Lower Decks

Once again, we have a Smallville gimmick episode.  Clark gets (insert random power) that makes everyone on the cast act funny for an episode.  This time, Clark gets the power of persuasion from a fairy with kryptonite dust – and that’s actually the plot.  It makes Chloe over-protective and Lois over-domestic.  There’s actually some good stuff in there, but you have to wade through a lot to get to it.

I think the show knows that it can never be Lois and Clark.  It can never have an actual episode where Clark proposes to Lois, and they’ll never be able to really put Erica Durance in a wedding dress.  And since they still want to do those things, they have to do stuff like this.

Or maybe they realized that it was Valentine’s Day, and they needed to do a theme show.

Either way, the episode didn’t really need to happen.  Because I don’t think anything was really gained from having Lois act like a 1950s housewife.  The final scene between the two effectively RESET buttoned any progress made in their relationship (even simply moving in together).  Even the Chloe stuff didn’t do a whole lot because I don’t think she’ll be any more focused on Clark than she was before.

It was an excuse to make a Clark and Lois 50s relationship happen.  It was an excuse to have a Chloe/Lois argument where a lot of boundaries are taken down.  And it was an excuse to have a Chloe/Tess girl fight.  Nothing more and nothing less.

And what’s really disappointing is that they hint at this Chloe/Oliver relationship, and then immediately have a romance-based episode.  And not only is there no mention of anything from Chloe (who is alone on Valentine’s Day), but Oliver doesn’t even show up.

It’s honestly one of the more frustrating things about Smallville – you never know if something from one episode will carry over into the next.  One tease might never end up going anywhere, and even if it does, it’s often ignored.  It’s like the writers’ room is made up of two factions that have no idea what the other side is doing.

Not that the episode was completely valueless.  After a few weeks with no progress on the Zod front, we finally get back to that story.  It turns out that Zod has been cranking out his towers at a frantic pace, and they’re nearly built.

In addition to that, Clark is apparently still upset about Jor-El’s death.  This is almost a mirror of the episode where Clark is going around trying to avenge Jonathan’s death, except this doesn’t make as much sense.  Jor-El died a long time ago, and Clark hasn’t mentioned it once since it happened.  Maybe Chloe mentioning it early in the episode opened up the wounds, but it just seemed really odd.

And the attachment to Jor-El is a bit strange since Clark never even knew him.  And the fact that it wasn’t really his father.  Clark’s father died on Krypton – it’s a “young clone” that was killed on Earth.  Why Clark would suddenly care so much about the death struck me as odd.

But Zod is about to build his tower, and everyone seems to be focusing on how to take advantage of it.  Zod, of course, wants his powers.  Some of the other Kandorians are following Clark’s plan to get them all new lives so they can fit in on Earth.  Clark doesn’t seem to have a plan for the tower at all, focusing on the passports and drivers licenses.  Chloe just wants to destroy the tower to avoid the dark future where she’s killed.  And Tess wants the tower built so that Clark can rule the Kandorians and “show mercy to the Earth.”

Got all that?

It’s funny that Clark has allowed the towers to be built in the first place.  He seems content on keeping the Kandorians powerless, and he’s doing the right thing in trying to get them acclimated to their new home.  But Clark also knows that the towers give the Kandorians their powers, and he knows that it takes away his.  He even says it to Tess later in the episode, and Tess’ ignorance to that fact is also illustrated.

So Tess was actually allowing the tower to be built to protect Clark and protect the Earth.  What was Clark’s excuse?

And you might say, “What was Clark supposed to do about it?”  And my answer would be that Clark ends the episode by destroying both towers with his heat vision (in an awkward post-9/11 moment, I must say).  So if he’s willing to do that, he can also try and stop the towers before they’re built, right?

Especially since he likely caused collateral damage when the towers collapsed.  Say nothing of the press conference that was happening immediately below.

And, honestly, I haven’t understood Clark’s motivations the entire season.  He knows that Zod is bad, and he knows that he’s conspiring behind Clark’s back.  Just like with Davis last year, he knows there’s no saving the good side of Zod – so it basically means that Clark learned nothing from last year’s arc.

And at the end of the season, we’re going to have a “I should have done something sooner” scene with Clark.  And, yes, Clark.  You should have done something sooner.

All in all, it was nice to get back to the Zod storyline.  Now that the tower is destroyed, I’ll be interested in seeing Zod’s counter-move, and I’m glad this happened early enough in the season to allow such a counter-move.

But outside of that, the episode was just lame.  Hopefully, next week will be an improvement.