I believe it was a philosopher, or possibly a talking car, who once said that you can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been, and to that end, David Uzumeri and I went all the way back to the very first episode of Smallville this week, so that we could better understand Season 10.
The result? Well, now I understand that it’s always been completely insane and full of nonsense. Which I probably could’ve guessed.
I know we said we’d do the pilot for the off week, but that was before Uzumeri and I knew that there is in fact a Smallville Christmas Special, with the best/worst pun for an episode title we’ve yet seen.
So join us as we spike our eggnog and settle in for a long winter’s recap and discover our absolute undying love for John Glover’s amazing mane of hair.
This week, it’s the last new Smallville of 2010, and Uzi and I are there to go through the high points (Hawkman on fire), the low points (any time Deathstroke opens his mouth) and everything between (straight up Nazi interrogators in the Daily Planet)! I actually liked this one, except for one huge, show-wrecking exception, but it’s definitely moving in the right direction. By which I mean a direction that’s completely insane.
We’re going to keep doing columns until the show comes back on January 28, using past episodes as cannon fodder. Next up is the pilot, but if you’ve got suggestions, now’s the time for ’em!
In this week’s chucklehead-enraging installment of Smallvillains, Bryan Q. Miller returns for a story of the Mirror Universe, featuring a sociopathic incestuous Clark, a scenery-chewing Lionel Luthor, and people getting smacked so hard they fly across the room without suffering any permanent damage!
It doesn’t quite reach the heights of the Zatanna episode, but it’s surprisingly well constructed for something that clearly shows the constraints of a TV budget!
Another Friday brings another installment of my weekly comics culture Q&A column, and this time around, I tackle Superman’s origin, why we never, ever need to see it again, and which of the 24,000 versions floating around out there are actually worth reading!
If you’ve got a question you’d like to see me answer in a future column, just tag it on Twitter with #askchris, or send an email to comicsalliance at gmail.com with [Ask Chris] in the subject line!
This week’s Smallville was a rerun, but rather than taking the week off from Deep Hurting, Uzi and I decided to break out some Smallvillains Classic with a look at a previous episode! We went back and forth on which episode to talk about — Uzi wanted to do the pilot and we thought about doing the oh-my-god-that-sounds-terrible Mr. Mxyzptlk episode — but in the end, as so often happen on Smallville, the male gaze won out and we watched the show’s first appearance of everyone’s favorite leggy sorceress, Zatanna!
We’ll be going back through previous episodes whenever the show takes a week off, so if you’ve got suggestions, let us know!
This week, Smallville takes on waterboarding and somehow makes it hilarious, in the way that only Smallville can!
This episode was pretty much the inverse of “Isis,” in that Uzi absolutely loved it, but I was left more than a little cold by the complete and utter nonsense of the script. But it was still better than we’ve seen, and for the first time ever, I actually cared about Aquaman’s wife.
But that was entirely due to the fact that she was pretty ridiculously hot and soaking wet at virtually all times. Way to play to the base, Smallville!