Pandora

DVD, Smallville S9 (Pandora)

We were due a bad episode, and this one is… surprisingly not so bad. It's basically What Lois Did Next, as, thanks to Tess, we see into her memories of the future. Turns out it was but a year into that future that she travelled, a place that looks like the set of 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire,' a bleak, post-apocalypse drenched in the red sun of Krypton… er, Earth, actually. Because… Zod built a tower… and that shields the Earth from the sun… giving it a red hue… I think. I wasn't all that clear on Zod's power, why he and his Kandorians need a red sun for power when Clark needs a yellow one, but the mechanics aren't really that important - what matters is that we get to see the origin of all Lois' 'visions,' which prove to be fragments of flashbacks (or flash-forwards, to be precise, since she's back from the future, though those memories were in the past when she was in the future, so… don't think too hard about it, is my advice!). So we see Chloe's vicious, sword-based death, and even Clark, stabbed by a Kryptonite dagger, appears to be on the way out. We don't see Queen's death, but we can assume he didn't survive the assault from what appeared to be hundreds of Kandorians. This possible future is interesting, and if anything I'd have liked to have seen more of this devastated Metropolis (maybe 'Man of Steel' got it's ideas here?), or, even more, the Kent Farm, apparently converted into a prison for humans. I couldn't really make out landmarks that showed how different the farm had become, so I felt they missed a trick of doing a proper set redress that you'd see and be shocked by.

Somehow, despite all the talk of Clark being their only hope if the yellow sun can be recovered, Lois still doesn't twig what makes him so special, or what he means when he says that he and Zod have history, even though they make it plain to her that Zod is an alien. And before the end of the episode Dr. Emil has blocked or removed any of these future memories, so Lois is back to square one again, when she keeps getting so close to knowing Clark's secret. She was actually an ideal person to flash into the future (via the Legion ring), as her reporting hat gives her the character and reason to ask questions and be tenacious, even when faced with such awful odds. Despite being a little bewildered (she initially believes it's a dream), she pulls through, accepting the time travel concept, aliens, and invasion - in fact it's that Clark and Chloe are no longer friends that is the only anomaly that truly unbalances her! So she was a good candidate to survive in a post apocalypse, being the practical type who can adapt to her situation, whatever that is, with a minimum of fuss. It's also nice for us to finally understand what happened to her between seasons, and the dash of the assassin who followed her back, stood out especially as being a cool moment that ties into her return to the past at the beginning of the season.

I liked the resistance led by a harder Chloe, her lieutenant being Oliver Queen and his band of merry men, and the rescue attempt to prevent Chloe and Clark's execution was a good sequence. There's just one problem: Clark has the power (under the yellow sun), to dodge bullets, and the Kandorians show similar, if not exactly the same, super-speed ability, yet they can't dodge Kryptonite-tipped arrows, which would be slower than bullets? A little logic problem there, I think… That wasn't the only hard-to-accept moment, either. In the past (or the present, whichever way you want to look at it), you can once again ignore the fact that Tess would be able to have such advanced technology which could allow someone to experience another person's memories when plugged into them (just like in 'DS9' episode 'Extreme Measures,' though that was set three hundred years into the future and is thus more believable), just because LutherCorp always has ridiculous tech - it's just a means to tell the story. What's harder to gloss over is that Tess' tech servant, Stuart, is shot, apparently in the head from what I saw, yet later they say he'll be okay! That looked like instant death to me!

At least, thanks to Lois, Oliver, Chloe and Clark can have 'another' go at preventing Zod and minions from taking over the world by trying a different strategy - Clark's brainwave is to become mates with him, to persuade him to abandon his warmongering and show him that living on Earth can be a good life. Yeah, right! Clark's overdosed on the optimistic pill, it seems, but it's a good concept, or could be if it plays out in the right way (a nice start was Zod ordering his folks to kneel before Kal-El), leaving me, for once, actually looking forward to seeing how it develops, when usually I'd prefer them to have kept the Kandorian arc to a minimum. Obviously they weren't going to do that, what with Callum Blue being an official member of the cast (though you can be pretty certain he's not going to make it to Season 10 if experience with the oft-used, one-season wonders of most previous seasons is anything to go by!). And finally, credit must be given to the actress that played Tess - no, it's nothing like a grand, Shakespearean speech she gets to orate, or even any spectacular fight action. No, she allowed herself to have soil shovelled right on her face when future Queen is burying her (in a very shallow grave!). Top marks for not moving in the slightest, though some of it must have gone up her nose! There's professionalism for you. The episode may not be up to the standard of the previous one, but it was so close to being more than just solid, it was palpable. Keep trying!

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