Smallville

[Miranda]

Yes, I'm reallly looking forward to the Grand Finale! I agree with everything you say there Slade.

[Miranda]

Well I watched the grand finale yesterday, er... But it was good seeing Clark flying AT LAST. I do think they finished the series about two seasons too late though, it did drag on.

[Slade]

Overall a very disappointing two part finale. Chloe only really seemed to play a cameo role despite being a pivotal part of Clark's character since the start. They should have brought Lana back, certainly during the wedding as he seemed to be Clark's first love. And the whole thing to me felt uneventful and flat. I did like however the fact that Lex returned. I liked how he acknowledged how important Clark's role as a foe was. In fact it was essential. Ironically now that Tess was one of the good guys and likeable, they killed her off. Lex wanted to save her even though she'd already been saved. It was good to see Jonathan Kent again too. And at least we got to see the red cape.

10 seasons is great for a US show but a lot of the episodes this season felt like been there done that, so ending it was a good thing. The right decision. And I still stand by what I said in that I preferred seasons 8 and 9.

[Red Ranger 1]

Well, spent the last week and a bit catching up on Season 10 via DVD.I think the show did suffer from sticking so rigidly to its insistence that Clark wasn't going to fly and wasn't going to become Superman.(Hearing him call himself the Blur as a compromise got a bit annoying after a while.)If the show had run for four of five years, it would have worked but it went on for at least three years too long with that premise:The limitations were obvious by the middle of Season 6, when you had every other superhero(apart from the important ones)around except Superman.By the end, you had a Clark Kent who was working at the Daily Planet, dating Lois Lane, friends with Jimmy Olsen, a member of the Justice League and fighting Brainiac, Bizarro, Darkseid, General Zod, Metallo and Lex Luthor so why wasn't he Superman?

I think the show did feel the absence of Chloe a bit, when she came back for a run midseason and you had a couple of episodes where it was her and Clark again, it felt like the show upped its game a bit.I'm glad they had her and Oliver married(at least, I think that's what happened...)and managed to keep the relationship alive even when she wasn't around.She seemed to have a decent amount to do in the first half of the finale but in the second half she was lost in the mix a bit.Tess slotted in well in the good guys team, although she was still making decisions Clark wouldn't approve of(then again, so did Lana and Chloe), most notably trying to kill Alexander against his wishes.(By the way, the needle breaking against his skin was the biggest jawdropping ending of the season:Didn't see that coming at all.)Astonishing that with only four or five regulars they were still missing them out all the time:In the early seasons, they seemed determined to squeeze all eight of them into each episode.I was waiting for the episode with only Clark and Lois in and it finally came with Episode 18.

I don't know whether I took a while to get into the season or it took a while to get going:I found myself thinking very much of Miranda's comment about remaking different movies since at one point each episode seemed to be set in an entirely different universe."Last week Lois was possessed by an Egyptian goddess, this week she's being sacrificed by the Crazy Amish People."It even seemed to forget what Clark can do:He's got a necklace that will contain Isis if sunlight shines on it but it's night, so instead of super speeding round to the other side of the world where it's day, he blasts it with his heat vision.Which is apparently the same thing.Except it isn't.

The 200th episode I was in two minds about:The flashbacks were a nice touch, Lois trying to remind everyone she was at the school for about a week was great continuity, the punch lady acting like a frustrated shipper going "Clark was so meant to be with Chloe-or possibly Lana" and Brainiac basically acting as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future worked okay.But I couldn't quite get over the fact that a character who was apparently crushed to death ten years previous after killing his mother and sealing Lana in a cocoon so he could mate with her turned up and thanked Clark for helping him out.

The Lane family reunion episode was another one I had mixed feelings about.Good idea but handled poorly:General Lane's turnaround felt out of character, if he was as against vigilantes as he claimed, you'd think he'd see the Blur symbol as a sign that he was responsible for the attack, not that he saved Lana.And his "I only act like a jerk towards my daughter's boyfriends to see if she loves them enough to object" left me thinking "Well, if you've been doing that to the poor guys for years [but apparently not Oliver or Grant] then you're still a jerk."Lucy was a fairly welcome addition mostly by being hot and I wished she'd come back later in the season.Her relationship with Lois followed on well from her last on screen appearance in Season 4 but seemed to ignore the fact they'd spoken on the phone and got on fine the previous year.

Highlights of the season for me:'Masquerade', the point where Oliver and Chloe's relationship was at its peak, Clark and Lois' relationship was the same, the Darkseid arc was kicking into high gear and the season seemed to be stepping up a gear.'Fortune', an absolutely hilarious episode which had some brilliant Clark and Chloe interaction(them waking up and wondering if they'd got married was an excellent idea), only marred by the uncomfortable inclusion of a crime subplot and the jarring scenes of Emil being tortured, even if it was played partly for laughs. 'Booster', which had a great anti-hero/anti-villain duo in Booster Gold and Blue Beetle and the best material Cat had all season, plus Clark getting one step closer to becoming Superman.

Real lowlight:'Kent', an unnecessary sequel to the already pretty poor 'Luthor', which completely undermined that episode and ended with a typically naive Clark sending an unrepentent multiple murderer back to the other world, convinced he'll be nice now because he tried to drop Tess off a tall building instead of snapping her neck, even though he'd just killed that world's Oliver.I thought at first they were setting it up to bring Alt-Jonathan to our world but even that didn't happen, rendering it totally pointless.

Some of the season arcs didn't really work.The VRA storyline, which thankfully didn't outstay its welcome like I thought it would, seemed to be based on the infamous Marvel Comics Captain America versus Iron Man Civil War storyline, although at least Smallville had the sense to recognise that those who lock people up in internment camps without trial are the bad guys.It felt at times like they didn't know what to do with Alexander, who at first looked like he was becoming Lex, then seemed to switch and become a little brother figure for Clark, before disappearing with only a couple of lines' explanation.The Darkseid arc was a bit uneven and could have done with a more solid enemy rather than a cloud of gas and a few sporadically appearing toadies.(Biggest disappointment was Godfrey, set up as one of Darkseid's chief agents then doing absolutely nothing.)

The supporting characters were fairly well served.Bringing Lionel back was a work of genius and the ending of 'Luthor' was loaded with subtext.I didn't mind Kara coming back and then fading into the background, with so many heroes around they needed to give them their individual spotlights, although her abrupt departure in 'Prophecy' was very strange:It felt like it was setting it up for something else or tying in with comic continuity but didn't really work.(I always felt they missed a trick with the character:She was apparently written out because they thought her arc would be too similar to Clark's but seemed to miss the fact she was a Kryptonian learning to live among humans, whereas he was brought up by humans and learning about his Kryptonian side.)And it was good that the question of what the Kandorians did with Zod was addressed and we got to see his comeuppance.Cat was a bit of an oddity, who started off seeming important then faded from view, although she did get less irritating once she dropped the anti-hero stance.

The finale...my main reaction is "Huh?"The first half was...okay.Too much attention was given to Clark and Lois' doubts about a wedding that, in the end, didn't happen anyway, Jonathan's ghost hanging around felt a bit silly and out of place and Martha's anger at Clark moving on and suggestion that living in the present instead of clinging onto relics of the past was a bad thing felt oddly pitched.But it had lots of Chloe, which was a good thing, and it seemed to be building up to something in the second half.And I didn't really mind Lana not coming back, since her exit was perfect and there was the tiny detail that she'd kill Clark if she went near him.I loved the next twenty minutes or so:Although Lex coming back and then getting amnesia seemed mainly a way to tie in with traditional continuity than anything, the showdown between him and Clark worked brilliantly.Tess' death was conceptually a great idea, as she goes the same way as the original Lionel, paying for her past but dying with a halo, protecting Clark's secret.Except it was handled appallingly, with no moment for the other characters to mourn or even know about her death.And about ten minutes from the end, as it all went a bit flashback happy, I realised they weren't going to have time to come up with a decent ending.And they didn't.We get about two minutes of Superman action, which wasn't really worth the ten year build up, and a very confusing coda, which fails to explain why Clark and Lois aren't married, deliberately obfuscates the issue of whether that's Chloe and Oliver's son and where Oliver is and pulls the rather embarrassing "Jimmy had a brother with the same name as him who looks exactly like him" card.A shame but on the whole, I'm glad they had a chance to finish it.

[Pierced Musie]

As someone who remembers watching the pilot on channel 4 10 years ago I have to say that I was kinda crying by the end of the last episode.

- The moment Lex appeared it was like the chemistry had never left. Clex to the end baby!!

- God I loved Tess. She was all woman and... *purrs* was almost as awesome as Chloe.

- I am glad that Lana was missing. For her to appear would have put a damper on Clark and his love for Lois.

The scene that was missing was one last Tess/Oliver moment.

I will miss you Smallville. Especially the way you never left out the HoYay !