Dominatio Per Malum

Smallville Season 4 aired its 90min season finale on May 18, and i managed to finish the season on May 27, slightly more than a week behind US viewers. Meanwhile Channel 5 is only less than halfway through Season 4. Talk about being slow. Season 4 has 22 episodes, ending with S4E22 “Commencement”. A Season 5 is currently in the works.

You know how it feels when you come to the realisation that a series you used be fanatical about starts to suck? It is with a sinking feeling that i realise this when i watched the season finale of Smallville yesterday, a sense of sadness and disappointment. Its the feeling you get when you realise that the Simpsons just ain’t that funny anymore and you defect to South Park. Its that sense of going to the next phase of maturity when you suddenly realise that you no longer like to watch cartoons anymore, and what used to be cool is now corny. It is the feeling that the Star Wars fanatic actuely felt, when after the intervening years after Return of the Jedi, they pack cinemas in anticipation of The Phantom Menace, only to realise that the Force was no longer with Lucas. In a sense, Season 4’s series finale was the last chance, a chance to atone for the weak episodes of Season 4, a way to reinstate the confidence in fans who felt that the series was beginning to dip in quality and lose its viewership to the likes of Lost or Desperate Housewives. Yet, like that sinking feeling you get when you watch The Phantom Menace, you know that the magic is gone.

Vis a vis the average episode of Season 4, S4E22 was not so bad. But as a finale, it is doubtlessly the least exciting and most plodding finale, especially when compared to the virtuoso ending of Season 3. In retrospect, after the high point that was Season 3, there was no way to go but down, but still the dip in quality is truly disappointing.

Starting from S4E01, “Crusade” which was a continuation of Season 3’s finale, the choice of starting it with a big fat “3 months Later” was the first major misstep of Season 4. Whilst the introduction of Erica Durance as Lois Lane was probably a smart move, the miscasting of Durance as Lane however was not. While not abysmal in performance, Erica Durance’s performance in this season is patchy at best and her cousin status with Chloe Sullivan is utterly contrived.

But the biggest mistake of the entire season was the inexplicable decision to add the Countess subplot as well as the intoduction of Jason Teague to the series, a movie which serves only to detract from the season. While the Countess subplot did start to get a tad interesting later in the season once Lionel Luthor starts crossing swords with Genevive Teague, it was still by and large an unmitigated failure and responsible for one of the worst episodes of the series: “Sacred” S4E15.

In fact the Season starts off sluggishly, with mundane freak of the week episodes which were all below par until a little spark lighted in S4E05 “Run”, which featured a young Flash. That would be followed by argurably the best episode of the Season, S4E06 “Transference” which despite its Freaky Friday premise has one of the best plot and sequences of the season. After that, it was a string of mediocre episodes until S4E09 “Bound”, in which the much anticipated Lex Luthor episode turned out to be an utter disappointment and was at one time the worst Smallville episode ever, only to be dethroned later in the Season by an ever lousier episode.

Bringing back Alicia proved to be one of the best choices the producers made, and next to Transference, the 2 Alicia episodes S4E11 Unsafe and S4E12 Pariah were some of the highlights of the season. That is until the quality dips with S4e15 Sacred, and wrests away the worst episode honour from Bound with one off the most unbearably crappy episodes i have ever seen. And after that, a series of unspectacular episodes until the season finale, with perhaps S4E17 Onyx being above average.

My report card for Smallville season 4? A big fat C-. While there were, as always some standout episodes, these were few and far between, with many generic freak-of-the week episodes and some truly abysmal low points.

The Episodes Worth Watching:
S4E06- Transference
S4E08- Spell
S4E11- Unsafe
S4E12- Pariah
S4E17- Onyx

Abysmally Bad:
S4E09-Bound
S4E15-Sacred

Mediocre: Everything else.

References: Season 4 episode guide