By TrinityVixen
Prejudice: wrote a song about it, like to hear it? Here it goes.
Season Eight, Episode Six: Prey
Smallville tackles the Constitutional rights of meteor freaks. Just because said citizens possess the abilities to turn lights on (the horror!), freeze coffee (so scary!), and rapid-Google (won’t somebody please think of the children!?) doesn’t mean we should abrogate their civil rights or automatically assume that one of them must be the brutal killer shredding up the citizens of Metropolis. Except, er, one of them is? The show is all over the map trying to justify both sides of the argument on whether or not meteor freaks should be feared and treated as second-class citizens and still prove that, no matter how boorish, horrid, and presumptive Clark’s assumptions are, he is always, always right.
Now that the meteor-afflicted are meeting in the open at the Isis Foundation under Chloe’s guidance (thus proving she’s already roughly one billion times better at managing Lana’s company than its founder), normal people have a group upon which to focus their meteor-related paranoias. So the norms are freaked by the freaks, and freaks are scared of the norms. Healthy! Chloe tries to be the voice of reason, but it’s kind of hard to make the meteor-enhanced trust anyone when they are a) some of the victims and b) the main suspects.
As Chloe struggles to hold her kids together so that one doesn’t rock the boat for all the others, Clark is actively capsizing her attempts. His nightly routine includes listening to the police scanner and putting petty criminals in their place. (I’m not joking about the “petty” part either; Clark takes time to beat up a couple of bullies pressuring a kid half their age for his pocket money. At night. In an alleyway. Clark should really be smacking the heads of the victim’s parents together for letting their son, who appears to be all of eight years old, run around Metropolis at night.)
When Clark arrives too late to save a bunch of doomed partiers at the Ace of Clubs, he assumes the killer could only have eluded him thanks to a meteor-powered assist. People are dead or severely injured, and among the casualties is our favorite lone-wolf EMT, Davis Bloome. And, in case you missed the previews, Doomsday. Bloomesday, covered in blood and amnesiac, blows off Clark’s attempts to interrogate him or get him to a hospital. That’s not the way Bloomesday rolls, yo. Clark falls back on his meteor-freak theory and proceeds to violate his friendship and trust with Chloe in the lowest, most-douchebaggy fashion: he speed-reads the names off her client roster and passes the names off to the police via the Martian Manhunter. (Ladies, gents, let us pause to give it up for the Man from Mars!!!) Still de-powered—WAY TO GO, CLARK—but working on the Metropolis Police Force as Detective John Jones, the Martian One is still keeping an eye on Clark. Would that he would slap the great Kryptonian doofus upside his thick head.
We interrupt this review to bring you the following scene of Bloomesday showering. Oh. Well. Ah-ha. Quite a long scene, actually. With the water and the blood and Bloomesday feeling himself up for cuts and bruises to explain the blood and the… You know, this scene could be really important. I think I need to rewind it.
On second viewing, the relevance of that scene seems to be the fact that Bloomesday doesn’t have a scratch on him, or any sore spots to explain his memory loss. I always feel bad for actors and actresses who have to do nude/sex scenes either in crap movies/shows or for scenes that are gratuitous. Funnily enough, however, I’m not really prepared to rant about it this time. It totally served the plot. Of this surpassingly shirtless excellent show.
Where were we? Ah, yes, Clark was being a jerkface, projecting his hero complex issues all over the meteor freaks. Clark catches hell from Chloe over the spying, and rightly f’ing so. This is the woman he forced his secrets upon; he has depended on her trust for three-four years of this show, and without it, he would have been dead or caught out as an alien ages ago. His implicating a meteor freak in the Ace of Clubs attack is extremely hypocritical, and Chloe lets him know it. He deserves some lashes with a kryptonite whip for the attitude he spills all over her before and after this extraordinarily dickish behavior. He’s only pissed about her withholding the names in the first place because of hero guilt over not stopping the Ace of Clubs massacre.
I love that the show doesn’t realize how ironic it is that the Martian Manhunter preaches caution at Clark—about concealing his identity in Metropolis, that is—but doesn’t make an issue of Clark stealing evidence to convict in the public prejudice people who could be innocent (but aren’t because Clark cannot be wrong.) The Martian one intones, “When someone’s life is on the line with every decision you make, it’s hard for anything else to seem important.” (Like the rights of the accused to be innocent until proven guilty.) Clark shoots back, “Because nothing else is.” And that includes his many years of mostly one-sided dependency on Chloe. Clark is a turdburger.
Jimmy has discovered that Metropolis has its very own hero. Not a superhero, mind, because he has no proof that there’s anything especial about the Kansan Good Samaritan except his inflated sense of personal responsibility. He’s determined to figure out who it is and to be there first to catch the hero’s identity on film. Jimmy tracks down Bloomesday and scores a ride-along with him in the ambulance to see if they can’t run afoul of some trouble, catch the killer, and maybe meet up with the city’s hero.
Coincidentally, the Martian Manhunter has Bloomesday in his sights, too, only as a suspect. Bloomesday has been first on the scene of every murder fitting the pattern from the Ace of Clubs. No word on whether that includes the Isis-friendly, meteor-freakette who was killed in the opening sequence. (No one cares about the meteor freaks anyway.) Bloomesday is not helping his case by drawing his own blood and examining the skin under fingernails of some of the victims to find out if it is his. Chloe catches him playing CSI and he breaks down and confesses about his blackouts and his fear that he is the killer everyone is after. All hail Mr. Witwer, he sells the hell out of Bloomesday’s confusion, self-recrimination, and desperation.
I’d like it better if this didn’t exist just to undermine Chloe’s argument. When Bloomesday, whom she likes a little more than she should for a new acquaintance (given her track record, new people = stalkers and killers), is in trouble, she’s all about finding anyone else—meteor-freaks included—to take the fall so he won’t. They bond over his tragic past, replete with traumatic episodes of blackouts and such. It provides her with more fuel to deny his fears about being a killer, seeing as he has had this condition for a while and, one would assume, not killed people in each of the many foster homes he bounced between as a kid.
Clark is less convinced. In an attempt to grow beyond his bias against the meteor folk, he tackles the Martian Manhunter’s lead and grills Bloomesday. Bloomesday, rather awesomely, snits right back in Clark’s face. He makes the cogent point that an EMT has more reason to be among the first at a crime scene than a low-level reporter, especially one who seems to get there before the press could even have caught scent of the story. His point is valid only so far as you don’t recognize that there are plenty of reporters out there with lightning-fast response times to blood in the water. (They don’t call ‘em sharks for nothing.) Clark, stymied by Bloomesday’s Earth logic, refuses to learn his lesson about not snooping into other people’s business; he spies a paper Bloomesday is trying to hide and snatches himself a copy of Bloomesday’s amateur detecting. Turns out that the DNA does not lie: Bloomesday is the killer.
Only he’s not because they can’t put him in the credits and have him only show up for six episodes. He can be guilty, but he can’t get caught. Instead, one of Chloe’s meteor story-hour kids takes the rap when he tries to kill Bloomesday and Jimmy on their ambulance run. As far as anyone cares, the killer was a meteor freak all along, so Chloe has to eat crow, but because it wasn’t Bloomesday, so does Clark. His self-righteousness is cut down only to be fluffed back up by the sacrifice of Chloe’s. That and the fact that Bloomesday might have been attacked by a copycat killer, but he’s the original recipe. (Now Clark gets to be right about him, too!) And now that Chloe and Clark have written him off, he’s free to continue on his merry, murderous way, absolved of guilt and trusting that his blackouts are harmless. He better get used to the alone time, though; Chloe’s easy attraction to him means her wedding is in jeopardy because of yet another would-be suitor, so it’s bye-bye Bloomesday for a while.
Next week: Jimmy Olsen gets his chance to snap a photo of the city’s hero. I guess the Martian Manhunter’s admonition about how Clark needs to defend and protect his identity passed right through the empty space between Clark’s ears. Then again, what with Chloe and the Martian One both yelling loudly about how they keep Clark’s secret and how awesome his abilities are in the middle of The Daily Planet’s newsroom, his difficulties keeping his secret aren’t entirely of his own making. Gotta love the vague shot of what looks like one of those used-car lot inflatable waving arm guys in a Superman costume. What cruel teases these show runners be! Surely we haven’t forgotten—after Eight. Goddamned. Years—that the motto of the show is “no flights, no tights.” Teases!
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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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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. 
