Smallville: Toxic
By TrinityVixen
Why does this show assume that Oliver Queen needs more motivation to be a hero? Last I checked, dead parents were good enough for Bruce Wayne. I understand that, after seven years of Clark ignoring every reason anyone ever gave him to be a hero, you might want to be sure, but Oliver had a healthy interest in saving the world two seasons ago. That was good enough, surely?
Season Eight, Episode 3: Toxic
Clearly, I was mistaken. Poisoned en route to a fund-raiser, Ollie dreams about the two years he spent on an island after his yacht ship-wrecked. His time there and evolution from feckless rich kid to bad-ass archer is told in montage, though one would be forgiven for assuming that we are being forced to suffer through the entirety of his Lord of the Flies phase given how tedious this entire episode is. Somehow, Ollie manages to survive long enough for his archery skills to hit critical but not so long as to learn that he should really stay away from this one power flower. When people show up on the island, he runs to investigate, pricks his palm on the flower’s briary stem, and falls immediately into a druggish stupor. (Thanks to the booze I had to survive the Vice Presidential Debate, I could sympathize.) Any resemblance of this previous fit of unconsciousness to his current, poisoned, feverish state must be a coincidence.
Chloe and Clark sneak Oliver away when he insists they don’t take him to a hospital. Chloe phones her new best platonic boyfriend, Bloomesday, so he can come and hook Oliver up to some machines that will help us know at what point we’re supposed to be really worried about Oliver’s health. (I’m pretty sure they spritzed Justin Hartley with glycerin and let him sleep through this part.) Lois shows up after Ms. Mercer assigned her to find out what happened to the poor drunk rich kid. She’s headlong into plans for a hangover cure (or an emetic, given that the “cure” entails a sports drink, vitamin B and one dill pickle) before Chloe can explain that Oliver isn’t hooked up to a heart monitor because he had one too many Mike’s Hard Lemonades in the limo.
Oliver mutters “Mercy” in his haze and Lois becomes Ms. Mercer. (Who looks a lot better with humidity-crimped hair and less than a metric ton of makeup.) In the flashback, Ms. Mercer applies leeches to do something that makes Oliver not be poisoned any more. If you thought treating people for infections with leeches was stupid, imagine trying to justify treating them for poisons via the same method. Oh, and apparently, Ms. Mercer knows this works because she’s a marine biologist. A la my favorite episode of Futurama, whenever she says anything that is blasphemously stupid or implausible in the future, I’m just going to let her off the hook with “Marine biologist!” Ms. Mercer and a colleague have been kidnapped by two men with guns, to whom she made a promise to keep Oliver alive.
Commercial commentary: I didn’t think the trailers for Max Payne could make the story even more incoherent, but they managed. I still heartily recommend it if only because the game was over-the-top noir brilliance and Mark Wahlberg is fun, too.
Completely healed and still shirtless, Oliver flirts with Ms. Mercer while she catches him up on her tragic life to date. The goons are going to ransom Oliver off. (To whom? Aren’t his parents dead?) Since he’s worth more than both the girls put together, they shoot Ms. Mercer’s only remaining friend. Oliver discovers he can be brave by putting himself between Ms. Mercer and the goons and saving her. It’s part of the deal: God gets him off the island, he becomes a better person. Oliver builds a weapon out of the dead girl’s bracelet and Ms. Mercer’s hair tie and non-fatally sabotages the goons so he and Ms. Mercer can steal their boat and get away. Ta-da! Hero!
In the present, Lois whines about Oliver breaking their deal—she, like Lana, broke up with Ollie to set him free to pursue the hero business. Noble, self-sacrificing female characters with no other distinguishing characterization? I know I’ve seen that somewhere before…Chloe scares the tights off of Clark when she is able to speed-research the entirety of LuthorCorp’s poison database and pick out the flower responsible. I’m pretty sure if Clark could be arsed to do it, he too could process the six or seven computer screens Chloe is reading at the same time. However, that would require him to make a leap in intelligence that Smallville probably can’t afford if they want to make it to season nine.
Chloe reveals that her seeming second meteor power is probably a consequence of Brainiac attempting to mess with her mind. Clark, rightly, freaks about this, but Chloe jumps in before he can say a word telling him to close down the guilt trip about how this is his fault. They’ll worry about this when they have time. Right now, Oliver is in trouble, and Clark needs to convince Ms. Mercer to help him locate the antidote. Mercer, genuine in her regret when she hears that it’s Oliver who’s been poisoned, recognizes that LuthorCorp does have the antidote but not anywhere accessible within the time Ollie has left.
Clark conveniently forgets to tell his boss that speed limits have no meaning to him. He rushes in right as the life-and-death machines determine that Ollie is going to die. Bloomesday administers the antidote and Oliver recovers fast enough to start barking orders with his second breath after flatlining. Oliver figures that one of the goons is responsible for the poetic revenge and that Ms. Mercer is next. Ms. Mercer repels the goon long enough to get hit on the head so she doesn’t see Clark super-speed in and use his heat vision to take down the goon. I don’t see why Mercer needed the head injury since this is one of the few times Clark didn’t charge into things. She wakes up assuming she had the most serendipitous choice of fight locations ever.
Oliver cares enough to spare Ms. Mercer a stupid death, but he’s pissed that she still ran a tabloid story on his being wasted at the party. They spar about some unspoken event that caused them to separate, fairly bitterly, with Oliver assuming she joined the Luthor team just to piss him off. (It’s working.) Ms. Mercer denies it and even offers a bit of a truce via some intel she scraped off of Lionel Luthor’s corpse. It’s official: I hate her now. LET LIONEL BE! The man is dead.
Lois and Clark discuss the awkwardness of dead romances at the Planet. Lois, awesomely, shuts down his attempts to commiserate by excusing herself from “a ride on the Clark and Lana rollercoaster.” The entire scene exists for Lois to say she can’t date anyone with a hero complex. Har har har. It’s ironical, get it? Bloomesday drops by the Isis Foundation to be exceedingly sketchy while Chloe tries to cover up the fact that she could out-read Johnny Five. By the way, he’s on to Chloe being special and wouldn’t you know it? He’s got his own secrets. For some reason, this is funny and charming to Chloe. She mustn’t know about the naked-next-to-dumpster part of his secret. Unsanitary!
Oliver gets wasted at a bar in Metropolis, the better to diffuse those rumors that he’s a falling-down drunk. Clark comes to interrogate him about his connection with Ms. Mercer, but Oliver turns ugly on him. Ms. Mercer’s file reveals that Lionel Luthor killed Ollie’s parents. Oliver assumes, what with Lionel being Clark’s second (third?) father-figure, that Clark knew. Clark admits to hiding some of Lionel’s shadier dealings from Oliver, afraid of what Ollie might have done with the information. Oliver explodes and defines for himself, the show, and the universe that, unlike Lex Luthor, he doesn’t kill people who do him wrong. (Lionel is only ever understood, respected, and loved by children he didn’t raise.) In fact, he’s glad he was on the island because it made him fearless. I…don’t know what that has to do with Lionel, since Lionel sabotaged Mommy and Daddy Queen’s plane, but Oliver ended up playing cast away because he drove his yacht into a reef. In any case, I’m not glad because it meant I had to watch this episode piss all over Oliver’s character.
Ms. Mercer ties things off by bailing her assailant out of jail purposely so that she can inject him with the flower toxin and leave him to die at the hospital. Her license plate reads “No Mercy.” No kidding.
Next week: Maxima! Congratulate her, she’s getting married! The promo name-drops Lois and Clark, which begs the question why, if the show has now moved beyond rural Kansas as is primarily set in Metropolis, we are still calling it Smallville. Because Clark Kent becoming Superman in Metropolis and falling for Lois Lane is the same thing as Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman. Tom Welling and the rest of the cast are probably all now older than Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher were when that show started. It’s time to give up the ghost. Vote “no” on season nine!
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About TrinityVixen: There’s an asterisk on TrinityVixen’scollege transcript that assures anyone who reads it that, though there is no specific major, degree, or certificate for it, she did, in fact, complete some kind of creative writing program as an undergrad. Armed with that symbol of irrelevant experience, she has polluted the internet with her opinions and horrible fanworks ever since (and for quite a long while before). Living poor in New York until she finds a means to become independently wealthy, she must subsist on the juicy meat of fandom. Fandom and noodles. And instant soup.
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![Smallville: The Complete Seventh Season [Blu-ray]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512QzpFhTkL._SL75_.jpg "Smallville: The Complete Seventh Season [Blu-ray]")
I dislike all this RetCon they’re feeding us (and not in the fun, Torchwood way). They really could’ve found a better way to replace Lex than with an embittered marine biologist turned corporate mastermind. (The hell?!?!!) The suit from the season premiere was right to be skeptical about her qualifications. In fact, I don’t think he was nearly skeptical enough, given this new information. I really hope Doomsday shows his true colors soon, or Brainiac gets more control over Chloe, or something, because I’m really starting to miss our bad guys of old.
And, yeah, I thought fighting for truth, justice, etc. was plenty of motivation for the Green Arrow. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good whumping as much as the next fangirl, but not when it’s as gratuitous and nonsensical as what happened to Ollie. They couldn’t be happy with him averting global crises with the nascent Justice League as an excuse for Justin Hartley’s absence the last year or so? Ugh.
It only occurred to me later, but Justin Hartley’s aborted Aquaman series was titled Mercy Reef, and here he is on an island with Mercy! Coincidence?