Ranadok …doesn't have much better to do

Smallville somehow made it to a ninth season!

Smallville is a bad show. It is a truly terrible hour of so-called entertainment. Of the shows that I watch (and many I don't) Smallville is by far the worst. I cannot get through a single episode without getting extremely annoyed at the characters, actors, writers, and anyone else involved in this seemingly immortal train wreck. I still watch it though. In fact, I have stopped watching other shows that, while quite bad, I would still consider to be better than Smallville (how's it going, Heroes?). So why then do I continue to watch Smallville? Simply because it is fun to complain. It's also kid of nice (in a very weird way, I admit) to watch a show that is truly and completely abysmal that I have no interest in.

I also used to watch Smallville with my brother. We watched and mocked for 6 or so painful, painful seasons before he moved out (to avoid watching more Smallville, no doubt). However, I will not suffer alone, so for the last little while I have been reviewing and recapping the episodes as I watch them to keep him in the loop. The reviews range from relatively short overviews of the major plot points and the things that are so very wrong with them to scene by scene breakdowns of plot points and what is wrong with them. This, being the season premiere, naturally gets the detailed treatment. The full point-form (yet rambling) review is in the full post, but be warned... I write it as I watch the episode, with little to no checking of facts, fiction, or spelling. It's pretty much unedited junk, but considering the show... you can't expect anything else.  Don't bother reading it, really.

Previously on Smallville: I didn't pay attention to the previouslies, so here's the recap I did at the end of the last season (more for my sake than anybody else's):

Clark: Faded out and 'Dead'
Red/Blue Blur: Mopey and needing a better name now that it's his only one
Chloe: ALL ALONE HAHAHAHAHAAAA! Also, setting up shop in the clock tower where Jimmy bit it, it seems (oh, the memories...)
Lois: Future? Past? Feudal japan where she will find out a childhood legend is not who he seems and teach him a lesson about love? The possibilites are endless! One thing's certain, though: amnesia, here we come!
Davis: Impaled and dead
Jimmy: Impaled and dead
Mini-Jimmy: Well on the way to crippling emotional issues as everyone tries to make him into his dead older brother even though he will never be able to meaure up in anybody's eyes to the hero he was (poor guy, the only real sympathetic one of the bunch)
Doomsday: blowed up and dead (Or so clark says...)
Leage of Whoever (present): Bummin' around, being heroe-y (though apparently Chloe doesn't know they are alive? This could just be a good old fashioned continuity error.)
League of Whoever (future): Plot device to get rid of Lois and make Clark a little more mopey
Zod: Naked, not dead.
She-Lex: Staring at naked Zod
Episode: Confusing jumbled mess
Season of buildup to epic doomsday/superman fight: done in thirty seconds, pointless waste of time and energy
Pete: Still criminally underused!
Whitney: sucks to be him

Yeah, looks about right. So, here we go!

- It's three weeks later, and Chloe looking for Lois (via phone!). The person on the other end of the phone isn't being helpful, so she hacks into their 'system' with about two keypresses and puts 'another cursor on the screen' to... teach them a lesson about customer service or something. We're only thirty seconds in. This is going to be a long season...

- Hey, look, Gaeta's back! Chloe almost shoots him, thinking he's a ghost, but you can't blame her, the lighting is typical Smallville (read:  none). He proceeds to tell Chloe that nobody wants to talk to her and everyone is avoiding her and doing fine. She should have shot him.

-Lois appears on a train in a purple lightning bolt, along with some other woman (who is dressed in black with a ninja mask). One kung-fu movie zoom and bad kung-fu fight later, the train derails and they are saved by the former red-blue blur (now wearing all black with the traditional Superman shield on the chest in slightly lighter black, though mostly obscured by his black trench coat - I dub the the blurblurblur!). He sees Lois and mopes a bit. Then runs away to mope some more (Batman-style on the edge of a skyscraper), but not before vandalizing a nearby building with a heat-visioned S-shield. I guess he just watched a Zorro movie or something.

- Somebody SAAAAAAAAAAVE meeee...  With some new clips  and a new cast member - Mason from Dead Like Me. (If we are lucky, he's here to take Clark's soul and end all of our suffering).

- Back in the Fortress of Solitude (AKA the Mopeatorium), the blurblurblur whines about not being able to fly and Jor-El tells him to stop being such a whiny wuss. More Moping.

- Meanwhile, back in the worst-lit hospital in the world, Lois has amnesia. What a twist! Chloe tries to bring her up to speed, but she sneaks out while Chloe goes to score some pills for her.

Inside the hospital

- Lois runs to the phone booth on the only street in metropolis (thinking it's three weeks earlier and she is supposed to meet the blurblurblur), but nobody is there because she is a moron.

- The blurblurblur jumps off the Statue of Liberty and tries to fly, then whines some more about destiny and crap to Daddy.

- New Guy (pretty sure it's Zod) is in Stately Luthor Manor talking to some other new people, looking all Military. Turns out they don't have any powers and his peons are none too pleased. He pulls the old 'KNEEL BEFORE ZOD' line, but gets smacked down (literally). Oh, and the whole scene is filmed in sickly Matrix Green tint.

- It's the next day, and Lois is in the train wreck. Some random guy walks in and tells her it's three weeks since she disappeared. He tells her it's the 25th, she grabs a paper off of the floor, and look at that, it's from the 25th! (Problem with this: the train crashed the night before, so why doesn't the paper have the previous day's date?) Random guy fills her in on the blurblurblur (now called just the blur by everyone as the red and blue are gone... what imaginative folks, these Metropolitypes) and kisses her for reasons unexplained.

- Gaeta has pimped out Chloe's pad using Oliver's funds (I thought he was just a scientist?). Chloe thinks this is super cool and fills him in on Lois going to the future. Turns out he's already looked into it and done some 'scans' that prove it possible. Naturally.

- A clearly beaten She-Lex wakes up in a room with an imprisoned Major Zod. They psychoanalyze, then try to kill each other.

- The blurblurblur meets with Chloe. Both whine about how they are better alone.

- Ollie gets beat up by some guy in a cage fight, Lois appears and gives him a pep talk. Then the wall explodes, and the Ninja-chick (who it turns out is kryptonian) appears. The Blurblurblur appears, burns his logo in something, and whisks her away to the barn (because they still have the set built, I guess).  She claims she's come from the future to kill the blurblurblur before he can destroy her world, chucks some power-stealing blue K on the ground, and pulls out a katana. They fight in a way that is theoretically non-powered but has some fishy wirework and slowmo. She dies through her own incompetence. The blurblurblur mopes.

- The former Zod-ites interrogate She-Lex and Zod. Zod delivers a stirring speech. His soldiers KNEEL BEFORE ZOD! There is a musical sting on some woman who doesn't look like anyone in particular (now-dead generic Ninja woman perhaps?).

- Chloe begs Clark (hey, 'Clark' is dead!) to go back in time and save Jimmy. The blurblurblur whines about destiny. Chloe cries.

- She-lex meets with the most incompetent security team ever. You know that whole summoning an alien army, being captured, beaten, and almost killed thing she had going on over the past couple of weeks? All part of the plan. Yeah, the security team was recording it the whole time... but it's been deleted. CURSE YOU, ZOD!

- Lois types some stuff. Random inappropriate kiss guy from before appears, tells her he is taking over Clark's position. The name? John Corben. For all you non-Superman-following folks out there, that means he's a cyborg with a kryptonite heart. How long before he and the blurblurblur duke it out on metropolis's only street? I give it eighteen episodes. This show doesn't rush things.

- The blurblurblur calls Lois, and whines about... something.

- Lois (back at the Talon apartment - another set that is still kicking around) falls asleep and has some crazy vision/dream/memories of all sorts of stuff not worth watching again to list.  She and Clark (or is it the blur?) have sex, Chloe dies, Zod makes people KNEEL BEFORE HIM, blah, blah, blah. I'm sure the rest of the season will revisit it over and over again. She wakes up and the episode is mercifully over.

Right, so that's about all of that. Stay tuned next week for some more people whining about more crap. Hooray.