On Tuesday, our Geoff Boucher sat down with Donner to chat about “
By Matt Adler
The very first episode of Smallville brought the last son of Krypton to Earth amid a terrorizing shower of radioactive meteor rocks. The very last episode of Smallville propelled the budding Superman into his adult life as a full-fledged superhero amid the Biblically apocalyptic arrival of one very big orb of extraterrestrial death – the flaming planet of Apokolips, (pronounced “a-pock-o-leepse,” per Granny Goodness), the awful abode of an entity that (again per Granny) we’ve been confusing for the likes of Hades and Loki and even Satan for as long as humans have been telling stories about gods and monsters, angels and demons, heroes and villains. The Big Bad in question? Why, Fake Locke, The Smoke Monster from Lost! Wait, sorry: I mean Darkseid, the dark demigod of Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” lore… although he behaved strangely like a certain Man In Black (billowing blackness; borrowing a dead man’s guise) in a tale that trafficked in similar custodian of light/incarnation of evil metaphors as “The End.” (You weren’t going to get out of these recaps without at least one one forced Lost-Smallville comparison from me.)
Against the backdrop of hell on earth and through an often exhilarating electrical charge of warm and fuzzy sentiment, the series finale of Smallville did what it needed to do: It completed the circuit on an epic coil of story that began 10 years ago. In the finale (entitled “Finale”), Superboy reached maturity and became a true Man of Steel. After a decade of “no flights, no tights,” Tom Welling donned Superman’s cape and soared. He wore it well, and Smallville rocked it hard. It was radically cornball and goosebumpingly geektastic, and the fanboy in me was satisfied. Well done, Smallville.
The first half of the two-part swan song was devoted to reheating Lois Lane’s cold feet and getting her to the altar and saying “I do” to The Greatest Guy In The World. As much as I love the Tom Welling/Erica Durance chemistry, there was zero tension in this hour, and in fact, the storyline achieved entropic degrees of negative drama when it tried to give Clark his own set of pre-marital doubts that involved… oh, whatever. It all unfolded as we predicted here in the recap of last week’s episode, in which Clark and Lois had learned the wrong lessons from Jor-El’s pre-wedding testing. Clark had to realize that “leaving and cleaving” didn’t mean severing and forgetting his roots; Lois had to get over her ‘I’m not worthy’ angst, however justified, and realize that she was Clark’s source of strength, not Achilles’ heel. Oliver – Clark’s best man and no stranger to self-questioning dark nights of the soul – scored with a goofy-funny line when he counseled his friend against second-guessing himself. “I’ve been down this road before and you know where it got me? Burning a perfectly good leather hoodie.” And so everyone got to the church on time. It was fitting that Clark walked Lois down the aisle (her Army father had important military business elsewhere); Clark had told her she would never hold him back as long she stood by his side, and their shared walk was metaphor for that. Clark looked to the pew and saw his father, Jonathan, sitting with his mother. Imaginary and spectral visitation? Didn’t matter, and no difference: Our loved ones stay with us forever as long as we have the imagination to see them. Again: Corny. But I believe that s–t and ate it up. Good on “Finale” for finding a compelling way to give John Schneider – always one of the best things about prim0-years Smallville – a role to play in the end.
Alas, Clark and Lois couldn’t comple
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