Crisis

DVD, Smallville S3 (Crisis)

The moral of the story, I suppose, is don't be afraid of the future. They don't often go in for morals, but since they were doing the other 'Star Trek' staples such as time travel and wormholes, they might as well go the whole hog!

I have to say that this was not the classic it could have been. The culmination of the Adam arc, the revival of the Luthor feud, and a story including time travelling phone calls and moody, nightmarish attacks in a storm. Somehow the episode is too clean. We see a few lab assistants strewn around Metron's dark underbelly, and we see Adam smack a few of our characters around, even fire the gun at the end, but with all that's happened he doesn't make the most believeable villain. They were too good at making him the handsome teen in the early episodes, and he was never going to bring dread horror on the audience, even if he could on Lana.

While the phone call was one of the best teaser sequences this season, the episode felt a bit too artificial, like it was written backwards and shoehorned into this sequence of events. It wasn't quite the spine-tingling conclusion it should have been, and I felt we learnt too early what it was all about. Perhaps if the mystery had been maintained a bit longer, the build up would have been to a higher pitch, but we still needed something more from the end, beyond the attempt to make Adam sympathetic.

Though classic status is not reached, it was a good episode, and retained, or brought back some of the Season One-style ensemble. While Pete is completely passive in story terms, we at least get the other characters banding together in small town trouble, which most of these later episodes have sacrificed for a grand scale. They managed to keep the scale going too, with the surprise that Lionel's claim about liver disease wasn't a ploy to get his new project manager to work faster. Unfortunately, one of the few episodes I had tuned in to that occurred after these events, was the resolution to Lionel's plight, so the dramatic impact was rather less pronounced. His despicable nature, and this time if he were to claim he was just trying to do Lex a favour by making him stronger really wouldn't wash, gets the better of the two Luthors.

Would Lex have been so quick to challenge if he hadn't been dropped in hot water, was his bid to become head of his Father's experiment really for good, or was he genuinely interested for his own evil reasons? We don't know. With a little more thought, and a little more style, this could have edged it in the classic stakes, but I say again, at least the friends aren't bickering at the moment, but working together. More of that should ensure continued quality.

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