Clockwork Planet Smallville S7 EP15 ‘Veritas’ Review

When I read the press release for this episode, I nearly fell off my chair. One particular line, “Kara decides to teach Clark how to fly in order to strengthen his chances against Brainiac.” really caught my eye. “Finally”, I thought, perhaps they are going to abandon the ridiculous ‘No tights, no flights’ rule, which was created way back in the show’s infancy, before anyone knew how long the series would run for or that Clark would get a flying cousin and several flying enemies to fight.

“Alright, so maybe he won’t be very good at it, or maybe it won’t work all the time, but still” thinks I, “this could be awesome!”

He isn’t, it doesn’t, and it wasn’t.

Right back near the start of the season, I complained in several of my reviews that Clark’s inability to fly was really dragging the character down when so many of the super powered individuals he has encountered this season can do it with ease. The idea of an earthbound Clark Kent was a fresh and appealing one that made perfect sense when the series launched because it showed how far Clark was from achieving his destiny. Flight is, after all, arguably Superman’s most iconic power (his invulnerability and weakness to Kryptonite being the other contenders for that particular throne in my opinion). In fact, Clark’s progression in terms of powers has so far been excellent, with him gaining new abilities each season as he gradually grows into the person he was born to be. Each power has been introduced in a relatively sensible way, and has come along at a time when his existing bag of tricks was beginning to get old. In short, this is the one aspect of Clark’s character development that the Smallville team has actually done a decent job with. Recently however, Clark has really begun to lose his way. Forget about his moodiness and barmy love life for a second. I’m talking powers here.

When was the last time you saw Clark use his X-Ray vision? Or his heat Vision, or his Super-Breath? When was the last time he really did anything other than run about and knock down a few baddies in slow motion?

The real problem is that Clark, more often than not, simply appears to be human. It wouldn’t take much to fix the problem. Why don’t we get a scene where Clark is hovering and chatting to Lana (lets face it, ‘Pussy whipped’ doesn’t even come close, Lana clearly has him doing everything around the house) then proceeds to pick up the sofa she is sitting on with one hand mid-way through the conversation so that he can clean underneath. Why does he never quip “I’ll do the dishes” after dinner and then do them in an eyeblink? Why does he never cook dinner with his heat vision or yank a beer out of the cupboard and instantly chill it with his breath in a neat little X-men 2 pastiche (possibly because he may or may not have freeze breath yet, but hey)? Why doesn’t he ever juggle bloody tractors JUST BECAUSE HE CAN?

The only recent example of this kind of thing I can think of is Clark loading a few fence posts into the back of a truck and hammering in a few nails with his hands and frankly, it sucks. Claire Bennet does more super powered stuff around the house than Clark Kent these days.

It’s immensely irritating to watch a character getting steadily worse rather than better, but with ‘Veritas’ that really is the case.

The main thread of the episode revolves around Braniac, and his turning up at the Kent farm demanding that Kara go with him to some undisclosed location, presumably so that he can do something evil and nefarious with her, though he doesn’t trouble to explain what.

Clark turns up just as Braniac grabs Kara, something that she seems powerless to resist for some bizarre reason, and chucks him through a wall and into a shed. Braniac then flies off, leaving Clark gurning after him like a useless tit as usual.

Kara then has the brilliant and aforementioned idea to teach Clark to fly so that he can share the same playing field, or sky, as her and the villain. Problem is, after flying about all over the shop to show him how it’s done and teasing him a little (it must be said that Laura Vandervoort does a pretty decent job in this scene), Kara doesn’t so much manage to teach him, as ‘get yelled at by her moody prick of a cousin and give up almost immediately’. Clark doesn’t even try; he just looks like he’s straining to control a nasty case of the shits for a few seconds, then gives up.

As missed opportunities go, it’s fair to say that this one takes the cake. In fact, it’s a giant kick in the teeth for all the genuine fans out there because a) now is the perfect time for Clark to start flying and b) they got our fucking hopes up in the first place!

Why bother? Why dangle the trout of metaphorical awesome in front of the fans’ faces and then slap them with in instead?

It’s a massive disappointment and an unbelievably retarded decision. In fact the sour taste it left in my mouth left me pissed off for the entire episode.

Having made a triumphant entrance, Braniac then fucks off for the majority of the episode, only popping up to do something naughty every now and again like the little shitbag of a school bully who always used to appear unannounced and boot you in the shins when you weren’t looking. Yet again, the Smallville writers seem to have immersed themselves in a giant pool of liquid stupid by failing miserably to come up with a single genuinely useful or entertaining thing for a talented guest star to do. I complained bitterly in my last review about the fact that the Chief from Battlestar Galactica, (the unquestionably capable Aaron Douglas) was basically locked in a basement for an entire episode yanking a lever up and down and laughing like a narcissistic prick before popping his clogs with an audible bum note of missed opportunity.

This week it’s the turn of James Masters, who, despite sporting that hilariously shit American drawl of a voice for yet another appearance, presumably because his native British accent was deemed TOO FUCKING AWESOME for the American masses to handle as it might make them feel inadequate, is actually a pretty decent actor. Alright so he has a face that looks like someone tried to sculpt a statue out of solid smug only to slip with the chisel and rip half of it off, then decide that he better make it symmetrical or it might look silly, and his fan base largely consists of fourteen year old girls who are prepared to jump on anything with a six pack, but the guy deserves more than six seconds of screen time.

We will come on to exactly what he does get up to a bit later because I simply can’t put off ripping into the Da Vinci code, sorry, ‘Veritas’ sequences any longer.

See, Lex, by way of a bullet to the face not so very long ago, or possibly Chloe’s healing powers, appears to suddenly be able to remember, at will, whatever the fuck he likes about his father’s past dealings with a secret society. This is explained away because apparently, back in the day, he just happened to have eavesdropped on PRECISELY the moments required to unravel the entire mystery in the blink of an eye, which is in no way a totally unoriginal ‘cop-out pile of wank’ way of accelerating yourself out of the hole you have written yourself into.

We are informed of this via a few sequences where Lex appears to be having an aneurism for a couple of seconds, and then we are catapulted into another mushy, soft focus flashback in which Lionel is apparently much younger (we can tell apparently, because despite looking exactly identical to his current incarnation, he has marginally less hair, way to go makeup team!) and we get to watch a meeting of the ‘Super-rich let’s talk total bollocks club’ through the eyes of, all together now: Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex! Hooray!

The scene in which Creepy Little Goggle-Eyed Appalling Child Actor Lex overhears one of the key meetings between Lionel and the other members, where they argue about what should be done with the envelope containing the secret to ‘controlling the traveler’, is an absolute hoot. Never since the ‘witches’ storyline in season 4 have I stared in such dumbfounded disbelief at what I was seeing and hearing. Apparently, contained within a bank vault in Zurich, which can only be opened with two keys sealed within lockets and entrusted to Veritas members, is an envelope containing the secret that could lead to ultimate power: a way to control Krypton’s last son. Apparently Dr Virgil Swan made the discovery that there was a way to control the traveller and decided to share it with three of the most morally corrupt, power obsessed business men he could get his hands on. And best of all, apparently, the Teague family have been the custodians of the secret of the traveller ‘for centuries’, and have been sacrificing themselves for all these years to protect it. What a load of total, TOTAL Bollocks. So much in fact that it’s the clear winner of the title ‘standout stupid moment of the week’.

For a start, nobody knew Clark was coming to earth aside from his Kryptonian parents and their extended family back on his home planet. All this nonsense about secret societies makes no sense whatsoever because nobody ever bothers to explain exactly HOW people, several centuries before Clark’s arrival, managed to find out he was coming when back on Krypton, nobody had a CLUE the planet was going to be destroyed, because if they had, they would have been high-tailing it to the other side of the universe. We are just expected to swallow the fact that someone, somewhere found out, despite that being impossible, and get on with worrying about what is in the ominous envelope locked in a bank vault.

I’m sorry but I wasn’t aware that ramming totally random plot elements from the collected works of Dan ‘I am a totally talentless cock’ Brown was deemed acceptable in modern television dramas. Especially when said elements make even less fucking sense than the contemptible piles of claptrap he manages to get away with passing off as novels simply because council estate retards from Manchester take them on holiday to Gran Canaria and digest them in an attempt to make themselves appear less thick.

It’s a terrible, contrived, badly executed mess of a storyline which plods through the heart of the episode like a dieing elephant and ruins everyone’s fun. The one and only saving grace about the whole sorry affair is that it seems to be pushing the increasingly (and pleasingly) unhinged Lex to hitherto unreached levels of contemplated patricide. It would be a shame to see a memorable character like Lionel bumped off over a locket, but still, at least it might liven things up a bit.

Meanwhile, Braniac has effectively lobotomised Lana (it actually makes her far less annoying as it turns out) and turned her into his puppet in order to force Kara to hand herself over in a tragic case of ‘it’s-me-he-wants-so-I’m-going-to-blunder-blindly-into-a-trap-in-the-hopes-that it-will-be-enough-to-save-her-itus’.

We are then ‘treated’ to a scene in which we get to watch Clark looking on, utterly powerless, as his cousin hands herself over to an evil, lunatic supercomputer and flies off into space with it (relatively decent and quite expensive flying special effects used on another two characters who aren’t Clark Kent, naturally).

The real cake-taker however has to be the ending scene of the episode. It’s a perfect metaphor for the way Clark has been treated this season, and more than slightly ironic considering that Chloe (who was tortured to the point of absurdity at the beginning of this season) is present to watch the same treatment being handed out to Clark.

Watching Clark break down in tears (well, he didn’t actually manage any tears, apparently it was beyond Tom Welling, so they had to drag Allison Mack in to show him how it’s done) was a sad moment. Not because of what’s going on with Lana, I couldn’t give a flying fuck about her, but because it represented the very lowest ebb that the writers have ever brought our hero to. Lost, powerless, alone, stressed and depressed to the point of breaking down. It really doesn’t sound much like Superman does it?

Something needs to change fast or Smallville risks becoming just like its hero, a useless mockery of everything it represents. The problem is, that with Kara soaring off to recreate Krypton with Braniac, and Lex about to bump off Lionel (if my guess is correct), the focus is anywhere BUT on the man would be Super and that’s the greatest letdown of all.

The only way is up (up and away)…

4.2/10