Smallville: Eternal

By TrinityVixen

“Eternal” aired the same night as “The Monster at the End of this Book.” Very similar story structures—the main plot centering on a book that details the events in the lives of the heroes—very different outcomes. One of them was good. (Nay, great!) The other was this episode of Smallville. Welcome to the worst non-Lana episode of season eight. (So far, dun-dun-dun.)

Season Eight, Episode Eighteen

Lionel Luthor is turning over in his grave. Granted, this is probably because he’s sitting on hot coals in Hell. It might be a more effective torture (Satan, take notice!), however, just having to watch his meticulous, paranoid, private characterization be overturned in favor of generating conflict between Clark Kent and this season’s big bad: Bloomesday. To date, the two have had all of three minutes worth of interaction, most of it through intermediaries like Chloe and Jimmy. Continuing in that vein, then, Tess Mercer reads a soo-per see-krit diary that Lionel left lying around someplace that details Bloomesday’s fall to Earth. (Lex’s inability to uncover this treasure doesn’t speak any more highly of his intelligence and cunning than it does of Lionel’s for having written up THE LUTHOR GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING ALIENS in the first place.)

I almost cried. Not because this is the worst convenient plot device ever. (Well, not just because of that.) More, it was regret. To ret-con Bloomesday into being the 2nd Kryptonian hopping an intergalactic shuttle to Earth, the episode opens with clips from the series premiere, wherein long-loved and –lost Mama and Papa Kent meet their son following the first meteor strike. Oh, the Kents. How I’ve missed them. Smallville manages to ruin the nostalgia by placing, a short distance away from where DC history is being made, Bloomesday’s egg-and-ooze body in the picture. We back out to realize that Tess Mercer is reading this story in Lionel’s diary and pretending to understand it better than the man who wrote it.

Presuming to know better than Lionel ought to be a crime worthy of death. No such luck. Ms. Mercer lives to annoy another day! She alludes to the Red-Blue Blur around Clark, persisting in accusing him of hiding things from her. We are least tolerant of those sins of which we, ourselves, are guilty, and Ms. Mercer is no different. While she gives Clark attitude for hiding his secret from her, she’s keeping mum on the cause of the many missing persons reports that Clark is investigating. Thanks to Lionel’s cheat-sheet journal, Ms. Mercer knows that the second Kryptonian kid is the killer; knows that it’s Davis Bloome; knows that Bloomesday is there only to kill Clark; and that he can’t be killed himself. (Not that she isn’t going to try killing him just to be absolutely sure.) I’m not sorry that we skipped the literal reading of those revelations, but still: how does she know that Doomsday is Bloome just from knowing Doomsday exists? How does she know where he goes for his body-burying?

The show hand-waves away anything that gets in the way of its hand-waving explanation. (Have a plot up a blind alley? Get some journals out of nowhere!) Despite Bloomesday having only met Ms. Mercer upon the fiery destruction of his truck, he listens to her tell him the story of his life while he recovers (in her bed at the Luthor Manse) from being exploded a little. The ret-con places Baby Bloome in Lionel’s care, being raised like the bastard child in the attic. Naturally, he and Lex meet cute as kids, and save for one accidental exposure to meteor rock, they get on swimmingly. (The only thing keeping Bloomesday from being a Marty Stu is his not yet having had a relationship with a hot, available main character. Oh, wait…) Bloomesday wasn’t the Traveler that Lionel was anticipating, but he kept an eye on him all the same while still looking for Clark.

Clark is busy using his x-ray vision to look through the killing field that Bloomesday has been using for the corpses of his victims. (Considering Bloomesday’s unmatched, tireless strength, he didn’t bury the bodies all that deeply.) Clark takes the opportunity to rail against Chloe for being deceived by Bloomesday before he zips around to find out what happened to the monster-man. Because Luthors and their lackeys are usually behind everything, Clark takes a short cut and goes straight to Ms. Mercer (in the hospital following Bloomesday’s escape) for the skinny on Bloomesday. This episode is all about convenience, so she does. The caves, the Traveler, Veritas—all of it was about setting Clark up for a battle with his doppelganger. (Not that one.) Oh, and Tess is totally sure that Clark is the Traveler. And, in case you missed that subtlety that this show is wont to employ, she makes sure to compare Clark to Jesus. A lot. (She also knows that his name is Kal-El, and she has the completed artifact that Lex took into the Fortress to destroy Clark. This should be fun.)

While Ms. Mercer is steamrollering over Clark’s protestations of normalcy, Bloomesday seeks out Chloe. His recovered memory of the meteor rock incident leads him to believe there may be a way yet to kill him, and he wants Chloe to help. This is a set up such that someone can kill the bad guy but Clark won’t have to do it. Clark shows up in time to argue that he and Bloomesday can be friends; he pretends that a difference of parentage is the only thing separating him from suffering Bloomesday’s fate. I dunno, they both had really hot mamas, but they still turned out radically different. Plus, there’s that whole thing where Bloomesday exists only to destroy mankind and Clark besides. Clark objects to killing Bloomesday regardless. Davis starts to doom-out, so Chloe throws a lever and douses Bloomesday with liquid kryptonite. (The whole thing is shot like a longer version of those slow-mo, sports-players-with-irradiated-sweat Gatorade ads.) Bloomesday karks it.

Only he totally doesn’t because he forgot that Mommy said anything that didn’t kill him would only make him stronger. Now he’s immune to impaling and kryptonite. Awesome. After forcing Chloe to kill him, Bloomesday could only do her one worse by blackmailing her into being his girl by promising that unless she does, he’ll doom-out and kill a bunch more people. (Chloe’s relationships are all so abusive. It’s not freakin’ fair. She doesn’t deserve this.) Not surprisingly, Chloe accepts this responsibility on top of everything else. She also gets another lecture from Clark about how every morally compromised decision that he forces her to make–because he’s an idiot on a very high horse–means she’s totally always wrong. Chloe’s life is amazingly awful. If Lana had ever had it half so hard, I might have even felt bad for her.

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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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