Smallville: Committed

By TrinityVixen

Say you’re an unstable person with no meteor abilities and you want to start terrorizing people. (Insert joke about relevant political candidates here.) You need a gag because, let’s face it, you wouldn’t last in the WWE without one, much less on the streets. Which leads you to consider the reason for your psychotic break in the first place: your wife cheated on you. That is a powerfully lame motif for a stalker/killer, but it’s the only one you’ve got. Fortunately for you, you were watching TV while wearing your wife’s scalp as a hat, and you saw this really awesome game show called “The Moment of Truth.” Lie detectors as a means to work confessions out of couples with dirty secrets? Brilliant! All you need is to provide more serious consequences for exposed lies (since national, public humiliation is not an option for your doings), and voila! You’re still lame, but you’ve got An Agenda. You could be the Penguin!

Or this Jigsaw knock-off that vaguely threatens our intrepid heroes this week.

Smallville: Season 8, Episode 5 “Committed”

This villain only serves the lazy purpose of allowing the show to prove, as it has not been able to do previously, that Jimmy and Chloe are meant to be together forever and evers. Chloe’s regrets over Clark? Their old crazy romantic tension, which has persisted in the face of her denials and given Jimmy Olsen his only solid footing in his increasingly paranoid suspicions about his girlfriend’s fidelity? Gone! The lie detector said so!

The Villain-of-the-Week asks all of two questions of Jimmy and Chloe both before releasing them out into the world: have they cheated? Do they love one another mostest? I suspect he’d have a better shot at a more thorough interrogation if he didn’t have to hand-crank his electric chairs. How terrifying can you be when you have to stop and spin up the dynamo every other question? Topics the VotW doesn’t even get into: hey, what about those meteor powers, and how are they progressing? Met any cute alien farm boys lately? The Justice League: a profile in courage or an excuse to wear leather in summer?

Whatever, Chloe and Jimmy pass. Jimmy is now forbidden from a) giving Chloe a hard time and b) being jealous. No one on this show should give anyone else any flak over secrets because they’re all guilty as sin for hiding them. Case in point: Jimmy lied about his parents because he’s insecure about how they really suck. Chloe, who’s been on the receiving end of only fifty million of these lectures, upbraids him for keeping a secret from her that’s so important. Why would he do that, she wants to know? I dunno, Chloe, maybe because having an alcoholic father and an entirely absent mother is embarrassing? Humiliating? Painful to think about? Maybe he doesn’t want pity? I’m sorry it’s not as glamorous as having a loony-tunes meteor freak for a mother or a missing-but-probably-dead-because-no-one-can-be-arsed-to-remember-him father. But it’s a real problem, and congratulations, show, you made me feel bad for Jimmy Olsen. Not because of his parental troubles, but because he’s being made to feel bad about not wanting to parade his sucktacular childhood in front of his judgmental peers and fiancé.

The trials and tribulations of the soon-to-be Mr. and Mrs. Olsen are treated as the background nonsense they should be when there are so many other little hilarities to enjoy. When Chloe and Jimmy are kidnapped, Lois cottons on to the VotW’s M.O. and decides to put in appearances at the wedding-related businesses that all his victims visited. To sweeten the bait, she ropes Clark into pretending they are married. All the melodrama with Chloe and Jimmy is entirely forgiven (well, mostly just forgotten) when Lois, in her genius planning mode, mock-proposes to Clark and we get to enjoy Tom Welling sporting the most horrified expression imaginable. Someone else is about one woman away from a psychotic break! Hurrah!

The faux-couple visit a jeweler for the piece de resistance: the engagement ring. Lois is oozing with endearing, romantic grossness, calling Clark every food-related pet name she can think of as she picks out a ring. Clark, still shell-shocked by how awful the very idea of even a fake romance with Lois is, gapes and snipes back at her. The VotW watches the happy couple and buys into this idea of theirs being a devastatingly deep love. So he’s not very imaginative or smart. (No surprises there.) Then again, Erica Durance and Tom Welling have such great antagonistic chemistry that Lois and Clark’s bickering is about as close to romance as we can believe either of them capable of. You know they’re blitzed out of their gourds on kryptonite cocktails when they’re being nice to each other.

Which is why poor Oliver cannot decide whether they are pulling his leg or not when he walks into the jewelry store and Lois, still keeping up her ruse for the benefit of the VotW, shows her ex-flame her ring. They are still acting like themselves, but there’s this romance thing standing in the way of Oliver believing they’re not secretly under the influence. Clark is desperately trying to send signals with his eyes that this is all a mistake, but he backs Lois up on the party line about their engagement. Oliver can’t even be mad (or betrayed or hurt) because he cannot wrap his head around what he’s seeing. Lois and Clark all but run out of the store to avoid the heaping mounds of awkward, though they are probably really just escaping before Clark starts giggling and gives them away.

Oliver, jaw still on the floor, somehow manages to stay long enough to buy a diamond bracelet for Ms. Mercer. He charms her into going to dinner with him, and despite the fact she’d just as soon use a long wooden paddle on his balls, they end up doing it in the Luthor Mansion. It sucks that Ms. Mercer dismisses him the morning after—their affair being nothing more than the scratching of an itch—but it can’t be all bad for Ollie. The schadenfreude of nailing Lex Luthor’s chosen minion in his own house has to be worth it. Lex is going to come back and choke some bitches, but Ollie will still have nailed his successor in the Luthor Manse. I call that match for the Green Arrow and not only because he’s obligingly stripped down to his boxers for half his time onscreen in this episode.

Also disturbingly hot: mussed up and bloodied Clark. The VotW kidnaps Lois and when Clark speeds to her rescue, he falls down on the job due to the extreme coincidence of the VotW owning a kryptonite watch. I don’t have a problem with the watch having kryptonite in the face, but who on earth has a crystal watchband? While I’m debating the convenience of crystal watches, the VotW ties Clark up to the electric chair and starts in questioning Lois. They try confessing to avoid lying; alas, lying by omission (as in, they’re not really dating, so they can’t answer the first question about having cheated truthfully) is still lying. Clark gets rather painfully zapped. Tom Welling looks better for the blood. It’s a damn shame he can’t get hurt like this more often. (Stupid invulnerable Superman!)

Lois steels herself for the next question: does she love him? Everything gets intense. Clark, hurting, is nonetheless visibly curious about her answer. Lois struggles, wincing in sympathy at his pain, and eventually has her reply: yes, she does love him. Clark, staggered and possibly empowered by this news, has enough fight left in him to snatch at the VotW’s watch. It goes down the drain, Clark messes the little bastard up, and they go free. Free to have Lois recant her statement in a series of increasingly unbelievable lies—she slipped the monitor off her finger; the machine was messed up; she’s such a good liar she fooled a lie detector. (The Mythbusters say nay.) They have one last cute moment—Lois thinks it’s a lucky thing they didn’t have to rely on Clark lying, or they’d have been toast ‘cause he can’t keep a secret to save his life—and we’re done.

Next week: Okay, so we’re not even pretending that Bloom isn’t Doomsday. Usually they’re a little more circumspect. The previews will have “A new villain shows up…” or, as the case may be, “A new hero comes to Smallville…” They are rarely so explicit: DOOMSDAY. NEXT WEEK. BE HERE. This is surely a sign of desperation. And deliverance! So long, 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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