Spoilers.
Smallville Official Site
The Time: Thursdays, 8:00 PM, The CW
The Show:
Having
grown up in Smallville under the protective eye of Jonathan and Martha
Kent, Clark Kent, the future Superman, is finally setting out into the
world to pursue his destiny. Ever wary of protecting his
secret, Clark nonetheless secretly uses his Kryptonian superpowers to
help people and save lives. He’s now colleagues with Lois
Lane at the Daily Planet and still friends with Chloe Sullivan, his
childhood pal who knows his secret. Lex Luthor has
mysteriously vanished after destroying the Fortress and learning his
secret. Lex’s hand-picked successor, Tess Mercer, is
nevertheless a dangerous individual who is obsessed with learning Lex’s
fate and the secret he was pursuing. And a dangerous enemy,
in the form of paramedic Davis Bloom is growing ever a bigger threat.
The Stars:
• Tom Welling – Clark Kent
• Allison Mack – Chloe Sullivan
• Erica Durance – Lois Lane
• Aaron Ashmore – Jimmy Olsen
• Justin Hartley – Oliver Queen / Green Arrow
• Cassidy Freeman – Tess Mercer
• Sam Witwer – Davis Bloom
The Episode: “Eternal”
Davis’ secret is finally out, at least as far as Clark and Chloe are concerned…and Tess. But Tess knows something about him that Clark and Chloe don’t. In a fine bit of retconning the shit out of the entire Smallville mythology, turns out Davis was also in the first meteor shower that saw Clark arrive in Smallville. When Tess discovers this, she takes matters into her own hands. But it seems that all attempts to kill Davis, including his own, only do one thing: make him stronger.
The Lowdown:
In terms of action or adventure, there’s not much if anything going on this episode. Clark sees almost no time on the superhero field and hardly even uses his powers. This might have been one of those deus ex episodes where something you thought you knew gets added to for story’s sake. Yes it is, but no it isn’t. Even though this is a retcon episode, it’s done with a fair amount of intelligence and it’s just one more critical stepping stone to what could end up being the biggest fight (God I hope so) in the show’s history.
Davis was in some sort of egg-like container that landed right next to Clark’s spaceship on meteor day. He emerged as some sort of green liquid and assumed the form of a boy. Lionel had his men combing the field for a boy, because thanks to previous retconning in recent seasons, he knew that Clark was going to arrive, which was why he was in Smallville that day. Lionel’s men find Davis instead of Clark and pick him up like a stray dog. They run tests on him, but his results come back normal, so Lionel has his men drop the boy off. But before they do, a young Lex finds Davis in the mansion and befriends him for a brief time.
This is all in Lionel’s journal, which Tess gets her hands on. She puts two and two together and realizes that Davis is the destroyer to Clark’s savior and must be destroyed himself. A car bomb doesn’t quite do the trick, though, and Davis eventually recovers and leaves the mansion, after bitchslapping Tess across a couple of rooms of course. When Clark and Chloe learn Davis’ secret, they set out to find him. But Davis finds Chloe and convinces her to kill him by going to one of Lionel’s old labs with a kryptonite spa treatment. Of course this fails to kill him, at least permanently, and Davis tells Chloe that his need to be with her is stronger than his need to kill everything that moves on the planet, so that if she’ll stay with him, maybe there’s hope for the world.
So why don’t I mind this retcon so much? Because it’s done in a smart way with a knowledge of the show’s own established mythology and makes good use of it. I’m talking about the Kawatchie Indian myth of Neman and Segeeth (probably misspelled both of those), which was a legend about Clark and his greatest nemesis, which for years had been hinted at being Lex. But Tess correctly puts it together that Segeeth is actually Davis, which I think is just a great spin on that old storyline. I always think it’s cool when a show can reference its own stories in new and fresh ways. It also puts a pretty good explanation on how Davis arrived and how he made his way from the cornfield to the streets of Metropolis as a boy. Also plenty of old – like first episode old – footage of the meteor shower and Jonathan and Martha.
Tess also compares Clark and Davis’ situation to that of Jesus and Judas, and realizes that Clark can never become the savior of the world until he’s faced the destroyer of the world. The way that they were emphasizing that means that the encounter with Doomsday could finally be the launching pad for Clark’s super development to really start taking off. I was also wrong about how Davis and Chloe’s relationship has been worked into the season. Chloe is fulfilling a purpose in Davis’ story and I can start to appreciate how the producers have managed to extend Doomsday’s story to fill out an entire season. In the past I’ve bitched about how one of the problems of the show was that whenever they’ve had an interesting villain, he’s around for about three minutes before being dispatched by Clark. Now when they bother to develop one to the utmost, I bitch about that too. Heh, silly me.
Anyway, Tess plays the cat and mouse game with Clark, but drops her pretense about not knowing about him, although Clark can’t let go of his own pretenses. He’s got a deathgrip on plausible deniability. But Tess does know everything, including Kal-El. Plus, she has Lex’s purple doomsday doohickey that brought down the fortress at the end of last year. I thought that might not have been the end of it. Only four episodes left for the season, but we’ve got to wait three weeks to seek Lois in vinyl and stilettos.