snarking, “Jealous much?” to the figure on the roof, he winds back with the bow and arrow and fires one right through Lois’s shoulder. She hits the ground pronto, bleeding and out cold.
Picking up where last week’s episode of Smallville, Lois is still comatose following her seizure-riffic smoochfest with Clark. After being nabbed from the hospital, she’s on a slab in Belle Reeve, thanks to Tess Mercer and attended by her double-agent, computer geek minion, Stuart. Together, thanks to Stuart’s technological know-how, they’re somehow able to tap into Lois’s mind and see what she’s seeing: the future.
An image of Zod’s solar tower is front and center in Lois’s mind. This concerns Tess greatly, considering the blueprints for the tower haven’t been released to the public. Furthermore, Zod’s solar tower looks all sorts of Third Reich-y with red flags galore (in both a literal and figurative sense). Turns out, the location Lois had disappeared to at the beginning of this season was the future.
A large crate arrives at the Daily Planet. When Lois and Clark – bickering and bantering back and forth like an old married couple – finally open the box, they find a pair cops stripped down to their skivvies and bound and gagged, the result of a botched undercover drug bust. Clark nearly drops a load of kryptonite in his Super Shorts when he sees someone has co-opted his Blur’s “S” and made it into a window display on a Metropolis high rise. Lois, meanwhile, gets a little tingly in her undies over the prospect of the major scoop in retaliation for The Blur dodging her phone calls.
Lois is losing faith in The Blur and her editor chides her that he wants a story on this, especially since thanks to a Blur blunder, a prominent crime boss is back on the street. Instead of banging out a story, Lois heads to her shrink to tell her doctor how she has dreams about banging out yet another, much more erotic story with Clark. Mid-session, Lois’s phone rings with her refusing to pick up and we discover The Blur has his very own ringtone: “Holding Out For a Hero.”
In a Lois-free, soap opera drama-free, Smallville finally makes some decent headway on the Kandorian/Kryptonian storyline, revealing the source of Zod and Jor-El’s rivalry. (Julian Sands guest stars as Clark’s Kryptonian pappy, a more than acceptable substitute for Terence Stamp.) Several other major reveals are dropped, including Tess’s knowledge of Clark/Kal-El’s true identity and origins. All in all, this was a refreshing change of pace from the love story-centric episodes of the past few weeks.
Things kick off with a flashback of Major Zod (and the rest of the Kandorian soldiers) in the middle of a war 20 years before the destruction of Krypton. Jor-El requests the blood of Zod and several other Kandorians for a project he terms as his life work. He congratulates Zod on his inspiring speech to rally the troops for what we can only assume is a Kryptonian civil war. Just then, a big, mushroom cloud erupts on the spot where Kandor once stood. An astonished and emotionally overwhelmed Major Zod is pulled to safety by Jor-El as Kandor – and Zod’s family — is blown to itty-bitty pieces.
This week, Kandorian hijinx take a backseat to Lois and Clark aspiring to become the new Regis and Kelly. Desperate to get her mug on television and broaden her scope, Lois dubs print journalism a dying breed. And because Lois has so much journalistic integrity, she opts the career path of a fluffy, coffee-talk sort of morning show instead of a hard news show like 60 Minutes. Even better, she recruits Clark to submit an audition tape along with her for a new show. With their sparkling chemistry evident on film, the producers only agree to take Clark and Lois as a package deal. Their first assignment: Each of them has to go on a blind date on camera. Clueless Clark’s televised blind date is up first with a gorgeous blonde named Catherine. He’s adorably clumsy yet still manages to make Lois seethe with jealousy with Cat on their café date.
Across town, Oliver’s got a new plaything named Mia. Mia is a prostitute by night and a one bad mutha in an underground fighting ring during the other part of the night. In spite of the fact that Mia can clean the clocks of five guys twice her size in hand-to-hand combat, she still can’t escape her pimp/promoter. Enter Oliver Queen who attempts to save Mia and enlist her in the League. It’s all very Pretty Woman meets UFC with Ollie stepping into the role of Richard Gere to Mia’s Julia Roberts – right down to buying her new clothes and setting her up with someplace to stay. He cites this good deed on the fact that his own friends helped him to find a way out of his problems.
Emo now comes in blonde with Oliver Queen gambling away his fortune at a Metropolis casino. Still distraught over having disposed of Lex Luthor, he encounters a smokin’ hot Asian chick wearing a cheongsam dress that barely covers an elaborate dragon tattoo stretching from her back down her thigh. Known as “Roulette,” she offers him a choice of what’s beneath three metal decanters. He chooses the one that houses a red pill and decides to indulge.
Next thing you know, Oliver finds himself – and his snazzy white suit – trapped in a coffin with a flashlight. Wow. How Kill Bill Vol. 2 is this scenario?! Ollie sees another coffin emblazoned with the name “Alexander Luthor” and busts it open, seeing a pair of speakers. The voice emanating from the speakers must be reading from the Saw handbook, indulging in a very Jigsaw-esque dialogue with Ollie about the lives he’s destroyed. The voice asks him if he’s had his rabies shot and things go from Saw to Cujo in a matter of seconds as Ollie hides in a car from the dog, and the doors lock themselves. Cue the possessed tractor trailer from Maximum Overdrive which plows into Oliver’s Cujo mobile.
It’s Halloween so it must be Saw! No, actually, it must mean an episode of Smallville featuring the Toyman. It sure looks like the latest installment of Saw, however, with a group of people bound and gagged in a warehouse with a life-size marionette eyeing up the captives. Clark-as-The-Blur comes to the rescue, releasing the hostages and absorbing the blast from the sticks of dynamite wired to the doll.
Just as Clark is changing in a nearby telephone booth, Lois Lane pulls up to the scene of the crime in search of a scoop. Apparently, as a result of the explosion, Clark can now hear everyone’s thoughts. Particularly Lois’s libidinous lustings aimed in Clark’s general direction. Back at the Daily Planet, Clark is still hearing Lois’s thoughts, which lean towards the “I should have worn panties” variety before the two step into the elevator. (I was half expecting a cheap, “going down” joke to crop up here, but Smallville kept it relatively classy. I was impressed.)
After confiding in Chloe about his newly acquired superpower, Clark visits the Fortress of Solitude to ask Big Daddy Jor-El what’s going on. As it turns out, Clark’s new ability to hear the innermost thoughts of others was something Jor-El had planted within him to be triggered at a time when Clark would most need it. Although it’s only temporary, Jor-El expounds that this new power will help Clark to focus on what he has to and to help him overcome his recent string of errors in judgment.
In this episode, Smallville capitalizes on the current zombie trend with the good folk of Smallville and Metropolis infected with a blood-borne virus that transforms them into holdovers from Dawn of the Dead.
Zombie-ism isn’t the only thing going around in this episode, however. Premonitions and precognitive dreams are running rampant as Clark dreams of Lois standing at the Daily Planet copy machine with her back to him. Before things veer towards Zach and Miri territory, Lois turns around sporting bloodshot eyes, black teeth, and a complexion so bad it makes Edward James Olmos look positively dewy.
Clark wakes up from his nightmare to put out a fire (literally) as The Blur and arrive at the Daily Planet in time to engage Lois in some subtle, sexually frustrated banter. Before you can say “contrived plot,” the intrepid reporters are off and running in pursuit of the latest headline. Stately Luthor Manor has been broken into with Tess Mercer having been attacked by some seriously creepy dudes, landing her in the hospital. Just goes to show you, it doesn’t matter if you’re Lex Luthor or his right-hand woman, it just wouldn’t be an episode of Smallville if someone didn’t compromise a million dollar mansion’s security system. Surveilance footage reveals a bunch of zombie-like dudes breaking in with Tess fending them off with her madd martial arts skills.
