Lower Decks

The following review contains spoilers for Smallville through the current episode, “Plastique,” originally broadcast September 25th, 2008.

Okay, now that the players are in place, we can get going with the season, right? Somewhat. “Plastique” is a definite improvement over “Odyssey,” but there’s nothing here to suggests that the show is on track to regain its long lost form. We get somewhat of a return of the “freak of the week,” another new character (Davis Bloom) and Clark’s first day at the Daily Planet. Of the three, Davis turns out to be the more interesting storyline.

We’ll start off with Clark and his new-found career. One of the best moments of the show comes when Clark is forced (by Lois) to change clothes in a phone booth. He doesn’t don a cape, but changes from farm-boy attire into a borrowed dress shirt and slacks. Still, it’s about as close as we’re likely to get in this series to the comics Clark/Superman transformation. Clark has to rush off on his first morning on the job when there’s an explosion on a city bus. In broad daylight, he rips the top off of the bus to help those trapped inside. One of the trapped turns out to be his new boss, Tess Mercer. Does this sound at all familliar? Clark meets Lex when he saves Lex’s life, and Lex spends the rest of his time on the series checking up on Clark? I’m sure it’s not coincidental, and it’s probably done as a nod to Smallville’s first episode, but it made me cringe a bit.

As it turns out, Tess would have been watching Clark anyway. She tells Clark that Lex told her all about him. I can’t imagine that he managed to tell her everything, but she already knew about his penchant for showing up when people need to be saved. She also suspects, rightly, that Clark knows more about Lex’s disappearnce than he’s letting on. With the show possibly being in its final season, I suppose there wasn’t time to gradually raise Tess’ suspisions about Clark, but it would have been an interesting take on things.

Our freak this week is also involved in the bus explosion. In fact, she’s the cause of the bus explosion. Bette is a run away that Chloe finds wandering around the explosion site. Initially she’s portrayed as a victim of the blast, but we find out that’s not the case when Bette torches someone that crossed her. We find out that Bette blasted the bus when Tess tried to approach her. Bette had escaped from the same facility where Chloe had been held, and she thought Tess was going to try to take her back. When Chloe finds out Bette’s secret, Bette decides its time to torch Chloe as well. Clark, of course, shows up just in time to shield Chloe from Bette’s microwave vision. The cops show up to take Bette to Belle Reeve, or so Bette, Chloe and Clark are told.

It turns out that Tess was trying to recruit Bette for her own little Injustice League. I can’t imagine she’d really have wanted to have that discussion on a public bus, but that’s her story and she’s sticking to it. Given the choice between a padded cell and char-broiling Tess’s targets, Bette takes Tess’s offer. Unfortunately, this means that we’ll be seeing Bette again someday. It’s unfortunate not because of Bette’s danger to the community, but because of actress Jessica Parker Kennedy’s lame performance. She makes Cassidy Freeman (Tess) look positively Emmy-worthy. One positive outcome of this storyline though is Chloe’s decision to take over the operation of Lana’s Isis Foundation. The show needs Chloe to have something relevant to do somewhere where she won’t be pained every time she sees her cousin flirting with Clark.

Speaking of Chloe, that’s where Davis Bloom comes in. He’s a fairly refreshing character, at least in his first outing. Davis is an EMT that responds to the bus explosion and gets set up as a romantic interest for Chloe. Of course, Chloe is engaged to Jimmy, but Jimmy is conveniently missing in this episode. Of course, no new love interest for Chloe would be complete without a deep, dark secret. Even if you haven’t read any of the spoilers about this character, the closing scene confirms that we’ve got a lot to learn yet about Mr. Bloom.

So while the story was rather run-of-the-mill, there were some nice moments. Some of the forced character positioning that took place in “Odyssey” was again on display here, but in much smaller amounts. Of the two new regular characters introduced so far, Davis would seem the more interesting, and better acted. “Plastique” was nothing to cheer about, but if its improvement over “Odyssey” is the start of a trend, rather than a blip, the season may yet have promise.