Doomsday

DVD, Smallville S8 (Doomsday)

Not a very satisfying end to the season, with everyone either dead or not talking, or vanished. They always like to finish on a cliffhanger, but this was more of a cliff slide, as things happened throughout the episode that would go on to need paying off. And it all ends with the missing purple globe that burst its way out of Tess Mercer's secret safe, returning to the grounds of the Luthor Mansion for Tess to witness the appearance of a man, presumably Zod as a 'Z'-like symbol is burned onto the lawn. So they've dealt with Doomsday (in a suitably unfinished way so he could be brought back quite easily), and now they're just going back to Zod? I don't know for sure it is Zod, who last plagued Clark in, was it Season 6? Back then he took the form of Lex, inhabiting Clark's nemesis until he was defeated… somehow, I can't remember exactly. The episode promised to be more imaginative at the start, but didn't really live up to it, although they did get some feeling into the story between characters, that isn't always successfully done. There were also some depressing moments between characters, but you can't have everything.

The Justice League (as it doesn't ever seem to call itself), is back to help Clark in his hour of need, after he's been informed by guy from the future that gave him a magic ring, which was destroyed, and so he came back to give him another one, in the future Clark's now dead. Because he couldn't defeat Doomsday, it was too much for him. I don't know why, as all the monster does to him is punch him repeatedly through walls (leaving not a bruise on his complexion, just some stylish blood trickles to show he's been injured, just not in the spot he was punched!), and all he had to do was grab the fiend, jump really hard into a deep tunnel and have the JLA set off an explosion that could bury it. Chloe sort of asks how he got out, but he says he just did before the blast. If Doomsday is a Kryptonian, though, he should have the same reflexes and speed, if not better. So it was all rather weak and off screen, which wasn't right for a storyline that had been leading up to this point all season. I will say this: Doomsday's look was excellent, and we get to see it in this episode quite clearly. Like a cross between the Jem'Hadar of 'DS9' and the Uruk-Hai of 'The Lord of The Rings' films, it was big and grey and slimy black, so they did a good job there.

The moral of the story, that Clark learns, is humanity's rottenness - Oliver believed he put humans on a pedestal, that's why he wanted to save Davis Bloome, although I thought it was more about his desire for his Kryptonian heritage not to muck up Earth any more than it already had. Either way, it gets to Clark again, and he decides it's best to no longer live as a human, 'Clark Kent is dead' he says melodramatically. Does this mean he puts on the red underpants and cloak and starts flying around? Of course not, this is the end of the season, not the end of the entire series! He just walks sadly, but resolutely, out of Chloe's life, just at her most devastated, having lost Jimmy, who was killed by the human portion of Doomsday, which is where we come back to the logic of Clark's no longer believing in humanity. I mean, it's not like he hasn't seen evil people do evil things before, right? …Right? Oh, only every week. But it's another death on his conscience, and what's more it's the death of a regular, so it 'means' something. Except I'm not convinced it does...

As soon as the future guy came back to warn Clark of his fate (which is confusing enough on its own as how could his future have changed while he was there, or did, um, what… there's no answer for time travel plots, they've simply got you over a barrel, so there's no point fighting, you just have to go with it), you start to think about the possibilities of time travel. Clark planned to use the future ring to send the monster there and have the future people beat it up because they have future tools and stuff, not to mention future Clark (or do they?), so that's not a bad idea. But he has to go and split Davis into two, using the handy Black Kryptonite he saved in his little box. And then it's Davis that does as much evil by murdering Jimmy and attempting to murder Chloe, and the plan goes awry because, like Bilbo Baggins, Lois stumbled upon a mysterious ring after fighting Gollum, sorry, Tess, and puts it on, vanishing into the future. As soon as that happened anything could be undone, I thought, because at some point Clark's going to have to go to the future, or Lois will come back, or something, and Jimmy's probably going to survive. I could be wrong, I didn't keep up with the cast list back in the day, but that's my feeling.

It wasn't the best time for Clark to walk out on Chloe, having just lost Jimmy, Lois missing, and Davis dead, and only a horrible memory to her (she's repaid by Jimmy's kind words that she's as much a hero as Clark, doing what she did, losing what she's lost). But then she's always got Oliver Queen, who gave her the watchtower job, who's not really speaking to Clark as they disagreed over saving or killing Davis, and, in a slightly repugnant turnaround, Oliver's twisted moral code is proven apparently correct, since Jimmy died because Clark didn't kill Davis when he could have. While we're on the subject, I didn't mind the JLA coming back, they've always hovered in the background ever since they were first created, but where were Aquaman and Cyborg? Why only Black Canary and Impulse, as they call him? They looked a little forlorn and out of place in their bizarre costumes, when as part of a big team they might have blended in better. There was some definite double-crossing, with their loyalty and belief in Queen's way stronger than to Clark's, and some double-teaming too, with Lois and Jimmy working together having both broken into Tess' office. Does she not have CCTV? It was hard to swallow that, now that Davis and Clark need to meet, suddenly everyone knows where they are and can even track them on some kind of radar!

All this stuff wasn't as much of a muddle as some season finales have been, so I couldn't say I didn't enjoy it to some extent. It wasn't the best of the season, or the worst, it felt more like a continuation that you should just jump right into Season 9 with. Maybe that's what viewers wanted back then, simply the reassurance that their programme was to return. Maybe the budget had suffered (Jimmy's secret hideaway that he had been doing up for Chloe's wedding present looked remarkably like Oliver's secret hideaway!), I don't know, but if so, it might have been better for the series as there were some nice conversations between characters: Clark continuing his disguised voice talk with Lois worked really well as it did before, as did Jimmy finally learning Clark's secret, even if the actual reveal was pretty weak: he finds a Kryptonite dart in Clark's back, pulls it out and sees a cut on his face disappear. Very low-key, but it's his wonder and the way his whole face lights up as everything dawns on him, that makes it work. Lois has a less than friendly confrontation with her boss, Tess, ending in a fight after Tess was, what, going to kill her? I'm not sure, it was a bit odd, but I think it's safe to say that as long as Mercer is head of the Daily Planet, Lois isn't going to work there. Except on this series it would be perfectly natural for Lois to go back and work for her with little problem as that's the kind of ridiculousness that I've had to learn to accept from this series in order to keep watching it.

At one point in the episode I did think they were going to keep their Davis and eat it too, as the Black Kryptonite idea could have worked. But it didn't, although the person who could be Zod could have been mistaken for being Davis. Was that intentional? It's all could, could, could, at the moment. One other point I would make: if Clark thought he was going to die, I think he'd do more than write a goodbye note for Lois to publish. He would have gone to see his still living Mum, and talk to her about what he had to do, but since leaving the series Martha almost never gets mentioned, though it wasn't that long ago he was on the phone to her. Maybe he did find the time to visit, but we didn't get to see it. It would have given the situation more gravity if there had been a last supper moment, although it would have been undone by the surprise hijacking of the mission by Oliver and his people. I think the episode lived up to the standards of the season. It was a bit bloody in places, with both Jimmy and Davis skewering each other, things played out okay, if largely depressing by the end, but I suppose that was inevitable. It wasn't a bad watch, and I was looking forward to the time of Doomsday, even if Davis' psychological problems were played out for too long, and things like the purple orb seemed to be thrown into the last episodes as an afterthought. But it was good, fine, entertaining enough with occasional episodes that reached above the low bar of the series. Only two seasons to go.

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