Smallville Season Finale
The season finale of Smallville was certainly, er… exciting, wasn’t it?
Well, no. No, it wasn’t. There were moments that were pure awesome, but that’s because my standards are ridiculously low for this show. I mean, the only thing I was hoping for when the last episode aired was that Chloe wouldn’t get KO’d. Turns out Chloe pretty much got the sweetest deal by the end of it, which, WIN.
Considering the finale was two hours long, not a whole lot happened, so my thoughts on this will be condensed into bullet points. I have to say something, after all. I may have left this show behind two or three times over the years, but it is a show I watched from the very first episode ten years ago. Man, I wasn’t even sixteen. No wonder I remember this show being better back then.
Okay, things I loved, loved, loved:
• LEX. I’ve always said there were few reasons I watched Smallville. Chloe was one of them. Lex was the other. The only really great thing about the finale is that it finally brought my three favourites (you guys already know I’m an Ollie fangirl) back together. My only disappointment was that they didn’t interact at all. That, and the fact that they gave Lex a clunky script that Rosenbaum clearly tried to sell the hell out of with mixed results. And the memory serum? Cheap cop-out.
• CHLOE AND OLIVER ARE MADE OF AWESOME. I can almost forgive this show for the last handful of years in which it’s sucked, purely because they didn’t 1) kill Chloe off, 2) have her relationship with Ollie end in an unnecessary, tragic way, or 3) forget Chloe existed completely in the near-future. I’ve read so many posts obsessively deconstructing the ending and what Ollie’s lack of presence in the bedroom meant that my eyes are starting to cross, but to be honest? I don’t think this show was as subtle as people like to think it was. You have Chloe with a wedding band on her finger and a son who is clearly enamoured of his bow and arrow set, and that pretty much says it all for me. To me it seemed they made the decision not to have Ollie in the final scene for two reasons. 1) The show couldn’t be accused of cementing these two as “canon” without alienating the comic book fans and the Ollie/Dinah ‘shippers, and therefore chose to touch on a more “ambiguous” ending. And 2) I think they might have wanted to give the impression that Green Arrow is still very much active, out there protecting the streets at night while Chloe protects their son at home. That’s my interpretation and I’m sticking to it!
• Erm…
Okay, there wasn’t really a whole lot I loved about the finale. Maybe I had a mini squee! moment when Clark actually flew, but that was about it.
Things that I didn’t particularly like because they were lame, ridiculous, stupid or all of the above:
• CLARK. He didn’t learn anything. Nothing. Nada. Never in the whole ten years of this show has he taken anything away from his “life lessons”. Right up until the very end he was narrow-minded, self-righteous, practically bursting with hot air and throwing around sentimental blather like it actually meant something to him. I’ve tolerated him with Lois this last season or so because they didn’t actually grate on me. Plus he smiled. And had fun. But never was there one moment in the finale when I thought that maybe Clark had learned just enough to be Superman. He’s still the same guy he was when he was a fifteen-year-old nerd.
• The whole Darkseid plotline was stupid. All of it. It had no impact on anyone, ever. Nothing bad happened. A few characters were tortured with the whole sin crap that one of the minions tried, but that was about it. Darkseid disappeared because Clark flew through him. Ollie was miraculously cured by Clark’s pep talk even though a couple of episodes before Clark was spouting crap about how Clark would have to lock a team member up if he were infected, because they couldn’t be saved. I know that was simply bad writing used purely to isolate Oliver and make him more easily manipulated, but come on? Couldn’t it have been Chloe? Or, even more awesomely, the whole League? Where were they? I would have thought they’d have pulled in AC, Bart, Victor and Black Canary for one last cameo, but apparently not!
• Tess died for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It was blatantly obvious by this point that Tess was in no way going to turn out like Lex. It was stupid. But then, I liked the moment they had. Lex seemed to genuinely care about her, seemed to be genuinely sorry for having to kill her, but I think that moment worked because Michael Rosenbaum nailed it like nobody’s business.
• The whole wedding being on-again/off-again? Stupid.
• A “meteor”/planet is blatantly exploding in the sky and they hold a conference on a plane? And Lois manages to bypass post-9/11 security AND Presidential security to get on it? Stupider.
• Clark beats Darkseid by pushing Apokolips away? What?
• Kara can’t be the one to do this miraculous pushing thing because… why? I didn’t get it. Why couldn’t Jor-El just say, “Hey, they need you in the future. Stuff is happening.” How would her being there affect Clark’s destiny?
I just don’t think this show even cared how stupid it was by the end of things. And it wasn’t even a cracky kind of stupid. It was lame, lacklustre, boring, and it’s last gasping breath was barely heard. It didn’t even go out with a bang.
But you know what? Chloe was in the final-final scene and I never thought I’d get to say that. And that’s all I care about.
Chloe Sullivan, you are awesome.
Coming up soon will be my review of Kim Harrison’s latest books, Black Magic Sanction and Pale Demon.
Oh, and I’ll be posting the link to my Draco/Hermione exchange fic now that names have been revealed.