SMALLVILLE Minicaps / Season 8, Eps. 21-22 and Season Eight Highlights

The Smallville season 8 minicaps would like to apologize for what happens in this installment. It’s not excusable.

Stewart here…

The whole Davis Bloome/Doomsday thing is starting to swing out of control, now that all our heroes (and villains) are aware what kind of threat he is. Not that Davis tries to take himself out of the equation, but that attempt just doesn’t work. Now Chloe is sheltering Davis in a crazy attempt to save both Davis and Clark from destroying one another. And meanwhile, Oliver is helping out Jimmy with a stable job besides pill-popping maniac, while dealing with his own guilt over killing Lex. Plus, Tess has some other odd kryptonian orb that I’m sure won’t be another world-ending calamity in the making. OK, who are we kidding? It pretty much will be. So, let’s jump in…

“Injustice”

Chloe seems to have wandered back alone to Clark, and is now convinced that killing Davis is a good idea. This may have something to do with that squad of meteor freaks Tess has assembled to trail Davis until “the Traveler” is forced to confront him. Or that “Chloe” is a shapeshifting meteor freak that is supposed to push Clark into killing Davis while Clark’s moving to find a way to split Davis from Doomsday. And then there’s that odd crystal in Tess’s possession that says her work has made her “the savior of Kandor”. Wha?

Don’t let it ever be said I don’t know how to pander to the audience of these minicaps.

–Really, Dr. Emil just happens to have a snazzy sports car just lying around in the middle of an alleyway in case someone needs it?

–Oh, and Oliver decides to drop to Clark that he killed Lex, just ‘cause.

–Man, Tess feels insulted she’s compared to being like Lex by Clark. If she only had a clue how accurate Clark is.

–Seriously, couldn’t Tess do a better job of hiding that meteor freak she killed with that brain bomb? I mean the other sap got ripped to pieces, and here’s another body that looks relatively unmolested.

–“Keep your cork…in your pants.”

“Doomsday”

Welcome to season finale time, and jeez, where to begin with this hot mess? Well, Rokk from the 31^st Century offers a solution for Doomsday by giving Clark another Legion ring so he can dump rocky man’s ass into the future. Somehow Lois ends up with it and thanks to a fight with Tess over that kryptonian orb, gets transported there (or somewhere anyway) instead. And Clark’s plan to separate Davis and Doomsday kind of works, albeit not because of him, but because Oliver and his Justice League incapacitate Clark and Chloe uses a slab of black kryptonite to separate man and beast. Clark has to fight Doomsday anyway, and wow, how short and lame that fight is. Davis ends up dying anyway (because, much to Chloe’s surprise, Davis was crazy even without Doomsday in him), and so does Jimmy saving Chloe. After Jimmy’s funeral (more on how that’s lame too below), Clark decides to ditch pretending to be human to be a full-time hero and Tess uses that kryptonian orb to herald the arrival of…Zod!

Some people just piss write in snow, but this naked guy burns his mark on the grass.

–Boy, this episode really needed some more time, or conversely, another episode to deal with all the events that happened, because this episode felt so rushed in certain points it made it hard to enjoy all the twists and turns.

–By the way, Jimmy Olsen has a younger brother…who gets Jimmy’s camera at the funeral! And then Chloe suspects he might be a news photographer too one day! Oh, my ass, Smallville!

–Ok, look, I get there are budgetary restrictions in television, but for Pete’s sake, when you pit your main character against an unstoppable super creature, you might want to have more than the majority of that fight in one area. For all the buildup to this fight, it ends so quick and anticlimactically it’s automatically a letdown.

–Jimmy’s wedding present is swanky new dibs that overlook all of Metropolis. Also, he finds out Clark’s secret. Thanks for making his demise even more of a piss in the face.

–Um, so where did that kryptonian orb go during its time missing from Tess’s safe? What, it went out for snacks?

“Wow, I’m that good looking?” –what both of them are thinking right there

So before we leave season eight of the Smallville minicaps, let’s take a look at the best and worst that we’ve seen this season:

BEST EPISODES: “Toxic”, “Legion”, “Bride”

WORST EPISODES: “Doomsday”, “Beast”

BEST METEOR FREAK THIS SEASON: Parasite from “Injustice”, even if he realizes too late that stealing Clark’s powers means he gets his kryptonite allergies.

LESSONS CLARK LEARNS THIS SEASON: Mankind isn’t all that and a bag of chips, which he realizes thanks to the following: One friend has sheltered a super kryptonian WMD over repairing her marriage, another has killed an archenemy/ former friend, and his ex-girlfriend got her skin burned off to get superpowers because she had deep seated insecurity issues. Also, he’s finally doing superhero stuff and saving people.

WHY YOU SHOULD HATE LANA LANG: Mistaking physical power for internal power and inadvertently seeding the end of any relationship with Clark. The good news is, this means we’ll never see her again, so yay, I guess?

WHAT HAPPENS FREQUENTLY IN SMALLVILLE: Well, I should rephrase this to be “What Happens Frequently in Metropolis” now, but whatever it is, happens in the almost same looking stretch of that city.

WHO SHOULD CLARK HOOK UP WITH: Lois. Really, is this category even relevant anymore to ask that question?

HOPES FOR SEASON NINE: Flying. And plus, lose that Red-Blue Blur moniker, Clark.

SEASON EIGHT ANALYSIS: For all the highs this season of Smallville, there are almost as equal lows. It doesn’t start out low at the opening of season eight, now that Clark seems to finally make some mobility towards being the hero he’s destined to be by spending the majority of his time in Metropolis working with Lois at the Daily Planet. Even with Lex and Lana not being part of the regular core of characters anymore, they are still felt until almost the end of the season when their arcs come to the end they do. And even the setup of Davis Bloome as the kryptonian WMD Doomsday was an intriguing one at first. Somewhere along the way, the bottom fell out on that storyline, leading Chloe to make a series of decisions that seemed to vary from stunningly naïve to unbelievable, and that plot to be closed up rather abruptly in the season finale, leading to a lot of “seriously?” moments that deflated the tension of the season that lead up to it.

If I was to sum up this season of Smallville, I would say it was “uneven”. There were some great redefining of the Clark and Lois relationship, a new villain in Tess Mercer who wasn’t a complete Lex clone, and some building of a larger world other than the occasional freak of the week the show started out with. Season eight had a lot to close up and set up for the seasons in-between, but the mess of a season finale did leave us with the possible return of Zod (and not some vessel for Zod or something, but the real flesh and blood bad guy). Whether it was good thing or bad thing for the show to bring back one of its big villains is another matter entirely to discuss, but there was a lot of hope for season nine…

“DIE, STUPID PINK FILE CABINET!”

NEXT TIME: Season nine of the Smallville minicaps begins as Zod arrives (as does Lois from whenever she’s been) in Metropolis in “Savior”, a man becomes a cyborg with a kryptonite heart in “Metallo”, Metropolis gets zombified by an alien virus in “Rabid”, and Clark becomes a literal mind-reader while Oliver plays the Toyman’s sick game in “Echo”.