Kandor

DVD, Smallville S9 (Kandor)

It had to happen eventually, but we finally get the mythology-heavy story to join up some of the dots of this season, and it's predictably a bore. I expect fanatics, deep into the lore of Superman and his heritage, lapped this up, but what is there for those not in the know? Conveniently, Lois has skipped out of town, Chloe thinks put off by Clark's forwardness, so that's one less thing to think about, and Oliver and Chloe are there to assist Clark in small ways (very small - one of the only moments that almost worked was Oliver understanding and sharing Clark's feeling of the loss of parents; and as for Chloe, she admits to have wired up and bugged Clark's house to the max, with cameras everywhere, ostensibly to keep an eye on the place when he left after the Doomsday incident, but she never told him since and kept the option to use them open - what a friend!), but the story's far more concerned with the two main Kryptonians, about which this series has never really been. I'm talking of Zod and Jor-El, because, yes, Clark's Kryptonian Father makes it to Smallville. Some might say 'at last,' but not me. The Kryptonian side of things has never been as interesting, in my eyes, than the human struggles Clark and his friends have been forced to go through, perhaps because there's no reason to care about this long-dead race from a planet that doesn't exist any more, but which keeps churning out Kryptonians by the dozen! I never liked that Clark wasn't the only one, because it makes him less special, so nothing's changed there for me.

We're supposed to have empathy for characters that haven't done anything to gain our interest - indeed, we find out that these aren't even the 'true' characters, but that Jor-El had taken samples of his own DNA and that of Major Zod's unit, in order to create the purple orb which would be sent to Earth in case of Krypton's destruction (they must have been a very pessimistic people). I didn't understand who they were fighting when the city of Kandor was destroyed, was it other Kryptonians? Were there factions? It wasn't clear, and for all I know it was some other alien race. Anyway, this DNA is what the current Earth-bound Kandorians come from, so they had no knowledge of the last twenty years, of how Zod destroyed Krypton, and neither does Jor-El until Chloe lets him in on it. But it's all dull, long-winded Shakespearian speeches, except drained of the Bard's wit, 'Fantasy speak' with a capital 'F,' the way so many fantasies have peddled, inspired by 'The Lord of The Rings' without understanding that what makes the manner of speech noble is not the way it's said, but what is meant and why. I'll give them points for getting a reasonable impression of a younger Jor-El, that does at least give a reasonably accurate imitation of how Terrance Stamp speaks (I assume that was Special Guest Star Julian Sands, not knowing the guy), and looked a bit as you might imagine him, though he was a lot shorter than I'd have expected. Also interesting to learn that the enmity between Jor-El and Zod was due to Jor-El refusing to recreate Zod's dead son from DNA.

Seeing Jor-El at the Clark farm should have been something to celebrate, but instead it was just not important. Even his death in Clark's arms on some hill nearby had zero emotion in it, because who cares, this is just some guy - it didn't even make much sense to me that Jor-El died. He'd been punched a few times, and it could be that we never saw the extent of what Zod did to him, but again, it wasn't explained well enough, you're left to fill in the blanks yourself. I never really bought that this Jor-El meant that much to Clark anyway, and I suppose that must be put down to the acting, but I'd rather find fault in the writing and the inability of them to lay things out well. It is mildly interesting to find out what the purple orb was all about, and it was also slightly interesting to see these soldiers on Krypton, but then you think 'so what?' - even 'Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles' was able to make the future Earth battle scenes have some meaning.

The only other real development is that Clark's forced to admit his Kryptonian heritage to Tess, since he knows she knows where Jor-El is, but it's something she pretty much knew anyway, and we knew it, and there's far too much of the characters catching up with things that the audience already know that it's a drag to watch. It's good to aspire to being a proper drama with the thoughts, feelings and motivations explored in conversation and argument, but the writers just weren't up to the task when they were no longer relying on set-pieces or action. It's almost a relief that the episode deals with all this Kandorian stuff so much, and the main characters so little, because it gives me hope that they've exhausted what they wanted to do with them, and maybe we can get to some good character episodes as the last couple had been, and leave this mythological boredom behind. I've nothing against Callum Blue, and I'm sure if he were given a three-dimensional character he could play it, but he's just a bore, even his voice is dull - I don't believe in him as a menacing villain, I don't believe in his motivation, even his "my wife, my child" cry when he sees Kandor destroyed was in a monotone when it should have been anguished and fearful. Even with the wackiness and awfulness of how they totally messed up Lex Luthor, he was rarely boring, and I just can't stomach this level of disinterest the series gives me.

Jor-El comes into Clark's life for one episode, because it's convenient and it sounds like a cool thing to do, but there's nothing going on there, it's an empty experience. It may be that my expectations were heightened a little after two good episodes, but the title was enough to warn me this was going to be uninspiring, and I wasn't mistaken. One other thing I did like, however, was the trial scene which recalled the old Christopher Reeve 'Superman' films, or what I think of as the template for how the franchise should be (in many ways, though not all). The huge faces in deep shadow and the spinning rings around Jor-El were nicely done, but I would bet that no one involved with this series from the beginning would ever have suspected from the strict 'no tights, no flights' mandate that they would one day cleave so close to musty old Superman lore. It's hard to imagine that ground-breaking, exciting, well-written, shocking, innovative series becoming the slow, speechified, lore-heavy, great waddling behemoth that it did. They sowed the seeds of destruction early, and never had the ideas to back their initial direction up, after the first season or so, but that's what happens with franchises: they may start out new, original takes, daring and unpredictable, but they all eventually revert to type, become what people expect, and usually in the most basic and dull way. That's what happened here.

**