It’s tough to be tough in a tough city
Our favorite young high-flying young adult is back! This time he has drama at every bend. The eighth season of Smaville is out and the judgement on it is a bit above average. This season you’ll see Clark go up against Lex Luthor’s minions (while Lex is away trying to survive cold weather), a very young Justice League and the almighty Doomsday. Outside of these inconveniences, Clark will have to keep his identity safe within the big booming city of Metropolis that has more eyes and ears than Smallville times two. There’s so much going on here in the eighth season to our young, budding superhero that sometimes it’s difficult to keep track of it.
The pros about the eighth season are you get to see a lot more of the Green Arrow (who is just badass on so many levels), you get a deeper, richer story about Jimmy Olsen and you start to see some major separation between Clark and his friends (including the lovely Lois Lane). The Green Arrow has such a heavy presence in this season as he acts like a guide for Clark (kind of like a big brother). Sometimes his intentions are a little confusing, but for the most part he plays the business minded character with a hero in the vain. For example, when Clark and he start to argue about how far they should go to stop criminals they unveil a line that Clark won’t cross, but Green Arrow is willing to cross. This reminds me of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns where Oliver (Green Arrow) is mockingly referring to Superman as the ‘Golden Boy’. The attitude established in the comics between Clark and Oliver carries over to Smallville and is very self-evident in this season. What I really enjoyed the season, which regretfully comes to the end at the end of season eight, is how Jimmy Olsen’s character was developed. The movies never gave time for Olsen, they usually wrote him off for comedy relief. The writers/director of Smallville clearly saw him as more than a goofball and brought him to a different level amongst all the characters. You see more of Olsen than you do of Lane. Surprised? Me too, but I really liked this.
Oh, speaking of which, GREAT ENDING. I never have time to watch the actual television series, so I have to catch up on it via home entertainment formats, so I didn’t see the ending coming. I can’t wait for season nine.
The cons of season eight were two-fold. The first is Chloe; this girl has got to go. She brings down the show; she’s now gotten to the point that she’s simply used as a device to push the story along. Chloe isn’t as interesting as all the other characters and quite frankly she gets annoyingly in the way of the story progressing. She has to go, please let her leave the city or something. A great example of her getting in the way is when Clark is trying to kill Doomsday and she prevents him from doing so. Doomsday….. anyone named Doomsday is someone who probably isn’t a superhero or someone who shouldn’t be saved. Ugh, she’s so annoying. This leads me into the second con of this season, Doomsday. The comic fight between Superman and Doomsday was epic. He just plainly looks goofy and the fight is over much too quickly. Doomsday wreaked havoc all over Metropolis and here he just kind of appears, destroys a few things, gets in a great fight with Clark and then that’s the end of it. It’s truly over much too quickly and without much explanation or build. Plus, the actual forming of Doomsday is a bit confusing, though the build up to the point of the fight is impressive. My last complaint about the series is the absence of Lex. I’ll leave you with that (I don’t want to go too deep into that story).
Red and Blu
There is truly nothing finer than to see Smallville in HD. It looks excellent in 1080p and sounds excellent thanks to a boost in audio remastering. The lush colors of the clothing (and costumes) look really sharp, as do the sets where the show was shot. You get a raw view of Metropolis and some stunning footage of the Kent farm. HD helps everything and it certainly helped with the viewing experience of Smallville. The CW probably bought a blu-ray player this week so that it could broadcast this gorgeous looking show. With that said, I have seen better-looking HD transfers. I’m not sure if it’s due to budget constraints or what, but there was some graininess in the picture now and then, but you’ll forgive it for that.
As for features, here’s what you’re looking at:
– Commentaries on two key episodes
– Unaired Scenes (in HD)
– In the Director’s Chair: Behind the Lens and Calling the Shots with Allison Mack
– Smallville’s Doomsday: The Making of a Monster
For a television show this is some good stuff. The two commentaries are solid and insightful. The unaired scenes are good (though they’re in HD, which is really good). The Director’s chair featurette is entertaining and the Doomsday featurette is solid (even though I wasn’t happy with how that went down).