Finally watched last week's Smallville.
It's becoming increasingly clear that we will not be seeing the New Gods in the next two weeks, which practically makes the episode title, "Apocalypse", false advertising.
Instead what we got was another goddamn It's a Wonderful Life episode -- I guess I can't blame them, given that their take on A Christmas Carol is probably my favorite episode, the Clark-saves-Santa B story notwithstanding.
Anyway. The writing was pretty mediocre, and all the best bits were just exploitative fan service. The usual apocalyptic story that creates an excuse to kill everybody off.
Showing Clark's baby brother, confirming Jonathan's continued existence, and also bringing in the Sheriff were all wonderful touches as far as recounting the people who are dead as a result of Clark's actions. However, bringing it down to "everybody dies anyway" is a gigantic fucking copout. That and this whole episode was already done, better, a year ago on Heroes. And frankly, Heroes spent much more time ripping off Watchmen than this ep did.
All that said, the visuals were solid and the direction was good; Tom Welling is probably a better director than he is an actor (though, in his defense, he probably does the best he can with the lines he's given).
Anyway. They could still wrap the series up in the two remaining eps of this season, but since it's not happening, I expect to see a final season that closely resembles this episode -- wink-wink nods to the audience as Clark starts wearing glasses and working at the Planet.
