Progeny

DVD, Smallville S6 (Progeny)

Some serious retcon action in this one! As soon as I saw Lynda Carter I recognised her, and I never expected to see someone from 'Starsky & Hutch' in a 'Smallville' episode, but it was good to have her as Chloe's Mum. I became a little confused with how much she did or didn't know. The set up was long before meteor freaks were common, in 1995, so it seems Mora Sullivan knew she had a power to control her daughter by the fact that she rubbed her hands raw when told to scrub them until all the ink was off, but she didn't know Chloe was one of the infected back then, she couldn't have because Chloe wasn't, or at least it's been said she became infected because of all the exposure to meteor rocks and other infectees. But she booked herself into a mental institution because she didn't want to hurt her family, not because she had mental problems, is that right? So why did she have mental problems, and needed Lex' drug to become cognisant and then slipped back into a comatose state. Was she tested as far back as '95? Was LutherCorp holding her? I just couldn't work it all out, and then she seems to know Chloe has a power and she can control other people who have powers yet there's never an explanation how she knows all about this stuff. Did Lex fill her in?

He certainly didn't fill anyone else in: we learn Lana's pregnancy was all a falsehood, she was never pregnant and had been injected with something to make it seem that way. If Lex was going to fill anything in, it was going to be a grave for Chloe, but it doesn't quite come to that, although when she was holding the gun on him I thought it was a shotgun so it wasn't quite as impactful to discover it was a smoke grenade - Clark may as well have let him take the blow. Clark's powers got a good airing, with a split second dash to Lex' car to grab Chloe's incriminating button (wow, those police are really useless, I mean how difficult could it have been to find the button? For that matter why did they not even look up when Clark's huge truck roars right off the road, stops and two youngsters get out. Wouldn't they tell them to get lost?), then there was the moment he stops Lex from getting a face full of grenade, as I just mentioned, Clark presumably whisking Chloe away in the moment Lex was knocked to the ground. I wonder if he realised he'd been pushed sideways when he should have fallen backwards if the projectile had hit him? Clark also chucks that guy across the room at the mansion to protect Lana. Actually it was more like a spot of revenge as he didn't need to do it, but said "You shouldn't have done that."

I felt the concept of someone controlling other meteor freak powers was a really good one that didn't get the exploration it needed. I know she needed to hold something that belonged to the person she wanted to control, but I wanted her to be using it with multiple people, using them to get all the inmates out of there. It was one aspect that suffered with all the detail flying around. At least Lex' messing about came back to haunt him this time, or it would have if he knew what had happened: because he threatened Mora into bringing back the escapee from that 'franchise' of 33.1 (as Clark or Chloe called it - it's beginning to sound like a fast food chain!), she gets the guy to find and kill Lex, he then smashes up the mansion, chucking Lana about in the process, which leads Clark to whisk her to the Smallville Medical Centre where an impartial Doctor gives her the news of her non-pregnancy, so now she must suspect Lex has lied to her, and certainly his Doctor Albright did! Valuable lessons he should have learned this episode were: don't do evil stuff because it'll find you out, and the other one would be don't use a phone and drive. You'd think after the number of times he's been in accidents he'd have learned a bit of road sense.

I felt it was all a bit too much, piling altogether one after the other like an unruly traffic crash all these explanations and events. It would have been enough to know Chloe's Mother had a power, or that she was able to be revived and that Chloe was able to talk with her (which did, incidentally, provoke a sweetly sad ending as she sees her Mum slip back into herself), that Lana wasn't pregnant and that Chloe now knows Lex knows she's infected. To have it all there meant Chloe's story was concertinaed into the one episode and it should have played out over several. Saying that, Lynda Carter was good, if not the Mum I imagined Chloe to have - the only time we saw her previously was from behind in a Season 4 or 5 episode when Chloe visits her so they were wise to leave the slot open for a 'name' guest star.

There were some good sequences, but they often didn't go very far: Lex having his car skid off the road was fine, but after we've seen so many over the top car crashes on the series it looked a bit tame. The same could be said for the scene in which Chloe and her Mum try to escape using the super-strong guy to fight for them - it's over almost before it's begun, so it felt a little bit like they were conserving the budget (and I didn't buy that a guard would care about the inmates enough to run into the cell all concerned, so Chloe could get out). I suppose the biggest thing we learn (other than that Chloe keeps a lump of Kryptonite handy for emergencies, unless that was Martha's and she kept it in the kitchen drawer - actually I wondered why she wasn't at home when she was needed, but she did come in eventually), is that the war is about to begin between Lex and his enemies, as Clark says.

They do like their multiple endings so that may have contributed to a feeling of rushing to fit all this stuff in, but the threat against Chloe with both of them fully conscious, not being manipulated by anything or anyone, laid down a line in the sand and infuriating Clark. Only Lana is stuck in the middle, and while he's not prepared to do anything that would hurt her, she's in the same position with him so Lex seems to have all the cards, and his professed love for her a blind. We still don't know what Chloe's power is, but I'm glad it was addressed in some way. It would be nice to see her Mum again (not to mention old Gabe who hasn't been in it for seasons at a time!), and Oliver Queen's apartment, though Star City is beginning to sound like a dumping ground: don't worry, if anything goes wrong we can send people to Star City. Is it some kind of paradise? If so maybe Clark should up sticks and move there, and maybe change the title to 'Starville.'

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