Clockwork Planet Smallville S7 EP12 ‘Fracture’ Review

In every long running scf-fi TV show, you can almost guarantee that at some point there will be an episode involving a trip inside one of the major characters’ heads. It’s about as predictable as the inevitable body swap episode, or the episode where one of the heroes’ loved ones temporarily gets all of their powers and ends up saying something along the lines of “I never realised how hard it is to be you” with a tear in their eye and a broomstick up their arse. Smallville has long since checked off all of the stupid episodic clichés it was duty bound to include, so it makes me wonder exactly what the hell is going on when they feel the need to make damned sure they haven’t missed one.

First they decided to give some random kid all of Clark’s powers, then they gave them to Lana earlier this season (and I don’t care what you say about Clark keeping his, it was still a stupid retread of an already overused idea so go suck a donkey’s balls).

Not content with having rehashed one contrived idea, the Smallville team have now decided that the little jaunt inside Clark’s phantom-fuddled noggin last season and the Jimmy Olsen head trip weren’t enough, so they send us inside Lex’s mind for the majority of an episode. Joy.

It’s not that these ‘inside the mind’ episodes are a bad thing necessarily, in fact handled correctly, they have to potential to become interesting and powerful glimpses into what makes a character tick. The problems start when the writers decide that they need to get into the deepest recesses of a character’s emotional turmoil and start ladling on the twisted metaphors and dingy corridors. And it is always fucking corridors! Don’t ask me why everyone, be they hero or villain, seems to have a mind full of concrete passageways in TV land, but you can be pretty flipping sure that as soon as we dive inside someone’s brain box, we are going to be ‘treated’ to a series of shots involving an ashen faced hero running down a long and poorly lit passage. Why is nobody’s mind ever a paradise of green meadows filled with little fluffy animals, or more realistically in the case of a man, full of food, sports and naked women engaged in some form of appealing sexual activity?

Either way, the episode opens with Lex and (of all people) Lois searching for an apparently powerless Kara who is trapped in a scrap yard (or junk yard for those of a more American persuasion). After Lois toddles over to Kara and ensures that we all fully understand that the girl Kent’s memory is still stuffed, a shifty looking chap locks them both in a small fenced off area and shoots Lex in the face. A few pointless minutes later and Lex has been flown to Smallville medical centre for treatment (apparently a tiny rural hospital in Kansas is considerably better equipped than the finest hospitals in the land in the Smallville universe).

Lana meanwhile, has been busy pulling a crazy Matrix-style mind melding contraption out of her perky little arse by means of her increasingly mission control style bank of computers. Once again, stealing Chloe’s thunder in the ‘totally implausible techno-shitspeak’ department.

Apparently, the device allows one to go inside the mind of another person in order to forcibly extract secrets from the interior of their cranium, whether they like it or not. Despite this constituting nothing short of virtual mind-rape and a gigantic human rights violation, nobody bats an eyelid at the idea of using it on Lex. They were testing it on terrorists see, so the indescribable evil of the machine is neatly sidestepped using the catch-all “we are fighting terror so anything goes” clause society seems to have adopted these days.

The only slight snag with the machine is that it has a nasty habit of killing the people using it, which means, you guessed it, Clark is the only one capable of safely using it to find out where Kara and Lois are before the token grubby bad guy does something horrid to them.

Once Clark is inside Lex’s mind, he spends his time wading through a bloated series of recalled encounters between Lex and Kara, which show us exactly why the amnesiac Supergirl has come to trust the shifty younger Luthor. Oh and apparently, Kara has lost all her powers. Just thought I’d throw that in there totally at random because that’s exactly what the writing team do without so much as a jot of explanation. I fail to see how losing your memories can drastically alter your genetic structure, but then again, I suppose expecting anything to make sense in Smallville is about as productive as trying to get a team of horses to perform a synchronised swimming routine.

Having wasted about fifteen minutes of our time and found out nothing aside from the fact that Lex is clearly manipulating Kara for his own ends, (really? You think? Thanks for clearing that up guys!) Clark finally gets to the real reason he’s been shoved inside Lex’s head in the first place. Not the stupid ‘I have to find out where the girls are’ premise, but the opportunity to prod his nose into Lex’s tormented childhood, and to have a chat with the two differing sides of his personality.

Clark meets two sides of Lex inside his shiny dome: Evil Lex, and Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex (he’s the good one incidentally). Evil Lex does nothing in the entire episode aside from attempting to throttle Clark and Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex and forcing Clark to watch him poking Lana’s weiner warmer with his blue-veined-custard-chucker in one of the most boring sex scenes I have ever seen. The two of them just sort of lie there wriggling a bit. Had I been Lex, I would have treated Clark to the sight of Lana on all fours getting boned to within an inch of her life, rather than fiddling about with foreplay, but then I guess the Smallville team (and most likely the actors involved) don’t have the balls for that.

Clark eventually finds out where Kara and Lois are being held, and then, rather than getting out of Lex’s mind lest he cause some sort of irreparable brain damage or get trapped inside, proceeds to rampage around trying to take on Lex’s inner daemons rather than saving his cousin and future missus.

Sadly, this is where a tolerable episode really begins to unravel.

Clark stumbles upon a scene where Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex gets yelled at and throttled by Lionel (is it me, or is Lex rather fixated with the whole throttling thing?), and is responsible for getting his mother clobbered round the chops by dear ol’ Dad. This is presumably supposed to make us feel sorry for Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex, and provide some sort of ham fisted explanation for why Lex is a sociopathic murderer and an evil lunatic of the highest order.

This then leads on to my standout stupid moment of the week, where Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex is saved from yet more throttling by Clark’s timely intervention. Clark then, with his only exit back to the real world disappearing fast, decides to have a ridiculous chat with Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex about how he must never give up because one day, he might overcome Evil Lex and bring the younger Luthor back to the side of good.

No no no. Lex Luthor is an iconic bad guy, one of the most iconic ever created in fact. People who have never read a Superman comic in their life the world over know his name, and that he is the mortal enemy of Krypton’s last son. He is pure evil, destroyed by his jealousy of Superman’s power and convinced that he is the real hero for being the only one to ‘see through’ the symbol to the ‘alien menace’ beneath. The whole point of the evil genius, not just Luthor but any mad, resourceful bad guy, is that they are beyond saving. They know no mercy or love, only hate and obsession.

To try and paint Lex as some sort of Anakin-like evil chap on the path to redemption is to totally undermine everything he represents. In essence, it amounts to stripping his character of its power, because with potential redemption around the corner, he loses the menacing, hinging on insane, edge that the character thrives on.

It would have been far, far better if Clark had told Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex to never give up, and then run for the doorway, only to hear a ‘Snap’ behind him and turned to see Evil Lex holding up the broken-necked ragdoll corpse of his ‘good’ self whilst laughing like a loon. Seeing the good in Lex Luthor die could have provided the catalyst for a more intense and open conflict between the two, and opened the door for a more unhinged and theatrical Lex courtesy of the doubtless-capable Michel Rosenbaum. Had they used this as an opportunity to allow him to play it more like Spacey in Superman Returns, the show could have really found its feet and kick started some truly memorable plot lines. Plus Mike might be less inclined to leave after this season.

Finally, as Clark is on the brink of exiting Lex’s mind, Chloe has to step in with her inspired healing powers to save them both. She ‘dies’ again having saved Lex (and therefore Clark) and this leads to a genuinely pleasing scene between her and Clark in her apartment. When she finally revives, Clark tells her he has been sitting there for hours “Trying to think about what to say at your funeral”. It’s a genuinely powerful exchange between two characters who really should get far more shared screen time than they do. It’s also nicely played by both actors and although Allison Mack is almost always dependable, it’s nice to see that Tom Welling really can add some nuance to his character when he’s allowed to do something other than mope about like a dog that’s swallowed a hedgehog.

Chloe’s power is fantastic. By far the best idea I think the Smallville team have ever come up with. The constant balance between risk and reward, life and death, is a powerful comment on the nature of true power, a lesson for Clark, and a way for the two characters to possess a deep and poignant understanding all rolled into one. I can’t help but feel however, that perhaps this is leading to Chloe going out in a blaze of sacrificial glory one day in the future and that would be a great shame. I remember hearing some time ago that her planned inclusion in the Superman comics was no longer going to happen, and I have to wonder if this is because the Smallville team are planning to kill her along with the series when it finally ends.

All in all, ‘Fracture’ was more of the usual average-stubbornly-refusing-to-become-great Smallville we have sadly grown too accustomed to this season. Despite being an idea the writers have used on more than one occasion in the past, the chance to dip into the mind of someone, especially when that someone is one of the most iconic bad guys ever, was always ripe with potential. It’s a great shame that yet again, sloppy direction, scripting and concept work totally undermine the fantastic setup and leave us wondering what on earth the point was. Sure, there have been worse episodes (quite a few in fact…), but it’s hardly comforting to end yet another review with the word ‘average’.

I only hope that the potential for a creepy and rather one-sided relationship between Lex and the amnesiac Kara isn’t squandered like so many other potentially interesting storylines in the very next episode.

5.8/10