supernatural66
erikab1123
Smallville Season 7 x01 BIZARRO Review:
By Erika - Founder OSCK
Written October , 2007
Score 7/10
Meeting the New Menace - Bizarro
The seventh season opener for SMALLVILLE opened, literally with a bang. The episode opens with events that took place directly after PHANTOM ended last season. The opening sequence had plenty of anvils to make Superman/mythos fans very happy. Clark was worried about the citizens of Smallville from the impending flood caused by damage to the dam. In fact he nearly begs Bizarro to leave him alone so he can help others. This is something that we at OPERATION SAVE CLARK KENT have been very frustrated with during the last ½ of season six. Although Clark’s solution to stopping the flood wasn’t exactly ecologically the wisest thing to do, it further showed that his powers are increasing by leaps and bounds. Clark’s heat vision is by far his most advanced power that he’s the most in control over and it’s always exciting to see what he’s going to do with it next. The smile and nod to the boy, coupled with the Superman horns music was a wonderful nod to Clark’s future as Superman when he becomes the superhero who expects nothing in return for his actions and takes complete pleasure and joy out of helping others.
The first encounter with Bizarro got a burning question out of the way over how SV’s Bizarro would mirror Clark Kent. In the comic books Bizarro usually is brought to life through some sort of lab accident where Clark/Superman’s close by and Bizarro gains all of Clark’s memories but because he’s a warped version of our hero, Superman’s alter ego’s moral center is askew. This was handily taken care of by Bizarro stating that he got all of Clark’s memories when he borrowed a few of our hero’s DNA cells.
Tom Welling deserves proper credit for his creation of Bizarro. Whenever watching Clark’s evil twin in this episode you can see traces of Clark Kent in the performance (which we should considering Bizarro sort of is Clark,) blended with some of his wild crazed RedK Clark characteristics, however, Bizarro is a character onto himself. His voice is deeper, he snarls a lot, but even more importantly he oozes with maniacal confidence that Clark Kent, even on RedK, does NOT possess. There’s no mistaking Bizarro for Clark.
Bizarro’s electrical tower scene further showed us that the phantom is every bit as strong as Clark. Much like when Clark got stabbed through the chest in WITHER last season, we saw that Bizarro was impervious to death even though he should’ve received a mortal wound. The merciless heat blasting of the would be good Samaritan defines Bizarro’s lack of values and helps to show that even though he’s no longer taking over human bodies as hosts, he’s still an evil menace. The FX used for showcasing his wild heat vision were very striking and were one of the “WHOA” moments on the show.
The Bizarro on the farm scene otherwise known as the obligatory shirtless Clark scene for the opener was…well enjoyable to watch and a lovely unnecessary scene in the episode other than to show us that Bizarro sucks the green out of green K when he gets near the stuff.
All Summer comic fans have been wondering what girl Bizarro would fall for. In the SUPERBOY mythos he spends a lot of time chasing Lana, however, in Superman mythology Bizarro is obsessed with Lois Lane. Usually Lana gets most of stories on SV that should goto Lois, so it was a pleasant surprise to see Bizarro become 100% lustful upon seeing Lois Lane for the first time. Other than the Bizarro/Lois scene being a much needed comedy relief moment in the episode it did leave you wondering whether any of the ‘twisted thoughts’ that Bizarro pulled out of Clark’s head EVER included him wanting to grab a hold of Lois’s butt. LOL!
Writers Brian Peterson and Kelley Souders further gave us glimpses that Clark might have more unresolved feelings for Lois lurking in his subconscious with this taunt by Bizarro to Clark during their final duel: “You had the existence I could only dream of. Every pleasure at your disposal and you wasted it. You don’t deserve this life, Clark, but I do.”
The final duel with Bizarro and Clark felt a bit rushed. Instead of allowing the two supercharged twins to clobber the hell out of each other they spent a lot of time showcasing Clark’s ability to heal in the sunlight. Clark’s final massive superpunch, sending Bizarro out into the upper atmosphere almost seemed rather anti-climactic, however, it was reassuring to know that Clark could at least get the upper hand in a fight.
Kara
All of the talk this summer has been about the arrival of Laura Vandervoort onto the show as Clark’s cousin Kara Zor-El aka Supergirl. BIZARRO gave us our first glimpses of the new blond beauty whose arrival will be throwing all of our characters lives into chaos. Our first introduction to Kara arrived in the “water ballet” scene where a floating blond “angel” arrives out of nowhere to visit a dying Lex Luthor who was trapped underwater in a patrol car.
This encounter, though brief became one of the highlights of the episode. Not a single word of dialogue is spoken between either Laura or Michael Rosenbaum. Michael beautifully portrays Lex’s overwhelming sense of wonder at seeing this lovely angel in the water.
Kara’s approaching Lex scene reminds me a bit too much of Ariel coming up to Eric in Disney’s THE LITTLE MERMAID, so much so that I was half expecting her to break into song. The scene did have that fairy tale aspect to it though which explains Lex’s actions later on in the episode. When Lex coughs again and blinks back to where his savior had been looming over him, Kara took advantage of his brief averted glance to lift off into the sky and flew away. The camera pans down on Lex in a way that’s reminiscent of Martha’s shock when Clark flew off from her in CRUSADE.
My one question – does Kara’s hair have superpowers? How can it be dry and impeccably curled after only moments earlier being completely submerged in water?
Lois/Chloe/Clark
This season we’ve been promised that the iconic ace reporter Lois Lane will begin to make her appearance on the show. The early scene in the dam with Lois discovering the bodies was wonderfully eerie. There was something spine chilling and tingling seeing THE DAILY PLANET’s future star reporter stumbling across what could be the biggest story of the year. Lois’s look of horror and wonder at her discovery was masterfully portrayed by Erica Durance.
Al Gough stated at Comic Con this summer that we’d see glimpses of Lois and Clark caring for each other throughout the season. The opener here certainly showed that they are very relieved to see each other in a time of crisis. Lois has this wonderfully grateful expression and disbelief on her face when Clark is there to rescue her out of the dam, whereas Clark is intensely worried over his friend being trapped. When Clark sees Chloe his pain intensifies. Tom has had to write a book on showcasing how to emote pain, misery, sadness, and angst over the last couple of seasons, this is one of those scenes where he truly puts his all into his performance and yet never once goes overboard with his expressions.
Lois and Clark continue to show their deepening friendship at the hospital where Clark is acutely aware of Lois’s anguish and concern over her cousin’s condition. The two of them have a heart to heart about what happened inside the dam that shows that Lois truly trusts Clark by telling him about the weirdness of how she was cured. Lois gets herself all in a panic and decides to try to get some dirt on Lex because she just can’t deal with hanging around being able to do nothing for Chloe in the hospital. Clark warns her that Lex is dangerous – a theme that is supposed to permeate through the season with Lois investigating Smallville’s local Billionaire. Lois’s reaction to Clark at the end of the scene seemed somewhat insensitive when Clark got all choked up when he was about to tell her that Lana was dead and instead of listening Lois stops him and wailed, “If this is another heart-to-heart about Lana, I don’t mean to be insensitive, but Chloe is fighting for her life and I am barely keeping it together, so one more ounce of emotion and I might just lose it, so make yourself useful for once (ouch) and just stay here and make sure nothing happens to my cuz, okay?” Lois storms off leaving Clark confused and sucking up his pain.
Lois’s reaction at the hospital was actually a very mature response to an emotional crisis. How many times in your life have you had horrific things happen to you or horrible news delivered to you at the worst possible time and the LAST thing that you can do is have the luxury of breaking down?
Lois’s response to Clark was a defense mechanism. I suppose it seemed “mean” to some people, however, if you can’t understand what she did, it’s likely you’ve never been in her kind of situation before.
Here’s an example: Say you’re at work and are in the middle of an important meeting and have just been delivered the news that someone close to you had died - it’s not appropriate to just break down and burst into tears because you might lose a big client or lose face in front of your boss. What do you do? Well you feel like you’re drowning but choke through what you need to do and PRAY that nobody mentions something that might make you think of the horrific news that you’ve just been given…you hold on until you get home where you can THEN finally bawl your head off.
THIS is why Lois said what she did to Clark. Her wanting to run to Lex’s was to give her something to do to put off falling apart.
Again, this is what makes LOIS Clark’s future partner, she can keep a cool head in a crisis and push aside her own emotions in order to get the job done. It’s why she can handle being Superman’s wife - by putting up those emotional walled barriers she’ll give away nothing to the outside world, even though she might be screaming inside with pain and worry.
The Chloe resurrection scene in the hospital was great and harkens back to HIDDEN when Clark “died” and was brought back to life. We got our next great scene with Clark using his powers in a new way. Had Clark not had his super hearing ability he wouldn’t have heard Chloe’s pleas for help.
Allison Mack did an amazing job in this scene. Not only were her screams hair raising, but after she’s been saved, we got to see a new side of Chloe that we’ve never seen before – that of a frightened victim. In the past when Clark rescued her from a strange situation she would’ve just grabbed him and started crying. Instead she tries to get as far away from Clark as possible as she tries to make sense of what has happened to her. I’m rather excited about seeing what they do with Chloe this season after too many seasons of having very little character growth from her. Seeing her react to having special abilities and having to constantly worry about what other people think of her will be exciting to watch.
The Talon scene a bit later was something that we’ve been dying to see coming as well. For once Chloe was there basically just as a sounding board for Clark to ping ideas off of, however, unlike the last couple of seasons, she doesn’t magically have the answers to point Clark on the right path on how to fix his problems. Instead he turns to Martian Manhunter for answers.
At the end of the episode Chloe is there for Clark when he confessed that he’d been traveling down the wrong path at the end of last season – that he wanted to kill Lex and for once understood what it meant to allow anger to be your ally, that it was “clean.” The use of the word clean is interesting because it implies that it’s easy to cleanse one of all responsibility for one’s actions. That actually was a very astute observation on Clark’s behalf. Clark is now acutely aware that he’s different than humans and exploring his Kryptonian side will hopefully become a large theme for this season.
This scene ends with Lois arriving and comforting Clark over losing Lana. Having recently lost her own friend, Wes, she gives him some heartfelt advice that the pain will subside. Clark, as always, is rather befuddled over how Lois can always seemingly tell him the right thing when he needs to hear at the right time.
Clark/Manhunter
The two conversations between Clark and Manhunter in the episode were filled with hard questions that have been posed to Clark that we’ve been desperately missing on the show since Jonathan’s death. For anyone who watched the deleted scenes on the Season 6 DVDs there was a scene in LABYRINTH that was cut that showed Manhunter ripping into Clark for allowing his quest to be human to weaken his character. Although Martha has been there for her son in season 6, she could really only foster his humanity, and indirectly by advising him to follow his heart she assisted in sending him down a dark and scary emotional path last season. Now Clark’s got someone new to align with who not only knew his birth father but who he can relate to Manhunter because the Martian is NOT human and shares similar abilities to Clark and most understands what he’s going through in life by being different.
Hopefully one of the key themes of this season will stem out from this conversation w/ Clark coming to terms w/ the fact that he’s an alien and won’t view that w/ disgust like he has in the past. The conversations w/ Manhunter in BIZARRO certainly did give us hope for this.
The Luthors
Lionel who was knocked out at the end of PHANTOM only made one brief appearance in this episode. The mystery of what happened to Lionel was not further addressed in the episode other than Lex wondering what happened to him. There is a bit of a continuity where Clark goes to the dam to look for Lionel and then up and forgets about him for the rest of the episode. Poor Lionel some thanks for remaining Clark’s ally all of this past season.
Lex’s “religious experience” has obviously left a mark on him. The scene with Lex in Luthorcorp was beautifully done. The Luthor office rather represents secrets, lies, lust for power, and morally ambiguous wrongdoings. Michael perfectly portrayed the part of the humbled man who was trying to make sense of something that made no sense. His voice absolutely oozed with remorse. This certainly is a different man from even a few hours earlier who was arguing with his wife and menacingly trying to hold onto her even though she wanted to leave.
The Bizarro/Lex scenes were great and right out of the comics where Lex and Bizarro usually share a strange alliance/friendship. Again, we see Bizarro taking pieces from Clark’s past and twisting them around for his own selfish needs. Instead of hating Lex, he plays on the former friendship of the two adversaries because he knows that Lex can provide him with the meteor rocks that he needs to stay healthy & give him extra strength. Lex, as always is tempted for his deepest desire is to gain back Clark’s trust and friendship.
Even after Clark nearly strangled the life out of Lex in CRIMSON and PHANTOM, it’s interesting that Lex would say that he’d never help Bizarro to kill Clark, some part of Lex is obviously still holding out that their friendship can be restored. For all that Lex is trying to change his ways, his nature can’t fully change and he while holding a rifle on Bizarro he demands to know where in the hell Bizarro is from and why he’s interested in Clark.
Our parting shot is of Lex being led into his prison cell and his looking at a picture of him and Lana, who we find out is of course not dead but is hiding out in China.
Final thoughts
The episode ends with Clark staring at the moon, obviously lost over where the next step in his journey will take him and this then cuts to a lonely and contemplative Kara sitting on top of a Smallville watertower.
She spends a moment nursing a Kryptonian bracelet and slips into onto her wrist. She then stands up, plants her fists on her hips, and flies off.
We can only hope that the end is symbolic that Kara will become a force of action in Clark’s stagnating life and help him to move forward towards his destiny.
Overall the episode felt rather rushed being it was only 41 minutes long w/ 2 of that recapping the end of season 6. Because the episode was shortened there were some inconsistencies in the storytelling that prevented the episode from becoming one of the great season openers. However, overall the episode was solid and addressed many concerns that fans had with the quagmire of emotional muck that made up the end of season 6.
Clark seems to be getting back on track, or at least has admitted to many of his failings over the last year, and that is the first step on leading him back towards the right path towards becoming Superman.
Ammendment: Note that in the scenes at Luthor Corp. we see Gina who becomes Lex’s go to gal in the episode Traveler later in the season.
Media Credits: Video courtesy Kate OSCK admin and SmallvilleStarpoints, HD screencaps from KEakaCK
Filed under: Essays, Smallville, Videos | Tagged: Smallville Bizarro Review
