Clockwork Planet Smallville S7 EP14 ‘Traveller’ Review

Season seven of Smallville presents me with a problem as a reviewer. I keep having to write the same thing. Every other season of the show has been up and down like a malfunctioning lift in terms of quality, but at least they didn’t make the same mistakes over and over and over. Each season, in its own small way, contributed to Clark’s journey. Sure, they might have been utter shit in places (See season 4 for more details), but they didn’t make Clark seem like he was walking backwards along the road to becoming Superman. ‘Traveller’ is a perfect example of the core problem that currently faces Smallville: Clark Kent is shit.

If anyone actually read this I would in all probability be deluged with angry comments surrounding that last point, but hear me out. In previous seasons, Clark has done some pretty awesome stuff and for all its faults, Smallville has delivered some truly memorable moments. From Clark’s first true flight (As Kal-El, his ruthless Kryptonian alter ego) to him clawing his way up the side of an ICBM and ripping the nuke out of it’s heart, money has often been spent in the right places and the results have been one of the few factors that made the show worth watching.

Initially, the signs were good for ‘Traveller’. The intro scene, where Clark is ambushed in his barn by the chief mechanic from the utterly sublime, re-imagined Battlestar Galactica and shot with kryptonite tasers is frankly brilliant. Atmospheric, well acted and a few gaping logic holes, (1. Why would you try to take on such a powerful ‘freak’ alone if you were the highly trained leader of an elite strike team? 2. Why didn’t Clark hear them coming from the other side of the globe, let alone 30 feet away? 3. Why, after recovering from his first dose of tasering, did Clark not simply move at nearly the speed of light in order to dodge the other incoming shots? 4. Oh alright, I’ll stop now) aside, genuinely striking. Clark flailing about like a wounded bear and lobbing Chief Tyrol across the room was a powerful illustration of his irritatingly hidden potential.

However, before long, our ‘hero’ is banged up in an expensive looking Kryptonite cell and in desperate need of saving once again. WRONG!

This could have been a fantastic opportunity for a hero’s true colours to emerge. Superman is not thick. In fact he has a crazy Krypto-brain that works like a supercomputer. He never forgets anything, and he always finds a way to win, no matter how intelligent his foes. It’s very easy to think of him as a well mannered bruiser in tights, a man who solves the world’s problems with brawn rather than brains, but that’s simply not the case and Smallville could have easily made that point with this episode. Imagine for a second if, rather than writhing on the floor for an entire episode, a stricken Clark had engaged in a tense battle of wills with his captor, constantly watching, waiting for an opportunity to break out. Maybe he could have achieved it about half way through, and then found himself in a fortress of Kryptonite laced traps, scrambling for safety and enjoying only short bursts of power, and all the while persued by the relentless agents and their adapted technology. His moral compunctions could have been his Achilles heal, his unwillingness to kill in order to escape his biggest challenge.

Instead, what we get is an immobilised, brutalised, tortured hero who can’t do anything about his situation but wish to god he wasn’t in it, and must rely on his friends to help him out.

This has consistently been the case for weeks and its really starting to grate. But for all its monotony in some senses, the series is also wildly inconsistent in others.

Take good old Lionel Luthor for example, who is once again grabbed by his ridiculous hair and hurled bodily into another totally unexplained change of heart. For over a season now, we have been told that Lionel is Jor-El’s emissary, a walking library of Kryptonian knowledge and secretly one of the good guys, only to be told an episode later that he is in fact a ruthless, murdering, wife beating despot who just happens to have a bonce full of Krypto-think. It’s ridiculous to the point where you have to wonder if the writer of each episode has even bothered to watch the one that preceded it. Lionel flip-flops so often he resembles a greasy, craggy faced goldfish that’s leapt out of its bowl in a frenzied bout of stupidity.

Here he’s something of a villain once again, having given the order to have Grumpy McDroopyface banged up and Kryptonited half to death in the first place. According to him he did it for Clark’s ‘protection’, but in actuality, it transpires that he has been wanting to control Clark all along, having anticipated his arrival on earth some time ago as a member of a secret society called ‘Veritas’ who knew that an alien of unimaginable power was going to fall from the stars. Veritas is made up of the men-folk of several of the DC universe’s richest families. As well as a Luthor, we also get a Queen, a Teague and a Swan. The society apparently planned to welcome Clark upon his arrival and ensure his protection, something which should be read as ‘cease potentially the most powerful asset on earth and control it’. Things didn’t exactly go to plan for the members of Veritas, unless of course you happen to be Lionel Luthor, for whom things went exactly as planned as he systematically had the other members killed off in order to claim Clark as his possession when he landed.

A charming little story isn’t it?

I have to wonder exactly which member of the writing team, whilst doubtless snorting coke from the heaving plastic bosom of a leggy prostitute, thought to himself “I know, let’s rip off The Da Vinci Code, NOBODY WILL NOTICE!!!” then actually managed to get the rest of the production team to buy into the idea. I can only assume that they are all off their faces on some sort of hallucinogen or simply utter fucking retards, but by god they made a colossal cock-up of this one.

First of all, allow me to indulge myself for a second by pointing out the one teeny-tiny flaw in this otherwise shining example of televisual script writing wonderment:

*ahem*

How in the name of all that’s holy did they have a bloody clue that the last son of Krypton was coming to earth in the first place let alone build a FUCKING stupid Fucking secret fucking society around the idea!? WHO IN GOD’S NAME WRITES THIS SHIT!!!?!

I feel better now. Anyway the point is that the entire idea is totally absurd. They never even bother to offer the slightest explanation as to how or why Veritas was able to determine that ‘The Traveller’ was on his way, let alone how they planned to control him when he did get there. The whole thing is clearly just a terrible excuse to sling in a ‘secret society’ simply because those were the talk of the town back in 2005 and hell, if it worked then, it’s gotta work again right? And also just to give Lionel an excuse to still be in the series.

Also, why the heck would you get an actor like Aaron Douglas (he of the aforementioned Battlestar fame) on the show and then proceed to give him a theoretically interesting role as the villain of the piece, only to then have him spending an entire episode pushing a lever up and down? He’s totally wasted and actually ends up looking a bit shit (not to mention dead) by the end of the episode thanks to some horrible dialogue and direction. If you are going to get guest stars on the show who have a proven track record, the least you could do is actually give them something productive to do.

So the scene is set for a dramatic rescue, though sadly not by Clark, and in this week’s standout stupid moment, the rescuing falls to Chloe and Kara.

With Clark in mortal peril as usual, it falls to Chloe to drag powerless amnesiac Kara to the fortress of solitude and shout at Jor-El until he restores her memory and powers. At which point both of them should freeze to death almost immediately because, correct me if I’m wrong, the north pole is not the sort of place you simply saunter around in in a fashionable coat and a pair of jeans unless you want your feet to fall off. But that’s exactly what they do and apparently suffer no ill effects.

Nitpicking aside, the really stupid moment comes when Chloe starts yelling. It’s a shame to have to say it for the second time in one season, but Allison Mack seems to be losing her touch slightly. She has, for a very long time, been possibly the best reason to watch the show, simply because she brings a genuinely pleasing amount of skill and charisma to a cast who otherwise sorely lack it. I don’t know if the director is to blame for this scene, but for my money, Chloe should have been on the point of emotional meltdown, screaming at Jor-El to help because she was terrified that Clark was going to bite the bullet at any second. Instead, she basically just marches into the fortress and grumbles loudly. To cap it all, she then declares that she ‘loves’ Clark without so much as a misty eye. Had she been on her knees, in floods of tears, begging for help when she made such a declaration, it could have been one of the most memorable scenes in recent memory, but instead, it’s almost as if nobody can be bothered. It’s a great shame because unlike many others, Mack is doubtless capable of such a performance.

To cap it all, without so much as a word, Jor-El fixes Kara just like that. Done! Right then, off to save the star of the show.

All that boring nonsense we had to endure in previous episodes evaporates then does it? All the messing about with Lex trying to pry Clark’s secret out of Kara? Done. No explanation, no major revelations, no point whatsoever. She just gets her memory back and that’s that and that leaves us screaming “why the hell did she need to lose it in the first place!?”

We then get yet another expensive, visually arresting special effect sequence where Kara bursts through a balsa-wood door, and fries the controls for Clarks cell, before ripping the whole thing out of the ground and throwing it at his captors. It’s impressive stuff, but it doesn’t change the fact that she should have been the one in the cell and Clark should have been saving her. Yet again they blew the budget on someone who isn’t our hero.

Finally, we have Lex, and his ordering a hitman to kill the ‘frankly far too young to be a mentor for Clark’ Patricia Swan, in order to further unravel the mystery of Veritas. She is introduced so quickly and disposed of so promptly that you never really get the chance to understand quite why she is so motivated to find the traveller. Does she want to control him, or is she a good guy after all? Sure, she seems genuine enough in the final scenes of the episode, but it’s irritating that we will never find out what she had planned. Having said that, the Veritas storyline, for all its stupidity, seems to finally be sending the two Luthors hurtling toward one another on a collision course and I really hope they don’t simply brush this storyline aside in the next episode like so many others when it has the potential to be epic, if rather unrelated to Clark and his journey.

Speaking of Clark, having escaped death for another week (sigh), he moves on to some more moping around the farmhouse and questioning whether he can ever live up to people’s expectations of him. Good to see some original thinking from the writers there…

All in all, Traveller made not a jot of sense. The Veritas ‘secret society’ idea is neither intriguing nor particularly useful in terms of advancing Clark’s progression, but it does offer up the potential for some fireworks between Lex and his father. Traveller was in many ways the victim of what proceeded it (I.e. several rubbish storylines) but it could have turned things around had Clark been able to do something other than get rescued for once. For a budding, indestructible Super hero, he sure doesn’t do much in the way of heroism these days, and it’s dragging the show into the doldrums.

5.5/10