Apocalypse

DVD, Smallville S7 (Apocalypse)

Utterly flawed, but with enough potential that it stays the right side of the watchability line, this is another alternate world story, and yes, it was all a dream. Again. The only lesson Clark learns is that we can't change the past, only the future (even if our Fortress has the sudden ability to send us back in time, and to another planet!), rather than what we knew he should do, which was go and… save the past. Protect the past, to preserve the future, and all its mistakes and wrongs, because for all he knows he could make things worse, just as Evil Kara was suggesting they should go back and fix all Krypton's problems at the end. By doing what, becoming President of that planet? Of course she's been taken over by Brainiac, a 'twist' I saw coming by the dismissive way she told Clark he was defeated and gone. Gone, just gone? No, Clark didn't give it much thought, he was too busy cooing over his own baby self. But wouldn't meeting himself bring some ultimate apocalyptic annihilation in the space/time continuum? In a word, no.

Clark isn't at his best, he's too upset over Lana's permanent coma (she only gets in as a photograph this time), believing Earth would have been a better place without him. You can tell he's not thinking straight when he calls up Chloe so she rushes round so that he can tell her the important news that… he's not going to do anything. That's when he gets sucked into a world where things are not as they should be, in incrementally small ways. They couldn't have afforded to set an episode on Krypton so they made it all about Clark coming to the decision that he should have made in the first place: to go there and stop Brainiac's scheme (which took an inordinate amount of time considering he's been there for several episodes - maybe it took all that time just to get there. Wonder what he and Kara talked about on the way?).

The whole point of an alternate reality is to make things as radically altered as alternately alternating possible. Alternatively, if you have a small budget you just use the same sets and very slight variations on the people you know, to sell the setting. I'm not getting at this episode, I like it, but there's a strong impression that this is all being done with money heavily in mind. We're given some exciting prospects to anticipate, but then they fall through: the biggest had to be the chance to see Jonathan and Martha Kent alive and well together, two driving forces that had left the series, this the ideal way to bring them back. I know it would likely have been written the same way as charisma-less alternate Clark, them questioning who he was, and it wouldn't have had any point except for bringing back the Kents, but there we have it, it would cost more money. Instead, it only costs 'in world' money to send them off on a birthday cruise (I can't imagine Jonathan ever going on one of those, he'd be too busy with the farm and he'd consider it a waste of money and time), and we can say this Clark is designed to be drab and ordinary.

That's fine, but they did bother to bring back another person from the past, Sheriff Nancy Adams (for no reason at all, except for us to go: "Hey, look, it's Sheriff Adams, back from the dead!"), who inexplicably goes from a law enforcer in the real history to an undercover informant on none other than the President of the United States of America! The money-saving ethos is high on the list with the setting of The Ace of Clubs, where Jimmy broke into recently, but anything wrong with any aspect of this story you can fix by pulling out the 'it was all a dream' card, and even if it had been for 'real,' this world still wouldn't have mattered - I mean, look at the way Clark has absolutely no qualms about showing his powers. He doesn't hide from Lois, whisking her off her feet and out of the clutches of the security me (she assumes he's a meteor freak, then an android, then doesn't even flinch when he explains his mission - maybe that's how real Lois would react?), and he lifts up Jimmy and slams him against the wall (after thoroughly pleasing the lad by pretending to be a fan of his photography!). It gives the world little reality, because if Clark's that cavalier and careless why should we worry about anything here. And yet, there were enough fun quirks that I liked it for the most part.

Things fall apart once President Lex is introduced (the old white suit gets another run out of the series' wardrobe store - please, why does he have one black glove?). It's not that seeing him as the leader of the free world is hard to swallow, we've seen these echoes of the future before, the problem lies in the credibility of the President still hanging out in Smallville, launching nuclear strikes across the globe from the old Luthor Mansion (man, you really need to get underground, fast!), and his James Bond villain plot to kill off the population for the sake of starting again with better people, safely in bunkers. Yeah, but where are they going to get their food from? How many centuries will it be before they can emerge into the devastated planet's surface once radiation has dissipated or whatever radiation does? Who cares, it's all a dream! But it isn't supposed to be a dream without a purpose, that's the point. Jor-El is doing the 'It's A Wonderful Life' thing, showing Clark a world without him. Yes, Chloe's about to be married and Lana's already happily married with children, and Lois and Jimmy are doing well at the Daily Planet, but Lex is in charge, and that's bad. Trouble is, there's not enough setting up of that lesson, Clark tumbleweeds along, or perhaps more aptly, pinballs around the machine of Smallville and Metropolis until he goes undercover and gets shot.

That's right, Clark got shot. By a gun. But, wait for it, it shoots Kryptonite bullets! So that makes Clark's reactions slower, how? Why can he not dodge them as he always has done? Yes, it's a dream. Don't forget it's a dream. It's Jor-El, he's making it up as he goes along - thinking about it, he'd have made an excellent member of the writing staff on this series, and would have been welcomed with open arms: "You're just like us! Join us…" Sorry, I'm getting into complaining territory again, when, as I said, I liked this one. When Lois gets Clark to dress in a suit and tie (for no real reason - ostensibly it was to get near the Prez as part of the press, but he could have used superspeed to do that), I was thinking, "Do the glasses, do the glasses!" And they did the glasses, even the little poke up the bridge of the nose action (but why does he need to take them off to use superhearing?). Real Lois later calls him a mild-mannered reporter and there are good meetings - alternate Clark is a nobody, but it's a 'what if?' Baby Clark is just a baby, but it's a connection to his own youth (the spaceship again!). Chloe doesn't know him, but she's happy to chat to him as an old school friend she doesn't recall.

There's even a surprise meet up between Lex and Clark back in the real world, at the end, in which Lex offers an olive branch in the way he wants to help Lana. Okay, looking at it pragmatically, he's after the answers, and if he ever finds out, he'll be holding the fact that Clark didn't even tell him when Lana's life was at stake, over his head forever. But I didn't expect Lex to be seen in the sun-bathed barn talking to Clark ever again. I liked the shot where Clark's on the left, out of focus and Lex is close up on the right in profile, and when you know that Tom Welling directed, that has to take the production as a whole, up a notch in estimation, because he's in it a lot, he had to direct himself, he had to do all the Krypton stuff and plenty of weird story moments, learn the lines, and bring in an episode on time and on budget. It's the first he directed, but considering how front and centre he was as the character I applaud him for the work. It's not a spectacular episode, and there are so many duff lines of both dialogue and reasoning, but it's a script of the usual 'quality' of the series when at its most plot-twist-button or plot-twist-artefact crazy.

Adams believes everything Clark says, a guy who just shows up, and although he persuades her by showing how fast he could move, why would that make her trust him? Coming from the whacko-land of Smallville, her first inclination would be that he's a meteor freak. Big things happen in such a small way - nuclear detonation set off from a briefcase in the mansion; Lois is in on this huge presidential secret yet she's just chatting about it as she sits at her computer; Kara's 'astounded' Clark knows her true name and trusts him because he gives her the pained 'Trust Me' look; Clark invites Chloe round to tell her about his inaction (why was that such an emergency - so she could say her bit about them needing him, of her needing him, in that bad line that only works in the least because of Allison Mack's abilities? I thought she shoved some Kryptonite into his hand and was going to drag him to the Fortress and throw him into a vortex so he was forced to save himself, but it was the Kryptonian disk thing). Jimmy lets him hang out in the Planet's basement to use the database, unsupervised, and is absent - is he upstairs writing a story? The main conceit that Clark could fade away any moment, doesn't make sense either - if Brainiac killed him as a baby he wouldn't be there, so it couldn't have happened.

One of the biggies is that the fate of Clark's life is solved in a little chamber that's an obvious redress of the Fortress. All we have is a short fight, if you can call a couple of people being thrown a few metres (I really should get around to defining what 'fight' means in the terminology of this TV series), and Brainiac being stabbed, and thus, history is righted. I thought he was liquid metal. So… no heart? But then I think of the wonderful explosion as the ship with little baby Clark aboard shoots into camera, like something out of the first Superman film, or the effect of Clark in a refracted glass tube, similar to the way Jor-El showed himself in that film, and lots of these touches enamour it to me. Not in a big way, we've certainly had the end of that several-episode-spanning patch of goodness that 'Smallville' seasons usually have. But alternate reality is fun. They didn't push the story far enough, they didn't play with the themes as deftly as they might, and whoever generates the dialogue is a computer program (Maybe Brainiac wrote it - nah, it would have been a classic then, as James Marsters is as good as he could be with the limited role), but for all that I simply liked this one. Nothing stronger than that.

***