Over the years there have been a few storylines in Smallville that have had great potential. The introduction of the phantoms last season for example set us up with the spine tingling possibility of a series of super-tussles between Clark and some nifty non-Krypto-powered villains. However, Smallville has almost always squandered these well conceived premises by messing up the execution. All too often, we are left wondering why the writers come up with such a neat concept and then create a rushed mess of a story arc to try and do it justice. Sadly, ‘Blue’ is very much a case in point.
The intention of the episode is to conclude the ‘Kara and her crystal’ plot line, which has so far been noteworthy for being one of the few stories in recent Smallville history to actually deliver a twist we couldn’t see coming from the other side of the globe with our eyes closed. Whilst being dead.
You may recall that Clark pinched Kara’s crystal from a government lab and didn’t tell anyone apart from Lana he had it. This prompted him to wonder if he would be able to clone his dead birth mother from the information held within the crystal. This always sounded like an incredibly un-Superman-like thing to do to me, but ho hum.
Despite the silliness of the methodology Clark employs to bring her back, it’s hard to deny that the potential for a great reunion loomed here like the arse cheeks of a generously proportioned German woman on a beach somewhere on the Costa del sol. (Worst analogy ever).
In ‘Blue’, the writers unwisely decide to wrap up the entire storyline in one episode, resulting in a rushed mess that lacks both direction and any real point. Things just sort of happen, falling limply out of your TV screen whilst failing miserably to stir up any real emotion.
Clark, having finally shown a jot of common sense last episode by taking the opportunity to poke Lana with his purple-headed-womb-broom, abandons his grip on sanity (yet again) by totally ignoring Jor-El (yet again) and bringing a load of havoc-reeking Kryptonians to earth (yet again) before being punished by his dead dad for being such a gargantuan cock (yet again).
Zor-El and Lara are both excruciatingly annoying for the entire episode, just as they were in previous appearances. Why is it I wonder that nobody from Krypton can speak properly?
At one point I almost buried my face in the TV screen just to stop Lara saying things like “you seem ill at ease” instead of ‘you seem nervous’. Zor-El, for his part, suffers a similar case of verbal diarrhea. But his contribution to the episode is to flounce about like a fool in the worst leather trench coat I have ever seen and talk total ‘malevolent’ bollocks at people. He comes across as some sort of pantomime villain, lacking anything resembling menace and being about as frightening as a puppy in a bag of cotton wool wearing a funny little hat.
In a foolhardy attempt to instil some scary, the writers decided to have him beat everyone up. He throws Lionel through a table, Lana across a room, tries to choke the life out of his own daughter, slaps Lara about with gleeful abandon and thumps Clark to within an inch of his powerless life. Yes, Clark looses his powers (yet again) in this episode, but I’m coming on to that. What the Smallville writers need to understand is that fisticuffs do not a decent villain make. It’s all very well having Zor-El hitting people, but when it’s simply for the sake of it, it really starts to grate.
Also, Clark loosing his powers for the thirteen millionth time is just fucking stupid. I’m sorry guys, but if you can’t afford the special effects for a decent fight, can you please stop setting us up with corkers? Watching Clark and Zor-El beating seven shades of shit out of each other in that alleyway would have been a real treat, even with that stupid trench coat flapping about. But instead the convenient and totally brainless introduction of a power sapping blue kryptonite ring on Clark’s fourth finger robs us of any potential fun he might have had with a real opponent. Clark can’t get it off his finger for some totally unfathomable reason, as it went on easily enough, and spends most of his time running about with blood streaming down his face, whinging about how his powers are gone. Kara and Lara (try saying that after a few drinks) also seem to loose their powers, or forget they have them at any rate, as they do precisely nothing to stop a madman taking them hostage and threatening to kill them. At one point, as mentioned previously, Zor-El starts choking Kara to death, which had me yelling ‘punch him in the face you dippy tart!’ at her in disgust.
In the comics at least, Kara is every bit as strong as Clark; in fact she is often stronger because she didn’t grow up having to restrain her awesome strength with conscious effort. So far this season she has had no trouble whatsoever flooring Clark whenever the mood takes her, so why prey tell, does she suddenly start acting like a wimpy girl in this episode? With the strength of two Kryptonian Women combined, Zor-El wouldn’t have stood a chance, so why they let themselves get trounced so soundly is beyond me.
Interspersed with all this is the even more awful plot line revolving around that poisonous trollop Lois and her useless excuse for an editor. She is caught trying to shove her tongue into his right bronchus by Chloe, who, in one of the episode’s few good moments, accuses her of being a silly tart who is effectively flushing her career down the pan by jumping up and down on her editors purple python. She points out that this is only going to lead to people (correctly) assuming that she slept her way to the top and writing her off as a two-bit whorebag.
Can I just say: YAY FOR CHLOE!
The writers then, realizing they had pretty much hit bedrock and were now tunnelling sideways in that hole they have been digging for Lois, hurriedly made a thoroughly useless attempt at placating Lois Lane fans everywhere by having her confront her boss about the reasons he hired her in the first place. He claims it had nothing to do with her pneumatic plastic inflato-tits and tells her and thus us, to be on our merry way and stop worrying about it. You know what?! No. Just No.
Stop wrecking Lois and have her fuck off for a few episodes. Totally revamp the character in that time, then have her come back, if you must, as the Lois we all want to see. End of.
Anyway, the main story comes to a climax with Clark teleporting to the fortress in an attempt to put an end to the most hilariously stupid evil villain’s evil master plan of doom ever. In fact this is without doubt my standout stupid moment of the week.
Zor-El, the huge dafty, decides that he’s going to consult the ‘Little Villain’s pocket guide to clichéd evil schemes’ and go with a classic: Blotting out the earth’s sun in order to kill the population.
Hmmm….teensy problem with ya plan there Zor-El mate, those nifty super powers of yours? The ones you seem to like having? Yeah, those come from the planet’s yellow sun you massive cheesy cock end!
How dumb, how indescribably dumb, would you actually need to be to remove the one source of your godlike powers when trying to take over the world? It’s not as if humans are going to spontaneously drop dead if you blot out the sun. Hell, I live in England, where seeing the sun for more than five seconds is an earth shattering event that makes us shoot our tea and crumpets out of our noses, and I can tell you that despite being a bit paler than your average yank, I have yet to expire. Sooner or later the military might cotton on and then, to put it bluntly, Zor-El would be a bit fucked.
“Ha ha, puny earthlings” he would say “fear my wrath!” to which someone would reply, “what wrath you powerless twat?” and shoot him in the middle of his beak-nosed face.
This lunacy aside, Clark uses Kryptonite to save the day, shatters Kara’s crystal (along with every single bit of potential the storyline had) and in so doing, gets rid of both Zor-El and Lara. This has the combined knock on effect of restoring his powers (yet again) and sending his cousin hurtling into the ether as she was wrestling with her dad when he vanished. She then wakes up in Ireland, without a memory, handcuffed to a container and with a necklace…ah no wait, see I’ve messed up there, that’s Heroes. Silly me. Easy to get the two confused though. Isn’t it Smallville writers…?
At about this point I was beginning to seethe, the season was in tatters, the only interesting plot line botched out of existence and the outraged shoutyness that has thus far pervaded this review beginning to form in my mind. But bugger me sideways (note: that’s an expression, not an invitation) if the show doesn’t suddenly reach up and pluck a surprise out of nowhere.
As depressing as it sounds to say it, Smallville is consistently the only show I watch that manages to genuinely surprise me. Admittedly I don’t see the odd thing coming in BSG or Heroes, but to be walloped around the side of the head by a twist I didn’t even have an inkling about is a very rare thing. But they manage it.
See, Grant Gabriel is Julian Luthor. Yup, that one. Lex’s brother, Lionel’s son, and the inspiration behind ‘Memoria’, one of Smallville’s strongest episodes to date. Quite how they are going to explain the events of that episode (which revolved around the younger Luthor’s death) away I have no idea, but it does set up some neat possibilities for future plot lines and explain a huge amount of inconsistent rubbish in previous episodes. Such as how an idiot like Gabriel came to be running the Daily Planet, or why he was deleting the files on that hard disk Lana gave him last episode. It’s the one ‘light in the dark’ so to speak for this season.
Finally, and far less successfully, Clark has another shouting match with Jor-El in the fortress and good old pa apparently has a nasty surprise in store for his errant son. It remains to be seen what exactly this entails, but I remain to be convinced that the ‘Clark should have listened to Jor-El’ storyline needs to be brought back into focus (yet-a-fucking-gain).
Overall, ‘Blue’ was a real case of mishandled potential. I say this pretty much every review, so I’m getting pretty fed up of having to write it, but with decent writing, Smallville could be the best thing on television and the ‘Kara and her crystal’ plotline could have been fantastic. As it was, aside from the Julian based sting in the tail, and Chloe, ‘Blue’ was simply hopeless.
5.6/10
