A few days ago, when writing my ridiculously late ‘Blue’ review, I praised Smallville for being the only show on television that could genuinely shock me with the unpredictability of its plot twists. I also accused the entirety of the rest of the show, and the majority of its cast, of being total shite, but I digress.
What ‘Gemini’ does, is take this one saving grace about the series so far, and sodomises it to the point where tears flow freely from its eyes and it promises to never do it again, simply to avoid more non-consensual buggery.
However, before we get onto the shouty bit, let’s take a look at the episode as a whole. The setup is that Lois is trapped in the Daily Planet building by a madman who seems to want her to jump through a series of Lex-Luthor-destroying hoops. Failure to comply with his batty schemes will result in the Planet offices being redecorated with a thin film of cousin Chloe’s exploded face because he’s planted a bomb on her.
Ok, so it’s clichéd to the point of near insanity, but to give the Smallville team their due, it doesn’t work too badly. 24 it isn’t, but the basis for an entertaining episode is there.
Now then, anyone who reads these reviews regularly (come on, surely there must be at least one?) will know that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the Smallville incarnation of Lois. Or Erica Durance and her unholy eyebrows for that matter.
However, I have no intention of spending another review whinging about her. Yes, the same problems are all still there, but the main issue I usually have with Lois is with the writing behind the character. The best young actress in the world couldn’t make a decent role out of the material Lois is usually saddled with. Hell, forget young, you could give this shit to Judi Dench if this was Smallville: Superman; The Geriatric Years and it would still be terrible. All she ever does is shag random men and hit people whilst wearing stupid outfits (that red PVC catsuit last season nearly induced a brain embolism I was laughing so hard).
Whilst I may not be a big fan of the Smallville character, it is refreshing to see Lois doing something out of the ordinary for a change. She is very much the focus of the episode and I almost feel sorry for Durance because she’s clearly trying to make the most of her moment in the limelight, despite her total inability to act. Bizarrely, she seems to have passed this on to the rest of the cast as well, that or they were all in a hurry to pack up for Christmas, because almost without exception, they were terrible in ‘Gemini’
Normally this is the point where I’d start droning on about how Allison Mack saved the episode, but this week, to my disappointment and amazement, I can’t (though this is more due to writing than her performance). Her moment with Jimmy in the lift was one of the most poorly executed sequences I have ever seen in Smallville. If I was stuck in a lift (American translation: ‘Elevaaaaaaiiidrrrr’) about to be blown to kingdom come by a half pound of C4, I would not be sitting there explaining, with all the animation and personality of a dead wildebeest, that I was a meteor freak to my ex-boyfriend. I would be contemplating why exactly (being a heterosexual male) I had an ex-boyfriend in the first place and how I had come to be stuck in an exploding lift with him, but that’s beside the point.
Chloe should have been running about as if her hair was on fire making panicked witty comments in her trademark style, whilst trying to hack the lift controls with her totally implausible techno bollocks to get them out. Having failed, her last minute lip lock with Jimmy would have been perfectly acceptable.
Instead we get a dismally directed, emotionless scene in which Smallville continues it’s tradition of characters revealing their ‘power’ related personal secrets in the lamest way possible *cough* Clark, Lana, safe door instead of 100th-episode-fortress-awesome *cough*.
Tom Welling also seems to have sent a waxwork model of himself with a broom handle shoved up its arse in to work, having decided to stay in bed for the day, because he’s completely useless for the entire episode. ‘Ah yes!’ I hear you cry, ‘but he’s not playing Clark is he? He’s playing Bizzaro masquerading as Clark!’ to which I reply ‘he wasn’t playing much of anything that I could detect’. Seriously, they could have wrapped the kitchen dresser up in garish plaid and shoved it in front of the camera and it would have produced much the same effect. Welling needs a good slap, as does the director, who should be tarred and fathered, forced to eat a red hot lump of charcoal and banished forever to direct episodes of Hollyoaks.
The scenes involving Lois and her mysterious assailant are all a bit limp, not to mention preposterous, as the madman communicates only by phone at first, then for no apparent reason decides half way through that it’s not worth the hassle and turns up in person. They are also riddled with plot holes. Forgive me for nitpicking, but he cuts Lois’s network cable, meaning her warning email can’t reach Chloe, yet later in the episode it inexplicably turns up on her computer. Sloppy doesn’t even come close.
And quite what the hell they were thinking having Lois wired up and told to pull a gun on Lex, I don’t know. What could have been a charged and intense scene ended up being hilarious because it was so completely unbelievable. Again, the writing is totally screwed up; any sensible man or woman in that situation would be sweating profusely, shaking, and possibly soiling themselves whilst verging on hysterical as they desperately screamed their questions at Lex. But as with the Chole and Jimmy lift-based nonsense, they opt for ‘cool under pressure’ and it totally misfires.
Viewed as a whole however, the plot has a lot more to offer, regardless of execution. You see, last episode it was revealed that Grant Gabriel is actually Julian Luthor, Lex’s younger, deader brother. This prompted me to wonder in my last review how exactly they were going to get around the slightly inconvenient ‘Memoria’, an episode that had explained Julian’s death in great detail and been the highlight of season 3.
Well, in this episode all is revealed and I’m sad to say that unlike the previous twists this season has slotted in without a moment’s warning, this one is about as predictable as Bill Clinton’s inspired attempt at denying he had anything to do with Monica Lewinsky turning out to be a load of total shitspeak.
See, Lois’s random Lex hating stalker turns out to be another skeleton from Lex’s closet of failed science experiment madness, or 33.1 as it’s implausibly known. Unfortunately the writers were so busy being pleased with themselves about the last plot twist that they forgot to write this one at all and in attempting to give subtle, cryptic hints, they totally gave the game away. About ten minutes after meeting ‘Adrian’ in the flesh, I twigged that he was in fact a failed version of ‘Julian’. Though this was partly because my first name is Julian in the good old real world, and the two names are often confused by people. I have no idea why, they don’t even sound similar, but hey, the world is full of thickies.
This of course means that Grant Gabriel, or Julian Luthor, (or ‘Twat’ as I like to call him), is in fact a clone, which is unbelievably annoying. The Smallville writers have a nasty habit of taking a relatively good idea and overusing it. This season has latched onto the ‘clones’ idea like a starving lamprey eel attaching to the buttock of a whale shark.
Lana wasn’t dead, it was a clone (and she still might be). Clark’s mum was a clone, Zor-El was a clone, Lex was making an army of clones, Lex’s brother is a clone, Bizzaro is a clone, the baddie this week was a clone and now Clark isn’t Clark but his aforementioned bonkers clone. Clones, clones, clones, clones, clones, clones, MOTHERFUCKING CLONES!
I wouldn’t be surprised if in the final ever episode it cuts, Soprano’s style, to a pitch black screen but with bold white lettering declaring: P.S. THEY WERE ALL CLONES!
The fact that when confronted by this Lex goes nuts, starts manically shouting at everyone and shoots Adrian in the chest in the only decently acted moment of the episode, is scant consolation for the uselessness and predictability of the twist. It’s not that it’s a bad idea, and it does neatly sidestep the ‘Memoria’ issue, but it’s pure sloppiness to constantly use ‘he/she was a clone’ as a get out of jail free card.
In the standout stupid moment of the week, we have Bizzaro’s revelation that he is in fact impersonating Clark, who appears to be frozen in a block of ice within the fortress.
Now then, at face value, this isn’t too bad, the fact that they are using the fucking ‘clone’ thing twice within the same episode not withstanding. (The phantom who became Bizarro stole some of Clarks Kryptonian DNA and cloned himself a body in the season premiere). However, the slight issue I have with this is that it doesn’t make a jot of sense. Jor-El has certainly never mentioned or shown any evidence of having the ability to control phantoms, so why does he suddenly start now? And in what way is trapping your son in a block of ice (even if you are downloading knowledge into his brain or something similar, as I suspect he might be) and letting a total maniac wreck his life a just punishment?
If Jor-El could control phantoms he could have saved Clark a lot of trouble in the previous season, although I suppose you could argue that he wanted to use them as a test for Kal-El to hone his powers against.
Why is Bizzaro bothering to impersonate Clark so perfectly? The last time he showed up, he accused Kal-El of being a total gimp and tried to beat him to death and clearly didn’t give a toss about anyone other than himself, so why bother saving Chloe and Jimmy or getting close to Lana? The creature is a jigsaw faced head case so what the hell he’s up to is anyone’s guess. It makes my brain hurt trying to work out how the heck they are going to manage to explain it.
And finally why hasn’t the Martian Manhunter come back to stop the phantom he clearly did a god-awful job of imprisoning? None of it makes any sense at all!
I realise that come next episode this may all be explained, thus making me look like a colossal idiot, but there needs to be a middle ground. It’s all very well setting your audience up for a little shock, but not even giving any hints as to why that shock takes place is irritating at best and undergarments-on-head stupid at worst.
Overall, ‘Gemini’ was something of an exception to the rule for Smallville. Its strongest point was, for once, it’s plot, rather than the decent performances of a few key cast members. Unfortunately, the direction and acting misfired staggeringly and resulted in an episode that felt plodding and soulless, when it could have been fast paced (if clichéd) fun. The decisions to let Lois do something out of the ordinary and to explain ‘Julian’ were good ones, but the ridiculous overuse of the ‘clones’ idea and the increasingly silly ‘random plot twist of the week’ weren’t. All in all, a standard Smallville disappointment.
5.8/10
