One New York Life

As a Superman whore, there’s no good reason I never got in to Smallville when it debuted. It must be that I was still in college and my little 12-inch TV/VHS combo didn’t really get much use. I went through a period between 1996 – 2005 where I just didn’t watch new shows. Then I moved in with a guy who worked for the cable company and we became part of DVR field testing. Smallville’s debut falls in that gap and as a staunch believer in not starting shows from the middle, it got placed on the back burner and forgotten about. At some point, I must have put the first season on the Netflix list. I rarely, if ever, check my Netflix list because, you know, there are really so few surprises in life.

The set-up, as everyone probably knows since it’s been on TV for nearly a decade, is Clark Kent’s life as a high school student in Smallville, Kansas. As far as my Superman experience goes (and it was extensive in my comic book phase — Superman being the only DC books I followed) I know nothing about his life in Smallville except his parents were already old by the time he got to Metropolis and Lana Lang was his high school sweetheart. I know his powers developed young and his parents did their best to hide it from the world. The show added a new twist on the Superman/Lex Luthor dynamic — that being they were friends in Smallville. DC liked this twist enough that they adopted it as one of the canonical origin stories during Infinite Crisis.

The Good

• I absolutely love the early dynamic of Superman and Lex Luthor being friends at a younger age. The beginning of the season places Clark as a freshman in high school and Lex probably about ten years older. Setting aside the largely ignored relative creepiness of an early 20s Lex hanging out with a gang of “15-year-old” kids — the chance encounter that introduces the two of them and Lex’s inability to let something go unexplained turns in to this great, twisting relationship. Lex desperately needs to figure out how Clark rescued him from certain death while, I think, still trying to be Clark’s friend. I get the sense that Lex doesn’t actually know how to be someone’s friend, so watching that struggle is also fun.
• Michael Rosenbaum’s take on Lex Luthor is unbelievably awesome. Rosenbaum is given this character who most everyone watching knows becomes this incredibly evil person who orchestrates thousands of deaths. To take that character and make him not only somewhat sympathetic — but take him to the point where viewers can root for him — is amazing. In addition, he’s able to subtly remind viewers that they absolutely should NOT be rooting for him. There is a scene where he tells Clark about his younger brother Julian. Lex believes his father Lionel loved Julian the most and viewed him as a second chance to produce a worthy heir. At the end of the story, Clark asks what happened to Julian. Lex tells Clark that an infant Julian died in his crib. I don’t know if Julian Luthor was a part of Lex’s comic book canon, but I’m relatively certain that in the show’s reality it will be revealed that Lex killed his infant brother. Rosenbaum’s delivery makes that scene chilling. And the way he is able to keep Lex, who is ostensibly still a good guy, right on that border of being a bad guy is great stuff. Even with all the good Lex does in season one, the finale cliffhanger sees him faced with a decision as to whether to save his father or let him die, and I really don’t know what he’s going to do. Lex’s struggle against himself is as entertaining a storyline as Clark rescuing people.
• I’m sure there have been plenty of discussions about this over the last decade — but whomever chooses the music is fantastic. Music on a TV show can go one of four directions. It can be off the radar entirely (like Lost), serviceably good but not really noticeable (Buffy), so bad it’s noticeable (The Hills), or so good you notice (Smallville). Not only do they have a great knack for picking the right song for the right situation, but even knowing when to pick covers that fit the scene better than the original. For instance, this funeral scene takes Eva Cassidy’s version of Cindi Lauper’s Time After Time and it fits the mournful mood of a funeral much better than the original. Small things like making sure that love songs being played while Clark pines for Lana are sung by Greenwheel instead of Melissa Etherage. On top of that, they have a sense of humor. Clark’s father, Jonathan Kent, is played by John Schneider. Schneider, as people my age know, played Bo Duke in the Dukes of Hazzard. In one episode, Jonathan ends up in a car chase. The song on the radio before the car chase starts is Good Old Boys — The Dukes of Hazzard Theme. That, my friends, is awesome.
• One of the questions I always had about the show is how they would manage to put Superman in perilous situations. Really, Superman was never so much about saving himself as it was saving his friends — but still, it was a concern. We quickly discovered that, in this reality, his ship was accompanied by a hail of meteors (parts of his exploded planet, perhaps) containing green kryptonite. Also, the kryptonite doesn’t only weaken Clark, but ongoing exposure grants superpowers to humans. This creates the monster-of-the-week bad guys. Which leads to one my favorite comic book arguments: the nature of Krypton. I’ve always found Krypton’s properties too convenient to be coincidental. Under a red sun and made up of kryptonite, it contains the only two properties that render its residents powerless. Consider the fact that 1) Kryptonians were violent enough to eventually destroy their planet and 2) they become super powered under a yellow sun. If we assume that yellow suns are relatively common, and that the light from these stars morphs violent Kryptonians in to unstoppable super-beings, doesn’t it seem likely the rest of the universe would be absolutely terrified of them? Doesn’t it also seem likely that Kryptonians were specifically marooned in the one place where their powers couldn’t be used to conquer the universe? On top of all that, Jor-El was a genius. There’s no way he would have launched the boy’s escape pod randomly and hoped it hit the right location. Jor-El launched his son to the one place he’d absolutely be safe. So, not only did at least some Kryptonians know they were specifically marooned in a place to render them inert, but also what yellow suns would do to their physiology. Discuss.

The Bad

• The character Pete — or “Token” as we’ll refer to him him here — sucks. And sucks in a “it seems like the writers added this kid they wanted to develop who largely ended up on the cutting room floor” kind of way. Watching the deleted scenes from the early episodes, there was a ton of backstory and relationship stuff between Pete and Clark that was removed. It must have spiraled from there until Pete just kind of became this background Scooby who shows up to be funny once in a while. In one vein, I do understand it — the relationships between Chloe/Lana/Clark/Whitney, Lex/Clark, and Clark/Jonathan/Martha are much more interesting. I think the idea of Pete — Clark’s regular dude high school buddy — was a solid one, but I think it was a little ambitious considering all the other relationships they wanted to explore.
• Thus far, I’m not the biggest fan of Tom Welling. Everything that Michael Rosenbaum brings to Lex Luthor, Welling does not bring to Clark Kent. I understand that Clark is supposed to be boring because he is desperately trying to not draw attention to himself but Welling doesn’t do a great job at communicating it. His delivery feels a little stilted and he seems to have an emotional range that begins and ends at “longing.” Pass for now because it’s the first season. I’ll let him grow in to the role. I think it’s more pronounced because Rosenbaum is SO awesome with such a deep character that everyone else looks bad by comparison. Whereas Clark is a good guy who is always good, Lex is a goodish guy who will eventually be terrible. There’s a lot more to the latter.
• As mentioned previously — the show relies very heavily on a Monster of the Week format to put Clark and his friends in danger. What I find bothersome about this is Smallville, like Sunnydale, has this generally accepted thing where weird things just kind of happen, and people just kind of die, due to some combination of the meteors and Luthercorp’s passing relationship with environmental protection laws. People get strange powers. And, through all this, Clark’s friend Chloe — who is supposed to be the Lois Lane, investigative reporter type — never quite puts together that Clark seems to be involved in all these rescues and maybe there’s something going on with him, too.

The Rest

The show is essentially the Buffy format turned upside down. Instead of solving all the mysteries and beating the bad guys with the help of her friends while keeping the adults largely in the dark, it’s instead solving all the mysteries and beating the bad guys while his friends absolutely can’t know what’s going on and his parents are the only ones he can talk to. Where Buffy is about this girl with the weight of the world on her shoulders with the help of her friends, Smallville is about this guy with the weight of the world on his shoulders with no one to share it with. It’s a great format. And, even though the monsters-of-the-week borrow a lot from Buffy — the insect monster week, the invisible bad guy week, losing your powers for a while week — I can forgive it.

The only slightly odd thing about the show that I’ve had a hard time with — why does EVERYONE who gets a power from the meteor pieces immediately become a bad guy? I’m not sure if it’s a knock on high school, small towns, or human nature in general but, literally, all people who get a power turn evil. Granted, all the people who get powers are social outcasts who suddenly find themselves in a position to get back at everyone who’s ever wronged them. As a former high school social outcast, I feel like a super power wouldn’t have immediately led to a killing spree. Do we really all work under the assumption that every high school kid is one superpower away from becoming a serial killer? Maybe one or two could do something good with their power? Mix it up a little?

I love this show. I have no idea if I’m going to be able to plow through eight seasons in time to watch the final season live on WB, but here’s hoping.

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• TDVDLevision: Ten Thoughts On Smallville Season Three
• TDVDLevision: Ten Thoughts On Smallville Season Two