Smallville 7.20 Arctic (2007, TV) – 2/10

Tom Welling: Clark Kent Michael Rosenbaum: Lex Luthor Kristin Kreuk: Lana Lang Allison Mack: Chloe Sullivan Erica Durance: Lois Lane Aaron Ashmore: Jimmy Olsen Laura Vandervoort: Kara Writer (Characters’ Creator) Superman: Jerry Siegel Writer (Characters’ Creator) Superman: Joe Shuster Developer for Television: Alfred Gough Developer for Television: Miles Millar James Marsters: Brainiac Robert Picardo: Edward Teague Ari Cohen: Writer: Don Whitehead Writer: Holly Henderson Director: Todd Slavkin

Smallville 7.20 Arctic (2007) Edward Teague runs to South America after his run-in with Clark and Lex but Kara intercepts his flight, extracts the location of the device that controls The Traveler… and kills him. Clark tries to convince her that she has changed since travelling back to Krypton but she flies off and starts to assist Lex and the device. 2/10 This has been an awful season, largely dull, largely incompetently written and, again, sometimes astonishingly violent and horrible. Appropriately, this is an awful episode to close things out. I had already called the Kara plot twist but it didn’t stop it being lazily resolved. Lex finally steps foot in the Fortress of Solitude and while the events are predictably monumental, it’s delivered without impact or, bizarrely, crescendo. The scenes between Lex and Clark have always been the crux of Smallville and that dynamic has been lost this season. Considering we’ve waited seven years for these scenes, it’s a big disappointment. What’s even more disappointing is our knowledge of how Smallville consistently treats its season cliffhangers and so we can be sure that these events will be given short change in the first one or two episodes next season. I’m not sure if I’ll bother watching. This Smallville episode contains extremely unpleasant scenes, extreme violence, extreme fantasy violence, extremely dangerous imitable behaviour. Links Next episode: Odyssey Previous episode: Quest