Clockwork Planet Smallville S7 Episode 9 ‘Gemini’ Review

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 100^th-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

Clockwork Planet Smallville S7 Episode 8 ‘Blue’ Review

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

Sorry for the delay

Hi folks

Just a quick note to let anyone who actually reads Clockwork Planet know that I haven’t abandoned it yet and I am going to be posting my reviews of the two Smallville episodes aired since ‘Wrath’ very soon. Sorry for the delay, I was on holiday!

Cheers

- Nihil

Clockwork Planet Smallville Ep 7 ‘Wrath’ Review

Opportunity is much like the British public transport system. It’s often never around when you want it, you frequently have to do things you really wish you hadn’t to make the most of it, and it’s incredibly easy to miss. Over the years, Smallville has made an art form of blatantly ignoring golden opportunities and plunging to new lows, in spite of a truly fantastic licence. Sadly, Wrath is a case in point. We get some development and some really neat moments, but they are mired in a bloated mess of a plot, some terrible performances and a barn load of atrocious clichés. And no, I’m not talking about the shag.

Yes there is a scene revolving entirely around sex in this episode that will doubtless have spotty pubescent muppets who can’t hear the word ‘sex’ without collapsing into fits of giggles tittering the world over. For those of us who don’t give a shit about sex in filmed media and actually have an understanding of the mechanics of ‘sending in the colonel’ it’s frankly mind boggling.

The basic premise is this: Lana gets Clarks powers by means of a lightning bolt and in a twist to the usual theme, Clark also retains his. This means that she can do everything Clark can do, aside from balancing a tractor on her cock . They spend a little while running about, and then Lana, the soulless little minx, quite accurately proves that despite womankind’s many protests, they are in fact more obsessed with sex than men 90% of the time (admit it ladies, its clearly true, you just hide it better than us). She throws herself at him and orders him to fish out his one-eyed trouser snake and occupy her like the Israeli army in the Gaza strip. Clark, who let’s face it, needs to get laid more than almost anyone else on earth, initially protests. But quickly (and sensibly it must be said) caves in and decides to spread Lana like fine butter and introduce her nether regions to his Kryptonian super-sausage.

What follows is a bizarre scene in which we are made to understand that the two of them are banging like a barn door in a storm by means of an earthquake (makes sense) and confusingly, several sonic booms. To be honest, I have no idea what we are supposed to imagine Clark is actually doing to Lana in there, but if sonic booms are involved I think he may be in need of a few pointers. Or possibly a pamphlet on ‘How to avoid premature ejaculation’.

This leads me neatly on to the standout stupid moment of the week, where we get a shot of Chloe sitting in the talon (despite the fact that she works in Metropolis), wondering why there appears to be a localized earth quake hitting Smallville (and if you can see where this is going, then rest assured you aren’t the only one). Never in human history has there been a more laborious set up for a punch line and I found myself genuinely disgusted that when Chloe rushed to the farm to find out if Clark had any idea what caused the tremors, nobody had the decency to quip ‘Wow, guess the earth really moved huh?’ For Christ’s sake Writers, if you are going to waste ten minutes of an episode setting up a bloody joke, at least have the decency to see it through.

There is also another rather worrying dimension to this little interlude: Lana might be pregnant. Again.

Without wanting to get too technical, I am acquainted with the behavioural mechanics of the male sexual organs, and I can assure you than given the performance an average man can turn in if sufficiently ‘provoked’, Clark Kent must shoot his wad with the force of an Artillery cannon, which rules out condoms (plus most people don’t keep them lying around in a barn). I also somehow doubt that Kryptonian sperm are going to say anything other than “Fuck right off” to ‘birth control’ or a ‘morning after pill’, or any other mode of contraception for that matter. All of which means, that since Clark most likely filled Lana with his salty man custard, she may very soon be experiencing the unwanted after effects of his supercharged gentlemen’s gel. (Yes I am trying to shoehorn every sexual reference under the sun into this review and no, I’m not going to stop).

This is an indescribably terrible idea for a story arc, so let’s hope the Smallville writers haven’t thought of it.

With this out of the way, Lana decides to use her newfound powers to get her revenge on Lex. This in essence is fine, if a little predictable. However, the way she goes about doing it isn’t.

For starters, let’s talk wardrobe shall we? If I was a newly created super being, my first instinct would not be to dress myself up like an idiot, but you can bet your bottom dollar it’s Lana’s. Clad in a black leather jacket and with her hair scraped back so hard it looks genuinely painful, she is clearly supposed to look ‘badass’ and ‘cool’, but actually ends up looking like a cross between the fonz and Morticia Adams. She is also caked in enough make up to protect her from re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere regardless of superpowers, which make’s her look less ‘threatening’ and more ‘genuinely frightening’. A bit like an air stewardess with a bad attitude.

She doesn’t act particularly sensibly either, brazenly ripping doors off safes and dumping a load of top secret data she steals from Lex on the desk of the Daily Planet’s excruciating editor, instead of jamming it up the government’s nose like anyone with a grain of common sense would. In fact, the only sensible thing Lana actually does with her powers is smack Lois in the face, for which I applaud her.

We also have the ‘fight’ scene between Lana and Clark, which was utter rubbish and a huge missed opportunity. It was rubbish because it lasted about six seconds and everyone knows that there is no way in a million years Clark would ever hit Lana. It sucked all the tension out of the scene and yet again the writers had to resort to Kryptonite to avoid spending money on effects. However, what really annoys me is that Lana shouldn’t have been fighting Clark in the first place. She should have been fighting Kara.

Think about it; Kara finds Lana knocking Clark about and charges in to protect him, setting up a brilliant excuse for a super powered bitch slappy cat-fight. It could have been campy fun and ended with the two of them ripping all their clothes off and having lesbian sex…alright perhaps that’s just me fantasising, but the point still stands.

On top of all of this, we get the terrible Daily Planet editor and the horrendous, two-dimensional whorebag the writers keep trying to pass off as Lois Lane.

Lois is one of the comic industry’s most iconic characters, and not just because she marries Superman. She has a cult status all of her own because she does a lot more than simply wash the titular hero’s underwear. She is a smart, funny, engaging woman, who is capable of taking Clark on with a decent chance of beating him in every regard other than superpowers. She is portrayed as fiercely intelligent and temperamental, but loving and kind at the same time. In short, she’s a perfect match for Clark and a thoroughly modern woman who has got to the top of her trade through sheer guts and ability. I like her.

Compare that to the Lois we get in Smallville. She’s a walking cliché, the rubbish ‘spunky gal’ archetype personified, and a slut. In this episode she finally gets together with her editor and I found myself sitting there with a horrid taste in my mouth as I watched the scene. It’s just so….wrong. Lois is meant to become an award winning journalist by being good at it, not because she happens to be shagging Perry White or his immediate twatbag of a predecessor. It’s an affront to the fans of the character and worse, it’s turning her into a totally unworthy match for Clark. Plus she has terrifying eyebrows. The damn things just look unholy.

So then, is there anything good about Wrath?

Yup, the Luthors.

Lionel does a decent job but Lex was simply excellent at a couple of points.

The best moments of the episode come near the end, when Lex and Clark have yet another conversation in the mansion. However, this one is dripping with ominous atmosphere and for once, didn’t simply consist of Clark wrapping Lex across the knuckles for yet another bonkers secret project. Lex actually has the upper hand here, as Clark desperately tries to convince himself that Lana is still his little angel and it’s great to see. The whole thing was helped along by an able script, great direction (the monotonous ticking of that clock as the only backing noise is genius) and a fantastic performance by Michael Rosenbaum. His frankly excellent delivery of lines such as: “What do you think is stronger Clark? Her hatred for me or her…affection for you?” and “Funny thing about obsession is, it outlives everything, even love” was on a different level to the usual. Tom Welling didn’t do a bad job either.

Chloe is finally allowed to do something other than mope about being picked on and her shared screen time with Clark serves as a bleak reminder of how awesome some of their exchanges have been in the past. Alison Mack is the only member of the cast who can match Rosenbaum and she manages it here when warning Lana that she had better think twice about hurting Clark.

In summery, Wrath was an episode of contrasts. It had some excruciatingly terrible moments, and a few that stood out as simply fantastic. I only hope that we get more of evil Lex and a lot less of Lois in future.

6.7/10

Clockwork Planet Smallville Ep 6 ‘Lara’ Review

This season of Smallville has so far been something of a mixed bag. Compared to the utter dross that Smallville has subjected us to in the past, season 7 is actually doing quite well. There are a few strong plot elements keeping things ticking along nicely. It’s a shame then that other aspects of the show so often let it down. For every decent bad guy or evil act by Lex, we get another appearance by Lois or the new Daily Planet editor, or even worse, both, to drag things back down into the mud. One of the few real plus points about season 7 so far, aside from the rubbish, disjointed ‘weather girls’ episode, has been the more long running ‘Kara and her crystal’ plotline, that has so far spanned several episodes and dominates ‘Lara’. It’s good to see the writers continuing to focus on it here.

Since time immemorial (hyperbole) I have been banging on about the almost total lack of Superman related content in Smallville, and last week I awarded ‘Action’ a decent score, mostly because it went some way towards addressing this issue. Imagine my surprise when ‘Lara’ began not with the usual ‘let’s set up this week’s meteor freak’, but instead with a scene set on Krypton. Yes, this episode opens with a plot element revolving solely around Superman’s home world, and if at this point you feel the need to drop spontaneously dead of a shock induced coronary, then please feel free because I almost did.

We see Krypton in a state of war as Kara is bundled into her spaceship by her father, protesting all the way, and then cut to a little scene of Kara almost getting run over by a 747. She zips out of the way at the last minute and we all spit blood because they blew yet another flight scene on her and not Clark. It is however, a neat little opening. If Smallville needs anything, its a firmer connection to the superb Superman license and it’s good to see that the writers may finally be cottoning on to this.

The main thread of the episode revolves around Kara and her hunt for her crystal. It’s a decent enough storyline to be following, but it’s not handled as well as it could be. For starters, in a ridiculously unbelievable scene, Kara stalks into a bar in a revealing red dress and proceeds to ‘seduce’ a rubbish nerd (who works at a top secret government lab where her crystal is being analyzed) and pump him for information. The problem is that it’s basically the equivalent of the Smallville writers shoving a drainpipe down your throat and pouring down it every tired, useless, shitty Hollywood ‘seduction’ cliché they can drum up, in the vain hope that you will digest the lot without complaining because you don’t have time to react. From the moment the scene begins, you know exactly how it’s going, so why even bother? It’s also incredibly unfair to men. Lets clear something up shall we, Ladies and Smallville writers?

Men often behave stupidly. It’s in our genes and there’s nothing we can do about it. However, we are NOT, no matter how useless with women, a bunch of simpering, sex crazed retards who, at the first sight of a pretty girl displaying a bit of cleavage and taking an interest in us, would be more than happy to divulge any and every secret held within our testosterone fuddled little minds. Despite being a nerd, this man is clearly clever enough to be working on the most top secret national security projects in existence, so why on earth he would fall for Kara’s amateurish attempts at seduction I simply cannot fathom. Anyone that clever and clearly desperate would spot her purpose a mile off, promise to tell her all if she slept with him, do the deed and then tell her to ‘fuck off’ for treating him like a retard when she demanded the information.

Despite all the silliness, Kara learns the location of her crystal and charges off to find it, breaking into a government lab in the process. However, someone has beaten her to it, so she storms back to the bar in a huff to question her idiot informant some more. Cue Clark turning up to stop her and a heated exchange of words between the two, which leads to the future Superman getting decked by Kara AGAIN and her blasting off into the sky, whilst Tom Welling does his best not to look disappointed that he doesn’t get the chance to do the same. A flying ‘chase’ sequence would have been cool, but ho hum, another opportunity slides past without so much as a whisper.

Kara then decides to go and hack into one of the highest security networks in the USA on Jimmy Olsen’s computer. Jimmy turns up, talks flirty shit at Kara and asks that she stop because he will rot in jail for her misuse of his equipment. She then reveals that she’s a computer genius so everything will be fine. Jimmy accepts this with a smile and a silly comment and we all die a little inside. I’m sorry, but if Kara had some kind of Krypto-device embedded in her brain that helped her learn things or something I could accept it, but the fact that the writers simply don’t bother to tell us how she is able to learn things so fast drives me mad. Smallville has enough unexplained crap in it already, the last thing we need is more.

Anyway, Kara soon gets arrested by pantomime baddie ‘Agent Carter’, who uses some nifty Kryptonite handcuffs on her, and is promptly strapped into a machine that allows the evil agent to extract information directly from his subject’s head, possibly killing him/her in the process.

Kara then relives a time when she came to earth several years before (along with Clark’s biological mother Lara and her own father Zor-El) looking exactly the same age and yet trying to convince everyone she was twelve by speaking like an idiot, wearing a terrible tee-shirt, and tying her hair back. She also explains her presence on earth by saying that she snuck through the same ‘portal’ that Lara used to get to earth, which prompted me to think: “If Kryptonians could fold time and space well enough to create a stable and apparently instantaneous portal to another world, why the hell did they spend so much time shooting their offspring off wildly about the galaxy in bloody space ships?!”

The rest of the scene plays out like some sort of interstellar episode of Neighbours, with melodramatic scene after melodramatic scene making the Kryptonian race seem less like a bunch of intergalactic super beings, and more like the cast of ‘The OC’. The contrived ‘Zor-El fancies Clark’s mum and will do anything to get her story’ seemed like a needless attempt to make the character seem more ‘evil’.

As for Lara sticking a photo of herself inside a picture frame in the Kent house, I can see where the writers were going with this one, but find it spectacularly unlikely that the photo would have remained undiscovered for all these years in a household containing a teenager with fucking X-Ray vision. Note to writers: think these things through.

Clark sees this little scene because he comes into contact with Kara and some Kryptonite whilst trying to rescue her, which provides a neat excuse for Clark to start taking more of an interest in his heritage again. Agent Carter, who has managed to uncover the identity of both Clark and Kara, is then promptly shot by Lionel Luthor, who yet again proves that every shady character in Smallville is perfectly content to hurl themselves into mortal danger on a weekly basis.

The episode ends with Kara returning to live at the Kent farm, after sharing a cringe worthy kiss with Jimmy, and a genuine surprise in the form of Clark revealing to Lana that he was the one who stole his cousin’s crystal from the government lab. It’s really not very often that Smallville manages to do anything you can’t see coming several country miles before it arrives, so it’s a real shame that this particular surprise manages to make precisely no sense whatsoever. Clark nicking the crystal I can deal with, even him not telling Kara is just about plausible, but implying that he is considering cloning his dead mother? Wrong wrong wrong.

Finally, we have the standout stupid moment of the week, which involves Chloe and Lana.

Now you may recall that when Lana first met up with Clark again, she told him not to tell Chloe and he reluctantly agreed. A few episodes later, Chloe and Lana are chattering away as if nothing has happened without so much as a peep of an explanation for why Lana has had such a massive change of heart or even bothered to make Clark agree to not telling Chloe in the first place. For everything Smallville does right, it has another of these massive fuckwitted inconsistencies rearing its ugly head and tearing down what little credibility the show manages to cling too. I don’t give a toss if it’s ‘implied’ that they must have met up again for the first time off screen. We should have seen it happen and it’s nigh unforgivable that we aren’t even given an explanation as to when and why it did.

Overall, ‘Lara’ was a solid, if barmy episode which was more connected with the Superman mythos then entire seasons of the show have been in the past. Lex and Lionel continue to be evil, which is nice, and Chloe continues to be tortured for no reason, which isn’t. I only hope that having delivered us two episodes in a row that have added small steps to Kal-El’s journey to hero status, I wont be ranting and raving about another useless ‘meteor freak’ episode next week.

6.9/10

Clockwork Planet Smallville Ep 5 ‘Action’ review

It’s often been a complaint of mine when knocking together a Smallville review that the show doesn’t feature enough ‘Superman’ related content. Let’s be honest, Clark is no closer these days to becoming the most iconic superhero ever created than he was a couple of seasons ago, and it’s really beginning to hurt the show. A good thing then, that although far from sufficient recompense for season after season of pointlessness, ‘Action’ gives us a tantalizing, if still rather rubbish glimpse at the boy Kent’s path to near godhood.

The episode opens with a nifty scene that neatly illustrates exactly why Clark Kent can be such a compelling character if handled correctly. Yes, he may be a floppy haired, flannel shirted arse most of the time, but by god he can do some cool stuff….apart from flying, but I’ve beaten that particular horse to death in my previous reviews, so I promise not to mention it again (for at least a paragraph or two).

The scene in which he catches the flailing body of guest star Christina Milian before being walloped between the shoulder blades by a flying car door, is a genuinely cool and super heroic moment. More of these please.

Milian is remarkably pointless in ‘Action’ and proceeds to prance about the screen wearing some of the most unlikely outfits in history for the duration of the episode. It’s one thing to awkwardly shoehorn yet another ‘guest star’ into an episode, but when they don’t even have the decency to do as good a job as Dean Cain did last week, you have to wonder why they bothered.

She does get a couple of fantastically awful lines though, which brightened up my day a little. When she says “there is something special about this one Lana” at the end of the episode I couldn’t help but think “yeah love, he’s the most unlikely ‘teenager’ in history”.

Anyway, the episode centers around a bunch of psychos, including several Luthors, a nutty stage hand and a certain former Luthor.

Firstly, lets deal with the main ‘villain’ of the piece. You will notice that I don’t use his name hear and there is a reason for this: I can’t for the life of me remember what it is. I’m serious. After last week’s memorable ‘Dr Knox’, this week’s bad guy is so unbelievably wet and useless that I can’t even be bothered to go and find out what he’s called. So for the purpose of this review, he shall be called: Dave.

See Dave is a big fan of comic books, and is working on a movie adaptation of ‘Warrior Angel’, a comic that features a somewhat Superman-like hero. This is where it all got a bit ironic because the Smallville writer’s rather unwisely decided to make a significant plot point out of many fans’ unhappiness with the quality of the fictional adaptation. Considering the alarming regularity with which Smallville doesn’t so much ‘tread on fans toes’ as ‘set fire to 60 years of mythos and piss all over it in an attempt to put it out’, I found myself surprised that they had the audacity to actually make it into a story. Still, you have to admire their balls for doing it.

Dave toddles off, having failed in his first attempt to kill Christina Milian (boo!) and proceeds to load a prop movie gun with a real bullet rather than a blank. We can tell that it’s a real bullet because he takes it out of a big box with ‘bullets’ written on it, instead of the big box right next to it sporting the word ‘blanks’. Half the time Smallville appears to be written by a bunch of utter bloody simpletons, so I found my intelligence genuinely insulted by this scene and very nearly stopped watching out of spite. For Christ’s sake guys, as tricks go, that’s pretty much up there with ‘claiming a middle eastern country is harboring weapons of mass destruction just so you can steal all their oil’ in terms of obviousness. Just because you wear your undergarments on your head doesn’t mean we do, so for fuck’s sake, stop treating us like a bunch of halfwits.

Christina nearly gets shot, Clark catches the bullet and Dave notices, so decides to make Lana into a pavement pancake by shoving her off a skyscraper in order to convince Clark to face up to his destiny and become a hero. In this case, I’m on Dave’s side.

This sets up our second nifty special effects sequence of the episode, in which Clark dives off said building, catching Lana in mid air and then stares lovingly into her eyes, totally unconcerned by the fact that he’s about to hit the ground at a great rate of knots. When he does, he totally flattens a car and then toddles off as if nothing has happened. It was nicely done, but by GOD what a missed opportunity.

Imagine for a second if Clark had dived off the building, caught Lana and stared into her eyes exactly as happens in the episode. Then gradually, the rushing blur of the skyscraper behind him had slowly come into focus. Why? Because he was flying without even realizing it, Lana looks down, notices, and grins at Clark. Clark frowns at her confused, also looks down, then realizes what he’s doing and with a startled “Woah!” plunges out of the sky, nearly dropping Lana before smashing into the car. That my friends, would have been a neat introduction to Clark’s ability to fly.

The other main plot thread of the episode revolves around Lionel Luthor, who you may recall was snatched away in the season premiere by possibly the most conspicuously ‘disguised’ bad guy ever. Lionel, it would seem, has been in something of a catatonic state these past few weeks, and is being held prisoner by some nutty bint who lives in a log cabin out in the local woods. Said nutter has decided that the best way to keep Lionel where he is, is to jam his hand in a bear trap rather than doing something sensible like tying him to the bed instead.

In a bizarre turn, Smallville then subjects us to a totally pointless and horrifically grizzly scene where Lionel rips his hand out of the trap, tearing massive gashes into his hand in the process. Nothing is left to the imagination and to be honest, I can’t see what the writers were trying to achieve by showing us the gory detail. If I was interested in seeing people getting tortured, I’d go and watch some god-awful piece of giblet strewn Hollywood dross like ‘Saw IV’. Smallville has never been afraid of a bit of gore, but for heaven’s sake people, if you are going to use special effects of any kind, make sure there is actually a point beyond senseless gratuity.

Having freed himself, Lionel legs it out of the cabin and promptly gets a shovel to the face courtesy of Lana, who presumably is out for a stroll. At night. In a forest. Alone. Carrying a shovel.

You see Lana was behind it all, or rather the increasingly likely ‘oh god its not really Lana, she’s a crazy clone lady’ storyline was. Just to add to the theory that all ruthless, obscenely rich people in Smallville haven’t heard of hired help and instead prefer to put themselves in mortal danger every week, Lex turns up to rescue his dad in person a short time later. Lionel then brutally beats the nutty women keeping him prisoner to death, which was far more in keeping with the Luthor family overall than that rubbish bear trap scene. The fact that Lex hardly even reacts to the horrific spectacle of his father venting his rage only serves to heighten the sense that both the Luthor men are getting perilously close to losing their humanity.

Lionel confronts Lana in the Kent barn, informing her that he knows all about her involvement in his kidnapping, but stubbornly refusing, as all the characters do, to actually tell us why she was bothering to keep him prisoner in the first place.

Aside from an incredibly staged little moment where Clark is given a cape, which he seems to like the look of, and a totally forgettable one involving Lois and that useless Daily Planet editor, that about wraps it up for ‘Action’. Apart, of course, from: The standout stupid moment of the week.

Yup, as usual, this week has several barmy moments, but one above all takes the cake. It even manages to trump Lana taking her shovel for a walk. Late in the episode, Lex goes to Bel-Reave to see Dave the psychotic floor manager and offers him some of the world’s rarest comic books in exchange for information about Clark Kent’s abilities.

Lets look at this again shall we? You are stuck in a notorious mental institution, never to see the light of day again. Then a baldy billionaire walks in through the door, offers to give you the equivalent of a small fortune, possibly enough to buy your freedom, and all he wants in return is for you to tell him about the secret of some guy you have never even met before? What the HELL would you do?! You would have to be genuinely deranged not to take the money and run, but that’s precisely the opposite of what Dave does. “It was all in my head” he claims, but we are never even given the slightest hint as to why he refuses to tell Lex everything. I was left gasping in blind frustration at the stupidity of the man.

Overall, ‘Action’ was less of a triumphant first step on Clark’s revived journey towards becoming Superman, and more a faltering stumble. However, that’s not to say it wasn’t without its merits. It didn’t resort to meteor freakery or lots of Lois, which is good, and at least it had the decency to contain some Superman related content. However, yet again, I can’t help but feel a sense of sadness at the show’s waste of such phenomenal potential. As is all too often the case, ‘Action’ was a distinctly average episode.

5.6/10

Smallville (S7 Episode 4) ‘Cure’ Review

When my sister told me that Dean Cain, formerly of that god-awful campy bastion of Saturday night television ‘The New Adventures of Superman’ and latterly of nothing whatsoever, was going to be in Smallville and playing a mad scientist, I groaned in anticipation of ‘Cure’ being yet another utterly lamentable excuse for an episode. We laughed at length about how Cain’s inevitably terrible villain would be a two dimensional pantomime figure with all the menace of a fish cake and about as much personality. We scoffed at a blatant publicity stunt, using an old Superman actor in a transparent attempt to convince people to watch simply as a contrived means of boosting ratings, and we laughed at the whole thing in a supercilious and charismatically ‘British’ way. We should really learn to keep our gobs shut because to my slack jawed amazement, ‘Cure’ was actually a relatively decent episode.

Smarmy, annoying, smug, paid to song beautiful Hollywood women, irritating to look at and generally a giant pain in the arse, I am of course talking about Dean Cain and not ‘West’ from Heroes (Grrrrr). Cain dominates the screen in this episode, but that’s mainly because he has gotten rather tubby in the intervening years since his last major television appearance.

In terms of acting, he actually manages to turn in a good performance (despite being given some excruciatingly terrible lines) and provides that rarest of things: a decent bad guy in Smallville. Clearly based on the DC character Vandal Savage (also a nigh indestructible, several millennia old immortal), the ridiculously named ‘Dr Curtis Knox’ manages to deliver just enough menace in his quest to resurrect a doomed lover that he genuinely adds something to the episode. Of particular note is his scene with Lex, where the two black hearted bastards exchange words before old shiny dome pumps several bullets into Knox’s chest and then walks away without a hint of remorse. It’s nice to see something suitably cold and evil from a man who so often comes across as lost in his own little la la Lana land.

The fact that Knox then gets straight back up again, rips the bullets out of his chest and starts shouting at Lex is just plain cool. What’s not so good is Clark’s timely intervention to save Lex, where he punches the nutty professor into a huge electrical transformer without a moment’s hesitation, apparently killing him. Lex Luthor as a cold blooded killer = good, Clark Kent as a cold blooded killer = just plain wrong.

There is a throwaway line later in the episode where Clark claims it makes him sick to have killed Knox to save Lex, but the fact that he doesn’t even bother to check the good doctor’s pulse before running off with Lex is pretty bloody silly. Though I suppose you could argue he was using his hearing or X-ray vision to check for signs of life.

The fact is Superman doesn’t kill people or even monsters like Doomsday very often, and when he does, it’s always an earth shattering event in his life. Clark blew a huge hole through a super soldier prototype last season with his heat vision and now this. The Smallville team risk turning their Clark into a very different animal from the one we all know and love from the comics if they carry on having him murder people left, right and centre.

Another huge plus for the episode is considerably more screen time for Chloe, who continues to practically carry the show on her own. Seeing that she is losing Jimmy and terrified that revealing her ‘Meteor freak’ nature to him would drive him away, she uncharacteristically jumps at the chance to be cured by Knox. The way she throws caution to the wind and rushes headlong into something she knows very little about for the chance at a normal life not only makes sense, but serves to highlight the emotional turmoil the character is going through at that moment. If I were in her position, I most likely would have done the same, despite it clearly being up there with electing George Bush as far as hilariously stupid ideas go.

Allison Mack continues to do sterling work, bringing a depth of emotion to her role that the other actors on the show can only gawp at and fruitlessly try to emulate. She is particularly good in the final scene, especially given that it is so atrociously stupid and contrived (more on that later).

It’s great to see a bit more of Clark and Chloe on screen together, and the best moment of the episode is yet another of their memorable exchanges. When Clark blasts into the daily planet offices ranting about finding Kara’s crystal and Chloe tells him to “Fly solo” because she is busy, Clarks reaction is absolutely perfect: “Chloe this is important”. Chloe’s counter reaction is even better and made all the more remarkable because Mack manages to deliver the tongue twisting line with perfect subtlety: ”I’m sure that it is, look, I know that from mount Olympus the view must seem like us mere mortals have nothing better to do than help you look for your crystal, but, believe it or not, I have important things to do too”. Score one for Chloe I think.

Needless to say it all goes horribly wrong and Clark has to save Chloe from the clutches of Dr Knox. Clark then hands over the immortal nutcase to the Martian Manhunter, who does ‘something’ with him. This leaves the possibility of Dr Knox returning at some point in the future, something I would be genuinely pleased to see. In one of their incredibly rare smart moves, the writers don’t bother to tell us where he came from or how he became immortal, leaving it up to our imaginations. Having a kryptonite-free villain in Smallville is something that doesn’t happen nearly often enough.

Speaking of the Martian Manhunter, he pops up in another great little scene at the beginning of the episode. Now I say the scene is great for three reasons:

1. The exchange of accusations between him, Kara and Clark.

2. The bewildered look and innocent “let me guess, you’re from krypton as well?” from Lana.

3. Laura Vandervoort in her jammies. What? She’s growing on me.

Anyway, it appears that the Manhunter has been to Krypton at some point in the past, met Kara and her family and done something unpleasant to them because daddy Zor-El was a traitor. Kara is deeply unhappy about Clark’s friendship with the man from Mars and flies away from the farm in a huff, setting up a ‘Clark and Kara work against each other to find her crystal’ storyline that shows a decent amount of promise.

Lana pops up one final time to show us her ‘nifty techno-stalker room of genuinely freaky obsessive bald man watching’, which she is using to keep tabs on Lex. Confusingly, most of the images she is watching seem to be filmed from surveillance cameras that perpetually hover about six inches from Lex’s face without him noticing, but hey, this is all getting a little nitpicky so I’ll get on to the final important matter at hand: The standout stupid moment of the episode.

This is becoming a regular feature of my reviews and this week doesn’t disappoint. The episode ends with yet another irritating American pop song chewing away at your brain in such a way that it feels like someone is shoving a rusty cheese grater into your ear. For God’s sake, can we please have an emotional scene in this show for once without some warbly bint crooning shit at us in such a loud and invasive way we can barely hear the bloody characters speak?!

This however is a minor annoyance compared to what is actually being said on screen. Chloe and Jimmy have a rather awkward conversation where Jimmy, who earlier in the episode was caught on a date with Kara (I don’t care what they said before you leave me shouty corrective comments. If that wasn’t a fucking date, I’m the Pope’s cobbler) denies he is planning to plough her like one of the Kent farms fields and claims to prefer Chloe after all. They then go through one of the stupidest screen break ups ever, simply because Chloe doesn’t tell Jimmy that she is a ‘Meteor Freak’. As Jack Sparrow would put it “if you were waiting for the opportune moment…that was it”.

Although Allison Mack and Aaron Ashmore do a decent job of playing the scene to its emotional conclusion, I found myself shaking my head in frustration. Yet again we are forced to watch the same ‘he/she has a secret that they, for reasons totally unknown, feel they cannot tell the closest person to them in the whole world’ storyline, just with different characters. Quite why the writers feel that everyone in the whole bloody series should have a deep dark secret is beyond me, but I wish to god they would stop it because it’s a huge waste of time and makes no sense whatsoever.

The final shot of Chloe, standing lost and alone in the planet offices was pretty much a metaphor for the way she has been treated so far this season. I am getting really rather worried about this. The Smallville writers aren’t exactly big on subtlety and one has to wonder about the mounting pressure on Chloe. This combined with the constant heavy handed lines saying things amounting to ‘all meteor freaks become raving nutters in the end’, smacks of a rubbish excuse to have her flip out in a couple of episodes’ time and have her go on a rampage, only to be pulled back by Clark at the last minute. I sincerely hope I’m wrong about this.

Overall, ‘Cure’ was far from perfect, but it did give us a small glimmer of hope in the ocean of shittyness that Smallville usually throws our way. Dean Cain was actually good in something, Lex was evil and we got lots more Chloe, which is never a bad thing. The usual ‘rehashing plotlines’ issue was still annoyingly present, and Lana appears to have turned into a soulless robot who has no chemistry with Clark, but hey, on the whole this was a definite improvement.

The best thing about the episode was having a decent baddie and I NEVER thought I’d say these words, but please Smallville writers, Bring back Dean Cain!.

6.7/10

Smallville (S7 Episode 3) ‘Fierce’ Review

It’s a difficult thing when writing reviews to be positive about the subject matter, especially when the subject matter in question is Smallville. As I mentioned in my last review, I have always seen Smallville as something of a missed opportunity. The 60 odd years of rich Superman mythos the show has the chance to draw on is some of the best material ever produced by the comic industry, so you would think that maybe after 6 seasons of the show, the writers would have come up with something a little more engaging than ‘Krypto freak of the week’. Alas, sadly not.

The episode revolves around the Smallville harvest festival beauty pageant, which is simply a paper-thin excuse for dirty old Kansas farmers to encourage the impressionable local girls to get their kit off. Kara, doing her bit to prove that blondes aren’t in fact dumb (irony), decides to enter. Terrific idea love, you’re an extraterrestrial from a million light-years away with the power of a god, and what do you do? You prance about in a bikini and start fancying Jimmy Olsen. Jesus, what are the writers thinking? Kara had the potential to be a great character and a decent foil for the flannel shirted emo-ponce that is Clark.

Imagine for a second what Kara could have been like in the right hands. A plucky, spirited, down to earth Kryptonian who dragged the reticent Kal-El out of his constant moaning and making moony eyes at Lana and forced him to face up to his destiny. Someone to help him share the burden of power, someone to force him to realize that he is destined for greatness, and someone to smack him in the chops and tell him to stop being such a twat all the time. What we got was a whinging teenage brat who has so far only managed to annoy the tits off me.

However, there was a tiny hint of this hidden potential revealed in the episode’s best line. Kara says “Kal-El…Clark, You’re not human no matter how much you want to be. We can harvest corn and pump mochas all we want, but its not going to make us one of them…If you think you can just spend your life hiding here on the farm growing old with Lana, you’re fooling yourself” This has slight echoes of Marlon Brando’s Jor-El in the movies. Now if only they could convince Laura Vandervoort to act as well as Brando, we might be on to something.

At one point in the episode, Kara almost looses control of her heat vision, which sets up another ‘mentoring’ scene between her and Clark. The sight of Clark burning a face onto a watermelon was cool enough, and his massive overreaction when Kara exploded it trying to do the same thing was nicely in keeping with the character overall. However, once again, Clark not being able to fly is a huge problem. The decision to give Kara the power of flight when Clark still lacks it was downright bloody stupid because it robs scenes where he is teaching her things of all their impact. Kara actually says, ‘Get back to me when you can fly earth boy”, implying that she doesn’t need to listen to someone who is clearly far less powerful than her. Superman should not be playing second fiddle to anyone, even if he isn’t wearing the suit yet.

But it’s more fundamental than even that. When Smallville launched, I recall hearing the phrase ‘no tights, no flights’ banded about, informing us that Clark would not be flying until the very end when he becomes Superman. However, this rule has clearly been broken already by Kara’s inclusion. It’s almost as if the writers said ‘Shit guys! Heroes has people who can fly! Quick, we need a flying character!”. As with so many things in Smallville, I find myself thinking ‘what the hell is this?’ A show about Superman? Or a show about his mates and distant relatives? Clark does almost nothing in this episode other than talk and get beaten up and in a show about Superman that’s just not on.

Anyway, getting back to the point. It turns out that three of the beauty pageant entrants are in fact Krypto freaks who can control the elements. One, a powerful cryokinetic, uses her ability to kill off another who was apparently betraying them, and then attempts to kill Jimmy for his blatant eavesdropping on one of their secret villains’ evil club meetings. Cue Kara saving the day instead of Clark. Terrific.

One of the ‘weather girls’, as Chloe dubs them, (am I the only one who kept thinking of ‘It’s raining men’ whenever someone called them that?) sees Kara and so they involve her in a plot to, I kid you not, break into the town time capsule to get a treasure map. Kara notices the treasure is Kryptonian (why is every Kryptonian Artefact ever landed on earth in fecking Kansas?) and rushes off to get it. She clearly manages this, but subsequently gets arrested after winning the beauty contest because she trashed the capsule. All of this pointless meandering eventually leads to the final confrontation between Clark and the Weather Girls.

Sadly it’s rubbish and serves only to highlight another of the Smallville writing team’s massive blunders. The fight basically goes like this: Clark turns up, one of the Weather Girls chucks some Kryptonite at him completely by accident, he falls over groaning, Kara turns up and annihilates the Weather Girls in about three seconds and saves Clark.

One of the biggest issues for Superman as a character has always been providing adequate challenge for him and the same holds true in Smallville. The trade off for this in the comics and movies of course, is that he can do things other heroes simply can’t. Spiderman catches falling people, Superman catches falling planes. However, in Smallville, the problem is far more pronounced because he doesn’t have a bunch of intergalactic warlords or skyscraper sized metal men to fight. The writers ‘ ‘Krypto freak’ solution has always failed to deliver anything particularly special or memorable because you never even for a moment think Clark is in any real danger. Despite the fact that he almost always gets floored by Kryptonite for at least part of every fight, he wins instantly when that threat is removed. The show’s decent fights always involve some other nemesis, such as a phantom, or a possessed Lex, and I for one would really like to see more of the villains from the comics in the show to up the ante a little.

Adding Kara into the mix has made things much worse. If it’s hard to find a decent challenge for one Kryptonian, then crikey Moses its going to be pretty fucking tough to find a decent challenge for two. Again I wonder what the hell the writers are smoking?

Chloe once again gets the thumbscrews treatment, which seams totally unnecessary. Alison Mack and Tom Welling’s partnership really was the highlight of last season, nicely blending chemistry and humour to create a lot of fun scenes. Aided by Mack’s capable performances, Chloe quickly became my favourite character on the show. Quite why the writers feel it necessary to torture her escapes me. First they give us the preposterously shit new ‘Daily Planet ‘editor insulting her at every turn, and now they show her relationship with Jimmy beginning to hit the rocks as a prelude to him buggering off with Kara. This, in addition to a massive reduction in her shared screen time with Clark, makes her feel hugely underused and far less compelling a character. To her immense credit, Allison Mack continues to grab hold of every hackneyed, clichéd, stumbling line of dialogue and deliver it well in spite of itself.

Finally, we have the ‘standout stupid moment of the week’. Lana turns up at the Kent farm and has a peculiarly soulless reunion with Clark, then tells him nobody can know about her coming back from the dead, not even Chloe. Then they go to the harvest festival together.

WHAT?! Hang on a sec, she comes back, acts like the world will end if her best friend finds out she’s still amongst the living and then toddles about her home town, in broad daylight, with a man who isn’t Lex Luthor. What in gods name are they thinking? For a woman supposedly capable of playing mind games with a Luthor, Lana Lang appears to by quite possibly the stupidest evil genius in history. What’s next I wonder? Lana tells Clark that she has to go into hiding then has to dash out because she’s going to be on Jerry Springer with the caption “I married an evil baldy genius but I prefer my men in plaid”. Jesus guys, you could at least try to think these things through.

Overall, ‘Fierce’ was simply ‘more of the same’. A run of the mill episode that didn’t really have much of a point to it and simply rehashed old ideas yet again. I can only hope that the season picks up somewhat as time goes on because if this is the shape of things to come, we are in for a long and decidedly boring ride. On the plus side though, Lois wasn’t in it, so they did get something right.

4.5/10

Bioshock: A Shock to the System or Simply Shocking?

Spoilers!: Be warned although I wont go out of my way to divulge details of the plot, I might. This is entirely dependant on what mood I’m in and possibly what I ate that morning. I wont do anything as fuckwitted as wandering about town in a tee-shirt proclaiming ‘Bruce Willis is really dead! – The Sixth Sense’, but you get the idea. If you read on and I ruin something, it’s your own fault!

So, Bioshock then.

Hailed by many as the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, this is the latest in a string of impressive releases from 2K Boston/2K Australia/Make your fucking minds up about a name Studios (previously Irrational Games). An FPS with a few RPG elements thrown in, it attempts to convey the idea of a Randian dystopia gone wrong situated on the ocean floor, and it must be said, it mostly succeeds.

Plot

Andrew Ryan is a man of vision, a man who believes that the intelligent should not be constrained by the stupid, that the fruits of a mans labors should be his own, to do with as he will, and apparently, that it’s a perfectly feasible idea to build an underwater city in the 1940s. He therefore rounds up a veritable cavalcade of professors, artists, doctors, visionaries and…er…pole dancers and heads off to create ‘Ratupre’. A secret sub-aquatic utopia cut off from the uneducated masses and conformity-demanding governments of the surface world.

The city beneath the waves prospers, with the genius population creating artistic masterpieces and scientific breakthroughs left right and proverbial center. However, it is one of these breakthroughs, specifically the discovery of an ocean floor life form that produces pure stem cells (dubbed ADAM), that spells the beginning of the end for Rapture. The ADAM allows the population to begin ‘splicing’ their DNA, and thus change their own genetic code as desired. At first this simply leads to people doing rather mundane things like having genetic ‘plastic surgery’ to make themselves more beautiful, or changing their sex on a regular basis. But then the growing feud between the ideological Ryan, and Frank Fontane, a one time Mobster and kingpin of Raptures black market smuggling operations explodes, leading to the creation of offensive genetic modifications (otherwise known as ‘Plasmids’). Soon enough there are riots in the underwater streets, and pyrokinetic, teleporting composers are fighting machine gun wielding superhuman botanists for control of the city.

To cap it all, the over-exploitation of the ADAM producing sea slugs has lead to their extinction in the natural world. Apparently the only way to procure a fresh supply of this splicer equivalent of crack cocaine, is (and this is where the plot nosedives from ‘rather improbable’ to ‘George Lucas’) to implant the remaining captive slugs into extensively spliced little girls called ‘little sisters’. They are given the unenviable task of running about the place with massive hypodermic needles sucking the blood out of the corpses littering the streets, drinking it, and processing it into useable ADAM. Of course these little sisters require protection and this comes in the form of the ‘Big Daddies’, massive ogre like chaps in metal diving suits who batter anything stupid enough to try and ‘harvest’ the ADAM from said syringe wielding moppets.

So in summery, everything in Rapture has pretty much gone from something good, like ‘Monkeys in top hats’ to something bad, like ‘Essex’.

Into this mess falls your character, the victim of a plane crash that conveniently dumps him in the drink right next to a lighthouse that serves as an ‘entrance’ of sorts to Rapture. The basic aim of the game is to find out what the hell is going on in the under water city, why it all went so horribly wrong, and above all, to get out alive.

Good

Bioshock is a very good game.

In the run up to its release, as is so often the case these days with ‘big’ games, the industry media, who seem determined to ruin the chances of any decent upcoming title before it comes to market by spunking an endless selection of puerile fuckwitted fanboytastic previews on it, were all over Bioshock like a cheap hooker on Rob Lowe. Coupled with this was ‘Creative Director’ Ken Levine’s nasty habit of releasing smug ‘developer diaries’ in which he and his team (complete with ‘token hot female employee hired only to make the workplace appear enlightened in stupid videos and pander to the spotty, pocket mining 13 year old twat demographic’) waxed lyrical about just how wonderful Bioshock was going to be and managed to look more pleased with themselves than God must have done when he created tits.

I got to the point where I actually wanted Bioshock to be crap simply so that Ken Levine would get his face smashed in, though of course that would require an industrial drilling crew to tunnel their way through his sternum in order to find his face, since its currently lodged along with the rest of his skull, somewhere in his small intestine.

It could so easily have been a total disaster, and I’ll begrudgingly admit that it’s a testament to Ken and the gang’s skills (modesty aside) that Bioshock turned out the way it did.

The game is gorgeous, with wonderfully atmospheric environments that look like a twisted, crumbling, art deco version of Atlantis. The enemies you face are suitably evocative and never look out of place, though they could do with more variation since there are only a few types (see the ‘Bad’ section). There has been much written and said about the water effects in Bioshock, and they are quite impressive. Not as impressive and the gushing (badum-tish) previews would have you believe, but still pretty good. Water doesn’t flow and move realistically around the environments, filling up rooms and spilling out of doorways when you enter, but it does do a very good job of falling down the odd staircase and sitting around lackadaisically in pretty puddles.

The weapons are all nicely realized and feel necessarily chunky and robust. One of the nicer aspects of the game is the upgrade system, which has you using ‘Power to the People’ machines to staple all sorts of crap to something like a shotgun to make it work better. Each of these modifications looks appropriately ‘home brewed’ and retro enough to fit in with the games 1960s setting. Only the wrench is un-upgradeable, but this is presumably because a wrench cannot be made more ‘wrenchy’ by stapling crap to it. However, in a masterful piece of game design, the developers have included many ‘tonics’ (basically modular upgrades for your character) that allow you to improve the effectiveness of the wrench. By the end of the game, I was able to kill pretty much anything apart from a big daddy with a couple of swings. So rather than simply being a glorified crate smashing tool (Bioshock actually lets you open containers rather than breaking them, see that Valve, that’s called ‘common fucking sense’) the melee weapon is actually useful throughout.

The plasmids all look pretty good too, from the blackened, cracked and glowing skin that appears on your hands when you splice ‘Incinerate’ to the sub dermal electrical energy crawling through your veins when you activate ‘Electro-bolt’. Their effects vary in terms of attractiveness, but overall, they do the job.

Of special note should be the game story and script. Much like System Shock 2 there are various ‘Audio Diaries’ left laying about for you to find as you make your way through Rapture. This is a wise move since the developer had to not only satisfy people who own PCs and therefore understand what a decent game with a decent story feels like, but also the millions of slack jawed, shit-for-brains , Xbox live retards who have the misplaced audacity to call the Halo series ‘The best games ever made’ and only require things to go ‘boom’ in a game to get a raging stiffy about it.

If you want to “push duh shiiiiiiney buttons and watch da baddies fall down” you can, whilst your fuddled little brain tries to tune out the likes of Andrew Ryan taunting you with witticisms you can’t understand. However, should you actually be intelligent and sensible enough to have played Deus Ex and understood the whole thing, you can rest assured that there is a genuinely decent exploration of human nature, a mans right to creative freedom and the principles of objectivism to be found here. Take a second to read that last sentence again. Now think, when was the last time you could say that about a game?

Propping all of this up is by far Bioshock’s greatest achievement: its sound design. The world of Rapture creaks and groans in exactly the way you would imagine a decaying underwater metropolis to as it struggles to keep the ocean out. The thumping footsteps and haunting groans of the big daddies imbue them with a form of personality that graphics alone simply couldn’t. Even the bizarre dialogue uttered by the splicers and little sisters is both perfectly in keeping with the games overall themes and well written enough to make its constant repetition by said NPCs bearable. There is something genuinely haunting about hearing the shambling footsteps of a male splicer just around the corner whilst listening to him sobbing loudly (yes, men crying in a video game) and mumbling ‘I am a success, I AM A SUCCESS’. There is also something to be said for a game where a deranged, mutated doctor in a blood stained lab coat catches sight of you as you poke your head round a corner, runs toward you shouting to nobody in particular “Nurse, help me find this patient” then proceeds to try and smash your brains in with a lead pipe whilst yelling “It’s just a standard procedure!”.

All of this would be totally unimpressive if the voice acting were not some of the very best in the business. The audio cast in Bioshock is brilliant without exception and makes the laughable efforts of other titles (Resident Evil’s slack jawed ‘look at me, I’m acting!’ morons for example) look…well…laughable.

So all in all, a flawless experience then?

Heh, not quite.

Bad

Ok, so I have explained why Bioshock is one of the best games of the year, but now let me explain why it is also one of the most disappointing.

Imagine one of the most beautiful, immersive game worlds in history. Imagine sound design that makes the world breathe exactly as it should. Imagine scrambling through the darkness of rapture, with two bullets to your name and your heart thudding as you hear the splicers closing in around you. Imagine the shitty industry hype setting up the ‘Big Daddies’ as one of the biggest challenges in gaming, and it actually turning out to be true. Imagine the heart thumping, adrenaline pumping thrill ride of fighting one.

Now imagine that you are some sort of immortal who suffers no penalty from death. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so scary does it?

This is the almost game breaking position Bioshock puts you in. When you die, you are revived at a ‘Vita Chamber’ (basically a big cloning tank thing). But rather than using this as an in game explanation for why you are being booted back to the last checkpoint you passed, and then reloading your last save-game, Bioshock literally resurrects you a second or so after you die and leaves the world exactly as it was. No loading of saves, no punishment, no replaying of content, it just plops you back in the game world and says ‘there there, its all better now, go kill those nasty monsters for being so mean’.

I played Bioshock on the hardest difficulty setting and the first time I came across a big daddy that I could fight, I nearly shat myself when it stormed across the room and killed me in about two seconds. ‘This is good’, I thought ‘I’m going to go back in there, and find a way to show that motherfucker who the real ‘daddy’ is. Imagine my utter disgust when I got back to said room only to find that the big daddy still bore the scars from our last encounter. He hadn’t healed the admittedly minuscule amount of damage I had done to him when I died. For a second, I stood there stunned, then I walked up to him, disbelieving, and whacked him over the head with my wrench. Three seconds later I was respawning at the vita chamber and making my way back to the daddy again. Sure enough, his health was exactly as it had been immediately post-wrenching. In a horribly mangled word: Un-fucking-believable.

I simply cannot describe how utterly terrible the death system in Bioshock is. Why a developer goes to all the trouble of creating some of the most compelling, challenging and downright fucking vicious enemies in gaming, and then makes them all seem about as threatening as a cross-eyed care-bear with Parkinson’s is beyond me. Realizing that I could beat every big daddy in the game to death with my wrench (which would admittedly take about six million years) was one of the most crushing disappointments I have ever experienced in gaming. Nothing is scary when you know that death is a non-issue. If a mutant freak in a waistcoat beats me to death, so what, I’ll just resurrect repeatedly and beat him to death whilst shouting ‘fuck you hard difficulty setting’. Admittedly, I would also be moaning my tits off if the game forced you to replay the last two hours of content whenever you died, but there should at least be a balance.

As alluded to in the ‘Good’ section, the enemies, although varied in terms of aesthetics, are depressingly bland in terms of behavior. For a bunch of mutant geniuses, they are surprisingly retarded when it comes to dealing with intruders. ‘Run at him and cut him up’ is the sort of behavior you expect to see in any northern British city on a Friday night, not in an underwater one full of supposed visionaries. The main problem is a distinct lack of variety.

There are only a few types of splicer whom you will see again and again but with slightly different clothing. It seems mighty unlikely that every single citizen of rapture is going to assign themselves to one of five or six ‘classes’ and stick rigidly to the same behavior patterns, but that’s exactly what they do. Why couldn’t they have switched weapons mid fight? Or done intelligent things like set traps or rip a pipe off a wall and try to hit you with it if you disarmed them?

The hacking system in the game is also noteworthy for being total shit. It’s basically ‘Pipe Dream’ but wedged improbably into a 1960s steam punk setting simply because some nobber on the development team thought it was ‘cool’ and ‘retro’. What it is, is really really repetitive, fucking annoying and sometimes outrageously unfair since some of the ‘puzzles’ it throws at you have no possible solution. It’s pathetically easy when it is solvable and lacks the depth and complexity necessary to make it a worthwhile addition to the game

Another major problem is the ‘resource’ system. In the very early stages, you are armed with nothing but a wrench, a plasmid and a revolver. For about half an hour, I enjoyed some fantastically tense game play where I was scrambling about, juggling between shocking splicers with my electro-bolt and twatting them in the skull with my wrench, or trying to shoot them in the eye with one of my very limited supply of bullets. Every time I pulled the trigger and missed, it was accompanied by a wince at the wastage of such a precious resource. Similarly, I was at several points, wandering about on the very brink of death, desperately hoping that I would be able to make it to the next aid station or med kit before a splicer managed to plug me. It was brilliant, though mostly because I hadn’t discovered the death system at that point.

However, pretty soon, I began finding more and more med kits, EVE hypos and ammo clips. Suddenly, I could afford to miss and not worry about it. I could take a few hits and simply top myself up when needed. I could use my plasmids as often as I liked and it didn’t matter.

By the latter stages of the game, I was carrying more weapons about my person than your average American inner city teenager and I had ammo popping out of my ears. I was stumbling across med kits, money, ammo and EVE so ridiculously often that I was unable to pick most of it up due to a full inventory (which the developers neglected to put a management screen in for) and could happily mow down anything in my path without even bothering to aim properly. I mean who in gods name was leaving all this shit lying about? ‘I know’ thinks Jonny splicer ‘I may be going slowly insane is this crumbling sub-aquatic dystopia, but rather than masturbating myself to death whilst whistling the national anthem, I think I’ll go raid the local hospital for medial supplies, and then toddle about the city leaving them in piles of refuse and on otherwise totally unadorned tables’. It makes no sense, and worse, it removes even more tension from the game.

To cap it all, the knock on effect of this massive imbalance of late game resources is a drastic drop in difficulty. It goes from ‘Hard isn’t really hard enough’ early on, to ‘A monkey could beat this by poking the buttons with his cock’. Big daddies go from being a rock solid challenge in the early game, providing you actually attempt to take one down properly and don’t simply resort to zerging him from the vita chamber, to being a chore in the late game that takes seconds to dispatch. Even when facing the ‘elite’ big daddies in the final stages of the game on hard, all it takes is eight tripwire crossbow bolts strung across a corridor, and a single normal pistol round to ‘aggro’ the daddy and you can stand there picking your nose whilst he blindly charges toward you and murders himself.

Being able to set traps for enemies = good, being able to set traps their AI routines have no idea how to notice or avoid = bad.

The levels in Bioshock are well designed for the most part, with plenty of secret areas for the inquisitive to discover. However, the last level of the game lacks any kind of creativity and resorts to a boring linear trudge through ‘Halo 2’ style dingy corridors whilst shooting things with some of your millions of bullets. It’s as if the developers just thought ‘fuck it, the rest is pretty good, lets just knock up some of the usual FPS bollocks and let’s ship this thing’.

The same thing applies to the final boss battle. Much like Gears of War, Bioshock suffers from the same ‘mostly awesome game with infrequent and unsatisfying boss battles syndrome’ (early game big daddies aside). The finale has a very ham fisted, tacked on feel and floats disjointedly aside from the rest of the game.

Finally the endings are a huge let down. As with so many games which offer the player the ‘choice’, there is no middle ground whatsoever. You either turn out to be a head-up-arse paragon of virtue and light who makes Florence Nightingale look like an unsympathetic whorebag, or a despotic tyrant who would employ Hitler as a tea boy in order to teach him the ropes. Its brain meltingly irritating to purchase a game that supposedly offers choices, only to find that the choices aren’t really choices at all but instead the game only contains a single choice: depressingly predictable path A or depressingly predictable path B.

I understand that every game can’t be expected to be as complex and involving as some of the great PC FPS/RPGs, especially when it has to cater to the ‘Xbox live’ morons. But for the love of god 2K, you could have given us something a little more involved than ‘murder the little girls or save them’. Dead Rising has more possible endings that this for Christ sake.

The most depressing thing of all is that had Bioshock been as complex as something like System Shock 2 or Deus Ex, it would quite possibly have been a genuinely worthy successor to the former and maybe as good as the latter. As it is, it comes of as a slightly poorer imitation that would have been nigh on perfect if only the developers had spent more time actually developing and less time sucking each other off in an orgy of backslappy hype-mongering.

Conclusion

Bioshock is one of those rare games that actually makes a decent attempt at pushing boundaries, and certainly in terms of story, looks and art design it succeeds. It’s brilliantly written and has a few genuinely interesting points to make about the world we live in. Also any game with this many literary references clearly has something going for it. The game play itself is brilliantly executed, the world immersive and the sound design simply staggering.

That said, it’s shallow, the enemies lack variation, the hacking is repetitive rubbish and the death system is almost unforgivably shit. Luckily though, none of these gripes is enough to make Bioshock a bad game. I just can’t help looking at it and thinking that it could have been one of the very best games ever made.

Rating: 9.1/10

Smallville (S7 Episode 2) ‘Kara’ Review

Every week I sit down to watch Smallville hoping futilely against hope that this will finally be the episode that begins the show’s elevation from ‘utter rubbish’ to ‘good’. For a show with one of the most promising licenses in TV history, it often amazes me how anyone can make such a shit attempt at a decent adaptation as the Smallville team regularly do. Sadly, Kara isn’t that episode.

The relatively decent opening episode of the season ended with a shot of new Kryptonian, Kara Zor-El, blasting off into the night sky over Smallville to the strains of a rubbish American pop song. This episode attempts to introduce her as a main character for this season by having her search for the infant Kal El on earth. You see, she is expecting him to be a baby because she was launched from Krypton at the same time as him, but was already in her teens when her dad bundled her into a spaceship. She crash landed in the same meteor shower as Clark, but unfortunately landed in a reservoir and lay undiscovered for 18 years in suspended animation. When the dam exploded in the season premier, her spaceship was disturbed and it released Kara from her slumber.

Now am I the only one who sees a slight flaw in the logic here? Kara Zor-El of Krypton flies across several galaxies to reach Earth in a spaceship of indescribably advanced design, yet as soon as the bloody thing gets wet, it goes crazy and locks its occupant inside for 18 years?! Good Lordy Lord those Kryptonian ship builders really knew their stuff didn’t they?

Anyway, the episode begins with Kara beating up Lois Lane, which I applaud her for, since Lois is an irritating twat. She then takes on Clark, who she throws through a forest at quite a rate of knots, sending him smashing through trees, rocks, earth and confusingly, a caravan.

Apparently not even noticing the fact that the dude she just hit around the head with several acres of deciduous woodland is perfectly unharmed, she saunters off to bite her lip in the upper atmosphere whilst looking at embarrassing baby photos of Clark. The special effects for this sequence aren’t brilliant, but were more than convincing enough to make me ponder the question of why everyone on telly these days seems to be able to fly apart from Clark Kent.

Lois, the silly bint, is convinced that she has indeed seen a real spaceship, and decides to start writing an article about it for her newspaper, plunging us into yet another storyline about ‘the birth of Lois Lane as an investigative reporter’. I’m sorry, but am I watching ‘Smallville: Superman the Early Years’, or ‘The Rubbish Teenage Adventures of Lois Lane’? I don’t give a flying shit about Lois, Erica Durance is ugly and can’t act, and yet again I’m left thinking, ‘why is Lois in Smallville anyway?’

To make things worse, Smallville then manages to pull an even more annoying, badly conceived and terribly acted character than Lois out of its arse. The new Daily Planet editor, (I don’t even remember his name because I was so offended by his presence I forgot it on purpose,) is nothing short of shocking. I swear the casting director must either be perpetually high on crack and acid, or is simply a dribbling fuckwit. To cast a man so young as Michael Cassidy as the editor of the world’s greatest newspaper is just plain wrong. The lines he is given throughout the episod aren’t the best but the real problem is that they sound like they should be coming out of a man 30 years his senior. If they had gotten someone like Edward James Olmos to deliver them, it might have worked, but since Cassidy is clearly only in the show for his looks and to serve as a potential love interest for Lois (yes another one, the girl’s knickers are up and down like the value of shares in Northern Rock) it’s a wasted opportunity. Also, his vindictive and unnecessarily rude attitude towards Chloe backfires spectacularly as a plot device. What on earth did poor old Chloe do to deserve such treatment I wonder? Aside from letting a large man in terrible shirts burst into the Planet offices and start shouting on a regular basis.

Speaking of Chloe, she is as usual by far the best thing about Smallville, and Alison Mack is still the only member of the cast to really grab her character by the scruff of the neck and actually do something productive with it.

The other main thread of the episode revolves around Kara’s spaceship, which for some reason, in another blindingly brilliant example of Kryptonian ship design, is set to detonate with the force of a several kiloton nuclear device if someone sets the burglar alarm off. This makes me wonder if the reason Krypton exploded in the Smallville universe was because several people left their dogs in the car at the same time and forgot to turn the alarm off. I wouldn’t put it past the writers, but I digress.

Kara and Clark save the day, the ship is destroyed and some ‘spooky chap in a suit with a silly voice who clearly works for Lex’ (since everyone who wares a suit in this show has pure, liquid evil flowing through their veins) fucks off with a Kryptonian crystal he pinched from the ship. That’s pretty much it and it’s about as impressive as it sounds. We have had ‘Kryptonian ships falling into the wrong hands’ storylines so many times on Smallville now that it would seem that the writers subscribe to the theory that if you poke the carcass of the same dead horse enough times, something decent is bound to happen eventually.

Kara only seems to be in the show as a thinly veiled excuse to put a reasonably attractive Barbie-doll-esque actress in hotpants and cowboy boots, though for all the world she ends up coming across as less of a superhero and more of an interstellar Daisy Duke. Still, the spotty faced, pocket mining, Comic-Con retards who are still moaning about the fact that the show isn’t a perfect reproduction of the comic should at least be placated for a bit longer by her inclusion.

Finally, we have the standout moment of the episode, the china-based confrontation between Lana Lang and Lex Luthor. I call this the standout moment of the episode not because it’s any good, but because it contains one of the best-worst lines ever delivered with a straight face in a TV drama series. After some initial pleasantries Lana attempts to convince Lex that she fully intended to lure him to the Far-East by saying:

“As soon as I heard you had freed yourself, I laid out the breadcrumbs and waited for the wolf to come knocking”

Now let me be the first to say: “What the fuck are you talking about you daft bitch?! Last time I checked wolves were carnivorous and thus don’t eat bread. That makes no sense at all!”.

The remainder of the scene has Lex trying to convince us that Lana is some sort of Machiavellian genius who can outwit even him, but it’s rather difficult to take his claims seriously after the aforementioned outburst of insanity. The blatant attempt by the writers to sweep the mystery of Lana’s ‘death’ under the rug with a single five minute sequence is frankly insulting, as it smacks of them backing themselves into a corner and coming up with a dimwitted escape clause. Lex apparently made a stillborn clone of Lana at some point, which she then blew up in order to fake her own death. Hang on, Lex made a Lana clone? Since when? Why the hell didn’t you tell us before so that this wouldn’t look like you made a massive cocking mistake and couldn’t think of a decent way out?

As Smallville goes, Kara wasn’t a bad episode, but then that’s a bit like saying that a sack of shit isn’t that bad, which of course is a great big lie.

Roll on next week!

Rating: 4.3/10