Smallville, Season Seven

 

Our rating: 4 out of 5

Rated: TV14

reviewed by Charity Bishop
 

This series defined my teenage years, but I find that as the show goes on, it has gotten progressively weaker in storyline and character development.

With its foundation severely damaged by the recent epic battle between Clark Kent (Tom Welling) and Bizzaro, one of the freaks from the Phantom Zone, the Smallville dam breaks, causing the nearby bridge to collapse. On it is a police car with Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) locked in the back. Plunging to the depths of the lake, Lex believes he is given a second chance at life and redemption when a mysterious blonde "angel" comes to his rescue. He is given a vision of her floating in the water and then wakes up a mile or so downstream on the riverbank just in time to see her fly off into the sky. The woman is not an angel at all, but Kara (Laura Vandervoort), one of Clark's cousins from Krypton, whose ship was suspended in time until the dam bursting broke it loose. Now on a mission to protect "baby Kal El," she is shocked to learn that eighteen years have passed since she was given her orders, and Clark has no need of her assistance.

Her presence disrupts the lives of the women in Clark's life, namely his best friend and confidante Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack), and the beautiful Lana Luthor (Kristin Kreuk), who has returned from the dead after framing her husband for murder. Lex has chosen to grant her a quiet divorce and promised to leave her alone, but Lana goes to the extreme to have her revenge on him for all he has done to her, threatening her new "lies-free" relationship with Clark in the process. Then there is Lois Lane (Erica Durrance), whose crack journalism skills have landed her a star reporter spot at the Daily Planet, and the fascination that Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore) has in Kara.

There are several excellent episodes this season, but in my opinion they were overshadowed by the mediocre. Lex Luthor has always been the best thing about Smallville and this season he was pushed to the background in order to give screen time to other less interesting characters. The series has always been an ensemble piece, but the finest episodes focused on one or two characters as opposed to having a dozen different plot lines. Kara was an interesting addition but never quite managed to have the impact that she was meant to. Lois was all but ignored (a shame, since she's fantastic) and underused, and all of the "adults" have left the cast except Lionel, who has gotten so soft that I miss the magnificent jerk from previous seasons. Where's the man who hooked up his son to an electrical current to wipe his memory of his own crimes?

I think the biggest mistake is the same one that has been in place since season three: Clana. For three or so years, Clark's crush on Lana was cute, but after that it got stale. Everyone knows the love of Superman's life is Lois Lane, so why do we keep coming back to this contrived, immature, increasingly pathetic relationship every single season? Just so we can watch the same plot over and over? Clark hides something from Lana. Lana hides something from Clark. They find out. There are tears and angst and moodiness, and then they start the process all over again, while the viewers experience a profane desire to gouge their own eyes out with the nearest blunt object. Last season, Lana was with Lex, and everyone except the die hard Clana fans loved it. There was more enthusiasm and excitement about that ship than any I have ever seen. But the writers chickened out midway through and sent her running back into Clark's arms by the end of the season. Those same excited and loyal fans rioted, and most of them quit watching altogether. If you're hoping for any lingering remnants of Lexana, it's dead and buried. If you're hoping for Clark and Lois, don't. It doesn't exist yet, and I'm starting to think never will. To put it bluntly, I'm disillusioned that the show will ever move on, and this season only reinforced my emotional distance from the characters.

That being said, there were aspects about this season that I enjoyed. "Wrath" has Lana embodied with superhuman powers, and she pays the Luthors a visit. "Fracture" is absolutely fantastic, as it involves a journey through Lex's mind into his tormented childhood. "Descent" features the dramatic death of a main character (at the hands of another), and the finale is tremendous. Content this season is on par with former years in the show, with a great deal of violence of the superhuman variety, and some scattered profanities. Lana moves in with Clark prior to her divorce going through, but they cannot be physically intimate due to Clark's fear of hurting her. In "Wrath," however, they aggressively make love off-screen (the countryside shakes with their intensity), and it's implied they have also slept together in "Persona." In "Fracture," Lex forces Clark to watch one of his memories, in which Lex and Lana are in bed together. There's lots of romantic kissing and heavy breathing.

There are some great cameos this season. Dean Caine (Superman in the Lois & Clark TV series) plays a psychopathic physician with dark intentions, and Helen Slater (the original Supergirl) appears as Clark's mother in a flashback episode. It also features the return of Brainiac in the form of James Marsters. I really wanted to love this season but I couldn't. More casual and less emotionally involved fans might find it entertaining and a reasonably decent way to spend a few hours, but more long term fans might be a bit bruised by it. That being said, it also marks the end of the involvement of the show's original creators and so it may also mean massive changes coming not only to the cast, but the structure of the series as well.