Smallville 9x01
Sep. 26th, 2009 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficI'm tempted to just post a picture of Clark Kent in his "costume" and laugh uproariously, but would that be fair to you, gentle reader? No. Let's get this bitch going. And I should note that my Chloe/Davis icon is representing this entry under protest.
*Proving that it’s never too early to start the cheese, Chloe is working at her computer when she hears a noise and DRAWS A PISTOL. This is one woman who should never own a cat.
*It’s just Dr. Gaeta! Hi Dr. Gaeta! He tells her that, basically, the Justice League has disbanded because they feel guilty about what happened to Jimmy, thus establishing that none of them knew Jimmy that well.
*In the Watchtower, Chloe says that she feels haunted. Oh, come off it, Sullivan, it’s not like you’re standing right where two people were mur…der…ed. Well, it’s not like you’re living in a place bought for you by your dead ex-husband… Chloe, have you ever given thought to a nice studio apartment?
*Laters, Lois is Back From The Future in a random train. She appears disoriented, so I guess all the time travel subplot did was send her three weeks into the future? Oh, c’mon, Smallville, you can be more stupidly disappointing than that!
*Soon, a female Darth Malak cosplayer follows her and attacks. Yes, even in the tolerant and peaceful world of the 30th century, Lois Lane drives people to homicidal rages.
*Their foxy boxing (yes, Lois is able to trade punches with a Kryptonian. Next, she punches out Jason Voorhees, because why the hell not?) dislodges the train, causing it to fall off a bridge. Luckily, Clark is there to catch it. Thank God! If that train had fallen another six feet, imagine the velocity it would’ve built up when it hit the ground!
*The CGI is really shit here, but then, you knew that. But even the establishing shots of Metropolis look like screenshots from SimCity.
*There’s really no getting over how silly Clark looks. He’s wearing black pants, a black duster, and a black T-shirt with the Superman logo. He’s the Super-Punisher! I love how they’ve decided to make his costume more “realistic,” yet he doesn’t wear any sort of mask or gloves. At least part your hair on the other side or something, geez.
I know, I know, he’s living exclusively as Super-Punisher and thus has no reason to hide his “secret identity,” but what if someone figures out that the Super-Punisher used to be Clark Kent and goes after his old friends? Well, sucks to be them, I guess.
*Proving that the writers have seen Daredevil, whose writers had in turn seen The Crow, who probably saw an episode or two of Zorro, Superman leaves his calling card by heatvisioning his logo into a nearby wall. Nice vandalism there, Man of Steel. You gonna pay for that?
*New credits! No Luthors, which makes for a very stacked ratio of talented actors to escapees from car commercials.
*Callum Blue! Man, remember in the first season of Dead Like Me when that goth girl had sex with him because he was a Reaper? That was Kaylee Frye! Wild, huh? Kinda makes me want to become an actor.
*Oh, man. They cut out the “Superman flies off into orbit” shot for the big reveal of Super-Punisher, looking for all the world like a cross-dressing Huntress from the old Birds of Prey series. I can’t help but wonder if there’s an alternate universe where the Bruce Wayne series got off the ground and, in the ninth season, they decided to “pave the way” for him being Batman by dressing him up in white tennis clothes with a little bat on the sleeve.
No, seriously, guys, who would mind if this show had died a few seasons ago and you moved on to the adventures of young Batman?
*Clark (do I have to call him Superman now?) randomly bitches at Jor-El about how he can’t fly. It’s awesome in its badness. I mean, yeah, Kara learned to fly in about three minutes (and she can’t even dress herself) and you’ve had three weeks—not even a hover? Of course, Jor-El tells him it’s all in his head. Unfortunately, he does not then open a trapdoor under Clark and say something like “Fly, boy, fly!” Of all the times for Jor-El not to be a dick…
*Lois refers to Chloe’s time with Davis as “playing Thelma & Louise with the Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Because under what possible circumstances could Chloe at all be sensitive about that? It’s been three whole weeks!
"Hey, how 'bout all those weeks you spent shacked up with a serial killer? I'm just going to assume it all worked out hunky-dory and that now we can look back at it and laugh."
"Ho ho ho, Creature from the Black Lagoon. Lois, you crack me up!"
*And after Chloe tells Lois that there’s things she needs to know, urgently, Lois of course puts her off and then sneaks out. Because she’san idiot feisty.
*Jor-El tells Clark that his passion will be his greatest strength and his greatest obstacle. What does that remind me of?
Is there, like, a test you have to do to become a mentor? Because by the archetype, you’d think a mentor would be a retired warrior or an old wizard or a crafty ex-spy. Jor-El is a guy who found out his planet was going to blow up, had portals going to Earth, and… uh… went to chat with a bunch of Indians about it. And hid a bunch of rocks around the globe. And fucked some woman who looked a lot like Lana Lang. Anyone who ends up as a disembodied voice in the Arctic should not be giving life lessons, IMHO.
*Hey guys, it’s Zod! He and the Zodlings wear olive green, tanktops, and dog tags, because they’re in an army, you see. Also, they’ve hung up a bunch of swastika-like emblems on red-background banners, because they’re fascists. Stop me if I’m going too fast. Haven’t we already established that Zod has a symbol conveniently shaped like the English Z? Oh, guy, he's going to start talking about the purity of the Krypton race, isn't he?
*So thirty seconds after he’s shown up, Zod orders his insubordinate subordinates to kneel before Zod, because that’s what the character said in Superman 2. Of course, because this is the Big Bad we’re being introduced to for the first time, one of his henchman pistol-whips him and he’s out like a light. Ooh, menacing. I think the French witch was more intimidating than this guy.
*And speaking of intimidating, BAG shows up asMetallo Not Yet Metallo where Lois is investigating the trash crash (she picks up Girl!Malak's funky little clothing item that covered her face for five seconds, but nothing comes of it). To subtly foreshadow his villainy, he’s randomly pissy about Clark stopping the train disaster. He doesn’t say that Clark caused the disaster for publicity or that humanity is growing too reliant on him, just that the ends don’t always justify the means. Yes, first he’s catching trains so that the people in them won’t die, what next? Will he put out fires so kittens don’t burn to death? Defuse bombs so they don’t blow up? When will his reign of terror end!?
*Apparently, BAG’s problems with Clark stems from the super-graffiti. See, Super-Pun, told you that’d come back to haunt you. I guess BAG’s a big believer in the Broken Windows approach.
*To avoid getting in trouble with the cops, when a policeman walks in on him and Lois, BAG kisses her. Yes, two people inside a crashed train would be suspicious, but two people kissing in a crashed train? Ho-hum.
*Dr. Gaeta ran a scan at the time of the train crash, and found two rips in the “temporal aperture continuum.” And I found two “BULLSHITS!” in the “disbelief suspension matrix.”
*I know it’s a running gag in Smallville fandom that Luthor manor security sucks, but this takes the cake. And it’s, like, a mondo-sized wedding cake served with ice cream. Tess, who is the CEO of Luthorcorp remember, has been held for DAYS inside HER OWN HOUSE by the Zodlings, who have no powers. How in the fuck did that work? Did Zod get on the phone and say “Yes, sorry, Tess will have to miss her appointment with Senator Kinsey, she has a bad cold. Listen! *kuff kuff kuff* She’s very sick, can’t come to the phone. Call you when she can, bye!”
*“Everybody, turn down the music, the cops are coming by!”
*Also, the sight of Tess looking like a battered housewife, getting skeeved on by Zod, and saying she’d prefer to be shot to death after the last few days (and Zod saying she wouldn’t be killed) is really, really gratuitously unpleasant. It’s kind of like Smallville is playing a game of Charades with the idea that Tess has been raped, but won’t come out and say it, which just makes it worse.
*In their reunion, Chloe (of course) completely lets Clark off the hook for abandoning her after her husband died, because she misplaced her spine a couple seasons ago. She also doesn’t bring up the way he basically blamed her for souring him on humanity or how he mind-raped her. Look, show, if you don’t want to deal with the consequences of Clark treating Chloe like shit, don’t have him treat her like shit.
*Meanwhile, Ollie is angstily expressing himself through an underground fight club. AHAHAHA, show. Naturally, Lois “sneaks” in as the ring girl and has a long conversation with him involving his secret identity, six feet away from the audience. I’m waiting for the week the producers just say “Fuck it” and have Lois wear a different skanky outfit each week with no explanation. Just, you know, she’s investigating sea monsters and she’s dressed as a naughty Bo Peep. Whatevs.
*So girl!Malak uses blue Kryptonite to take away her and Clark’s powers and then pulls out a katana (I guess they don’t have guns in the future. Damn you, Obama!). Then, immediately after she says that she’s neutralized their powers so they’re on even footing, she does an obvious wire-fu jump at him.
*Girl, he can't fly. Keep your superpowers, just pick him up and drop him in a volcano.
*And of course, Clark grabs a piece of metal and knows how to sword-fight. Because to live in Metropolis, you have to take mandatory martial arts classes. Cuts down on crime, dontcha know.
*Then Clark kicks the waifish, 120-pound girl in the face, flipping her across the room… and she lands on her feet and completely ignores it. Not even a bruise. Okay then.
*How To Fuck With Clark Kent For Fun And Profit: Buy a watch of the same model as Jonathan Kent’s, then set it to a random date in the future and crack the glass. Then give it to him and say “Clark, I’m from the future! If you want to save the world, you have to do exactly as I say!” And he’s your slave for life.
*Chloe asks Clark to go back in time and save Jimmy, but he says no because he’s a dick. This is the problem with giving your hero a WORKING TIME MACHINE, in that you continuously have to justify not using it to fix something, but then you can also pull it out whenever you need a reset button, all under the nebulous heading of “destiny.” So when Clark told the whole world he was Superman and then later went “nah” and changed the past, that wasn’t destiny. And when the Legionaries showed up, TWICE, to screw around with history, that wasn’t destiny. And when Clark literally said “screw destiny, Imma save Chloe!”, that wasn’t destiny. But Jimmy getting killed because of Davis (who, according to destiny, was supposed to get launched into the Phantom Zone before they ever met, right?), that’s destiny.
Then again, it is Jimmy, so I can’t blame him that much. But still, way to break it gently. “What, with the time machine? Oh, I, uh, left it in my other pants. Gotta go!”
*As long as you’ve got a time machine, hell, why not go back and hit Davis when the Black Kryptonite back before he started his killing spree? Or tell yourself not to treat Lex like such a d-bag? Or, hell, just kill him when he first goes bad, since he’s going to die anyway.
*Chloe gets to tell Clark off, for once, saying there’s nothing human left in him. Well, not since Lex left the show. Boo-yah!
*And the whole rape-torture-whatnot thing on Tess’s part was part of a (stupid) plan to tape the Zodlings doing whatever, but they managed to hack the system and erase all the files. In its own way, this is even more stupid than Jeff Goldblum hacking the aliens in Independence Day with a Mac. At least Goldblum was a hacker. I guess even on Krypton, every squad of commandoes has to include a techie.
*Oh, hey, remember when Lois thought BAG was a cop and then he pulled the ol’ “Don’t look at us, we just like having smoochies in unusual places” routine on a fellow cop? Even after that, she still thinks he’s a cop up until he comes right out and says he’s a reporter. Pulitzer Prize winner, people.
*As for Zod, he gives a big speech which makes everyone forget the whole treason thing and everything’s hunky-dory. He doesn’t even kill the guy who betrayed him. I just really don’t see what’s at all intimidating or unique about him.
*Dear BAG, hey, you’re dating Megan Fox, I get it. But could you please stop smiling every five seconds? It’s giving you this freaky Tom Cruise persona.
*Lois has a weird dream about (I guess) a fascist, red-tinted future, including having sex with Clark and swordplay (what would Freud say?). As everyone knows that Lois’s subconscious involves a great deal more gummi bears, this is probably a prophetic dream or a repressed memory. Wow, a show where a character has visions of life a year into the future. What’ll they come up with next?
*Proving that it’s never too early to start the cheese, Chloe is working at her computer when she hears a noise and DRAWS A PISTOL. This is one woman who should never own a cat.
*It’s just Dr. Gaeta! Hi Dr. Gaeta! He tells her that, basically, the Justice League has disbanded because they feel guilty about what happened to Jimmy, thus establishing that none of them knew Jimmy that well.
*In the Watchtower, Chloe says that she feels haunted. Oh, come off it, Sullivan, it’s not like you’re standing right where two people were mur…der…ed. Well, it’s not like you’re living in a place bought for you by your dead ex-husband… Chloe, have you ever given thought to a nice studio apartment?
*Laters, Lois is Back From The Future in a random train. She appears disoriented, so I guess all the time travel subplot did was send her three weeks into the future? Oh, c’mon, Smallville, you can be more stupidly disappointing than that!
*Soon, a female Darth Malak cosplayer follows her and attacks. Yes, even in the tolerant and peaceful world of the 30th century, Lois Lane drives people to homicidal rages.
*Their foxy boxing (yes, Lois is able to trade punches with a Kryptonian. Next, she punches out Jason Voorhees, because why the hell not?) dislodges the train, causing it to fall off a bridge. Luckily, Clark is there to catch it. Thank God! If that train had fallen another six feet, imagine the velocity it would’ve built up when it hit the ground!
*The CGI is really shit here, but then, you knew that. But even the establishing shots of Metropolis look like screenshots from SimCity.
*There’s really no getting over how silly Clark looks. He’s wearing black pants, a black duster, and a black T-shirt with the Superman logo. He’s the Super-Punisher! I love how they’ve decided to make his costume more “realistic,” yet he doesn’t wear any sort of mask or gloves. At least part your hair on the other side or something, geez.
I know, I know, he’s living exclusively as Super-Punisher and thus has no reason to hide his “secret identity,” but what if someone figures out that the Super-Punisher used to be Clark Kent and goes after his old friends? Well, sucks to be them, I guess.
*Proving that the writers have seen Daredevil, whose writers had in turn seen The Crow, who probably saw an episode or two of Zorro, Superman leaves his calling card by heatvisioning his logo into a nearby wall. Nice vandalism there, Man of Steel. You gonna pay for that?
*New credits! No Luthors, which makes for a very stacked ratio of talented actors to escapees from car commercials.
*Callum Blue! Man, remember in the first season of Dead Like Me when that goth girl had sex with him because he was a Reaper? That was Kaylee Frye! Wild, huh? Kinda makes me want to become an actor.
*Oh, man. They cut out the “Superman flies off into orbit” shot for the big reveal of Super-Punisher, looking for all the world like a cross-dressing Huntress from the old Birds of Prey series. I can’t help but wonder if there’s an alternate universe where the Bruce Wayne series got off the ground and, in the ninth season, they decided to “pave the way” for him being Batman by dressing him up in white tennis clothes with a little bat on the sleeve.
No, seriously, guys, who would mind if this show had died a few seasons ago and you moved on to the adventures of young Batman?
*Clark (do I have to call him Superman now?) randomly bitches at Jor-El about how he can’t fly. It’s awesome in its badness. I mean, yeah, Kara learned to fly in about three minutes (and she can’t even dress herself) and you’ve had three weeks—not even a hover? Of course, Jor-El tells him it’s all in his head. Unfortunately, he does not then open a trapdoor under Clark and say something like “Fly, boy, fly!” Of all the times for Jor-El not to be a dick…
*Lois refers to Chloe’s time with Davis as “playing Thelma & Louise with the Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Because under what possible circumstances could Chloe at all be sensitive about that? It’s been three whole weeks!
"Hey, how 'bout all those weeks you spent shacked up with a serial killer? I'm just going to assume it all worked out hunky-dory and that now we can look back at it and laugh."
"Ho ho ho, Creature from the Black Lagoon. Lois, you crack me up!"
*And after Chloe tells Lois that there’s things she needs to know, urgently, Lois of course puts her off and then sneaks out. Because she’s
*Jor-El tells Clark that his passion will be his greatest strength and his greatest obstacle. What does that remind me of?
Is there, like, a test you have to do to become a mentor? Because by the archetype, you’d think a mentor would be a retired warrior or an old wizard or a crafty ex-spy. Jor-El is a guy who found out his planet was going to blow up, had portals going to Earth, and… uh… went to chat with a bunch of Indians about it. And hid a bunch of rocks around the globe. And fucked some woman who looked a lot like Lana Lang. Anyone who ends up as a disembodied voice in the Arctic should not be giving life lessons, IMHO.
*Hey guys, it’s Zod! He and the Zodlings wear olive green, tanktops, and dog tags, because they’re in an army, you see. Also, they’ve hung up a bunch of swastika-like emblems on red-background banners, because they’re fascists. Stop me if I’m going too fast. Haven’t we already established that Zod has a symbol conveniently shaped like the English Z? Oh, guy, he's going to start talking about the purity of the Krypton race, isn't he?
*So thirty seconds after he’s shown up, Zod orders his insubordinate subordinates to kneel before Zod, because that’s what the character said in Superman 2. Of course, because this is the Big Bad we’re being introduced to for the first time, one of his henchman pistol-whips him and he’s out like a light. Ooh, menacing. I think the French witch was more intimidating than this guy.
*And speaking of intimidating, BAG shows up as
*Apparently, BAG’s problems with Clark stems from the super-graffiti. See, Super-Pun, told you that’d come back to haunt you. I guess BAG’s a big believer in the Broken Windows approach.
*To avoid getting in trouble with the cops, when a policeman walks in on him and Lois, BAG kisses her. Yes, two people inside a crashed train would be suspicious, but two people kissing in a crashed train? Ho-hum.
*Dr. Gaeta ran a scan at the time of the train crash, and found two rips in the “temporal aperture continuum.” And I found two “BULLSHITS!” in the “disbelief suspension matrix.”
*I know it’s a running gag in Smallville fandom that Luthor manor security sucks, but this takes the cake. And it’s, like, a mondo-sized wedding cake served with ice cream. Tess, who is the CEO of Luthorcorp remember, has been held for DAYS inside HER OWN HOUSE by the Zodlings, who have no powers. How in the fuck did that work? Did Zod get on the phone and say “Yes, sorry, Tess will have to miss her appointment with Senator Kinsey, she has a bad cold. Listen! *kuff kuff kuff* She’s very sick, can’t come to the phone. Call you when she can, bye!”
*“Everybody, turn down the music, the cops are coming by!”
*Also, the sight of Tess looking like a battered housewife, getting skeeved on by Zod, and saying she’d prefer to be shot to death after the last few days (and Zod saying she wouldn’t be killed) is really, really gratuitously unpleasant. It’s kind of like Smallville is playing a game of Charades with the idea that Tess has been raped, but won’t come out and say it, which just makes it worse.
*In their reunion, Chloe (of course) completely lets Clark off the hook for abandoning her after her husband died, because she misplaced her spine a couple seasons ago. She also doesn’t bring up the way he basically blamed her for souring him on humanity or how he mind-raped her. Look, show, if you don’t want to deal with the consequences of Clark treating Chloe like shit, don’t have him treat her like shit.
*Meanwhile, Ollie is angstily expressing himself through an underground fight club. AHAHAHA, show. Naturally, Lois “sneaks” in as the ring girl and has a long conversation with him involving his secret identity, six feet away from the audience. I’m waiting for the week the producers just say “Fuck it” and have Lois wear a different skanky outfit each week with no explanation. Just, you know, she’s investigating sea monsters and she’s dressed as a naughty Bo Peep. Whatevs.
*So girl!Malak uses blue Kryptonite to take away her and Clark’s powers and then pulls out a katana (I guess they don’t have guns in the future. Damn you, Obama!). Then, immediately after she says that she’s neutralized their powers so they’re on even footing, she does an obvious wire-fu jump at him.
*Girl, he can't fly. Keep your superpowers, just pick him up and drop him in a volcano.
*And of course, Clark grabs a piece of metal and knows how to sword-fight. Because to live in Metropolis, you have to take mandatory martial arts classes. Cuts down on crime, dontcha know.
*Then Clark kicks the waifish, 120-pound girl in the face, flipping her across the room… and she lands on her feet and completely ignores it. Not even a bruise. Okay then.
*How To Fuck With Clark Kent For Fun And Profit: Buy a watch of the same model as Jonathan Kent’s, then set it to a random date in the future and crack the glass. Then give it to him and say “Clark, I’m from the future! If you want to save the world, you have to do exactly as I say!” And he’s your slave for life.
*Chloe asks Clark to go back in time and save Jimmy, but he says no because he’s a dick. This is the problem with giving your hero a WORKING TIME MACHINE, in that you continuously have to justify not using it to fix something, but then you can also pull it out whenever you need a reset button, all under the nebulous heading of “destiny.” So when Clark told the whole world he was Superman and then later went “nah” and changed the past, that wasn’t destiny. And when the Legionaries showed up, TWICE, to screw around with history, that wasn’t destiny. And when Clark literally said “screw destiny, Imma save Chloe!”, that wasn’t destiny. But Jimmy getting killed because of Davis (who, according to destiny, was supposed to get launched into the Phantom Zone before they ever met, right?), that’s destiny.
Then again, it is Jimmy, so I can’t blame him that much. But still, way to break it gently. “What, with the time machine? Oh, I, uh, left it in my other pants. Gotta go!”
*As long as you’ve got a time machine, hell, why not go back and hit Davis when the Black Kryptonite back before he started his killing spree? Or tell yourself not to treat Lex like such a d-bag? Or, hell, just kill him when he first goes bad, since he’s going to die anyway.
*Chloe gets to tell Clark off, for once, saying there’s nothing human left in him. Well, not since Lex left the show. Boo-yah!
*And the whole rape-torture-whatnot thing on Tess’s part was part of a (stupid) plan to tape the Zodlings doing whatever, but they managed to hack the system and erase all the files. In its own way, this is even more stupid than Jeff Goldblum hacking the aliens in Independence Day with a Mac. At least Goldblum was a hacker. I guess even on Krypton, every squad of commandoes has to include a techie.
*Oh, hey, remember when Lois thought BAG was a cop and then he pulled the ol’ “Don’t look at us, we just like having smoochies in unusual places” routine on a fellow cop? Even after that, she still thinks he’s a cop up until he comes right out and says he’s a reporter. Pulitzer Prize winner, people.
*As for Zod, he gives a big speech which makes everyone forget the whole treason thing and everything’s hunky-dory. He doesn’t even kill the guy who betrayed him. I just really don’t see what’s at all intimidating or unique about him.
*Dear BAG, hey, you’re dating Megan Fox, I get it. But could you please stop smiling every five seconds? It’s giving you this freaky Tom Cruise persona.
*Lois has a weird dream about (I guess) a fascist, red-tinted future, including having sex with Clark and swordplay (what would Freud say?). As everyone knows that Lois’s subconscious involves a great deal more gummi bears, this is probably a prophetic dream or a repressed memory. Wow, a show where a character has visions of life a year into the future. What’ll they come up with next?
