Chloee is actually the hottest of the three (great smile), but whatever.
The best parts of the series are all the season premier, midpoint and finale episodes. The villain-of-the-week episodes don’t stand as well on their own. It’s sort of the opposite of X-Files, where all the monster-of-the-week episodes were great, but the overall story arch just kept dragging on and on until it simply became an overly complex and confusing mess.
The highlight of the series for me was the growth and transformation of Lex Luthor. Yea, the show is mainly about Clark and all, but watching him learn to shoot lasers out of his eyes when a particularly sexy teacher gives him an erection was an awkward moment.
You have to shovel through a lot of garbage to see any real gems, but they are there if you care enough to do the sifting. The worst plot-lines over all, for the seasons I’ve seen, pretty much all involve Lana (Witchcraft/Magic, Ghosts, love affairs etc)
The highlight of the series for me was the growth and transformation of Lex Luthor.
Totally. I mean, some of the kryptonite monster of the week episodes were shameless, shameless ripoffs of Buffy episode, down to using the same musical cues at times. Really embarrassing stuff. But Michael Rosenbaum and John Glover as the Luthers were just sublime. They were the only good reason to watch the show and at times they elevated it to epic heights.
Smallville is fun and light. I enjoyed the first 5 or 6 seasons. The last two seasons have really gone off the rails and I stopped watching but it was a solid show for a while, given the natural limitations of what it was trying to do. What it offers is some silly teenage drama in a fairly well done comic book setting. You have to deal with the fact that a major character will get shot in the stomach one episode and then be completely healed the next episode or that Lana is cast in the role of damsel in distress pretty much every single episode but it sort of works if you just buy into that sort of episodic content.
The character development is itneresting and the dialogue is usually pretty good. It helps a lot to start at the beginning because you’ll be more invested in the characters. The Green Arrow stuff later on is definitely fun but I don’t think it’d that be interesting if you just skipped ahead to it.
Yes, the girls help the show. Chloe is a great addition and really cute. Lois is funny but I could do without the fake boobs. Lana is a bit overrated but hey, whatever.
I always felt that this show suffered most because they clearly didn’t have an end in mind when they started. If they’d actually, at least loosely, plotted out like five years of the show, followed him in high school, then either show him going to college or perhaps going on a round the world trip where he’d learn what it truly meant to be a superhero and creating the Superman persona to separate his powers from his “normal life” with a final episode that has him showing up in Metropolis in the suit and cape, that would have been great… but instead we’ve got this endless meandering mess that has no real focus.
I started giving up after he got out of high school… as they started introducing more and more of the Justice League I started missing more episodes… I totally quit a couple seasons ago. I’ve heard Zan & Jana, the Wonder Twins, will be showing up this season… so, if you still watch, enjoy that! :)
Allison Mack (Chloe) isn’t what I would call hot (they don’t show her from the stern much for a reason), but what she is is an excellent actress (certainly the best of the females - oh God, the model that played Kara was just awful). She should have a long career as a character actress whenever Smallville ends (while Tom Welling and Kristen Kreuk better make good investments with their money). Anyway, the character Chloe always seemed a better match for Clark intellectually.
It basically is, only one with super powers. Dawson’s Creek with super powers sounds about right.
I’ll echo what others have said. I watched the first four seasons with my son and thought it was fun family viewing. I really liked the dynamic between Clark and his parents and the idea that, in spite of his powers, Clark Kent is as human as the rest of us and struggles with many of the same issues any other teen does. True to the Superman mythology, his parents were the great shapers of his sense of morality, decency and fairness. (You can see why I enjoyed watching it with my son who was a young teen at the time.)
Also interesting was the Luthor dynamic. The two of them being friends and Luthor’s struggle to find his own path, which we all know will end badly.
My problem with the show, even back then, was that it stagnated. None of the relationships ever developed, Luthor kept walking up to the line without crossing it and four years of retreading the same material turned Clark into an angsty mess.
The show definitely had its bright moments, most of them involving Chloe and the Luthors. I didn’t like any of the Jor-El stuff, though and hated all of the witchcraft nonsense. (Was that season 4 or 5?) I think I stopped watching a few episodes into Lois’s second season.
Smallville at its best is somewhat worth watching. Smallville at its worst is cringeworthy. The witch season was a low point, although I appreciated that it was heralded by Lana getting a mysterious tramp stamp.
Lana also spent a lot of time in the shower during this period as well. It was not enough of a mitigating factor to compensate for the stupidity of the story.
I donno. There was plenty of nonsensical Chloe-related melodrama.
OH NO! CHLOE DIED!
n/m she good
I loved the moment when Clark first managed to get the message from Jor-El and THEN SOMETHING PRETTY COOL HAPPENS. Unfortunately, they totally back off on that startling and interesting premise. Still, it was a great scene and, hey, Terrence Stamp!
Edit: Edited for spoilers, just in case the OP decides to ignore all the advice that he run away from Smallville at top speed.
I dunno. I don’t think I’d ever call Dawson’s Creek a great show, but I enjoyed it, and I don’t think Smallville has what it had. You’d think the superpowers and aliens and shit (and Lex) would make up for that, but not really.
I think one of the big things is that Dawson’s Creek changed. They had some on-and-off relationship bullshit, but they actually moved on with their lives, met new people, made discernable progress through school, etc. I gather that there was -some- forward progress, kind of, in Smallville after I stopped watching it. But after two seasons of awkward but basically unconsummated romantic tension, I was really sick of that aspect of the show.
