Smallville: Bulletproof

By TrinityVixen

Advice to bad guys everywhere: do not play chicken with the Martian Manhunter. If you are tempted to strike up a felonious tango with the great Martian one, you’d best catch him by surprise, from a distance, using a sniper rifle. Even then, you’re never going to hit him on the first shot. If only Clark could ever be half so resilient without his powers. Every time meteor rock takes him down, he flops around helplessly like a dying fish; both times he lost his powers entirely, he died. The Martian Manhunter takes a bullet to the chest and lives to fight another day. All hail the Martian Manhunter!

Season Eight, Episode Twelve

Oliver and Clark pow-wow over how best to pursue the miscreants responsible for the assassination attempt. Oliver bluntly confesses how little confidence he has in teamwork, especially where Clark is concerned; they go their separate ways, working at the mystery from opposite ends and meeting in the middle. After he determines that mangling of police evidence point to the shooting being an inside job, Clark goes undercover as a patrol cop. He is partnered with Superman’s future ally Dan Turpin, who is currently just a lowly pledge in a suspicious micro-fraternity of boys in blue. Oliver, being too famous for such ruses, sticks to the cowl and drops a few bad guys as the Green Arrow. Turns out, such interference is exactly what has the cops in such a foul mood: the costume crowd not only steals their thunder but threatens to expose their street justice. “Cops got rules, capes don’t,” Turpin elucidates. Except for that part where the Blue Cabal is secretly offing scumbags and profiting off of it (and the fact that none of the hero crowd have capes–yet), he’s absolutely right.

Turpin is rendered less of a bastard by dint of having a sob story (his previous partner was murdered) and a family. Clark saves his life while they are out on patrol, and his gratitude pushes him towards morally clear territory. The frat-pack is happy to be marching along in the black, however, and they pull Turpin towards their side by offering up his partner’s murderer for tenderizing. Before Clark can blow his cover, Green Arrow arrives to do it for him. Everyone except for Turpin succumbs immediately to knock-out arrows (try to suspend your disbelief); Turpin witnesses Clark convincing the Green Arrow to buzz off. The jig is up for Officer Kent.

Later, Clark and Oliver have the strangest reversal-of-personal-logic conversations about whether or not to kill in the name of the greater good. We know Oliver is a fan since he shot first and asked questions later where Lex Luthor was concerned, but it is Clark who forgives Dan Turpin his rage at the thug he was beating to death (before the Green Arrow pissed in the fascist kool-aid). Oliver argues that you can’t let the police take the law into their own hands; that is totally superhero territory. So…he is a fan of killing the bad cops if it means they won’t be able to kill bad guys without due process, but cops can’t kill people to stop them from killing? Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

With the Boys in Bad already onto Clark as a rat, the issue of “greater good” is tabled for the time being as they frame him for attempting to murder the Martian Manhunter. Turpin has a Moral Crisis as he watches the innocent man (who saved his life!) go to jail and is then assigned to trap and kill the Green Arrow. Oliver talks Turpin down by begging him to live up to Clark’s saintly standards and assumption of Turpin’s ability to not go over to the Dark Side. Don’t disappoint Clark, Turpin! Of course, he cannot do, and all the bad cops are taken, alive, into custody. Turpin is rewarded for having Learned A Valuable Lesson by not being arrested with them. The Martian Manhunter recovers enough to sermonize on the subject of teamwork. They all decide to stop lone-wolfing it and work together forever and ever and the JLA was birthed in that instant for real and for true and they never had any more problems ever.

Psych!

The B-plot this episode follows the continuing adventures of Lana Lang, secret ninja. This week, Lana shows up to shoot the breeze with Tess Mercer at her former digs in Smallville. Tess’s every interaction with another woman on this show immediately turns into soft-core porn. (It does not help in this case that Tess is sweaty and winded from her interrupted workout.) “You have as much…presence as Lex said you did.” Perhaps her hesitation about her word choice indicates that Lex wasn’t as charitable as Ms. Mercer makes him sound, especially not about his ex-wife. Yet given how enthused Ms. Mercer is about praising Lana, I don’t think she was straining for the polite word choice so much as restraining the amorous. Even Lana, who should be well used to everyone fawning over her, is taken aback.

But not for long. She jumps down Ms. Mercer’s throat about her suspicions that Lex is alive and providing Ms. Mercer with her marching orders. This doesn’t gel with Ms. Mercer’s continued, genuine, and seemingly frustrated efforts to discover Lex’s whereabouts, but she’s been off screen for a while, so maybe they started e-mailing in the interim. Sloppy, Smallville, real sloppy. Lana warns Tess about Lex’s deviant charisma; Tess defends him. Stalemate? Nope, Lana didn’t give a rat’s ass whether they talked Lex or lipstick; she just wanted enough time in Ms. Mercer’s company to use a wireless gizmo to steal information from her computer about a Project Prometheus.

When Tess discovers the theft, she ambushes Lana at the Isis Foundation and demands, at gunpoint, to have her data back. (She is still flirting wantonly.) Turns out Lana’s data-piracy really screwed Ms. Mercer’s drives. (Oh man, now I’m doing it.) Girl fight! Lana comes out on top (groan) and opens Ms. Mercer’s eyes–by remote! After boosting the data on Prometheus, Lana discovered another wireless device in the room. It seems Lex had a good reason to install this particular puppet in the high throne: Tess Mercer has a tracking device behind her eyeballs that allows Lex to see and hear everything that she does. Which means Lex enjoyed every last bump and grind when Tess and Oliver got it on. For those scant few not already convinced by seven years of Lex determinedly stalking Clark and then sexing up his woman (and sharing it with Clark when Clark went into Lex’s subconscious): Lex Luthor is a tremendous pervert. Tess dies a little on the inside while Lana watches, pitying her.

Tess Mercer, however, needs no one’s pity. She composes a loving farewell and f***-off to Lex and recites it into a mirror so he can see how pissed off and hurt she is. This woman scorned does not mess around: she scrambles the spy gear Lex put in her eyeballs, closes his bank accounts, declares him dead, and leaves him to twist in the wind. When she is finally alone, Tess tearfully confesses aloud that she loved Lex; his betrayal breaks her heart. (Sort of like The Godfather only less Italian.) In the next second, Tess hammers the last nail in Lex’s coffin as she offers the company she now controls (with no strings attached) to a bemused Oliver Queen. His confusion is not helped by the woman who slept with him and then turned him out of her bed suddenly offering herself up to him again. Somebody is a Real Girl this week! (Though she’s probably not going to tell Oliver about Lex spying on their mutual monkey-spanking, huh?)

Also doing it again despite all evidence that it is a supremely bad idea: Clark and Lana. Once more, Clark throws Superman under the bus in favor of lip-locking with the woman who abandoned him. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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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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