It’s been 18 months since I last looked at ‘Smallville’, partially because – moving in the opposite direction to things like Sky’s simulcast of the ‘Lost’ finale – E4 have decided to run the series ten months behind the US broadcast in a prestigious ‘just after a double-bill of ‘Friends’ repeats’ timeslot.
Not that I blame them. ‘Smallville’ is definitely not fresh produce. It’s hard to see fans desperately hiding from spoilers, terrified of finding out if Chloe is good/bad/moderate/alive/dead/annoyed this week, or the colour of Clark’s superheroing coat this year (Spoiler! It’s black).
Anyway, Season 9 is here now, and the series has been confirmed for a tenth and final, final, honest-to-Rao final season, which will mean that a prequel show being written to a loose ‘five-year plan’ will have run for a full decade, which is one year longer than ‘The X-Files’, double the length of ‘Alias’ or ‘Angel’ and three years longer than the longest running ‘Star Trek’ show.
Season Ten starts in the US in the autumn, but E4 is (checks internet) nine episodes into Season Nine. The series is still struggling with the format that it’s had since early in Season Eight, that of being a fully-fledged, grown-up ‘Superman’ show in every respect apart from the fact that they’re not allowed to have Clark become Superman.
Daily Planet, Lois, double-identity, Metropolis, supervillains… check, check, check, check, check.
Cape, flying, iconic superhero… NO.
They’ve finessed the placeholder identity since last season. Instead of having Clark run around in the cunning disguise of the red denim jacket/blue t-shirt combo that he’s been publicly wearing for years and being known by the awkward nickname of the ‘Red/Blue Blur’, which was a sort-of logical lead-in to a full reveal of Superman but sounded absolutely bloody ridiculous, Metropolis’ super-fast superhero is now just ‘the Blur’, with Clark wearing a stylised black raincoat and T-shirt with sprayed on white logo.
It’s an OK costume: sort of a cross between the black and white Kryptonian battle costume that occasionally turns up in the comic, and a cosplaying tramp.
While it’s a compromise that allows more superhero action, it does create a situation whereby, in being contractually obliged to not make Clark into Superman, the producers have instead turned him into a Batman knock-off, a black-clad vigilante who lurks in the shadows and hangs around on rooftops looking moody.
This is, I believe, what is known as a ‘perverse outcome’.
On the plus side, this costume change signals a continued shift into more straightforward superheroics. Compared to the ponderous ‘Heroes’ and its endless chin-stroking about the responsible use of superpowers, ‘Smallville’ is pleasingly full of ninja assassins from the future and enraged robot men.
There’s also a grab-bag of stuff from DC Comics and related sources thrown into this season: the second Speedy from Kevin Smith’s ‘Green Arrow’ run, the bottle city of Kandor (here a cloned back-up of Kandor’s entire population), DC villains like Roulette and Metallo and, most baffling of all, The Wonder Twins from the old ‘Super Friends’ cartoon.
Some of this works better than others. Most of the Kandorian stuff (bar a terrible guest turn from Julian Sands as an alternate/young/clone/whatever Jor-El) is really fun, with Callum Blue suitably over the top as Major Zod. Season highlight so far has been ‘Pandora’, in which we finally see Lois Lane’s inter-season trip to the future, and an apocalyptic scenario where Metropolis suffers under a Red Sun and fascistic Kryptonians have enslaved humanity.
It’s in these really, really wacky moments that ‘Smallville’ works best these days, where it embraces the most extreme aspects of comic-strip storytelling and abandons its teen soap roots altogether.
Less pleasant is the realisation that the series is increasingly in line with the current editorial direction of DC Comics, a toxic cocktail of reverence for the silliest excesses of the Silver Age combined with nasty, miserable storytelling in lieu of ‘edginess’. A couple of the plots seem to have jumped from the pages of ‘Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane’, and the Wonder Twins are daft even with a teen-idol makeover, but the show occasionally veers into surprising brutality.
There’s also a lot of moping, acceptable back when Clark was a teen, less so now he’s pushing thirty.
Aside from Clark, the only surviving cast member from the series’ original set-up remains Allison Mack as Chloe Sullivan, and the transition has not been a smooth one. Chloe’s original schtick was that she was doe-eyedly in love with Clark, and a convenient source of info-dumps. Nine years in and she’s mutated into a ruthless, embittered super-stalking all-powerful coordinator of information with an obsessive, ruthless streak who still talks in garbled vintage Whedonisms, with no sentence free of a torturous pop-culture analogy.
Such is the all-powerful nature of Chloe, that if she was part of the comic book Superman’s back-story she’d either be commemorated with a 400 foot statue in the centre of Metropolis or imprisoned on one of the moons of Pluto as the greatest threat to the universe ever known.
In short, the character has ceased to make any sense and it’s not surprising she’s leaving early in the final season. This leaves Tom Welling as the last man standing, and he remains a confident presence at the centre of the show. He’s not inspiring or anything (in spite of other characters insisting otherwise), but he’s a solid lead.
Unfortunately, ’solid’ can’t lift terrible dialogue – only genuine acting flare of a kind seen nowhere in this show can do that – and there’s a lot of terrible dialogue. Chloe is, as mentioned above, the worst victim/offender in terms of convoluted gibberish, but everyone gets there fair share of twisty-turny unconvincing sentences to spew out.
‘Smallville’ is still, technically, a show about/for young people, and the twin gods of Joss Whedon and ‘Dawson’s Creek’ creator Kevin Williamson cast a baleful shadow over the scripting, with ornately unrealistic dialogue that’s neither functional nor witty, loaded with portent and pretension. At it’s worst, ‘Smallville’ is an indigestible mess of characters banging on about their emotions and destinies in stilted exchanges where they swap torturous, unconvincing lines of dialogue. It’s like a poetry slam for fanficcers.
In spite of all this, I can’t quite give up on ‘Smallville’. That’s partially because I’ve been watching it since the beginning, of course, and it’s partially because I find the desperate measures used by the writers to sustain the series well beyond its natural life fascinating.
But it’s also because, as a fan of the DC comics characters in general, ‘Smallville’ still hits the odd beat that raises a smile. It’s a weird mutant version of Superman, but still one I prefer to most of the comics being published featuring the character, one which retains some of the fun and sincerity of the concept that the comics often lose track of.
Having said that, if they do ‘Blackest Night’ next season I’m throwing a brick through the screen.
