Smallville: Doomsday

By TrinityVixen

When at first you don’t succeed, throw abso-friggin’-lutely every last stunt-cast character at the problem until the audience reels away in horror and can’t be arsed to pay attention. Welcome to the season finale of Smallville! I wish I could say series finale, but the powers-that-be would have me suffer this idiocy for another year. That’s right folks: say goodbye to The Sarah Connor Chronicles and bemoan the gutting of our beloved Chuck, but rest assured that Smallville, in all its soapy glory, will be back with us for another twenty-odd episodes of pain!

Season Eight, Episode Twenty-Two

Previously, the season happened. All the momentum and good will generated by the beginning was sapped by Lana Lang’s midseason return. After that, it was all downhill. A quick recap in links: There was a new acolyte in Luthor-ville. The proto-JLA did almost nothing. Some people from the future screwed around in the time stream. Oliver Queen murdered an off-screen, obviously-no-longer-Michael-Rosenbaum Lex Luthor. Clark pretended to be the Red-Blue Blur to give Lois an ego boost. (Not that she needed one.) Oh, and this guy stalked Chloe for an entire season and nobody, Chloe included, stopped him even though he was a serial killer who was also an alien goo/rock monster who tried to kill everyone she loved. (And nearly succeeded, thanks to her efforts.) All of these things are relevant to the plot at hand, provided one is very generous about the definition of “plot.”

Cosmic Boy (also known as “Yes, my name is Rokk, baby”) flies hundreds of years into the past to give Clark another time-travel-enabling ring. Are time travel rings the beads of the future—easily disposable goods of no real value that nonetheless charm those who have never come into contact with them? Because this is the second time Rokk’s tossed one of these potentially paradox-creating devices at the perpetually dim Clark Kent in hopes that Clark will use it to fix the future that Rokk is now no longer certain he has. That worked out so well the last time, didn’t it? Rokk says Clark can’t take Bloomesday, so he should just shunt that indestructible monster into the future where the Legion can do his work for him. Otherwise, Clark will die.

By the way? This is all Chloe’s fault because she’s still breathing; if she’d just died like the Legion arbitrarily decided she should, she wouldn’t have tried to murder Bloomesday with kryptonite (thus making him immune to it) and then prevented Clark from banishing him to the Phantom Zone. Smallville: proudly blaming the victim since 2001!

As Clark prepares for the final battle, he leaves a farewell letter for Lois to publish on behalf of the Red-Blue Blur should anything happen to him. In return, he’ll track Chloe down for her. Not content to wait, Lois breaks into Tess Mercer’s office to see what the boss lady knows about Chloe’s whereabouts. Jimmy, on an errand for Oliver, is already there hacking Ms. Mercer’s computer. He finds Chloe and Bloomesday’s trail; he heads out to their location and leaves Lois to watch and inform him if and when they move. Instead, Lois wanders off and ends up fighting—we’re talking a physical throw down, with punches and hair-pulling—with Ms. Mercer in the newsroom. Tess has lost her order-giving orb and thinks Lois is responsible. Before the girl fight can escalate into soft-core territory (for which these women were bound since the season began), Lois knocks into Clark’s desk and dislodges his new Legion ring. When she picks it up, it transports her away to time and places unknown. The Legionnaires are expecting Bloomesday, so they’re probably on alert; let us hope for Lois’ sake that they don’t shoot first when she materializes in the future.

Clark goes over Oliver’s head and taps Black Canary and Impulse for his plan to trap but not kill Bloomesday: after he bifurcates the man from the monster, he’s going to lure the monster to a geothermal plant and then bury it alive underground when he blows up the building on top of it. Oliver crashes the party to point out that schisming Davis Bloome might just result in an even better monster—one utterly free of even the barest hint of humanity. Clark informs the others than Oliver’s a murderer and thus not allowed in the Super Awesome Upright Heroes Club no more. Impulse is surprised at the news, and Black Canary sounds hurt when she asks Ollie if this is true. Oliver’s silence confirms it, and, assuming the others revile him as much as Clark does, he departs.

The team sets to work. Canary tracks down Bloomesday and calls Clark out to meet her and Impulse. Clark arrives only to find himself on the wrong end of second thoughts. Canary and Impulse have had some time to think everything over and they’re throwing in with Oliver against Clark. (Way to kiss up to the boss, guys!) Oliver’s Earth logic regarding the Bloomesday situation has won them over. (That, and they have a vested interest in not losing their strongest member because he’s a stubborn mule who never breaks the goddamned rules.) Oliver neutralizes Clark with a kryptonite arrow and he, Impulse, and Black Canary head to the geothermal plant where they have captured the fugitive couple.

Chloe comes to and begs Oliver to use the black kryptonite to separate Davis and the monster. The entire proto-JLA gives her the stink-eye. Even Davis thinks Chloe is barking up the wrong tree. He’d let them do whatever they were planning on doing that wasn’t that except that he subsequently freaks out and no one has any time to enact the mystery plan. Chloe steps in and bang! We have two Bloomesdays. The monster doesn’t look especially fond of his formerly human half. And yet? It kills none of the people who’d just been trying to kill it as it makes its way into the city to start rampaging. Wussy.

Jimmy finally arrives at Chloe’s last known location (according to Ms. Mercer’s trackers) and rescues Clark from the kryptonite arrow. He watches, open-mouthed, as a cut on Clark’s face heals as soon as the green goo is removed. Clark falls back on bad habits, trying to lie his way out of revealing his secret, but it’s impossible to convince Jimmy out of what he’s seen. Jimmy is ecstatic over the revelation that Clark is the Red-Blue Blur and all the attendant cogs that click into place as a result of having this crucial piece of information. It’s been done before, but Jimmy is still totally cute in mid-discovery. (He is also totally doomed.) He is even willing to do Clark a favor that involves not only saving Davis but spoiling his wedding present to his former wife while Clark runs off to figure out what mischief the rest of the gang have gotten themselves into.

A much chastened proto-JLA cowers before Clark’s fury when he arrives at the plant. Chloe and the unconscious Davis are trundled off with Jimmy. Clark and Oliver have a stare-down, wherein Clark insists that Oliver be trustworthy, damn it, and Oliver agrees. Canary is on explosives duty. They are still moving forward with the bury-the-monster-in-concrete, pray-he-eventually-escape plan. From there, Clark goes to his ridiculously short-lived battle with the monster. Bloomesday has been all hype from day one—the greater the hyperbole about the danger a seasonal villain poses to truth, justice, and the Red-Blue way, the weaker the resulting climactic battle. Bloomesday is the one monster that Clark cannot possibly defeat! It will kill him, thus endangering the future of peace and prosperity that the Legion enjoys! It…is buried alive inside of three minutes, start to super-sped finish.

There are still some fifteen minutes left to the finale at this point, all of which are dedicated to closing out the awkward love/stalker triangle. That’s five times as much investment in Chloe and Jimmy’s issues as we spared the Clark/Bloomesday fight. Because what people really want from a show that purports to tell the story of a young Superman is more melodrama. I suppose it was unavoidable. Chloe looked like she had actually done something right for a change, and that just couldn’t be, right? Nope!

At the secure, undisclosed location to which he has taken Davis and Chloe, Jimmy confesses what he knows about Clark, recants all his evil thoughts and statements about his ex-wife’s betrayals of confidence, and he gives her a rooftop apartment. (A watchtower for Watchtower. Which he bought on a freelance photographer’s salary…how?) Chloe swears she only did what she did because she loved Jimmy and Clark too much to let Davis hurt them. Despite Chloe’s lies and uncomfortable relationship with a possessive stalker and Jimmy saying that marrying her was the worst mistake of his life, they reconcile with some smooching. Those crazy kids!

All is not well, of course. (We still have ten minutes to kill! Literally!) Davis, a little disappointed that his stalking victim wasn’t really in love with him this whole time, impales Jimmy on some rebar. So even though Davis Bloome insisted he was not a murderous jerk and appeared to be constantly sickened by his murderous other half for the entire season, it turns out he’s a friend of slaughter after all. And Chloe was wrong about him being worth a damn. Jimmy rallies to return the favor and kill not-so-poor-little Davis before he can hurt Chloe and dies professing his love to his ex-wife. Let’s tally that up, shall we? Chloe was wrong about both the paramours in her life, and she got the good one killed because she led the bad one on. Fantastic.

And Jimmy is really dead because they have a funeral and everything. Not that that proves anything by itself. (I still hold out hope that Lionel Luthor will return, and he was a corpse ages ago.) But the real nail in the no-longer-proverbial coffin is Chloe giving Jimmy’s camera away to the brother we never knew he had (no, not that one) and encouraging the little kid to follow in his brother’s footsteps. (Erm, as a photographer, not a murder victim. This might have been better done not right next to the casket, Chloe.) Jimmy’s death is sealed by the demands of canon: because Jimmy Olsen as we know him in the proper DC universe is younger than Clark and Lois and has no idea that Clark is Superman. The ickiness of a kid taking up his murdered brother’s name at his brother’s former workplace some mumbledy-mumble years in the future is overwhelming. It’s tackier even than Clark not coming to stand by Chloe’s side at the funeral. No one bats an eyelash at Black Canary (in her civvies) attending Jimmy’s funeral, but Clark can’t? WTF?

More WTF-ery: Chloe seems to be moving into the watchtower where not only was her husband-as-was murdered but where no one has even cleaned up the bloodstains yet. Clark shows up and gets swamped into a hug he doesn’t bother returning from an emotional Chloe. Because someone was a douche and didn’t let her know he was alive until just now, she’s understandably elated to see him. Clark gives a rote, flat excuse as to how he survived the explosion. (I guarantee that no one has thought about the fact that if Clark can escape the tomb, so could Bloomesday.) On top of losing Jimmy and Davis and almost losing Clark, Chloe’s beside herself about Lois having vanished. Clark spares that a heartbeat of his time before launching into angst about how he failed to save Jimmy. (Because he let himself believe that Chloe was right about Davis, which, nuh-uh!) Lest we forget, this show is not about Chloe’s pain; it’s about Clark’s guilt.

The guilt takes a bizarre turn as Clark, bitter about losing his friend because of his oversight, starts ragging on humanity. “Oliver was right. I put humanity on a pedestal. It wasn’t a Kryptonian beast that killed Jimmy. It was a human.” He has a point only if you forget the oodles of people Bloomesday killed as an indestructible Kryptonian monster. Jimmy’s death at Davis’ hands might be a bitter pill, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that Doomsday filled a cornfield with corpses. And excuse me very much, but for all of our serial killers and murderers, has humanity ever specifically set out to create an invulnerable, highly adaptable biological weapon like Bloomesday? No, we have not. Isn’t Bloomesday like the second one of those, too? (Brainiac being the first?) Eat a little crow, you supremacist Kryptonian hypocrite.

Chloe has nothing to say to this, so she redirects her grief and confusion into a plea for she and Clark to work together to protect the city while the proto-JLA is AWOL. (Really, Oliver? You let a monster out to destroy Metropolis and you just up and leave without doing any clean up?) Clark persists in his recriminations of humanity. Humans suck. He’s tired of pretending to be human. I would sympathize if not for the following: “I was raised to believe it was my Kryptonian part that was dangerous, but I was wrong. It’s my human side that gets attached, the side that makes decisions based on emotions. That’s my enemy.”

Okay, first of all: Clark, your super-strong, not-always-controlled super powers are way more dangerous than your “feelings.” Secondly, perhaps your emotions wouldn’t be so powerful if you weren’t dumber than a box of old, rusty hammers. And thirdly, are you trying to become a Vulcan or what? Well, PS, you’re not Spock, and you can’t get rid of your emotions. Emotions are a feature, not a bug, and that is as true of Kryptonians as it is of Earthlings. In fact, the only Kryptonians who have rid themselves of the sorts of conscience-based emotions you describe are the sorts of psychopathic murderers who have upset you in the first place! You want to be like Bloomesday? You think this kid got to be a murderer for being human or for, you know, BEING GENETICALLY ENGINEERED TO KILL BY A BUNCH OF STINKING ALIENS?

Chloe is having none of this mess. “Human emotions are what made you the hero you are today!” Clark: “They’re what’s stopping me from being the hero I could be.” Clark, for the last time, YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE THE FREAKING PUNISHER. You want to be Superman, damn it. Clark stands there as Chloe cries her eyes out about how alone she is, denigrates her species as inferior and inherently awful, and then walks out on her in order to learn how to be an automaton hero-bot. I’d be more pissed off except that the show derails my anger by having a sad, lonely Chloe put her hands to her belly as he walks off. This is TV. Unless that’s a huge red herring, there’s only one thing that could mean. And if she’s pregnant, so help me…

As Clark disappears to raise his douchebaggery to new heights (he’ll have to learn how to fly to accommodate all that racist baggage he’s carrying), Ms. Mercer discovers what happened to her orb. It went for a walk and then returned to the Luthor mansion to birth a naked, hairless General Zod on her lawn. What was that about Kryptonians being less dangerous than humans, Clark?

Season nine is some blissful four months away. Enjoy it while it lasts, folks!

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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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