Smallville: The Complete First Season

Review By: Dan Deevy
DanDeevy@TheCinemaSource.com

"Just because everyone else chooses to ignore the strange things that happen in this leafy little hamlet, doesn't mean that they don't happen."
- Allison Mack as Chloe Sullivan

Smallville is without a doubt one of the best comic book adaptations in years!

I must admit when I first heard that they were remaking Superman yet again, this time as a teenager growing up in Smallville, I shuddered and had strange flashes of Dean Cain and Terri Hatcher running through corn fields wearing red and gold Smallville Varsity Letter jackets. But after watching the pilot episode, I knew that for once my fears were unwarranted.

Say what you will about the WB network, they know how to combine gorgeous actors with meaningful, all-be-it teen angst-ridden, storylines that keep you watching week after week. In the case of Smallville, things did look a bit bleak there for a moment or two after the fourth episode had aired and it had followed the exact same formula as each and every previous episode.

In the pilot,‘Metamorphosis,’ ‘Hothead’ and ‘X-Ray,’ it was always the same damn meteor rocks that would manage to show up and incapacitate Clark just long enough for him to be hurt slightly towards the end of the show, and then of course overcome it and thwart his nemesis. Be it a neurotic Bug boy, a flame-throwing psychotic coach or even a shape-shifting Lana-obsessed lesbian, Clark always managed to overcome them all in precisely the same way every time. Luckily the writers found their way out of that repetitive storyline and starting finding new challenges for our hero.

Future episodes like ‘Hourglass,’ where Annette O’Toole proved that she was definitely not your parents ‘Martha Kent’ by kicking some serious ass as she defended herself against an ailing 80 year old mass murderer whose youth had been restored to him (played by Eric Christian Olsen) and ‘Leech,’ where a freak lighting strike transferred Clarks powers to another kid for a time, (played by X-Men’s Shawn Ashmore) proved that there were a lot of different directions that this show could and would go in.

In a lot of prequel situations, like UPN’s latest Star Trek series Enterprise, for example, knowing what comes after can really ruin the new stories that they are trying to tell. The exact opposite happens with this show. Every time something happens that winks to the mythology of Superman that we all know, it’s done in a respectful non-plot altering way. Yes we know that he will eventually learn how to use his X-ray vision properly when he gets older, but that doesn’t take away from the thrill of watching him discover that he has this ability. And the show doesn’t shy away from the fact that Clark is a kid at an incredibly awkward stage in his life and that in addition to the alien changes going on inside of him, his human hormones are also raging! ...