Friday evening saw the premiere of season 9 of Smallville, and the ratings were not that great to be honest. Like Dollhouse, only 2.8 million people tuned in to watch the show. I DVR’d it. So warning, Spoilers below.
We open on Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) trying to track down Lois Lane (Erica Durance) who in last season’s finale was transported to the future by accidently finding Clark’s Legion ring. All we get from this is that Green Arrow, The Flash and Cyborg have dropped off the grid and Chloe attempts to wield a 7mm semi-consciously at Emil Hamilton (played by the dude who played Gaita on Battlestar Galactica).
We’re rewarded with Lois’s return via purple lighting bolt aboard a monorail to which she’s attacked by a “ninja assassin”. The fight causes the train to derail and Clark saves it. This is the big reveal featuring Tom Welling in his Neo suit. It looks terrible, and tacky, and I can’t wait until they get rid of it. He spends much of the episode in flight simulators whining about not being able to fly.
And now we get our big moment with “Major” Zod, played by Callum Blue. Apparently when Tess Mercer let him out of the Phantom Zone, she also let out most of his army. They estimated there must be at least 100+ of them on the planet. Zod has been searching for them, and in a discussion with two of his soldiers (unnamed) question him, to which Blue delivers a pretty great “Kneel Before Zod!” I must say it was better than expected. To which immediately after, he gets knocked out by his subordinates. Apparently, they haven’t reached any power levels yet. Which is quite different, because the ninja assassin woman seemingly has heat vision.
Lois while investigating the train wreck meets Brian Austin Green, playing the pre-Metallo version of John Corben. She finds Green Arrow (Justin Hartley) in some kind of fight cut wholecloth from Snatch. The Assassin lady shows up to blow everything sky-high, Neo Clark shows up and they fight. She dies because of Blue Kryptonite and a flying tractor engine. But not before she reveals that she’s come from the future to kill Clark because he causes the end of “her world” and she wears Jonathan Kent’s watch, set to a year from last Friday.
The rest is forgettable, but at the end you get the idea of what is going to happen under Zod and why the ninja woman came back to kill Clark.
Regardless, in the end, I’ve always appreciated Smallville’s success in breaking the barrier of the Superman mythos and doing its own thing. Yeah, does it suffer from things? Many, many, contrived things, but for this Superman fanboy, the show still intrigues me. I like seeing what they do next.
Coming up we see Brian Austin Green become Metallo. Smallville airs Friday nights at 8pm.
