Smallville: Action – Viridian’s View

By Viridian
This week, Smallville once again manages to surprise despite a plot setup that looks, at first glance, pretty weak. Filming a comic-based superhero movie in Smallville? Okay, the chances for amusing meta-commentary were high, but since this show does meta with all the subtlety of ten thousand anvils dropping, my hopes were simply that the episode would entertain. I was not expecting the overarching plot elements to be hit so heavily and so compellingly in this episode, thinking instead that this one would be, at best, a cute episode full of gimmicky fluff.

How wrong I was. Okay, sure: Rachel, the starlet character that they brought in, was fairly bland and boring, but I’ll forgive that as there wasn’t meant to be much more to her role than the ability to stand there and look cute. I’ll save my rants on the overabundance of those roles and the lack of truly strong, capable female characters on this show for later. (Yes, I know. Chloe. And Lois. And Kara. And amazingly even Lana, but this show does such terrible and laughable things to those characters on a weekly basis that it begins to undermine the strength of their characters.) There were a few amusing moments wherein Rachel was clearly mimicking the Lana role of seasons past, and though that’s not as funny as it could’ve been, I did laugh at the exchange between her and Lana wherein it was subtly (and I’m certain accidentally) implied that Lana and Clark’s relationship was akin to Rachel’s onscreen relationships; i.e., all an act.

Which, given Lana’s alarming tendencies to be actually sneaky and skirt evil somewhat convincingly this season, may have not been so accidental a statement at all, on the part of the writers. I was really prepared for dark Lana to suck, as a concept, and even if she hadn’t been doing a decent job in episodes previous, this one would’ve sold me, because, (let me interrupt this review in order to be the first to say it:) HOLY CRAP, LIONEL’S HAND IN A BEAR TRAP!!! This episode proves itself not for the squeamish, as we get to see Papa Luthor pry said hand out of said bear trap, and a few scenes later beat his captor to death. Sure, Lana’s not being directly awesome in these scenes, but the fact that she managed to find a truly off-her-rocker crazy person to keep Lionel captive for so long, and with such brutality, is pretty impressive. As is the scene where she hits Lionel in the face with a shovel. I don’t know who turned the violence up to eleven in this episode, but it’s the first time in seven seasons of this show that I’ve ever flinched at something they’ve shown onscreen. I’m sure it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m happy any time this show tests its own limits.

There was a lot more potential for creepy and disturbing than was actually explored in the main plot, however. If the villain, (who already showed hints of similarity to both the Saw villain and Randy from Scream) had not been competing with Lionel’s captor for creepiest person in the episode, he might’ve had more screentime to be appropriately crazed and creepy with his twisted lessons in superheroism. If this was meant to be the Halloween episode, they could’ve gone a lot further than they did in turning the superhero movie into a horror movie. Still, I did like the tidbits of villainy that we do see, and I’m willing to sacrifice the episodic plot in favor of the stuff that won’t go back to status quo after episode’s end. The return of Lionel, Lana’s further adventures on the dark side, and Clark being pushed more and more firmly toward his eventual destiny? It sounds like it could be too much, this soon in the season, but for what’s it’s worth, this reviewer found it entirely enjoyable, right down to the closing shot of a casually-thrown red cape fluttering in the wind.

Viridian lives in New York, where she puts her degree in English Literature and Theater to dubious use by alternating between doing the evil bidding of her Cylon overlords and teaching high school students how to psych ETS into giving them good SAT scores. She used to fruitlessly deny her geekiness, and in penitence has decided to prove herself the biggest dork of all by sharing her fannish opinions with the entire internet. She also has a livejournal, in which she posts all opinions too inflammatory, irrelevant, or just plain incomprehensible to make it into her reviews.

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