Smallville 9x06 - Crossfire
Nov. 18th, 2009 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficSo Lois and Clark are filming an audition for a morning news program, but Clark keeps flubbing his lines. Are you sure you want to make jokes about Tom Welling being a bad actor, show? What’s next, do you want to have Chloe say “I was just thinking about Davis and how anticlimactic my entire thing with him was.”
Then the producer tells them they got the job, but it’s both of them, because they have so much chemistry. Because that’s how jobs in the television industry are given out, five seconds after a shoddy audition. And the producer compares them to Hepburn and Tracy. I don’t remember the movie where Tracy was a jackass with severe mental issues and Hepburn was a belligerent drunk, but there has to be one, because the comparison would make no sense otherwise!
And that’s the teaser. No villain vowing to do evil, no startling plot development, just Lois & Clark: Co-Anchors. Congratulations, show, you’ve turned Superman into a sitcom.
Chloe considerately shows up to remind us we’re supposed to have a season arc. And in case you had an iota of sympathy for Clark, remember he’s only courting Lois to find out what she knows about the Kandorians (but of course, that's a cover for his true feelings blah blah blah Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson). Ugh.
Chloe also says Tess has “an attraction to all things alien.” Glass houses, Chloe.
In a subplot, Ollie sees Mia Dearden fighting in an underground boxing match (what IS IT with the MMA this season?) then picks her up. That’s right, in Smallville, Mia is a kickboxing hooker. Okay, I’ll admit, that’s an improvement on Kevin Smith’s writing.
Immortal Dialogue
Mia: I don’t bruise easily.
Ollie: Maybe not on the outside…
Oh, how I wish I could projectile vomit through the Internet.
So Clark has a blind date with some woman, with Lois chatting with him via an bug in his ear for some reason. You’d think there’d be a joke featuring it, but she only makes bitchy comments about his date. It later figures into the plot with Clark overhearing a struggle over the bug, but he could just have easily as used his superhearing for that. It's as if someone was trying to see how completely extraneous and poorly conceived a plot point could be.
Then Lois goes to talk with Ollie about how she can have a better blind date (although wouldn’t a disastrous blind date be equally good morning television?) and oh dear god, this is actually the A-plot of a Superman TV show. There are aliens running around and a kung-fu hooker, but who has time for that, Clark has a blind date!
Oh, and Mia comes out of the shower while Lois is chatting with Ollie, so she thinks Ollie picked up a hooker, when he really only picked up a hooker platonically. Sadly, we don’t get to see him explain “well, I happened to be in an underground fight club when I saw a hooker doing really well at an intergender match, so I decided to glomp onto her as my sidekick.”
Also, (and remember, this is still second-fiddle to Clark on a blind date) Zod has become the CEO of a company merging with Luthorcorp, and one of his men has infiltrated Tess’s operation as a bodyguard. Now, imagine dropping a company of Marines in North Korea, sight unseen, and them pulling this off. Now imagine it’s not just a different culture, it’s a different species, on a different planet, with totally different technology and customs. How do these people even have drivers’ licenses?
And well, there’s not much else to say. Tess briefly turns into Jason Voorhees to dump a memento of her killing Zod’s man on his lap, then Chloe uses a grainy webcam image to scan the fingerprints of Tess’s computer guy and somehow blackmail him into helping her (instead of using facial recognition software, which actually exists, and is therefore not stupid enough to appear on Smallville). And for some reason, Clark’s blind date ends up getting the morning show gig, and turns out to be Smallville Cat Grant, even though she acts nothing like the Cat Grant from the comics. Which is a shame, because “Clark’s blind date is a skank” at least has comic potential. Oh, and Clark kisses Lois, but it’s so unmotivated and arbitrary, arising only from Chloe pulling one of her million Clark lectures out of a hat, that you know they only threw it in to give this blah episode something memorable.
Really, the bad guy was just some pimp. I realize not every episode can afford for Clark to fight Doomsday, but I also expect something more than a rip-off of Superman Returns for a climax. I have no idea what this episode set out to accomplish. It introduces characters from the comics, but in an unrecognizable fashion and it doesn't make them at all interesting or sympathetic, and gives them no conceivable bearing on the plot. It advances the Clark/Lois romance, but only in a punch-clock fashion. It touches on the Zod arc, but in a completely illogical manner. In short, they wasted all the potential inherent in a kung-fu hooker.
Then the producer tells them they got the job, but it’s both of them, because they have so much chemistry. Because that’s how jobs in the television industry are given out, five seconds after a shoddy audition. And the producer compares them to Hepburn and Tracy. I don’t remember the movie where Tracy was a jackass with severe mental issues and Hepburn was a belligerent drunk, but there has to be one, because the comparison would make no sense otherwise!
And that’s the teaser. No villain vowing to do evil, no startling plot development, just Lois & Clark: Co-Anchors. Congratulations, show, you’ve turned Superman into a sitcom.
Chloe considerately shows up to remind us we’re supposed to have a season arc. And in case you had an iota of sympathy for Clark, remember he’s only courting Lois to find out what she knows about the Kandorians (but of course, that's a cover for his true feelings blah blah blah Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson). Ugh.
Chloe also says Tess has “an attraction to all things alien.” Glass houses, Chloe.
In a subplot, Ollie sees Mia Dearden fighting in an underground boxing match (what IS IT with the MMA this season?) then picks her up. That’s right, in Smallville, Mia is a kickboxing hooker. Okay, I’ll admit, that’s an improvement on Kevin Smith’s writing.
Immortal Dialogue
Mia: I don’t bruise easily.
Ollie: Maybe not on the outside…
Oh, how I wish I could projectile vomit through the Internet.
So Clark has a blind date with some woman, with Lois chatting with him via an bug in his ear for some reason. You’d think there’d be a joke featuring it, but she only makes bitchy comments about his date. It later figures into the plot with Clark overhearing a struggle over the bug, but he could just have easily as used his superhearing for that. It's as if someone was trying to see how completely extraneous and poorly conceived a plot point could be.
Then Lois goes to talk with Ollie about how she can have a better blind date (although wouldn’t a disastrous blind date be equally good morning television?) and oh dear god, this is actually the A-plot of a Superman TV show. There are aliens running around and a kung-fu hooker, but who has time for that, Clark has a blind date!
Oh, and Mia comes out of the shower while Lois is chatting with Ollie, so she thinks Ollie picked up a hooker, when he really only picked up a hooker platonically. Sadly, we don’t get to see him explain “well, I happened to be in an underground fight club when I saw a hooker doing really well at an intergender match, so I decided to glomp onto her as my sidekick.”
Also, (and remember, this is still second-fiddle to Clark on a blind date) Zod has become the CEO of a company merging with Luthorcorp, and one of his men has infiltrated Tess’s operation as a bodyguard. Now, imagine dropping a company of Marines in North Korea, sight unseen, and them pulling this off. Now imagine it’s not just a different culture, it’s a different species, on a different planet, with totally different technology and customs. How do these people even have drivers’ licenses?
And well, there’s not much else to say. Tess briefly turns into Jason Voorhees to dump a memento of her killing Zod’s man on his lap, then Chloe uses a grainy webcam image to scan the fingerprints of Tess’s computer guy and somehow blackmail him into helping her (instead of using facial recognition software, which actually exists, and is therefore not stupid enough to appear on Smallville). And for some reason, Clark’s blind date ends up getting the morning show gig, and turns out to be Smallville Cat Grant, even though she acts nothing like the Cat Grant from the comics. Which is a shame, because “Clark’s blind date is a skank” at least has comic potential. Oh, and Clark kisses Lois, but it’s so unmotivated and arbitrary, arising only from Chloe pulling one of her million Clark lectures out of a hat, that you know they only threw it in to give this blah episode something memorable.
Really, the bad guy was just some pimp. I realize not every episode can afford for Clark to fight Doomsday, but I also expect something more than a rip-off of Superman Returns for a climax. I have no idea what this episode set out to accomplish. It introduces characters from the comics, but in an unrecognizable fashion and it doesn't make them at all interesting or sympathetic, and gives them no conceivable bearing on the plot. It advances the Clark/Lois romance, but only in a punch-clock fashion. It touches on the Zod arc, but in a completely illogical manner. In short, they wasted all the potential inherent in a kung-fu hooker.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-19 05:19 am (UTC)You're right. We should register this as a hate crime.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-19 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-19 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-19 03:14 pm (UTC)I think Oliver needs a pal.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-19 05:04 pm (UTC)