Persuasion

DVD, Smallville S9 (Persuasion)

They do love their holiday-themed episodes, don't they. We've already had Christmas and Halloween episodes, and now we get a Valentine's Day one. Initial impressions were that this was going to be a cutesy, silly, lovey-dovey, forgettable entry in the season, but it doesn't go quite that route, instead straddling both comedy and tragedy, though not necessarily in the right proportions: it has an identity crisis, one moment having a meteor dust-infected Lois dance round the Kent farmhouse in Martha's wedding dress, and in another, pitching Tess and Chloe against each other in frenetic female fistfight combat, another thing they love to do on this series. But it never has a balance, it's nasty enough to prevent the story being a lighthearted examination of love, as you might expect from a Valentine's Day scenario, but it is heavily comedic in the most old-fashioned way (both in terms of the series itself as we have another meteor-infecting cause like the old episodes had week to week, and in the real world as we see Lois turn into a fifties housewife!). It's not boring, it's ridiculous, but in an accepted way for the series, using its conventions; it moves the ongoing Kandorian story forward; and it alters the future we saw earlier in the season, as well as revealing who actually killed Jor-El.

If the comedy had been the full body of the episode, that would have been enough for me, and equally, if the dramatic side of the story, despite featuring the Kandorians and Zod quite heavily, had been focused upon, I'd have liked it better than the mishmash we got. Who would suggest a Valentine's Day episode in which Zod executes one of his own people at her request? Or to feature a violent, hand-to-hand bust-up? The tone didn't suit the polar opposites of the two stories. Yet it wasn't bad, either, it didn't fill me with irritation or make me pine for the good old days of Season 1 or 2 (except perhaps in the more singleminded execution of a narrative that they tended towards back then), and it was certainly a few notches up from the previous episode. The premise is fairly daft: during a Valentine's do on the street, Lois and Clark are both exposed to 'pixie dust' which is later explained as coming from a Smallville quarry, making it meteor dust, or Kryptonite to us these days. At first, I thought it was making people fall strongly in love with Clark, but you soon realise that it gives a moment of super-powered persuasion: Clark wants Lois to be more traditional, Chloe to watch out for him, and Emil to stop being so hyped up and relax. He also manages to persuade Zod to tell the truth about whether it was he that killed his Father, and even persuades himself to go and take revenge on Tess, whom Zod falsely claims was the one who committed the act.

So it was the perfect maguffin for a comedy episode, and it would have been fun to see Clark go round persuading more of the cast - maybe Oliver (who doesn't appear), could have more self-belief, or Tess might want to put Lois in charge of the Daily Planet, or any number of humorous scenarios. Instead it turns a disturbing corner when these conflicting interests that have such powerful persuasion behind them start to grate against each other. That was the way I thought it was going, with Chloe and Lois coming to verbal blows, but it didn't even go that route for long, culminating in Chloe risking her life to take out Tess' firewalls, even though the mogul says that would leave Clark open to even more danger: she doesn't want Clark to just be the saviour of Earth, she sees him as the leader of the Kandorians! Meanwhile, Clark is getting on their good sides by providing new identities for those that want them, though as it turns out, one of these is the weird-eyed Alia (who appears to wear huge blue contact lenses for some reason…), the killer of Jor-El, whose guilt makes her turn to Zod for death so that Clark will have justice. Interesting that Zod doesn't like doing it, though he does it anyway. It was a nice moment when we see Clark helping them in this way, and their grateful acceptance, showing that they don't have to turn into enemies.

Except that the 'Tower of Doom' is finished during the episode, and then promptly destroyed (in one of too many end scenes, making the episode drag a bit towards the conclusion, though the funeral procession was interesting from a Kryptonian culture point of view, even if it turns the episode into a Bonfire Night episode). I was surprised they did that, as it looked pretty close to the sight of the Twin Towers collapsing, even if it was done at night and we don't see the full collapse. Before this there's a good scene between Clark and Zod where they lay out where they stand, some truths get told and we see Clark's pain and how sometimes he wishes he could do the things Zod does, and I didn't even mind Callum Blue, which is something. The episode falls down in the solution to the pixie dust, with Chloe standing nearby with some Kryptonite - so Kryptonite neutralises Kryptonite? Didn't make sense. I suppose I should be grateful that it wasn't some other colour of the alien rock that started it all, as that was my first thought, since Clark's eyes usually flash with colour when the various types come into contact with him. Then again, maybe the dust was of purple Kryptonite as it did make people's eyes turn that colour for a moment.

Also, the big reset button is pushed once Lois comes round and realises what a fool she's been acting, calling up Martha Kent, her Dad, General Lane, and even her sister, though sadly it's all one-sided conversations and we don't get cameos from anyone. It's nice that they keep making these Martha references, so she's still part of the series in a small way, but it also cheats us out of a real appearance, or two. So Lois decides engagement and marriage isn't the thing to do right now, but what about her job? She quit the Planet, but we never hear anything about her getting her job back. The other story underlines the end of the episode with the future altered: with Alia dead, she won't be skewering Chloe in the future we saw, and the tentative alliance between Clark and the Kandorians seems to be at an end when he chooses to take out the tower, but peace between him and them was always going to be an interlude. It might be interesting to see how events play out this time round, now that things have changed. Or it might not. Either way, Season 9 continues to be better on average than most recent seasons, and it's only a strong finish in the latter part of the season that's required to make me consider this a keeper. It could have been a worse episode - at least it wasn't a proper Valentine story!

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