One of the themes of the show has always been faith – both finding it and losing it.  Locke was the primary example of this – in all his flashbacks, he continually finds ways to doubt his own faith from the tragedy with his father to his disastrous relationship with Helen.  Then he arrives at the Island, experiences the miraculous healing of his spine, and his faith is immediately restored.  The discovery of the Hatch led to an increase in his faith that he was brought to the Island to save the world, but Henry Gale helps erode that faith until he’s broken by the season two premiere.  That faith is eventually restored to the point that John is willing to sacrifice himself for the Island, only to be shown that the Island doesn’t really care about him after his time as Jeremy Bentham.

But Locke isn’t the only one who’s had faith issues.  Jack, recently, has gone from “man of science” to near-zealot last year – giving Locke’s corpse his father’s shoes and rambling on about his destiny when it came to Faraday’s plan to detonate the hydrogen bomb.  When the plan didn’t work, Jack lost his faith again, only to be restored again here (more on that later).

Ben’s crisis of faith in the episode deals with the fact that no one seems to want him.  His life has been a mess from the start, with his father openly blaming him for the death of his mother.  Like Locke, the Island convinces a young Ben that it cares, and Ben is installed as the leader of the Others.

But in the last few years, Ben learns he had a deadly tumor, has lost all his power, watched his daughter die in front of him, was manipulated into killing his spiritual leader, and has been physically beaten on more occasions than I can count.  It’s safe to say that Ben’s faith has been shaken.

The problem now is that no one wants anything to do with poor Ben.  The Monster simply used him to kill Jacob, and now that he’s with Ilana and company, he was forced to admit to the murders of Locke and Jacob.  Since Jacob was a father figure to Ilana, she literally forces him to dig his own grave before she kills him.

Before she can, though, the Monster saves him with the promise that he can rule the Island once LockeMonster and his crew have left.  Since power is the only thing that seems to interest Ben, it almost works.  Ben is released from his shackles, and he escapes into the jungle.  And when he finds a gun left behind by the Monster, he has the opportunity to kill Ilana.

But at the end of the day, Ben simply says that he wants to feel wanted by someone.  His father didn’t want him.  The Island didn’t want him.  The Monster didn’t want him.  The Others didn’t want him.  Granted, a lot of those things were his own doing, but it’s still a pretty depressing idea.

And so, for now, Ben decided to turn down the Monster’s offer and go with Ilana, who decided to forgive Ben for the murder of Jacob.

Will Ben be tempted again by the dark side?  Will he act as a double agent for the Monster in hopes of getting some kind of leverage to make sure the Monster carries through with his promise of power?  Or has Ben finally turned a corner after hitting rock bottom?  Is there a chance that Benjamin Linus could, after all these years, end the series as a good guy?

I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

The other character with a crisis of faith is Richard.  Despite being added to the main cast this season, we haven’t really seen much of Richard this year.  He was attacked by the Monster in the premiere before being released, and Richard has been running around in the jungle ever since.

And when he stumbles upon Hurley and Jack in the jungle, he decides to take them to the Black Rock because he needs their help to die.  For the first time, the show actually tells us that Jacob granted him the gift of immortality when Richard tells Jack that he cannot kill himself. 

We also get confirmation that Richard came to the Island on the Black Rock, which explains the “chains” comment that the Monster said in this season’s premiere.  It seems that Richard was a slave on the Black Rock, although we don’t know why Jacob chose Richard for his job.  I’m really hoping we still get some kind of Richard flashback because it’d really be something cool.

But while Richard can’t kill himself,  it seems that Richard can be killed if someone else does it.  So he needs Jack to light the fuse on dynamite to kill Richard and put him out of his misery.

So why is Richard willing to die all of the sudden?  Richard says that he’s spent his entire life following Jacob, and he believes it was all for a lie.  Seeing Jacob die, the Monster take power, and the Temple ransacked was apparently too much for Richard, who appears to believe that the Monster is going to win in the end.  And because of that, he decides that there’s nothing else to do but die.

And, in the end, he’s saved by Jack.  Jack has been rudderless since he learned that the H-bomb plan failed, but it was seemingly restored a couple episode again when he saw his name on Jacob’s lighthouse.  Jacob told Hurley that he needed to look out on the ocean for a while, and that apparently worked.

Because Jack agrees to light the fuse, but he also agrees to sit with Richard to see if anything happens.  Because Jack expects to survive the experience, and he helps Richard see that, even after Jacob’s death, they’re both still significant figures on the Island.

So Richard and Jack both return to the beach, faith restored, and meet up with Hurley, Sun, Lapidus, Ilana, Miles, and Ben at the beach.  And it seems like the two groups are now set, with every major character either with Jacob’s group or the Monster’s group.

Elsewhere on the Island, we get an interesting connection to Nikki and Paolo.  While he’s digging his own grave, Ben offers Miles a bribe to let him go – it almost worked when Miles first arrived so it was worth a shot, huh?

Miles, however, turns down the bribe when he learns about the diamonds that Nikki and Paolo were buried with.  Later in the episode, Miles is seen holding a diamond, meaning that Miles actually dug down to get them at some point.  It’s an interesting reference to that story, and it goes to show you that, while the fans never liked them, the writers still appreciate the value of Nikki and Paolo.

The episode ends with a revelation that, I imagine, was supposed to be a big surprise.  It was ruined for me, though, when the opening credits announced that Alan Dale was guest starring.  It also was spoiled by the episode information provided by my local cable carrier.

I realize that these actors need to be paid, but as soon as I saw Dale’s name in the credits, I was immediately looking for him in the episode.  I figured there was a chance that he could appear in the flash-sideways (maybe as the principal), but as soon as that storyline wrapped up, I knew we’d see Widmore show back up on the Island.

I realize it wasn’t really a spoiler, but can’t they keep his name a secret?  I know they’ve done so in a couple of Walt’s surprise appearances, and it would’ve been much more of a surprise if I hadn’t been looking out for him.

That being said, it’s really interesting that Widmore is back.  Does that mean that he’s the man that Jacob wanted to bring back to the Island?  I assumed that it was Desmond, but if it’s Widmore, that means that there’s a chance that Widmore could be a good guy.  Or, at the very least, on Jacob’s side.  Why else would Jacob want him brought back to the Island?

On the other hand, I watched the “enhanced” episode of “Sundown”, and the pop-ups made a reference to a Widmore line from “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham.”  He was talking to Locke about returning to the Island, and he referenced the “war” that was coming.  And he told John that if he (John) didn’t return to the Island, the “wrong side” was going to win the war.

John returning to the Island allowed the Monster to take Locke’s form.  Which allowed for Jacob to be killed and allowed the Monster to ransack the Temple.  Just like Christian Shephard guiding Locke to his death (and presumably working for the Monster, if not the Monster himself), it all seemed to be part of the Monster’s plan.

Of course, if the whole thing (including Locke and Jacob dying) is part of Jacob’s plan, it makes things more interesting.  But, as of now, we don’t know who Widmore is working for.  Either way, it’s odd to think he might be good.

As far as the flash-sideways goes, I found it to be the most interesting one yet.  I thought the David bombshell was the most interesting nugget, but this whole story just felt right.  Ben manipulated and planned his way to power, just like on the Island, and it felt just the way I would imagine it would work in this parallel universe.  Working with Arzt and working with Alex worked perfectly, just like you’d expect with LOST destiny.

But there were also nice little differences.  The main one, obviously, is Ben deciding to save Alex instead of fighting for his power.  Ben admits to Ilana that he chose his power over Alex in the “main” universe, and he takes the other path this episode.  There was also the fact that Ben was taking care of his father (more on that in a minute).

So what caused these changes?  According to the new timeline, Ben still would’ve been shot by Sayid and brought to the Others by Kate.  And, according to Richard, he still would’ve been “changed” by Jacob’s healing pool.

So was the Island simply a bad influence on Ben?  Did all the power of leading the Others drive him to be the man we know on the Island?  Because Ben even found a way to forgive his father, who he hated even before he discovered the Hostiles.  I’d be interested to see what happened after the bomb.

Which is another revelation.  Roger Linus surviving proves that everyone on the Island wasn’t killed by the explosion of the hydrogen bomb.  And it proves that the Island didn’t sink immediately.

Which leads to the question of what happened to the Island.  Why did it sink?  Who got off, and who died with it?  Did flash-sideways Widmore survive?  Flash-sideways baby Daniel?  Flash-sideways Hawking?  Flash-sideways Richard?

All interesting questions that have to be answered.

All in all, I just really liked what they did with the flash-sideways, and it was just really nice to see the beautiful Tania Raymonde (Alex) return again.  She and Michael Emerson have great chemistry.

So another great episode, and now we have less than ten episodes until the series finale.  This season is moving quickly, and before we know it, there won’t be any more LOST.  Savor it while you can.

In recent seasons, as characters began to shift and change, I’ve started to appreciate Sayid.  Because while Jack began to embrace the idea of faith, Sawyer loosened up a bit, and Locke grew more and more devoted to the Island, Sayid never changed.  He’s always tried to do the right thing, always put the group’s safety above his own, and he did whatever he could to get everyone off the Island.

Even some of the darker things he did (bounty hunting, torture, etc.) were all done in the name of helping everyone he cared about.  And at the end of the day, Sayid was used by everyone around him, and he ends up hating himself.

And that’s why “Sundown” was such a sad moment for me – as Sayid embraces his dark side (or simply allows the darkness to consume him).  I’m really hoping it’s something that will end up reversible because it’s simply unsettling to imagine the idea that one of our favorite characters will have to go head to head with Sayid.

I think it’s a testament to the acting of Naveen Andrews, who is able to convey a completely different version of Sayid as soon as he is finally “claimed.”  Emilie de Ravin is able to do the same thing, and I was a bit horrified (and certainly creeped out) as Dark Sayid and Dark Claire surveyed the damage inside the Temple.  Both have this serene darkness that just really makes you cringe.  You know that these are no longer the characters that you got to love – instead, they’re something twisted and different.

Of course, the creepy version of “Catch a Falling Star” didn’t hurt things.  I felt so bad for Kate, who simply believes she’s doing the right thing by sticking with her friends.  Unfortunately, she has no idea what she’s getting herself into.

Let’s talk a bit about the plot.  When the Monster shows up at the Temple, Dogen finally realizes that Jack and Hurley are gone.  With nothing else to do, he brings Sayid into his chamber with an offer.  He says that the “test” was to figure out if Sayid’s good/evil level was in balance.  And while the test proved that Sayid’s level tipped in the wrong direction, Sayid claims to be good.

And after a pretty cool fight between Dogen and Sayid (where Dogen almost kills Sayid but holds off at the last moment), Mr. Jarrah is offered a chance to prove that he’s still good.  He’s given a dagger and told to kill the Monster in the same way Jacob was killed.  And Sayid actually tries it, despite the fact that it doesn’t work.

The Mosnter tells Sayid that Dogen simply wanted the Monster to kill him.  That, like he tried with Jack, Dogen wanted someone else to kill Sayid so that he wouldn’t have to dirty his own hands.  The Monster spares Sayid, and he even offers the Arab man a chance to get back the one thing that he thought he’d never see again.

You have to respect what the Monster is able to do.  He’s going to everyone with the promise to grant their wishes – to get Sawyer home, to get Aaron back to Claire, and to bring Nadia back to Sayid.  With only five “candidates” left, the Monster has already grabbed two of them.  And with Jack and Hurley with Jacob at the Lighthouse, it seems like the important “Kwon” (either Jin or Sun) is the tie-breaking vote left unclaimed – pun intended.

Now we don’t know what will happen next, as the LockeMonster continues to recruit as many people as he can.  He claims that he’s going to take everyone off the Island, but it’s unknown why he even needs anyone’s help to do it.

And at the end of the day, things simply look dark.  The Temple has been destroyed, all of the Others are alongside the Monster, and everyone else is running for their lives.  Hopefully things will get a little brighter next week.

Of course, with Kate and Claire together, that might not happen.  Claire’s already proclaimed her intentions to kill Kate over what happened with Aaron, and like I said earlier, I feel bad for Kate.  At the end of the day, Kate’s done everything in the best interests of those around her.  She saved Aaron because she felt it was for the best, and when she realized the selfishness of it all, she tried to do the right thing by bringing his mother back to him.

You understand what Claire is going through, even the “dark” version of her, and hopefully Kate will be able to convey her intentions before she’s killed.

So I felt bad for Sayid, bad for Claire, and bad for the Others who stayed to defend the Temple.  But one of the people I felt the worst for was Dogen, who finally gets to tell his own story.  I thought the revelations about him were very interesting, and it adds a lot of depth to his character.

There’s a lot to look at with him, especially his obvious connection with Juliet.  Both were forced to come to the Island, seemingly against their will, to save someone they loved.  Dogen, after making a mistake that led to an automobile accident that injured his beloved son, is recruited by Jacob to lead the people at the Temple.  And, as we learn after his death, he’s also the Temple’s protector.

What’s interesting is that Dogen doesn’t seem to embrace the job, but he does seem to believe in the work.  I’ll admit that I was pretty sad to see him die.

The flash-sideways dealt with Sayid, who returns to Los Angeles to visit the family of his brother Omer.  We only briefly saw Omer in a Sayid flashback, where Sayid slaughtered a chicken so that his brother wouldn’t have to.

Here, it’s Omer who seems to have the upper hand, as he has married Nadia, the love of Sayid’s life.  Despite the marriage, Nadia and Sayid still have a connection, and Sayid simply explains to Nadia that he never made a move because he didn’t deserve to be with her.

And I found that to be pretty interesting – why would Sayid believe that he wasn’t worthy of Nadia in one world and actually marry her in another.  Was Sayid simply more sympathetic in the alternate timeline, or did he actually do worse things?  You also have to wonder how Nadia ended up with Omer, something that didn’t even seem to be a possibility in the original timeline.

Just like in a couple of Sayid’s original flashbacks, someone (Omer, in this case) is in trouble, and Sayid has to clean up their mess.  This time, Omer owes money to someone, and he asks his brother to “take care of it.”  Sayid refuses, but he’s forced into action when his brother is attacked after failing to make a payment.

The man who lent Omer the money turns out to be Martin Keamy, and it was another nod to the idea that these characters are simply destined to run into each other.  I’m not sure if there’s anything to read into Keamy’s different occupation (loan shark instead of mercenary), but I’m simply looking forward to seeing whether or not it has to do with Charles Widmore’s location in the alternate timeline.

And the flash-sideways ends with a twist, as it turns out that Keamy was also holding Jin hostage.  We don’t know what happened to Jin after he was questioned at the airport (about the watch and the money in his suitcase), but it seems likely that Jin was supposed to deliver the watch to Keamy.

And, along the way, the deal didn’t really go as planned.

I’m really enjoying these flash-sideways stories, as we get to see the same characters we know and love from a different perspective.  And now that Sayid is fully “claimed,” his flash-sideways might be his only chance at redemption.

All in all, it was another solid episode.  I continue to be impressed each week, and I continue to look forward to what they have for us next.

For you modern fans out there, ‘Babylon 5’ was the precursor to ‘Stargate SG1,’ ‘Farscape,’ and most importantly, ‘Battlestar Galactica.’ Premiering at the height of Star Trek’s dominance of filmed genre material (though already with shows like ‘The X-Files’ and ‘Xena’ ready to beat down the doors and redefine everything, set up ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ and eventually ‘Lost,’ which for me was the true culmination of this trend, the next evolution), ‘B5’ was the first real effort since the original ‘BSG’ (itself inspired moreso by Star Wars) to challenge the dominance of Star Trek in the space opera arena. Once the eerily similar ‘Deep Space Nine’ premiered, comparisons, quagmires, and battle lines were drawn that would never truly fade. I was one of the fans who quickly threw their allegiance behind one rather than the other (or both), ‘DS9,’ and never truly looked back.

During the golden age of the Observation Lounge (our message board community that still acts as the heart of the Lower Decks experience, even though activity has slowed recently to a meandering crawl), I became most familiar with how the genre crowd saw this experience of the 1990s as it discussed ‘B5’ so passionately as one of the best stories ever told on television. The OL was one of the places that spoke in the same hallowed tones about ‘DS9,’ so it wasn’t as if my early impressions in that regard would have necessitated my choosing one over the other, but I had my own hang-ups, which I’ll get into soon enough. The truth was, every time I heard how great ‘B5’ was, I couldn’t help but shake my head. That was the very opposite of my opinion in those days. Sure, I could appreciate how intricate the storytelling apparently was, but I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy any of it. All I saw was something that was a pale imitation of even the shows (‘Voyager’) that the same community almost universally despised.

As the years progressed, I would immerse myself in more TV shows (‘Earth: Final Conflict,’ ‘Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda,’ ‘Enterprise,’ all material I’ve covered in previously HYGOTS columns, #17, 27, and 37 respectively) that featured what I had understood to be at the heart of the appeal of ‘B5,’ intricate, long-term arcs, which would be continuously ridiculed and dismissed by that community. The big difference, of course, was the presence, or lack thereof, of a central creative figure on any of these shows. When Robert Hewitt Wolfe famously left ‘Andromeda’ during its second season, it was the deathnell of any continued interest for many of its fans, for instance, comparable if fellow ‘DS9’ alum Ron Moore had left ‘BSG’ at some point before its conclusion.

‘Babylon 5’ had, of course, J. Michael Straczynski. ‘B5’ was thoroughly dominated, in fact, by Straczynski, who wrote every one of its scripts, a completely unheard kind of dedication in television. But that show was his baby, which he struggled for years to bring into existence. At this point, I might stress how difficult it really is to bring a science fiction show to life on television. Even today, with SyFy having a ‘Stargate’ on every season (like Paramount had a Star Trek on for nearly twenty years), a space opera isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as a crime drama. It’s too expensive, and the rewards are far more difficult to support, especially with most fans unwilling to support more than one of them at a time in any truly significant numbers. When Straczynski was finally able to bring ‘B5’ to life, he and his audience had the misfortune to come about at the very same time as ‘DS9,’ a show set at a space station that would go on to feature an increasingly complex series arc. Since Star Trek was far better known, it got more attention and better ratings, but genre fans being as they are, they threw most of their strongest support behind ‘B5,’ which for the fact of its very existence and the vision of its creator, was primed to be one of their favorites for years.

That’s how it always happens, how the Star Trek empire was crumbled, the slow chipping-away of its fan base by an ever-increasing onslaught of competition, and with ‘B5’ so convincingly demonstrating an alternative so early, it was a foregone conclusion that eventually, the Star Trek fans would eventually dwindle enough so they could no longer sustain their franchise.

What Straczynski and ‘B5’ did was prove the old formula (mission-of-the-week) established thirty years earlier by the original Star Trek was no longer good enough for modern, sophisticated audiences, many of whom were as much abandoning filmed Star Trek for competitors as for the expanding Pocket Books line of original Star Trek fiction that more closely mirrored their experiences with other sci-fi novels they might have been reading. What ‘B5’ really represented was a television version of that experience, one creator willing to devote himself entirely to a continuing story, which Star Trek never entirely pulled off (last summer I did a series of specials dedicated to the team of writers who made ‘DS9’ work for seven seasons, two more than ‘B5’ got in syndication and TNT airings).

But as I said, I wasn’t onboard the ‘Babylon Five’ wagon. Now, by necessity, for the reasons of ill-support that defied the fact that Straczynski was able to do ‘B5’ at all, the show never had the same kind of budget contemporary Star Trek productions regularly enjoyed. Almost by necessity, ‘B5’ embraced a total CGI immersion long before Star Trek did, but the resulting graphics never did quite manage to totally convince the viewer in any realistic sense. At the same time, the acting, with a few notable exceptions, wasn’t always to par with what you’d find on a Star Trek. (To take nothing away from genre acting in general, I’ll note that even in 2003, Edward James Olmos was reluctant to do ‘Battlestar Galactica’ because of the continuing stigma against the material that exists in the public.) The writing itself was another problem for me. Simply put, I didn’t think Straczynski was up to the rigorous schedule he’d made for himself. The combination of the effects, acting, and writing made for a series, regardless of the hype, I was unwilling to watch with any real level of commitment. For me, ‘B5’ really was just an excuse for people to quit what they considered the Star Trek habit. I didn’t think ‘B5’ was good enough to compare, much less compete, with Star Trek, and that was very much the kind of opinion that led to my persecution complex (funny, isn’t it?).

So for years I dismissed ‘Babylon 5’ the same way others rejected ‘Andromeda’ or ‘Enterprise,’ never bothering to truly take a second look. I laughed at the continuing devotion to Straczynski, how it failed to support the ‘B5’ spin-off ‘Crusade’ (which he didn’t write, during its one and only season, entirely by himself) or any of the other efforts to continue the franchise (from ‘Legend of the Rangers’ to ‘The Lost Tales’). When he started writing comics, from ‘Rising Stars’ to ‘Amazing Spider-Man,’ I saw no reason to take them seriously.

When the same kind of support that had created the ‘B5’ phenomenon fell behind Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ films (albeit amplified about a thousand times), I wasn’t all that surprised to find my reaction to be pretty similar. The more fans cheered, the more cynically I took in the reaction. I saw in both efforts a creative force that didn’t sustain the support, decisions made that constantly crippled the results. Where ‘B5’ failed in the execution, Jackson failed in the reverse, a wildly successful visual experience that couldn’t support what was in essence a story that was sabotaged with increasing earnestness with each film. But it was the shock of the new with both of them that built their audiences, the sheer fact that neither could have been anticipated. Before ‘Babylon 5’ no other TV show had truly rivaled the Star Trek empire. Before ‘Lord of the Rings,’ no film had managed to represent fantasy so convincingly.

But as I said, I couldn’t support either one, not like others were around me. For years, I brooded on the remarkable success Jackson enjoyed, at the expense of the new Star Wars trilogy, or the Matrix films. Like ‘B5’ and Star Trek, film fans couldn’t support both ‘LotR’ and Star Wars, much less the increasingly intricate Matrix saga. I understand that there are certain personal tastes that need to be accounted for, how ‘The Phantom Menace’ had already begun alienating existing Star Wars fans, how ‘The Matrix’ had started that trilogy to so much unexpected popular appeal, and that to an extent, the fate of those trilogies rested on their own fortunes, just as many would argue that diminishing creative returns was what cooled off the Star Trek franchise. But without ‘Lord of the Rings,’ would eager genre fans really have found it so easy to turn their noses as the competition?

I kept giving Jackson’s films new chances. I’d always loved ‘Fellowship of the Ring,’ but ‘The Two Towers’ and ‘Return of the King’ always left me cold, so each time I watched them again, I tried to see what I might be missing, but always circled back to the same thoughts that I’d originally had, that the films made decisions that couldn’t support them, or compare favorably to what had been done in the first one. I would never deny that the trilogy was itself an achievement I was proud to represent in my collection, but I found that I couldn’t change my opinion about the overall effort.

Meanwhile, Straczynski began writing ‘The Twelve’ for Marvel Comics. Without getting too much into another recurring subject in HYGOTS, ‘Watchmen,’ I’ll simply note that ‘The Twelve’ is another modern attempt to replicate the ‘Watchmen’ experience, telling an epic, self-contained story about a group of superheroes, in this case a group of forgotten Golden Age characters. Now, unfortunately, Straczynski stopped producing new issues of the series right around the time he started writing for DC (about four issues before it would have been completed), but suffice it to say, ‘The Twelve’ quickly became one of my favorite comics, and it became the gateway I’d long needed into the creative mind of J. Michael Straczynski.

I’d never entirely shaken my interest in ‘Babylon 5.’ As I’ve said, filmed sci-fi is still rare, and I’ve always got an appetite for it. Since Star Trek went off the air and most of recent productions sticking to cable (which I’ve only intermittently had access to over the years), I’ve had to scrounge for doses, and while I’m still selective about it (the old curse!), it made me want to revisit ‘B5.’ Recently, to get that sampling, I purchased the movie collection box set. It was through that purchase, plus the good will ‘The Twelve’ had engendered, that I finally had my breakthrough, in the film called ‘In the Beginning.’

When TNT agreed to air the final season of ‘B5,’ part of the agreement was that Straczynski would produce a series of standalone feature-length episodes that might serve as starting points for new viewers. ‘In the Beginning’ was, appropriately, the first of them, and it told the origin story of the whole series. Simply put, if Straczynski had always managed to produce the kind of visionary storytelling evident in that film, I probably would have long been a fan of the series. Deeply embroiled in all the petty excuses as to why I shouldn’t care, I think I might have missed out on the experience I’d long been told about, which had always been there, a deeply intricate saga, a singular television event and moment.

This is not the part where I confess I suddenly devoured the rest of the ‘Babylon 5’ experience. That is still a matter of time and economics, and the old fears that I will still have problems with certain acting and the day-to-day writing (after all, a conviction that Straczynski in the end could have used to accept a little more support doesn’t just go away). This is where I admit that I can appreciate the work that was put into the show, the vision of Straczynski, which is still mostly unparalleled in TV shows without “Star Trek” in the title (though I’d argue that ‘Futurama,’ which I covered in HYGOTS #46, trumped it fairly handily), unless you count ‘Lost,’ which at this point has become the new touchstone in genre television, a belief that the column is going to start thoroughly examining starting with HYGOTS #85 at the end of May.

So, here’s to you, ‘Babylon 5’ and J. Michael Straczynski. I did you wrong for years, but am now ready to admit my mistakes.

***

The Twenty-Five Best Comics from February 2010, no particular order but alphabetical:

1. Adventure Comics #7 (DC)
After the introductory issues of the relaunch featuring Geoff Johns reintroducing Superboy to comics fans, this is the ‘Blackest Night’ tie-in that features Black Lantern Superboy (long story short, the returning Superboy is the result of a long-term resurrection project that actually saw him return to the present after his revival in the Legion of Super-Heroes future so technically at this point in the lore, he’s dead). Another standout Blackest Night tae.

2. Air #18 (Vertigo)
It’s my belief that if you’re not interested in superheroes, then you’ll find no better comic book than ‘Air,’ a true successor to the Vertigo tradition of finding the best and most innovative storytelling talent and letting them run wild. G. Willow Wilson is that kind of talent (following the likes of Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Brian K. Vaughn), and her tale of flight attendant Blythe as she learns the complex saga of the next evolution in technology only gets better. This issue, she learns she’s only now ready to take her pilot’s test as a hyperpract, a tradition that she carries on from Amelia Earhart, and this issues suggests the next historical figure to be woven into the tapestry will be none other than Jules Verne. Remember that guy?

3. Atomic Robo: Revenge of the Vampire Dimension #1 (Red 5)
By now, there’s no point in denying it: Atomic Robo is my Hellboy. I’ve never read a Hellboy comic, though I have seen both movies. I’ve never developed an interest in delving further into Mike Mignola’s creation, but it seemed like kismet the first time I saw an Atomic Robo comic, back in 2008. At the time, it had just launched, was in demand because it’d been nominated for the Eisner Awards (the comic book version of the Oscars), so I wanted to see what the fuss was about. It was a robot comic! But the real interest for me was that no matter how facile it might have seemed, it name-checked Tesla, an obscure but important scientist from an century ago, Edison’s chief rival, and a name I kept bumping into in my youth. Two years later, I’m a fan, the comics have only gotten better, and the latest one launched in February.

4. Azrael #5 (DC)
I became a fan of Fabian Nicieza not during his Marvel run a decade ago but far more recently, while he was working on ‘Robin,’ which I considered to be the best Boy Wonder comics since Chuck Dixon launched Tim Drake’s first series in 1993. Azrael was a character first introduced around the same time, who played an integral part of the last time Bruce Wayne wasn’t Batman, but eventually became lost in the shuffle. This is a new incarnation of the character, quickly and brilliantly introduced in the first issue of this new series, though subsequent issues haven’t been so inspired. Still, one of my favorite obscure characters, Ragman (last seen regularly in the pages of ‘Shadowpact’), makes an appearance this issue, which by way of Palestinian-Israeli metaphor, tries to make the case of how complicated the world really is. It’s good Nicieza, Azrael, and Ragman all rolled into one!

5. Batman #696 (DC)
Since making his name as artist during some of the later Grant Morrison issues on this title, Tony Daniel has become a major figure in the current lore of the Dark Knight. He wrote and illustrated ‘Battle for the Cowl,’ the mini-series that introduced Dick Grayson as the new Batman, and subsequently inherited the main title. Intriguingly, he’s been spending most of his run in effect creating a sequel to the iconic work done by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale in the pages of ‘The Long Halloween’ and ‘Dark Victory,’ but this would have to be his best issue to date, which might be the best way to sample how he’s become in a very unorthodox way one of the best creators to hit Batman in years.

6. Batman and Robin #s 8-9 (DC)
This would be the series Grant Morrison launched to continue his own Bat-adventures with Dick under the cowl and Bruce Wayne’s son Damian as the new Robin, and #8 would be the best Batman comic Grant’s done since concluding “Batman R.I.P.” last year. It features vintage, kinetic (some might say “frenetic”) Grant storytelling, which spills into #9, where the reader learns definitely that the Batman whose corpse Superman famously clutched in the pages of ‘Final Crisis’ belonged to one of the Darkseid-created clones that were supposed to introduce an army of Batmen into the world (seriously, you must read this stuff, which will be all the easier when the ‘Batman R.I.P.’ TPB collection is finally released, really soon). Plus, you know that Grant’s had the return of Bruce plotted in his mind since the beginning, a comic that will begin releasing in May, so now would be an excellent time to begin reading anyway, if you haven’t been reading from the start (the ‘Batman & Son’ trade, featuring Damian’s debut).

7. Blackest Night #7 (DC)
Geoff Johns has been revolutionizing Green Lantern lore since ‘Rebirth’ (for slightly more information on that, you can reread last week’s HYGOTS), and this is the issue of ‘Blackest Night’ where he takes all that work to the next level, creating the very first White Lantern (horribly appropriately Sinestro). With the event concluding this month, you’ve got to read this one first!

8. Black Lantern Green Arrow #30 (DC)
Playing off the old ‘Green Lantern/Green Arrow’ comics, this is the ‘Blackest Night’ tie-in issue that’s more or less the Oliver Queen version of the Superboy story referenced earlier in ‘Adventure Comics #7.’ More importantly, it’s written by J.T. Krul, the dude who seems poised to be the next Geoff Johns at DC, who’ll be handling a very important year for GA, perhaps the first time he’s a must-read since the Kevin Smith relaunch.

9. Booster Gold #29 (DC)
Again, not to slight Booster and Dan Jurgens at all, but the Blue Beetle second feature is the reason this one’s a must-read from February, since it’s the final one, concluding the Reach arc that began back in Jaime Reyes’ late ongoing series. I was a huge fan of that book, and Matt Sturges did it pretty proud here.

10. The Flash: Rebirth #6 (DC)
The long-delayed final issue of Barry Allen’s return to comics doesn’t provide a lot of surprises, only the defeat of the Reverse Flash and the opportunity to give fans another, definitive relaunch of ‘The Flash’ ongoing series, which Barry’s grandson Bart attempted to carry in recent years, before Mark Waid returned for an abbreviated effort of his own. It’s funny, because before ‘Rebirth,’ Geoff Johns wasn’t doing Flash like Waid did, but rather as a more traditional approach that embraced more the Rogues tradition than the mythology that had exploded in the ’90s under Waid. With ‘Rebirth,’ however, Johns finally started approaching The Flash as he has Green Lantern, making this book probably the start of what everyone’s going to be buzzing about five years from now…

11. G.I. Joe: Cobra #2 (IDW)
With the release of the first ‘G.I. Joe: Cobra’ trade, fans can catch up on the best of IDW’s efforts with this franchise, how it took also-ran (if anything) Chuckles and transformed him into the most interesting character in the whole collection. Mike Costa and Christos Gage continue here the story of his infiltration into the mysterious Cobra organization, in the days before much was known about them, much less half the battle even begun. This issue is a terrible sort of reunion between Chuckles and Jinx, who was actually killed in the original mini-series, but here is actually new Joe recruit Chameleon, whose help Chuckles doesn’t actually need to free himself from his current predicament. An absolute must-read series, whether you’re a G.I. Joe fan or not.

12. The Great Ten #4 (DC)
Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel continue the series that explores a different member of the Great Ten, the Chinese superhero team first introduced in ‘52,’ every issue, all the while telling a single story. This would be a great book for fans of either ‘Watchmen’ or ‘The Twelve,’ actually, consistently engaging character studies every time, with this issue spotlighting Immortal Man in Darkness, which reads like a nightmare version of the kind of game Dick Grayson is currently playing as the new Batman.

13. The Incredible Hercules #141 (Marvel)
On the recap page Marvel has been including in all its books for the past few years now, this issue cleverly recaps every cover and comic since Hercules inherited the numbering from ‘Incredible Hulk’ in January of 2008. Which means this is probably a pretty important book, and of course it is. Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente conclude what has been apparently Amadeus Cho’s ascension to the role of Prince of Power, replacing Herc as Athena’s champion on Earth in the epic conclusion to “Assault on New Olympus,” killing off really important characters (including Herc) and leading to bold new stories for fans of this title in the months to come. Part of me was wondering if this was always going to be only a temporary thing, but I had so much fun reading it, naturally I never wanted it to end. How often to I get into monthly Marvel storytelling? Not very often (it seems the cancelled ‘Captain Britain and MI13’ might be continuing in some fashion as well, with Paul Cornell likely integrating the Black Knight into future Avengers comics in the coming months).

14. Justice Society of America #36 (DC)
I’ve never gotten into ‘Fables,’ one of Vertigo’s most prominent current offerings and the original home of writers Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges, who have been attempting to find permanent homes at the DC side of the stables for years now. Their best effort, ‘Shadowpact,’ disintegrated and never had fan support, but nurtured my soft spot for both of them. Sturges writes ‘JSA All-Stars,’ among other projects, these days, while Willingham has this one, and my tenuous relationship has continued for both writers. But this issue might have changed that. This is a bold one indeed. Willingham envisions a possible future (which has to be assumed at this point) where the Fourth Reich band of modern Nazi villains defeated the Justice Society, and on the eve of Mr. Terrific’s execution, he’s forced to relive the entire story. This is the first issue in this arc, the first must-read in the title since Geoff Johns departed early last year.

15. Magog #6 (DC)
One of the most interesting things Johns did with his last run on the Society was finally introduce Mark Waid’s ‘Kingdom Come’ antihero Magog into regular continuity. The fact that he now has his own series is a fairly momentous development, and may signal any number of things, but finding the right tone has been something of a problem for Keith Giffen (aided by Howard Porter on art), until now, that is. Weaving through a number of recent JSA titles was Magog’s expulsion from the group, which was something that should always have been inevitable, and can help free him to do more of the stuff that sets him apart from other DC heroes. This book only gets better the more Giffen explores that territory, which means now’s a great time to jump onboard.

16. The Marvelous Land of Oz #4 (Marvel)
I cannot speak highly enough about this book and/or the collaboration of Eric Shanower and Skottie Young, which is helping to demonstrate how alive and vital the work of L. Frank Baum really does continue to be. Long neglected in the face of the famous Judy Garland film (now some seventy years in the past), maybe you just need to meet H.M. Woggle-Bug T.E. to discover the considerable charms for yourself.

17. Resurrection #8 (Oni)
Marc Guggenheim’s increasingly intricate concept of what might happen ten years after an alien invasion and occupation that devastated mankind continues to unfold, with unsettling new questions raised about the events surrounding the return of Bill Clinton. Hey, any comic, and regardless of what you think about him, that features such a touchstone to our own history, ought to be recognized for that level of boldness alone.

18. Scalped #s 34-35 (Vertigo)
People have their opinions about the Vertigo books worth following, but for my money, it doesn’t get any better than ‘Air’ and ‘Scalped,’ which had a double-serving in February, concluding the wrenching and suspenseful “The Gnawing” arc and followed that with a standalone issue featuring another way to look at the plight of the Native American in today’s world. Jason Aaron gets more attention for his Marvel work, but it doesn’t get any better than ‘Scalped.’

19. Spider-Man: Clone Saga #6 (Marvel)
The re-envisioning of the infamous ’90s arc that wouldn’t end comes to its own conclusion with this issue, a real pickle for fans of current continuity, where if you tried to reconcile the current situations of Norman and Harry Osborn to what they were at the time of this story, you’d be more confused than the fans still trying to wrap their heads around “One More Day.”

20. The Stand: Soul Survivors #4 (Marvel)
With the Dark Tower and upcoming ‘N’ comics at Marvel and ‘Talisman’ over at Del Rey, you might suddenly find it difficult these days to choose which Stephen King comic to read, and that’s before even considering that King himself will be writing the upcoming ‘American Vampire’ at Vertigo. But I doubt anything truly compares to ‘The Stand,’ which I still contend (as in HYGOTS #20) will be the author’s most lasting legacy. In this issue, the story of Mother Abagail is finally explored, another key component of the epic revealed, how the opposite number of the main villain (whom I’ll refer to as the Walkin’ Dude here) factors into the grand scheme, beyond strictly how a group of survivors from an apocalyptic plague become drawn to her.

21. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Fool’s Gold #3 (IDW)
This is classic ‘DS9’ storytelling in the most literal sense. A long-time fan of the show will feel right at home reading this book, or even a casual one. You don’t need to know the Dominion at all (the events here actually take place before the war years), just the friendly and familiar faces of the station. The treasure hunt’s background is explored this issue, as well as the first suggestion that, as always, Garak knows more than anyone else about what’s really going on…

22. Star Trek – The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #1 (IDW)
IDW has quickly become the home of the best Star Trek comics I’ve ever read, and that in itself would be a reason to check out this much-anticipated adaptation of last year’s movie, which finally revived (and augmented) the fortunes of the franchise. Another reason to read this book would be to see how the movie works in a different medium (I won’t be getting around to the novelization for a while, so this is my first chance). For the record, this includes the deleted scenes from the DVD release, which means this issue runs from Spock’s birth to Kirk’s. It’s a contrast from movie storytelling to comics, certainly, but one that works pretty interestingly.

23. The Web #6 (DC)
I was worried when DC first announced it was messing with the creative team (I guess I don’t really know the details about why it happened, whether it was always planned or not, only that I enjoyed the book as it was originally presented, an excellent spin-off from the launch one-shot from J. Michael Straczynski), especially after reading last month’s issue, which written by Marc Guggenheim, which failed to match either the impact or the specific storytelling already established. Matt Sturges, however, takes over this issue, with original artist Roger Robinson back and inking his own work (which actually makes it stronger, making it all the more puzzling that the last time I remember him even penciling at all was on the ‘Steel’ ongoing book – yeah). Hey, turns out I shouldn’t have been so worried…

24. Whatever Happened to the World’s Fastest Man? (Accent UK)
A rare graphic novel to cross my path, this one’s another look at the alternatives to the traditional approach to superheroes, which might read like a standalone episode of ‘Heroes,’ as if Hiro spends his life attempting one grand gesture while freezing time, aging for him regularly, and rescuing a crowded public area from a bomb’s explosion. Pretty awesome stuff.

25. Okay, so I pulled up only 24 comics worth, but this spot could belong to any number of others, whether the ‘45’ graphic novel from Com.X that sold out before I could get it, featuring an innovative approach that intrigued me to no end (an interview with, yup, forty-five superheroes, text with illustrations from as many artists), or any of the following:

‘Joe the Barbarian #2’ (Vertigo), from Grant Morrison; ‘Power Girl #9’ (DC), featuring the start of another great arc; ‘Outsiders #27’ (DC), which advances Dan DiDio’s bold new direction a step further; ‘The Mice Templar #7’ (Image), which is a key issue for the comic’s lore and continuing arc; ‘Green Lantern Corps #45’ and ‘Green Lantern #51’ (DC), which free Guy Gardner from the rage of the red ring and Hal Jordan from Parallax, respectively; ‘Blackest Night: The Flash #3’ (DC), which allows Geoff Johns to continue his love for the Rogues; ‘The Anchor #5’ (Boom!), which features Phil Hester working his mojo with an emerging cult classic; ‘Superman: World of New Krypton #12’ (DC), which brings back not only Zod but Brainiac; or ‘Milestone Forever #1’ (DC), which is the version of ‘Image United’ I actually care about.

The staff at Lower Decks would like to offer our thoughts and prayers to the Koenig family as they deal with this tragedy.

Clark has made a lot of bad decisions in the name of “doing the right thing,” and he does it again in this episode.  It’s a bit disturbing because I thought that was the whole point of last season – Clark looking too deep for the goodness in people and realizing that some people can’t be saved.  And it seems like Clark is doing the exact same thing here with Zod.

And, like I said last week, I’m not entirely sure why Clark is so loyal to his father.  He knows that Zod is evil, and he’s already fought/destroyed him in another incarnation.  And yet a clone of his father, who Clark never even met (and hasn’t really even gotten along with for most of his life), tells Clark to “save Zod” and Clark risks the world to do so?  It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Because you have to think Clark considered the idea that Zod would get his powers from his blood?  After all, Clark knows virtually nothing about the Kandorians, their DNA, or their powers, and he has no idea what would activate or de-activate them.  And as soon as Clark used his blood to heal Zod’s wound, I knew what it would end with.

But maybe that’s the Man of Steel’s greatest weakness – that he has too much faith in the good in people.  And maybe it’s a weakness that he can’t overcome – maybe even one that he shouldn’t overcome in fear that Superman would no longer be the unstoppable force for good.  It just sucks that, in the context of this character, we don’t really see him overcoming his past mistakes.

Particularly in this case, where unleashing a powered Zod on the world could, literally, destroy it.

But it certainly sets up the final quarter of the season pretty nicely.  We have two powered Kryptonians with a collection of groups on the side with varying loyalties.  Let’s examine a couple of them before we move on.

Let’s start with the Kandorians.  We know that most of them are (or have been) loyal to Zod.  He led them on Krypton, helped save them from death, and has been leading them on Earth.  Due to Clark’s role as a protector / emissary on Earth, some of the Kandorians have jumped ship to Clark.  But knowing Zod’s masterful ability to manipulate those around him, you have to think Zod can reclaim any or all of them. 

Especially when you consider that Zod can now present the “anything Clark can do, I can do better” argument.  Zod has military-level fighting skills, military-level strategic skills, and considering his flight ability, a greater control of his Kryptonian powers.  If the Kandorians are simply looking for the more powerful protector, Clark doesn’t really stand a chance anymore.

But in some kind of battle royale, the Kandorians are probably just innocent bystanders (like regular humans).  It will be interesting to see if Zod tries to get the rest of his people their powers, or if he was simply interested in getting powers for himself.  Now that he knows that Kal-El’s blood is the key, we’ll see if he tries to use that chip.  If the Kandorians all get re-powered, all bets are off.

Then there’s Chloe and Oliver.  We confirm that the two of them are in some sort of relationship, but it’s done awkwardly again.  Two episodes ago, Chloe and Oliver had a moment, but Oliver had been drinking at the time.  Then we have a love-based episode where Chloe is by herself on Valentine’s Day, making us wonder if something is actually happening.  Then we get some flirtation from Chloe, while Oliver is simply interested in finding out what happened to his money.  And they spend the episode in some kind of battle over power/control.

So are they in a relationship or not?  We’ve never seen them kiss, and Oliver really doesn’t show a whole lot of interest.  They openly disagree with each other, openly lie to each other, and they display a lack of trust in each other.  If they’re in a relationship, it doesn’t seem to have a strong foundation.

Anyway, Chloe tells Oliver that she’s been shifting money from his estate (borrowing, she says, not stealing) to create a cache of kryptonite-based weapons (like we saw in the dark future).  By the end, Oliver hides the weapons from Chloe, and they both agree to keep it secret from Clark.

It’s a little disappointing that Chloe is back to not trusting Clark, especially after a few episodes where it seemed like things were getting better.  So either Chloe is manipulating Clark when it seems like things are good, or Chloe is simply being written inconsistently.  At this point, I think both are likely possibilities.

Although like I’ve said above, I can’t really blame her.  It does seem like Clark is favoring the Kandorians over humans, and he does show an odd preference of his own people over the people that raised him.

If some kind of big battle, we know that Chloe and Oliver would be against Zod (and probably also against the Kandorians).  But since they’re not letting Clark in on the plan, you can’t really say they’re siding with him either.  You have to think that the Justice League will side with Oliver over Clark, especially since they’ve already sided with Oliver once before.

Which is similar to Checkmate.  We know that Amanda Waller re-activated the Justice Society in preparation for some upcoming “apocalypse.”  It’s unknown what she knows about Zod, Clark, or the Kandorians, but now that she has a kryptonian blood sample, you have to think she knows now.  Waller’s “suicide squad” will likely also be against Zod and the Kandorians, but they’ll probably be their own group.  So probably separate from Clark and the Justice League.

Then there’s the Justice Society.  Just like with the Justice League, it’s unknown if they’ll be back, but Smallvillehas been pretty good in the past about getting people to come back later in the year if they’re needed.  Waller thought they’d be important, and maybe they will be.  We’d likely just see Hawkman and/or Star Girl, since they were the only two to survive the “Absolute Justice” two-parter, and they’d probably side with the Justice League as well.

If they could do some kind of battle royale, it’d be really cool.  I’m not sure how it’d work on TV (or if it’d simply be too many people to work), but I think it’d be really cool if we got the Justice League and Justice Society vs. powered Kandorians with Clark as the X-factor.  It sounds like a really cool series finale, but with rumors that Smallville will likely come back for a tenth season, that might not work out.

As far as the actual plot went, I thought the villain was pretty interesting, and I liked how they tied it all in with Metallo.  We already knew that the Kandorians were experimenting on humans to try and get their powers back, and it was a nice bit of continuity to have that come back and haunt them.

Although, again, I don’t really understand what was supposed to be happening in the final “fight”.  I realize that the doctor had absolutely zero chance to fight Clark, but the last fight was extremely awkward.  Was the doctor intentionally killing himself, or did he accidentally electrocute himself?  It was another strange ending to an episode, and it brings up the question on when the last time Clark actually fought someone one-on-one.  It feels like it’s been a really long time.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was Zod and Lois.  It seems like Zod has gotten into Lois’ head, and it will be interesting to see what his endgame with her is.  Is he simply trying to get into Clark’s head, or does he actually want to take Lois for himself.  It happened when Zod came the first time, when LexZod took Lana for himself.

You have to think that it would be the ultimate revenge on Clark to have Zod controlling the world with Lois by his side, whether or not Zod actually cares for her at all.

So now we have a month off before Smallville returns in early April.  Just a few episodes remain, and things are setting up for an interesting end to the year.

Some of the comic book characters who were my early favorites were Spider-Man and Robin, but this was before I’d ever read a comic. Spider-Man I’d encountered a number of times on television, from a glimpse at his earliest live action work to the ‘Amazing Friends’ cartoon that the Ultimate comics revisited a few years back. Robin, from the 1960s TV show. I developed enough interest to be crushed when readers infamously phone-called Jason Todd to death, even though I had no idea at that point that the newspaper article I read had nothing to do with the Robin I’d loosely become attached to. My interest in these two traditionally youth-oriented characters wasn’t related, at least as far as I was concerned, with the very reasons they were created, for someone a little older than me to relate to, so it was pretty ironic that I became so interested in them. No, when I latched onto my first real favorite, from the time I got to read comics themselves, it was because…the dude wore my favorite color.

Yeah, so that’s my dirty little secret origin, the reason why I developed such an affinity for Green Lantern.

In middle school, during activity period, my first real interaction with other comics readers who weren’t my brothers, all I had were a few DC reprints of early Hal Jordan stories, plus a back issue featuring Hector Hammond, the genius whose head grew (literally) as the years progressed (to the point where he really can’t, these days, er, support himself). Anyway, while I proudly represented my interest with this meager offering, the rest of the group had their collections filled with Punisher and other such participants in the violence wave that was still following the late 1980s fad begun with ‘The Dark Knight Returns.’ They didn’t quite openly mock me, but it wasn’t hard to notice that they didn’t exactly respect my choice.

Green Lantern in the early 1990s was certainly an established character. He was respected for a run twenty years earlier he’d had with Green Arrow as part of a social wave of stories that helped comics begin to mature. Hal Jordan himself was the second incarnation of the character, after the original (and quite different) Alan Scott version from the Golden Age. Jordan’s version, along with Barry Allen, helped usher in the Silver Age. But he wasn’t popular. He was fairly obscure, known only by his fans, despite a number of stories from DC that had attempted to emphasize the Green Lantern Corps, including ‘Cosmic Odyssey,’ which even today is remembered as the story that saw John Stewart let a planet be destroyed on his watch (which was even depicted in the ‘Justice League Unlimited’ cartoon). (It’s worth noting that the Manhunters, a key part of Green Lantern/Guardians of the Universe lore, in ‘Invasion,’ did DC’s version of Marvel’s ‘Secret Invasion,’ oh, about a decade sooner.)

Anyway, it was to the point where, in 1994, Hal Jordan was used to help bring Superman back and then cast aside during ‘Emerald Twilight,’ leading to a streamlining of Green Lantern mythos and the introduction of a modern version known as Kyle Rayner.

Okay, that might sound more flippant than I mean it to. I had a chance to read comics around this time, and ‘Emerald Twilight’ was the first run of Green Lantern that I got to read on a more or less regular basis. I thought it was a great time to be a fan. I had no problem trading Hal for something new, and Ron Marz did a terrific job. Kyle was my Green Lantern, as a reader. I was familiar with Hal’s adventures, but was more than happy to actually read Kyle. There was a campaign to bring Hal back almost from the point he was taken out, even though technically his transformation into Parallax (with villain status firmly established in ‘Zero Hour,’ which at the time was in itself the sequel to ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ and is still a testament to the career of Dan Jurgens) kept him around for years, until his death in ‘The Final Night’ (another event comic that’s still a must-read), and first resurrection as the Spectre. Okay, so he wasn’t exactly Green Lantern then.

Anyway, Kyle (and the demise of Hal’s good boy reputation) did start the positive buzz going. Green Lantern still wasn’t setting the comics world on fire, but at least, in the community, he was starting to earn some real respect. For ten years, Kyle carried the torch (even garnered some mainstream publicity when Judd Winick began writing him and introduced a gay character in memory of his late friend and fellow ‘Real World’ alumnus Pedro). Then Geoff Johns came around and decided the time was right for Hal to return.

It might have had to do with the fact that Kevin Smith had already resurrected Green Arrow to great critical acclaim and sales success. I don’t know. Before ’Green Lantern Rebirth,’ Johns was mostly known for some controversial Marvel writing on ‘Avengers’ and co-scripting ‘JSA,’ not to mention back-to-basics runs with The Flash and Teen Titans. I don’t know. But Johns brought Hal Jordan back and in the process began to unfold a complicated new version of the mythos. While I would have been perfectly content for Kyle to remain Green Lantern, by the time I was finished reading ‘Rebirth,’ I understood how much he was actually doing with his story, from explaining Parallax to be the manifestation of Fear (or the color yellow, thus explaining a confusing bit of the lore of years past and setting the stage for the spectrum of rings that now includes orange, red, blue, indigo, and even black, plus a better integration of the Star Sapphire, which at one point was just a villainous version of Hal’s perennial girlfriend Carol Ferris) to bringing back Sinestro, a character who is as important to the Green Lantern saga as the destruction of Krypton is to Superman.

During those early days, though, reading Green Lantern in my own little bubble, I enjoyed reading the letters columns (hey, some indy books still remember those), and the fans seemed to like comparing Green Lantern to Star Wars. Maybe it was a little difficult to see back then, but by the time Johns came around, it was a lot easier. Hal’s origin, how he got his power ring from Abin Sur after he crashed to his death on Earth and was trained by Sinestro, the “greatest Green Lantern,” until his need for order made him a villain, was made into a cartoon movie, finally, last year, and so it became easier for a wider audience to sample the mythology.

Johns continued writing the ongoing Green Lantern series, and worked on the seeds he’d planted in ‘Rebirth,’ which gradually grew stronger and stronger buzz, until it became a verifiable bestseller, culminating in ‘Blackest Night,’ which became a true rival to the dominant stories in Marvel, with even spin-off series ‘Green Lantern Corps’ (a title DC had resisted supporting for decades) enjoying strong sales. Finally, Hollywood is even developing a movie, which in Marvel terms might not be all that significant (almost any character of theirs can get one these days), but for DC is practically unparalleled. Superman and Batman are well-established with audiences, but even Wonder Woman has only ever had a TV shows, decades old at this point. ‘The Flash’ lasted one season. (Any, um, other examples? ‘Swamp Thing’ doesn’t necessarily count. Okay, so there was also ‘Birds of Prey.’)

So it’s a good time to be a fan of Green Lantern. A great time, even. Frankly, I don’t know exactly how it happened, but it’s pretty awesome. Hal Jordan’s creation ushered in a new kind of hero, a super cop (but not, sadly, Jackie Chan), technically just one of many such versions of the same character (thereby acknowledging the secret behind the entire superhero genre), but one who has managed to endure for decades despite this apparent flaw. Hal has been replaced three different times as Earth’s Green Lantern, by Stewart and Rayner and also, infamously, by Guy Gardner, whose popularity has kept him around as one of the original anti-heroes of the modern era. And there’s lots more alien Green Lanterns worth knowing, too, not to mention, lately, thanks to Johns a whole spectrum worth exploring. The saddest part is knowing that it probably won’t be very soon that a guru like Johns will come around to make things quite so lively.

But hey, he’s here now, and that’s a good reason to celebrate Green Lantern. ‘Blackest Night’ is over next month, a culmination of five years work. It’s not the end of the ride, though, and for new readers, there’s plenty to explore, from how Hal ended up on the road to ‘Rebirth’ in the first place to his glory days of comparative innocence, the classic ‘Emerald Dawn’ version of his origin (though ‘Secret Origin’ as told by Johns might seem to make it irrelevant), even Green Lantern/Green Arrow, which even today still defines GA Oliver Queen (making way for an upcoming arc that may return that one to prominence, too).

So that’s my popularity story, something I was in on the ground floor with and am happy to continue riding, wherever it leads.

This episode is a huge step into understanding what really happened when the bomb exploded in last season’s finale.  I think we all imagined that, if the plan was going to work, it would simply reset what had happened.  Everything that happened since the plane had crashed would be erased, but everything before the crash would be the same.

A couple of things in the premiere showed that to be false – Hurley’s luck, Jack’s fear of flying, and Charlie’s suicidal thoughts.  But outside of Shannon choosing not to come back with Boone, there didn’t seem to be any major changes.

Even Kate’s episode seemed to illustrate that the world wasn’t much different than we knew.  Kate was still a fugitive, and Claire was still going to give her baby up for adoption.  Other than Ethan showing up as a doctor in Los Angeles, things seemed to be going the way it would’ve gone in the original timeline.

Locke’s life was a little more different.  He was still with Helen, and without the Island, his faith was still in major jeopardy.  The biggest change seems to be with his father, but we were never really given any concrete details there.

But then came Jack.  No matter what you think of him, Jack Shephard is the star of the show.  He’s the first guy we met, and he’s the overwhelming leader in flashback episodes.  In a world of connected people, Jack seems to have the most connected threads – especially when you include Christian Shephard, Jack’s enigmatic father.

Jack was the first one to have a flash-forward, and he’s the first one to drop a huge bombshell in the alternate universe.  Because not only did the hydrogen bomb save the plane, sink the Island, and change Shannon’s travel plans – it created life.  Jack, in the alternate timeline, has a son named David.

And it starts to open up possibilities – I assume that the big differences in the timeline all stem from Jacob’s activity.  If the Island was destroyed, Jacob (alive or not) wouldn’t have a lot of reason to try and impact the Oceanic 815 survivors’ lives.  So I imagine that all changes would start from the moment Jacob was supposed to show up (when Sawyer wrote the letter to his parents’ killer, when Kate stole the lunchbox, and the moment after Jack’s first solo surgery…the famous “count to five” incident).

Now we don’t know enough to answer this question, but we have to ask if David was born before or after the “count to five” surgery.  If it was, my theory could be right.  If it was before, it doesn’t hold a lot of water.  I guess we’ll see.

But the bigger question is who David’s mother is.  Knowing LOST, it’s likely someone we have met before, but the writers, of course, keep the mother’s identity a secret.  But there are candidates – Juliet, Ana-Lucia, and Sarah (Jack’s ex-wife) are the major ones because it didn’t seem like Kate and Jack knew each other when they saw each other on the plane.  You’d also think, if David’s mother was a fugitive, that would’ve come up.

I’m going to lean towards Juliet as the mother.  I know she never met Jacob, but I just have a gut feeling.  But the mother could also be irrelevant – you never know with these writers.

The main storyline in the episode is Jack’s fear that he’s turning into his father.  Just like it was with Christian, Jack’s relationship with David is strained.  Jack’s mother explains that David could be just as scared of Jack as Jack was with his own father.  This causes Jack to do his best to make things right.

What’s interesting about Jack, as opposed to the Others, is that memories of the Island seem to be seeping through.  Jack doesn’t remember his appendix surgery (which happend to him as a child in the alternate timeline), and it might be because his appendix was taken out on the Island in the original one.

It’s interesting that only Jack seems to have any idea that the world was reset, and I’m interesting to find out when/if he figures out what really happened.

The story in the flash-sideways, itself, is nice – but the major payoff is David’s existence.  Dogen appearing off-Island continues to drive home that these people are connected, and it explains that even true Others had to find real lives off-Island.

In the real world, things continue to move forward.  Jacob re-appears to Hurley, sending him on a mission to a mysterious lighthouse in order to make sure someone is able to get back to the Island.  But, in typical Jacob fashion, Hurley is simply the tool to get Jack to the lighthouse.

Jacob has Hurley manipulate Jack into leaving the Temple, which has to frustrate Dogen.  He didn’t want to let anyone out of the locked-down Temple, but now the only people left are Miles and Sayid.  And if Dogen had his way, Sayid would be dead.  If you’d ask him, things aren’t really going according to plan.

On the way, Jack and Hurley stumble upon Kate (who lets them know that she’s looking for Claire), but the cool part is the return of the Caves.  The Caves were a major part of season one, but they were completely forgotten after the Hatch was opened.  It was cool to see Jack back there, and there was a lot of good continuity with the appearance of the smashed coffin and the return of Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve are still a mystery, and there have been a lot of theories surrounding them.  Ever since the LOST producers hinted at their significance in the overall mythos of the show, fans have been speculating on who they would be.  I’ve read theories that they are Rose and Bernard, Kate and Jack, and other combination of male/female characters.  Hurley even references these theories with his idea that time travel was involved.

But the white and black stones (found in the hands of the bodies) makes it seem like these were former “candidates”.  More on that later.

But that’s where the real meat of the episode lies.  When Jack and Hurley arrive at the lighthouse, they discover another place where Jacob kept track of various candidates.  Just like the cliff-side caves that the LockeMonster showed Sawyer last week, many names are written in the lighthouse, and each are assigned a number.  Someone more dedicated than me has put together a list of all the names and numbers, and with a couple of minor exceptions, the lists are identical.

And thanks to the wheel in the lighthouse, we learn that various other survivors (including Kate) were listed as candidates with other numbers.  What’s interesting is that some names are crossed out (Miles, for example) and some aren’t (Kate).  So being crossed isn’t necessarily connected to being dead.

The LockeMonster explained last week that Jacob was looking for his replacement.  But thinking about it, you have to wonder if the LockeMonster is also looking for his own candidate.  Is there a chance that the LockeMonster has to find a replacement before he’s allowed to “go home?”  It would certainly explain why he’s gone out of his way to find two potential candidates (Sawyer and, by the end of the episode, Jin).

And if the LockeMonster really is looking for the candidates, it would seem that Jin would have to be the person listed on the wall.  Because he didn’t seem terribly interested in taking Sun with him, and she would’ve been the first candidate he’d met.

Anyway, the idea of Jacob spying on Jack is enough to drive the good doctor a little insane.  And just like he did with his father’s coffin, Jack loses his cool and smashes the mirrors in the lighthouse.  A few minutes later, Jack is staring into the ocean, wondering what in the Hell he’s supposed to do.

And when Hurley, disappointed, tries to explain himself to Jacob – Jacob reveals his true plan.  I loved last year’s quote from Jacob to the Monster (“It only ever ends once, the rest is just progress”) and he offers another gem in this episode when he’s telling Hurley what he was trying to accomplish with Jack.

“Sometimes you can just hop in the back of someone’s cab and tell them what they’re supposed to do.  Other times, you have to let them lo0k out at the ocean for a while.”

And I just love that – he tells Hurley that Jack has to figure out what he’s supposed to do on his own. It’s a great symbol of what Jacob is trying to do. Unlike what the LockeMonster says, I don’t think Jacob is being manipulative – I think he’s simply guiding people to the right path.  Although I could also see the argument that such an action is just as bad.

What’s interesting is that Jacob tells Hurley that they had to get away from the Temple.  It’s obvious that the LockeMonster is on his way to the Temple, but I’m curious why he chose to only save Jack and Hurley.  And I’m also curious what the Monster plans on doing once he gets there.

The rest of the episode deals with the cliffhanger from a couple episodes ago.  Claire saves Jin, and she brings him back to her base camp.  She also brings the other Other, who pleads with Jin to turn against Claire.

Claire has obviously taken Rousseau’s place on the Island.  Being left alone on the Island hasn’t done a lot for her sanity, and she spends most of her time looking for Aaron (she keeps a fake baby in a crib inside her makeshift tent).

Claire is led to believe that the Others have her child, on the advice of her father and her “friend.”  By the end of the episode, it turns out that her “friend” is the LockeMonster.

And this is another sign that Christian Shephard is in league with the Monster.  Like I’ve pointed out before, it seemed like Christian was directly leading Locke to his death and return (so that the Monster could take his form).  But this is the first connection that isn’t speculated upon - Claire actually says that they both told her that the Others had Aaron.

Jungle Claire is an interesting character, and I think it’s an interesting dynamic.  But there’s something a bit odd about it – the Other claims that Claire has been killing his people for three years.  And that would imply that Claire has been in the “present” since the Island was moved.

Does that mean that Claire wasn’t involved in the time jumps?  We know that everyone on the Island wasn’t  (Richard and the Others didn’t jump with the Island), but Claire would be the first Oceanic survivor who didn’t jump.  There’s a chance she’s connected with Sun, who was the only Oceanic survivor who didn’t travel back to the 1970s during the Ajira flight (maybe it’s related to the fact that both were pregnant on the Island?)

And Claire’s line about killing Kate if she’d taken Aaron is interesting.  Kate came back to the Island to make things right, and there’s a chance that it could lead to her death.  When they fight, it will certainly be intriguing to watch.

It’s a little sad that sweet, little Claire is the survivor who’s done the worst.  Whether or not the rest of the Oceanic survivors are happy with their post-crash lives, none of them are as worse-off as Claire.  Like with Locke, I’m hoping things can turn around for her (in either timeline).

And there you have it - Jacob has a plan for Jack, someone is coming to the Island, and the LockeMonster has a growing group alongside him (Sawyer, Claire, and maybe Jin).  And in the alternate universe, it seems the rules are completely off.

More questions posed and more questions answered.  So far, I’ve loved this season, and I can’t wait to see what happens next week.  Until then…

The complaint is recent times has been pretty loud and pretty incessant: Superman, when you get right down to it, is pretty boring. What do you do with the man who can do anything? It’s actually a fairly old argument at this point. When John Byrne rebooted the character almost twenty-five years ago, he stripped away most of what the critics were complaining about without resorting to the rainbow forms of the familiar poison kryptonite that had gotten out of control in previous eras, which in any given color could knock the Big Blue Boy Scout out of commission (no real need to explain much more of that here), emphasizing the man behind the Last Son of Krypton and honing his abilities down to the basics: flight, invulnerability, heat- and x-ray vision, and that freeze-breath thing.

Actually, I guess I’m not really the person to try and explain any of that, because I’ve never really understood it. I think of it more of a problem for either readers or the creators. Comics are filled with characters who are more powerful (heck, even Batman has on many occasions been described as having or depicted with the ability to defeat even Superman in battle, and he’s merely supposed to be the quintessential human superhero), some described outright as gods (some borrowed straight from familiar myth, others original creations), others various combinations of omnipotent or simply omniscient. But Superman being Superman, he’s, yeah, the most famous, so you don’t exactly have to be familiar with obscure characters or nerdy allegiances to know, as basic as they come, that Superman is synonymous with the concept of superheroes, embodies everything you could think about. The most recent TV show to feature him has spent nine seasons almost exclusively devoted to the edict “no flights, no tights,” preferring to keep Clark Kent firmly rooted in his ‘Smallville,’ very human roots, the same way the last TV attempt, ‘Lois & Clark,’ focused almost exclusively on his love life. The last time a movie was made, ‘Superman Returns’ alienated audiences by refusing, again, to embody what they thought they should expect, the superhero engaged in manly slugfests with his enemies.

Anyone, I would argue, who says there’s only one way to approach Superman, lest it be predictable and boring, has to have been actively ignoring what’s been done with the character for a very long time now. Since Byrne’s reboot, there hasn’t been a single period where Superman has been approached in a “predictable and boring” light. This was the era that saw the Man of Steel fall in combat against the monster Doomsday, introduced (in two attempts) General Zod into comics continuity, execute two foes, even in recent months relinquish the famous costume to try and moderate a community of his own people, succeeding little better in being the perfect example for Kryptonians than he has with humans, either fictionally or for the real world.

Superman’s problem is that he’s always been a very good idea, one might say almost too good, unbelievable. His biggest problem is trying to maintain his secret identity (which itself has been compromised on a number of occasions, at one point even by his former “pal” Jimmy Olsen), which is easy to ridicule, because it basically involves a pair of glasses and play-acting (nerds aren’t really so bad these days, nor are glasses particularly relevant in the contact lenses/corrective surgery age). He becomes almost an instant piece of nostalgia, something that was probably really awesome for a given era, but maybe not so relevant anymore. What does he have to say now that Spider-Man (“great responsibility”), Iron Man (the military-industrial issue), the X-Men (social fears), or Batman (vigilante justice) don’t better address, on a scale that’s actually relatable? The dude’s an admitted alien. How much more self-symbolic do you really need to get?

But as I said, I find that to be a lot of nonsense. So much of what we think of today in regards to Superman seems to be an apology it’s easy to forget that he was relevant in the first place because he didn’t just embody the superhero, but heroes in general, what it used to be easy to admire, what the Vietnam War did a good job of obscuring for generations. Maybe it’s because no creator has ever really addressed what a modern Superman might mean, what a modern origin story might encompass, it’s easy to continue dismissing him as increasingly irrelevant.

That’s not to say no one has done anything worth following. On the contrary, there’s been some real revelatory work done. I’ve already mentioned ‘Superman Returns,’ which at the very least addressed, in a context that was at once familiar (continuing the same general continuity from at least the first two Christopher Reeve films) and also more widely expansive. When Superman tries to explain himself to a suddenly skeptical Lois Lane, he remarks that his super-hearing allows him to hear just about everything, which means he hears every time someone asks for a miracle. He’s not God (despite a number of messianic images used during the film), but he’s assumed the responsibility that everyone’s always expecting, praying for. That’s why I always loved the movie, because it dared to look beyond the expected, to give audiences a glimpse of what a modern Superman might actually represent.

In the ‘All Star Superman’ comic, Grant Morrison took it one step further. While the majority of creators have in recent years attempted to downplay the ways Clark Kent is Kryptonian (something, ironically, ‘Smallville’ spent a good deal of time in its middle seasons torturing the character with), displaying only his powers as what sets him apart, Morrison instead reflected on how similar he really is to his archenemy, Lex Luthor, who in various incarnations has generally been depicted either as a ruthless businessman or genius scientist (sometimes both at the same time, but rarely, like trying to reconcile how he ever ends up in that green and purple battle suit). Discovering that he’s come away from one of his adventures with a terminal condition, Superman decides to focus his attention and abilities doing all the things Luthor has apparently refused to do with the interloping do-gooder flying around Metropolis: using the assets of the Fortress of Solitude and his own mind to help mankind in ways his powers never truly could. The point of it being, Superman is not just another superhero, he’s a Kryptonian who has more than just powers that set him apart, but in fact a rich legacy and evolved civilization to draw on, even if he’s never been a part of it (keeping in mind this was before Geoff Johns rescued the Bottle City of Kandor from the clutches of Brainiac and eventually gave birth to New Krypton, a saga Greg Rucka and James Robinson are still continuing; for further details, sample ‘War of the Supermen’ on Free Comic Book Day this May).

Superman isn’t just a symbol, either of the superheroic ideal or of certain idyllic values, but a man capable of greats things, tempered by an incredible (and incredibly famous) origin, but who continually struggles to do what he can, no matter what that means. Cynically, even the best creators sometimes pervert what that means (see: Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight Returns;’ more cleverly in “Elseworlds” stories like ‘Superman: Red Son’). It’s not about how difficult it “is” to tell a compelling story featuring a character who can do “anything,” but taking that character, his backstory, the heritage that has built up over the decades, and looking at the possibilities. It’s not really that hard. It’s certainly become increasingly popular to take just about every alternative look at superheroes that there is (from ‘The Boys,’ which takes cynicism to an arguably offensive at best extreme, to comics like ‘Irredeemable’ or ‘The Mighty,’ which look at ways a Superman might be corrupted), but it’s more impossible than necessary to truly look at the Man of Steel and only see a character who has not interesting angle to exploit. That’s not what a good creator sees, and not what a discerning reader should be thinking.

There’s hardly a superhero yet created with more raw potential, who’s been knocked off more times, than Superman. I would argue that’s the real stumbling block he continues to embody, the sheer intimidation of a character who continues to loom large, both over comics and our culture. There’s so many ways to approach him, he really has become a new kind of myth, all by himself. If an alien were to rocket into our modern world, look like us, be raised by us, and end up championing us, wouldn’t you at the very least hope he were exactly like Superman? Always trying to do the right thing? He never begs, never grovels, never tries to cut deals that benefit only a few. The worst he’s ever done is make his home in only one place (well, two, technically). But that’s only because he can make it work. A lot of creators like to think he does it because he wants to inspire us, and that’s a pretty good message. At the very least, in the comics, he’s done plenty of inspiring. But in the end, Superman is still only one man. I think that’s what really defines him. Four men once tried to replace him. None of them, not even all of them, could.

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.