Product: Smallville: The Complete Ninth Season (2009)
Rating: 2.0
It's time to end it
Superman has always fascinated me, and Smallville used to be an interesting series. But now, Clark Kent seems more a native of Dullsville as he inhabits the great city of Insipidopolis working (occasionally) a job for which he is completely unqualified and speeding around the city tackling bad guys while dressed like a Goth flasher and still trying to figure out why he's on Earth.Superman is implausible by definition, and Smallville has always stretched the limits of reason, to whit: twenty-five-year-old actors playing high school freshman, Chloe spending four years as school editor and having 24/7 access to the school (not to mention her impossible abilities as a computer hacker), Tess Harper seemingly as super as Superman, etc. But the series has become insanely implausible. I can accept the premise of a man with super strength and who can fly through the air (except that by season 9 Clark still can't fly although he did in previous seasons when affected by turquoise or ecru or whatever color d'jour of kryptonite was available). That is the Superman story, after all. What I can't accept is the human characters, episode after episode, getting socked in the head by super-villains and thusly smashed into a wall fifteen feet across the room only to rise with nothing more than a few cuts on their faces that likely will heal before the end of the show and certainly by the next one. Lois has been clobbered so often that by episode 9 she should look like an NHL goalie that never wore a mask and the have mental acuity of an Alzheimer's victim. Lana was possessed so many times that she should have left the show a raving lunatic. And exactly how does Chloe earn a living? I've wearied of watching 120 lb. women routinely beat the daylights out of 200 lb. muscular men themselves trained in the martial arts. And how does the disembodied Jor-El carry on perpetual interactive conversations with Clark (not to mention that he is as quixotic as the fictional character that generated that adjective)? It would seem from the number of Krytonians that keep appearing that all the inhabitants of Krypton escaped before the planet exploded. And enough with the kryptonite that seems to be more common on Earth than granite. It would seem by now that half of planet Earth knows Clark's secret. Since Clark has never adopted the traditional wimpy persona, he'll never be able to adopt a dual identity. I could go on, but you get the point. Writers are straining for ideas to keep the show running, and they're failing.I canceled Smallville from my Netflix list mid-ninth season. I used to enjoy it, but I've seen enough. It's grown old, stale, and, frankly, really stupid.