Clockwork Planet Smallville S7 EP11 ‘Siren’ Review

Once upon a time a man came up with an idea. He thought it was a pretty good idea and as it turned out, he was bang on the money. Quite a lot of it in fact because his idea went on to become one of the most enduring franchises of all time. He created an icon for a generation, or several, and more than forty years on, that icon is still going strong. The icon’s name became synonymous with heroism, patriotism, idealism and strength and it still is. It represents everything that is great and good about the world, and us, the small frail creatures who are doing our damnedest to destroy it. It also represents redemption, because when he was first conceived, the icon was a bad guy.

In short, the icon became not only a household name, but he captured the imaginations of the people and struck a chord with every person, young or old, who has ever dreamed of growing up to be a beefy heterosexual man in tights who wares his underpants on the outside. There are kids in India who don’t speak any English, but will respond with excited shouts of his name when shown a picture of his world famous ‘S’ symbol.

The icon’s name is Superman.

The greatest fictional hero the world has ever known. Superman. The Man of Steel. Our solar powered saviour from the stars. The “light to show the way”.

But every hero’s journey must have a beginning and it’s fair to say, Smallville has always had a mountain to climb. There have been many attempts to explain the origins of Kal-El of Krypton. Hell, he hasn’t even been Kal-El forever, at first his name was Kal-L. Things have been rebooted more than once.

However, the truth is that Superman isn’t really Superman at all. He’s a farmers son from Kansas and his name is Clark Kent. Bang on about his origins on a planet that’s been dead for thousands of years all you like, but Kal-El is his biological name, it’s not who he is. Similarly, Superman is just a mask, an untouchable paragon of virtue and light, a face to show a grateful and sometimes hostile world in order to protect the people he loves. The man behind the mask is Clark Kent and for all his power he is just that; a man.

Smallville, more than any other show, had the potential to tell the story of that man, and why he chose to become an icon in the first place. Nearly seven years later, I for one am no closer to knowing. The Clark Kent of Smallville is a whinging, mopey, angst ridden fool who simply refuses to grow up or take responsibility for his actions. He’s a shell, a hollow waste of space and about the furthest thing from a hero you can imagine. I’m sick to death of him.

Contrast him with Oliver Queen who returns briefly in ‘Siren’. Ollie is a dashing, unfeasibly good looking man in a stupid outfit. Within five minutes of the episode opening, we get to see him strutting his superhero stuff, twanging arrows at some daft looking cow in fishnets. He arrives, delivers his one liner (badly it must be said, and in a stupid voice) and saves a damsel in distress from the forces of evil eye makeup. No moody stares and petulant silences, no pointless bickering with his drippy girlfriend, just good clean superhero fun.

When was the last time Clark did anything like that?

‘Siren’ is a classic example of everything that is currently wrong with Smallville’s central character.

After Chloe uses some more of her stupidly implausible techno bollocks to hack into Lex Luthor’s files for Oliver on a regular basis, the younger Luthor decides enough is enough and hires himself some super powered help to put an end to her meddling. Enter the ludicrously dressed ‘Black Canary’. A woman with the ability to ‘scream’ at subsonic frequencies with enough resonance to shatter arrows in flight and who apparently designed her superhero costume with the sole purpose of falling out of it every ten seconds and looking like a hooker from a cheap bondage parlour. Canary is the love interest of Green Arrow in the comic books, a typical ‘spunky gal’ and apparently makes most other female superheroes look like plain Janes in the looks department. Smallville’s attempt at the character isn’t too bad, aside from one thing. Her hair.

Black Canary is meant to have luscious long blonde hair, but in Smallville, she doesn’t. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is that when toddling around as her alter ego, a gobby journalist, she wares possibly the stupidest wig ever created. It’s difficult to take a woman seriously when she appears to have a piece of coconut fibre matting strapped to the top of her head.

Anyway, she works for Lex and chucks knives at Chloe (boo!) so for most of the episode she serves as an antagonist. This of course puts her on a collision course with Mr Mopeypants (aka Clark) and it doesn’t end well for him.

Nothing about Clark is right in this episode. Black Canary is basically just a normal human woman (who seems to have shins of steel the way she keeps dropping down into view without snapping her spindly legs like twigs) who happens to be able to emit a subsonic barrage of sound. Clark is supposed to be invulnerable to everything but magic, Kryptonite and Doomsday. He’s almost as fast as light, strong enough to punch an intergalactic warlord into space or bench-press a mountain, can see in about a million spectrums, exhale a tornado, survive in space unaided, freeze a lake solid in a second and SHOOT BLOODY LAZERS FROM HIS EYES. This is less a contest and more a joke. Yet he loses. In less than twenty seconds.

Ok, so he has super hearing and he wasn’t expecting someone to scream at him until his ears bled, but so what?

Every fight Clark has had this season has seen him get tossed around like a rag doll, usually without throwing a single punch. This is meant to be Superman. Superman never loses. Ok he may not be able to fly yet, but he’s still the Man of Steel. It’s heartbreaking to see one of the most beloved heroes ever being used as a punching bag by people he should simply swat aside like flies. The scene where he confronts Black Canary would have been better if he had simply stood there grinning with his arms folded whilst she flailed away at him, then said something along the lines of ‘let’s talk’ when she gave up. The scene in Superman Returns where he takes a minigun to the chest and .45 to the eyeball before responding with a wry smile and a raised eyebrow, is the perfect example of how this kind of thing SHOULD be handled. The fact that it isn’t is simply a total waste of potential and an insult to the very nature of the character. Much of Superman’s charisma comes from his power. He doesn’t need to sweep about in a big black cape going ‘BOO!’ at people like Batman because he can, should he desire, EAT A VOLCANO. Clark seems to suck the life out of every scene he is in at the moment and despite him being the star of the show, I was actually praying for him to sod off whenever he appeared so we could get a bit more ‘Green Arrow’ screen time.

And please GOD don’t get me started on Clark and Lana (I’m still not calling them ‘Clana’, please go chew an electric fence whilst hitting yourself about the head with a brick if you think I should). A good quarter of the episode is wasted on them trading awkward glances, talking shit, crying and shouting at each other. ENOUGH!!

I simply cannot imagine anyone, not even the most ardent fan, caring one jot about Clark and Lana’s relationship anymore. It’s a total waste of time and it needs to end.

Talking of relationship woes we also get a story arc about Lois and Ollie revealing that they still have feelings for each other, which ends with Ollie’s secret being discovered by Lois and eventually with the two of them breaking up for good. At which point Lois turns to Clark of all people, someone she is supposed to dislike unless my memory totally fails me, for comfort. Whilst it’s pleasing to see the beginnings of something between the two of them, and Clark being involved in an emotional scene where he isn’t the one being emotional for fucking once, it doesn’t make a lot of sense when nobody has bothered to explain why the two of them are suddenly the best of friends.

Finally, after much laborious messing about and Black Canary deciding that she doesn’t like working for Lex and swapping sides, we get to the grand finale of the episode: the big fight.

Sadly however, this has got to be my standout stupid moment of the week. Now don’t get me wrong here, the idea of Lex Luthor wielding duel pistols against the superhero tag team of Green Arrow and Black Canary is a fun one, but the execution is terrible.

When things get violent, Lex, after showing no signs of it for six seasons, suddenly reveals himself to be what can only be described as a ‘Gun Wielding Super-Ninja’. He trades a lightning series of blows with Arrow, whilst trying to shoot him in the face and missing by a whisker each time (and if this sounds familiar that’s probably because you have seen the film Equilibrium, which features exactly the same fight scene, only without a man in green leather fetish gear). Smallville has never been big on plausibility or originality, but stealing an entire scene from a recent feature film is pure stupidity, especially when the man doing the shooting is a rich public school boy who thinks fencing is a manly thing to do with his time. Ollie should have wiped the floor with him.

The other stupid thing about the scene is that despite it being the most interesting fight in a long time featured on the show, Clark, our hero, isn’t even in most of it! When he eventually did show up and performed the old ‘swat bullets out of the air and save people in slow motion’ routine AGAIN, I actually felt my heart sink, because I knew the fun, stupid as it was, was over. Rather than a saviour or a hero, he felt like the drunk guy at a party who throws up all over a hot chick and ruins everyone’s evening.

Yet again, Clark is denied the ability to save the day with any kind of style or charisma. He even deliberately allows Lex to get stabbed in the shoulder, which is both petty and stupid since had the knife clipped an artery and ended the baldy bad guy, Clark would have been wracked with guilt. Like the entire episode, all the fight serves to show is just how boring and un-cool Clark has become in comparison to nearly every other character on the show. It’s not as if the Smallville team can’t do entertaining things with Clark. I recall him catching a flailing Christina Millian earlier this season as she was hurled from a speeding car with a fantastic flourish, but they simply refuse to craft more moments like this and it’s a real shame.

As the episode draws to a close, Green Arrow and Black Canary disappear off into the night together to go play at being heroes, and Clark refuses to join in. He then heads home to subject us to yet another attempt at breathing life into his doomed relationship with Lana. Great.

Overall, ‘Siren’ just irritated. Our hero has become lost, boring and contrived. Even acts of heroism on his part seem hollow these days and his personal life, sparky interactions with the awesome Chloe aside, is a total waste of space and screen time. It’s a great shame to see a true icon brought to his knees, but that’s exactly what has happened. The magic of Superman seems a long way off, and Clark’s journey to greatness seems to have stalled so badly it’s actually gone into reverse. The show is in desperate need of a total change in direction and tone and frankly, it can’t come soon enough. I actually preferred Bizzaro to the real Clark (Welling’s acting aside) and that’s simply not how it should be. Both Smallville and its central character have a long, long way to go…

5.5/10