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Well, that’s depressing. Let me mull it over with a nice cool glass of Drano.

The show is only an hour long if you count commercials.

Ha ha thanks for the Smallville analysis. I love the show been watching it since I was in 4th grade!
I completely understand the whole “whats going on?” line of thinking but you really need to watch each and every episode to be fully caught up. There is no skipping. And I’ll tell that for sure in Season 10 there is going to be alot of referencing of the past for fans who have kept up all 9 seasons.

As a follow-up, network shows are about 40-42 minutes long. Let’s give commercial-prone Smallville 40 minutes per episode. That’s 217 * 40 / 60 = 144.66 repeating; 145 hours. A heck of a lot less.

The show is only an hour long if you count commercials.

That’s actually acknowledged in the article above. I counted ALL the television shows on the basis of aired-with-commercials. Because it’s a hell of a lot easier to count on the basis of hour and half-hour episodes than it is to look at actual runtimes. That would take a bigger nerd than even myself. I was rounding off for the sake of simplicity.

Let’s give commercial-prone Smallville 40 minutes per episode. That’s 217 * 40 / 60 = 144.66 repeating; 145 hours. A heck of a lot less.

But you have to apply the same equation to ALL the television shows if you want to make it valid. The ratio of all the others added up against Smallville still comes out more or less even.

Anyway, it will take someone more ambitious than me to work it out to the minute. If you are volunteering, have at it, but do it for everything, not just Smallville.

You need to give the actors more credit. They all do a phenomenal job of playing their characters, whether or not the script itself makes a lot of sense. Erica Durance alone has converted me into a Lois Lane fan. Couldn’t stand her before.

Some very interesting observations. Does it really all just boil down to “sex sells”, which is what the soap opera stuff sells itself on? I think that the Claremont comparison is accurate only in the sense that Chris Claremont, in the 70′s and 80′s, latched onto the primal basic pop cultural stuff that we all love in our fiction. Maybe those ideas weren’t as prevalent in media at the time, but as you’ve observed, print’s often ahead of television (and then sometimes way, way behind it).

Claremont’s X-Men had more than soap opera, it also had mystery and suspense (often simply because Claremont would accidentally launch subplots and not get back to them for a year). It was a rollercoaster of emotion because it introduced us to characters, then took them on an epic journey that never seemed to end quite where it was projected to. In X-Men, that place was maybe the dream the X-Men were fighting for (or a horrible alternate future), and in Smallville, that future they’re constantly not reaching is embodied by Superman.

Sexy, mysterious, powerful people doing stuff while never quite reaching their real goal.

I can’t really add much to this conversation since I’ve never seen even a single episode of Smallville, and probably never will.
I have to say, though, that those screen shots of Hawkman are hilariously atrocious. Was anyone else reminded of Prince Vultan and his Hawkmen from that similarly, awesomely atrocious “Flash Gordon” movie? In fact, they should have cast Brian Blessed as Hawkman – I would watch that.

My issue with Smallville is that it started out as a SuperBOY show. Fine and good. Then Season 4 brings in all these elements from the Superman mythos in rapid succession. Lex starts acting evil, Lois comes to town, no more Pete Ross, Clark gets the fortress. These are the things that make it much more of a SuperMAN show. And yet, the creators kept Kristen Kreuk on the show for another…4 seasons? Even when Lex was turning evil, they still had Lionel “Lexlite” Luthor on the show? These are extraneous elements in the show. They were still trying to hold tight to the very few elements that remained from their SuperBOY show. It took them 8 years to get Clark into anywhere near a SuperMAN place, but it really should have happened in Season 5. They were trying to have their cake and eat it too.

You lost me at the part about Zod. Maybe it’s because I’m familiar with the character’s history, but it seemed pretty damn obvious he was exploiting Clark to advance his evil scheme from day one. It’s not that subtle a show. “Yeah, I was totally your dad’s best friend, he’d want you to show me the Fortress of Solitude.”

You lost me at the part about Zod. Maybe it’s because I’m familiar with the character’s history, but it seemed pretty damn obvious he was exploiting Clark to advance his evil scheme from day one.

Okay. I believe you. You saw the episode, apparently, and I did not; as I said, that was one of those incidents where someone from my daily life came up to me and demanded to know something based on his perception that I as a comics fan Must Know Everything About All Comics Published Ever. I daresay if people in your life know you’re a fan that you have run into that phenomenon as well.

Anyway, I don’t see how that negates the larger point, which is that Smallville can be confusing to the casual viewer, especially one not steeped in comics mythology. I am somewhat relieved to find out that Zod was still a bad guy, but honestly, sometimes I wonder if people actually ever read our posts all the way through before commenting.

You missed Oliver with Zatanna…Zatanna with Clark….Chloe with Oliver…lol

Yep I definitely see the Claremont X-Men comparison

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if people actually ever read our posts all the way through before commenting.

Well, I just did. But I’m a nerd.

Good analysis, Greg. I’ve sometimes discussed Smallville with a fellow comic fan friend of mine, and we agree that it probably worked better with a limited shelf life. Really, you can hit all of the big “He’s going to be Superman someday but not yet” stories worth telling in about 2-3 seasons. As it stands now, Smallville is a perfect example of a show that’s been on for so long it’s outlived its initial premise (See also: Happy Days. It was initially Ritchie Cunningham’s coming of age story. How many years did it continue on after Ron Howard left the show?).

But you really hit the nail on the head when you said that the show is depressing. You’re right, it’s downright DOUR. Smallville does a really great job of making it seem like having superpowers would be the biggest drag in the world. Guess that’s why I haven’t bothered watching it in a good 5 years or more. I did tune in for the JSA episode… meh.

And maybe the X-Men parallel isn’t as coincidental as you think. Don’t forget that comic writers like Jeph Loeb and Geoff Johns have written for the show.

I meant to write, “we agree that it probably WOULD HAVE worked better with a limited shelf life” above. (i.e., as a miniseries or a show with a limited number of seasons).

I’m a total “Smallville” addict these days. All of my friends are sick of hearing about it. I thought that the S9 finale in particular was fantastic. It featured Clark FINALLY taking charge of his destiny in a positive way, huzzah!

This is one of the best promos that the CW had for “Smallville” this past season: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaHdfkRPvN8

I think it represents the overall feel of the show quite well. “Smallville” is far from being the smartest show out there, but it mostly gets by on being irreverent, silly fun. I feel the show works the best when it absolutely refuses to take itself seriously.

I also adore its take on the Lois and Clark relationship (and I realize I’m in the absolute minority, but uh, “Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” is what actually got me into comics back in the ’90s). One of my friends summed this up quite well…I hope he doesn’t mind if I quote him:

“There are a number of conceits in the comics that had become tired and cliche, which the show has managed to avoid in the way they’ve developed the relationship. Lois isn’t solely motivated by getting “a big scoop”, she’s more motivated by trying to do something meaningful and making a difference in the world. The love triangle has been modified to where Lois has feelings for both the hero and the civilian identity, rather than Clark chasing Lois and Lois chasing Superman. The big one that has been turned on its ear is that Lois isn’t constantly trying to discover “Superman’s/The Blur’s” secret identity. In fact, she doesn’t want to know who he is, for her own safety. It makes her a much more believable, likable character, and makes the notion of the secret identity more credible.”

(He made this comment towards the end of S9, to provide some context for anyone else who actually watches the show.)

Smallville is easily the shittiest version of Superman I’ve come across. Just… just terrible in it its uncanny ability to take everything cool about the Superboy/man mythos and COMPLETELY IGNORE IT.

Stacy Haiduk.

Ahhh … Krypton Creek.

I was actually a faithful SMALLVILLE watcher through its fifth season. Like every High School set show ever, it stumbled in the College Years and never recovered. Its durability is admirable though.

Maybe the later seasons were different, but the show I watched bore only the most slight resemblance to the Claremont X-MEN. The sub-plots paid off consistently for one thing.

As a result, I think that you are being overly dismissive. The tension between duty and romantic love has always been at the core of the Superman mythos. The Silver Age comics were full of love triangles, jealousy and the rest. In that way SMALLVILLE is not just the longest running Superman adaptation, but also the most faithful.

FYI like pretty much every drama on television Smallville isn’t the type of show where the episodes are self-contained.

It’s like reading sporadic chapters of a book and complaining about not knowing what’s going on. You want to know why so many people like Smallville? Start by reading the whole book before you criticize.

Not to nit pick, but you need to add 5 hours to your total for other media Superman. You claim 54 half hour Superman Animated episodes and come up with 22 hours; it should be 27.

I watch it, mostly because I can’t tear myself away from it. Like any good train wreck tv show, it’s mesmerizing in a way where you want to see how much further it force me to suspend disbelief.

That said, I thought that after really abysmal seasons 6-8 (really…seven seasons…and Lex figures it only to confront Clark in a 90 second battle royale that winds up with them separated and the whole point of the series to that point unresolved…until Green Arrow presumably kills Lex for real in season 8). They bounced back somewhat in season 9. The Zod story had some nice twists to it, and it did develop Zod in a way we hadn’t really seen by giving him some deeper back story (and I like Callum Blue, so there was that). They introduced Checkmate, and for some reason it worked for me when it probably shouldn’t have. I’m looking forward somewhat to season 10, though, just to end it all.

Favorite piece of inexplicably bad writing on the show: start of season 8. Clark has presumably lost all of his powers after the end of season 7 and goes after a mind controlled Green Arrow (don’t ask). Clark is then shot by GA through the chest and is ready to kick off this mortal coil…until the Martian Manhunter appears and whisks him away.

Cut to commercial. Come back, and Clark is waking up on his couch with no idea how he got there. Martian Manhunter as John Jones is standing there and explains that to restore Clark’s powers, he threw him into the sun. The catch? The Manhunter sacrifices his in the process because the sun takes his power.

So, if Clark is just waking up and has no idea what happened, and MM lost his powers…how did they get from the sun to Clark’s living room?

The writers always find a new way to amaze…

Why pick on Superman and DC? Smallville’s ratings dwarf the sales numbers of any comic – actually, it’s audience is probably larger than the entire US comics readership put together.

Seriously? Hawkman? The Star-Spangled-Kid? Neat.

Wow, it gets really damning when you point out that even the Smallville DVD sets outsell the comics.

I’m no fan of Smallville, but I’m not surprised. I think that there’s three big reasons why the TV show is so much popular: lighter tone, consistent tone and respect for continuity

Lighter tone: I realize that I lost this argument 20 years ago, but I think that the biggest thing that comics should be learning from TV and the movies is that superheroes only work in a PG-13-rated universe (or G or PG). Sure, Watchmen was a great comic, but the whole point of that book was that superheroism would seem like a totally deranged thing in a world of sex and bloody violence. If the Toyman was going around torturing people then you wouldn’t put on tights to fight him. The very idea of superhero-ing only makes sense in a world in which that kind of stuff doesn’t happen. Superhero TV shows and those superhero movies that haven’t been flops get this.

Consistent tone: Two of the few recent Superman stories I liked were the “Last Son” arc by Donner-Johns-Kubert and the subsequent Bizarro arc by Johns-Powell. But even these two excellent arcs, written by the same guy, had wild differences in tone. Many people who would enjoy one wouldn’t enjoy the other. That kills the brand when your tone is so inconsistent. Smallville does better at this, and Superman: The Animated Series did a GREAT job. It managed to alternate serious earthbound episodes with wild outer space stories and silly magical episodes, but they all stayed within the same general tone. Superman comics, even when they’re good, are all over the map, totally different genres and styles of art from month to month. Where are the editors? Does Warner Brothers not realize that DC’s lackadaisical editors are the brand-managers for their most valuable characters? Why do they impose such strong brand management on TV but not on the comics? Some would say that it’s because the comics make so much less money, but I think it’s the other way around: comics make so little money these days BECAUSE of lazy editing.

Respect for continuity: Even on Smallville, where characters personalities do jump around in inconsistent directions, you can at least be assured that they’re never going to casually announce, “Oh, by the way the first two seasons didn’t happen anymore.” The comics? Forget about it. Ordway’s continuity is ignored by Kelly who’s ignored by Waid who’s ignored by Johns. How many “soft reboots” (aka half-ass reboots) has Superman had in the last ten years? TV fans buy the DVDs because they know that those old stores led to these new stories. If comic fans expect the same treatment, they’re called “continuity nazis”. “Chillax, dude, don’t you know that respecting another writer’s work just isn’t cool anymore?” If a TV writer tried that, they’d be out the door in two seconds. Surprise: Fans like to believe in stories. That doesn’t make them nerds, that makes them fans.

Why pick on Superman and DC?

Because it’s basically the same story. The one on television has millions of fans, the one in print does not. I wondered why.

Not to nit pick, but you need to add 5 hours to your total for other media Superman. You claim 54 half hour Superman Animated episodes and come up with 22 hours; it should be 27.

Fixed. This is why I wasn’t a math major.

You want to know why so many people like Smallville? Start by reading the whole book before you criticize.

We gave it four seasons in this household before giving up on it, and the last two were largely on the basis of “maybe it’ll get better,” because the early epsiodes’ Superboy vibe was what we liked and we were hoping it would get back to that. I think four seasons and change is fair. If it turned into something AWESOME since then, okay, but honestly what I’m seeing people talk about in the comments, and the random sampling I’ve seen since we quit watching it regularly, are not particularly enticing.

Apart from that, your premise is not really valid. This idea of all prime-time television being serialized, to the point where you dare not miss an episode or you might as well give up, is a fairly new innovation. I think it’s really starting to peak now that TV is becoming an on-demand entertainment medium with DVD and TiVo and so on. But for the most part, TV shows for the last half-century or so were based on the idea that every episode is the first one for somebody… and I still think rendering your continuity impenetrable to a casual viewer is not a great idea commercially. Your mileage may vary.

Agreed about the above comment. If a show takes more than several seasons to get good, you can’t complain about people not wanting to watch it.

I like Smallville. My wife, who likes Jersey Shore, makes fun of me for it. Anyway, I’m under no illusions. I know it’s crap. I watch it anyway because I am compelled to.

Kind of like when I was buying X-Men comics in the ’90s. I think your comparison is apt, but Smallville feels more like the Lobdell years to me, when they aped the formula without the soul.

Honestly, the camp & trainwreck value is high, but I like seeing the DC characters in action (even if Hawkman was uproariously bad. Black Canary was pretty awful, too). Pre-poverty Green Arrow & mostly-human J’Onn J’Onzz feel “on.” The stupid soap opera gets me interested. Clark, Chloe, & Lois work fine. Still, I can’t refute any criticism, because it’s really not that good.

Smallville is easily the shittiest version of Superman I’ve come across. Just… just terrible in it its uncanny ability to take everything cool about the Superboy/man mythos and COMPLETELY IGNORE IT.

It shows how out of touch I am that I completely agree with you. I can’t even wrap my head around how the pitch for this series was greenlighted nor how it managed to actually succeed as a show.

Here’s a reenactment of my 14 year-old self hearing about this show:

“OHHH, a show about Superman! Awesome!!!!! — Oh. A show about Clark Kent. As a teenager. In Smallville. awesome. Oh hey look they’re rerunning the soup nazi episode on channel five!”

Hmm, what works here? HTML? I miss preview functions.

Testing…

here is a great article about the initial development of Smallville. It discusses in depth how the show was designed to switch gears between episodic and serial narrative — which it still does to this day.

The WB, then, in producing and marketing Smallville, adapted a three-tier strategy for success:

1. pursue a young audience;
2. draw upon the cultural capital of a character associated with both American-ness and comic book fandom;
3. encourage the active participatory culture of both these groups by extending the text of the show into familiar formats of fandom.

Smallville, of course, differs from The X-Files in one fundamental way: at the very outset, producers and marketers at The WB were aiming for a youthful (12-34) demographic. The WB, in producing a show that reworks a cultural myth, had to contend with striking an X-Files-like balance between cult and mainstream viewership, involving careful selection of which elements of the Superman mythos to include or discard in order to translate the character to a much younger audience. The show’s creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, decided that the key to allowing Superman to speak to U.S. youth in a fresh way would be to situate the Clark Kent character as an awkward, unsure teenager on the verge of discovering the extent of his powers.

Sorry if the formatting doesn’t work… Anyway, I found it fascinating.

Bah, too used to bcc code. Sorry that prior post didn’t quote properly.

I would also argue that today’s show definitively isn’t the same show that was conceived by Millar and Gough. The “no flights, no tights” rule is finally going out the window next season (and deservedly so, after 10 years). (Er, granted, that rule only ever seemed to apply to Clark.)

Honestly, while I blame the writers for some of the incomprehensible (if entertaining) writing from time to time, I also fault DC’s editorial controls. To explain in an unnecessarily rambling fashion:

I initially caught up on the show via DVDs. Seasons 1-4 were generally entertaining, though the freak-of-the-week and someone-finds-out-about-Clark’s-secret-and-promptly-forgets-or-dies formulas grated a bit. Season 5 was angsty, but watchable (Spike!). Seasons 6 and 7 were a Lana/Lex train wreck., writ large I still haven’t made it through all of season 7.

For whatever reason, I decided to buy the season 8 dvds, and was impressed that the show actually showed some life. Arguably, the loss of the show’s creators (Gough and Millar) and the exit of the Luthors and Lana after S7 were the best thing that could have happened to it. (Though obviously, everyone would love to see Michael Rosenbaum come back as Lex for at least an episode.) It was finally able to reinvent itself and allow Clark to evolve into an actual hero, instead of some emo/self-absorbed Dawson’s Creek leftover who lurked at the farm constantly even after everyone else had moved on. Clark working at the Daily Planet made sense. Clark and Lois’s slow-but-sure relationship was intriguing. The Red-and-Blue-Blur nonsense was goofy, but fun. However, season 8 also had a lot of big misses — most notably, the finale.

Then, I encountered the following tidbit on the S8 blu-ray reviews posted by someone. It explained a whole lot. A fair amount of this is unsubstantiated rumor (so take it with a grain of salt), but at the very least, the fact that DC Comics decided that Smallville was an “Elseworld” only after S8 is mind-boggling, but backed up by other sources.

I imagine if it wasn’t for all the behind the scenes drama, like:

- DC Comics only giving the rights to Lois Lane for 12 episodes, with rule that she cannot appear on-screen with Lana, resulting in the massive gaps in appearances
- The previous showrunners inking horrible contract with Kristen Kreuk giving her the power to decide how Lana leaves the series
- The studio not inking a Season 9 and 10 contract with Tom Welling until pre-production on the finale began, meaning the writers had to pre-produce two separate scripts (“Superman” and “Doomsday”)
- The studio not inking a Season 9 and 10 contract with Erica Durance until AFTER production on Season 8 wrapped, hence her disappearing halfway through the finale
- DC Comics mandating Clark is not allowed to successfully punch Doomsday on-screen, then that Doomsday had to be put underground, and no more Jimmy Olsen

then Season 8 would have been an 8/10 or 9/10 imo.

Fortunately the studios new agreement with DC Comics for Season 9 and 10 (for the first time DC Comics formally accepts Smallville as an “Elseworld”) means most of the rules before have been lifted.

8 seasons to decide that the show fell into the Elseworld category? I can understand initial concerns in the first couple seasons, but sheesh. I can’t help but feel that there’s a strong correlation between S9 NOT sucking and the fact that DC finally loosened up the creative restrictions. Maybe I’m crazy.

I could tell right away that Smallville was an “emo show” from the beginning which is why I never bothered with it- but also why I knew it would work. Just look at stuff like “Twilight”. Hardly Shakespeare, but it sells because there’s a big audience for it out there. And I don’t mind it. It’s not the version of Superman I care for, but if it helps keep the character in the public eye (without ruining it) good for them.

My question is: Smallville is ending just as they’re about to reboot the Superman movies. Does this mean the movies will follow from the TV continuity? That *would* help translate at least part of the fandom over, at least at first.

Moving the tv show into movie form would basically kill its mainstream appeal. You can try and take several million fans from the show, or you can try and appeal to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but you can’t have it both ways. I would aim for the latter and do things with a clean slate. Ignore Smallville, ignore Singer’s latest iteration, ignore Donner’s and every other version out there.

Make something fresh, something new that doesn’t focus on the origin (soft reboot style), something without Lex Luthor in a significant role, and make it something people can sink their teeth into.

“But they lost me in the second season with that mystical bullshit about the Kryptonian cave shamanism or whatever the hell that was. And though we’ve watched the show sporadically since then, we are usually confused by the changes to the status quo — Wait, Lionel Luthor’s a good guy now? Wasn’t he in jail? Wait, Kryptonians have been coming to Earth — to Smallville — for decades? Huh? Chloe has powers now? What? — and so on.”

“We gave it four seasons in this household before giving up on it, and the last two were largely on the basis of “maybe it’ll get better,” because the early epsiodes’ Superboy vibe was what we liked and we were hoping it would get back to that. I think four seasons and change is fair. If it turned into something AWESOME since then, okay, but honestly what I’m seeing people talk about in the comments, and the random sampling I’ve seen since we quit watching it regularly, are not particularly enticing.”

You wrote that you only watched it regularly for 2 seasons not 4–and my point is that you can’t act so surprised that you don’t understand what’s going on if you don’t actually watch the show. For the record, I think Smallville failed quite hard after season 3–but even I wouldn’t base my criticisms of it off the fact that I have no clue what’s going on because I haven’t been watching. Smallville fails by repeating its own formula too often and basically reseting to status quo every season.

The only character I didn’t care for in the JSA team-up in Absolute Truth was Hawkman. I have to admit that those wings were bad, and they could have used CGI for that.
The Dr. Fate was probably the best of that group.

I wonder, who played Superboy in the that first season, and who the red-head was (did she play Lois Lane or Lana Lang)?

I always wondered, what’s with all the L.L.? I kept expecting a guest-appearance by Lindsay Lohan or Lisa Loeb. Isn’t the alliteration with names a bit over-done these days?

You wrote that you only watched it regularly for 2 seasons not 4–and my point is that you can’t act so surprised that you don’t understand what’s going on if you don’t actually watch the show. For the record, I think Smallville failed quite hard after season 3–but even I wouldn’t base my criticisms of it off the fact that I have no clue what’s going on because I haven’t been watching. Smallville fails by repeating its own formula too often and basically resetting to status quo every season.

Ooooooo, I guess you got me there, Tex. It couldn’t possibly be that we stopped LIKING it after two seasons but gave it two more before giving up because we liked it BEFORE that, and we have continued to check in every now and again since then. That kind of silly optimism never EVER happens with comics fans. Show of hands, anyone who’s hung in there with something bad longer than they probably should have.

Anyway, you got me so annoyed over this pedantry that I went and looked it up and even checked with my wife. The truth is I was mis-remembering. We quit about halfway through the season Lana was doing the coach because that just plain skeeved us out. I teach in a public school and that particular plot twist was just too creepy and stupid for us. Which makes it, I guess, three and a half seasons that we were there every week. After that, it was once in a while. You win. I mis-typed it. Happy now?

In any case, my point, which you are either ignoring or deliberately refusing to acknowledge, is that playing to a devoted fanbase at the expense of casual viewers is dumb. If you disagree, that’s fine, but at least disagree with the actual point instead of yelling at me about how I have no right to say anything about how the show hits a casual viewer before sitting down for all 217 hours of a show you YOURSELF say has turned to crap.

I wonder, who played Superboy in the that first season, and who the red-head was (did she play Lois Lane or Lana Lang)?

First season was John Haymes Newton, and the rest was Gerard Christopher. And the redhead was Lana Lang, played by Stacy Haiduk.

You guys are totally overlooking the fact that it is awesome now!

I’m looking forward to season 10 of Smallville more than I am the start of the NBA season and/or Dexter season 5. Which–believe me–is saying something.

Liking this show is like enjoying Rice Krispies treats — sometimes you can complain about bad batches, but don’t ever expect your Krispies to suddenly be like, chocolate mousse. Comic books may ATTEMPT to be Tolstoy, but generally speaking, they’re about entertainment. Sometimes it’s almost worse when they are weighty/tragic/serious (I have a couple friends who absolutely loathed The Dark Knight for this reason).

And I really would argue with the contention that Smallville is bogged down by continuity and only appeals to the cult viewer. I think it does a very good job with alternating its episodes between the demands of a serial narrative and catering to the interests of the casual viewer. If anything, Smallville gets demonized for overlooking continuity too much. For every Zod/Checkmate-centric episode in the past season, there was one that simply featured zombies, or the Wonder Twins, or a kid who was transformed into a superhero by a comic book, or Lois/Chloe randomly possessed by the Silver Banshee, etc. Judging the show purely by its event-driven episodes is doing it a disservice. Certainly, they’re an integral part of the show, but they’re only half of it.

P.S. Plus plus plus — OK, the initial premise of Smallville was a obviously that it was a series about the soap-operatic misadventures of a young man who bore a passing resemblance to Superman. This was an intriguing idea to start with, but started to grate as the seasons wore on, and the most notable signs of Clark’s development were his nascent superpowers and his failed relationships. The “eventual payoff” winks and nods bore a continually diluted impact.

This coming season is all about the payoff. By the series finale, Clark is supposed to have fully morphed into a recognizable Superman. The writers have stated they’re attempting to throw in everything they can think of, including the kitchen sink. Whether this season ultimately succeeds or fails, I would argue that it’s still a fascinating experiment.

Okay, Vesper, we’ll give it one more shot. Mostly because we still owe you for Veronica Mars. Which reminds me, we have some stuff to mail you, so you need to drop me a line with a mailing address.

The Zod thing was a knee jerk reaction on my part. I suppose there was the odd episode where Zod appeared and wasn’t the focus, and a casual viewer might assume he was being genuinely nice to Clark. But even knowing the character’s history, I don’t think him betraying Clark was ever meant as a shocking twist. Looking at a season 9 synopsis, Zod doesn’t even find out about Kal-El being on Earth until episode 7, and episode 9 shows an alternate future where Zod enslaves humanity.

Okay, Vesper, we’ll give it one more shot. Mostly because we still owe you for Veronica Mars. Which reminds me, we have some stuff to mail you, so you need to drop me a line with a mailing address.

Aw, I didn’t mean to bully you guys into watching it, sorry! I’m just a huge apologist for the show these days. It doesn’t touch the greatness of season 1 Veronica Mars for me, but I love it on its own grounds. (Perhaps a bit too much — it’s definitely slavish, blind devotion.)

I will say that CW is still showing the S9 finale online, and since it was (imo) easily the best episode of the season, I think it’s a fairly decent barometer for anyone’s current feelings for Smallville — i.e. if it leaves you disinterested, then season 10 probably won’t be any better.

I will also confess that while I did enjoy Callum Blue as Zod (though it was really strange catching up on Dead Like Me and watching this season’s Smallville at the same time!), most of the Zod episodes didn’t do that much for me. I’m definitely more of a Lois/Clark ‘shipper. (Shocker!) Erica Durance has edged out Teri Hatcher as my favorite incarnation of Lois now.

Based on everything I’ve seen and read, the only way Tom Welling’s character is morphing into Superman at the end would need to involve time travel and mindwipes. His version of Clark Kent is so whiny, self-serving and just plain… stupid that it’d be hard to believe he would qualify to be Booster Gold, let alone Superman.

And what da fug? Mason from Dead Like Me was Zod? That’s almost intriguing enough to make me watch his version of the character.

I see your Mason-as-Zod and raise you guys one Zatanna!

There’s a quote in that article that does a good job of further explaining my sentiments about the show, too:

Overall, this was a very entertaining episode. Smallville is no Battlestar Galactica, but it certainly has been entertaining lately. And that’s all a show like this needs to be. Galactica is a like a fine meal provided by a world class chef. Smallville is like ice cream. And last night was some good Ben & Jerry’s.

What happens if you eat too much Ben and Jerry’s?

Heart failure, diabetes, rotting teeth, etc.

The old “entertainment as junk food” metaphor goes both ways.

Well, I was an English major, so I make sure to mix things up. Just saw “Waiting for Godot” last weekend. It all balances out!

“Mason from Dead Like Me was Zod? ”

I’d argue he was the strongest point of last season and that they handled a storyline similar to the Lex/Clark one in a much better manner. We knew where it would end up, but getting there had some nice twists (and I read it that Zod does try to change…he just can’t partly because of who he is and partly because of how he and the Kryptonians are treated by everyone else).

Metallo was handled well also last season; I thought that they created a way to make that work well. Silver Banshee, Zatanna and JSA eps were ok; some of the stuff, like the zombie episode, felt 4 years too late (seriously, zombies are just overdone, and no one save a few really gets it). Some stuff was just bizarre (like pink kryptonite giving Clark persuasion powers or Checkmate involved in everything with everyone).

All in all, it was a major step forward in season 9 from the three seasons prior to it, and I am interested in season 10, but I can’t fault that so many have run screaming from emo Supes.

Of course, the real show to watch on CW for the past 3 seasons has been Supernatural…but I’m honestly split between anticipating and being terrified of season 6 because seasons 3, 4 and 5 were so good that the show can really only go down. Part of me wishes that they would have called it a day, though Ben Edlund is still on as writer, so it has the potential to be solid.

Also, a lot of the deal with Zod was that he was a clone of himself, so there was the moral argument of whether he would automatically be a war criminal capable of decimating an entire race, or if he could be saved from himself. There was also the question of whether Clark was capable of saving Zod (given their history), and Clark learning that saving a person involved more than simply removing them from danger — i.e. one must be prepared to forgive all their sins. This was really a different approach than the one they took with Lex (whom he went from willful naivete with to constant moral indignation/castigation). It’s an interesting question, if a rather convoluted one.

They explored this from time to time, but mercifully, didn’t make this the agenda of the entire season. In effect, you’d get a zany episode like the zombie one, with a darker/more powerful scene like this Zod one mixed in. There were also darker episodes, but they were generally instantly followed up by a light-hearted romantic comedic romp. My favorite episode all season was the Wonder Twins one, which worked out amazingly well.

The “L-L” name thing was at first a coincidence -both Lois Lane and Lex Luthor had such first and last names more because comics writers at the time liked their alliterations. However later on someone caught on the fact and started doing it *intentionally* and we now have Lana Lang, Lori Lemaris, and several other characters in the Superman canon whose names both start with “L”.

So, you didn’t keep up with Smallville or watch it and then when you watched an episode and didn’t know what was going on you were angry or disappointed? That’s your fault, not the fault of the Smallville writers. Thank God they didn’t try to make it 10 seasons of fully encapsulated villain of the week episodes.

I think the comparison between Smallville watchers and Superman-comics buyers was incredible. I didn’t know the typical Superman comic only had 50,000 readers! A TV show would be cancelled if the audience fell to 10 times that number.

Anyway, I think a better analysis would be to compare Smallville to other TV shows. Vesper brought up the point in an above post which started talking about how the WB needed a new teen-soap show, so they decided to give Superman a try. Dawson’s Creek had ended (or was nearing the end), but it was getting stale.
By now (2008-2010), the CW has the new 90210, Melrose Place, and the Vampire Diaries, which means their plate is full of teen-soaps. Sorry to say, but now Smallville is the stale show as the teen audience moves on to newer shows.

The other thing to consider is the ratings: Smallville still brings in the audience on Friday nights, but what’s the competition, especially when going out to a movie costs a lot of money? No, it’s not reading a Superman comic book.

I also think you give the writers too much credit for following Claremont’s X-Men ideas. Smallville was originally pitched as “X-Files meets Superman”, but by the later seasons, the producers saw how serialized shows (such as Lost) were keeping an audience. And guess what? Seasons started to have over-arcing plots.

I don’t get why anyone would be surprised that a tv audience is much larger than a comic audience.

If you had to pay $3-4 per person to simultaneously enjoy entertainment that only came once a month and was usually dragged out over years, as opposed to the model that “free” tv currently has, then there’d be a lot fewer people watching any show, let alone a b-show filled with superpowered 20-somethings.

I do like the analysis compared to other shows. In terms of a speculative fiction (sci-fi/fantasy) show that airs on a non-specialty network, it doesn’t seem to be doing that poorly.

that was one of those incidents where someone from my daily life came up to me and demanded to know something based on his perception that I as a comics fan Must Know Everything About All Comics Published Ever. I daresay if people in your life know you’re a fan that you have run into that phenomenon as well.

I get that shit all the time, and also people not being happy with the answers.

Not just asking how a character appeared, but trying to explain, for example why Frank Miller was important to comics – particularly Daredevil and Batman – if he didn’t create them, his art isn’t immediately eye catching, and only brought in new ways/outside influences.
(Another is explaining why Watchmen was so important to comics, to someone who has only seen the film).
Thankfully, most of my friends are film buffs, so I can draw parallels, and whilst it’s mostly fun, it can get annoying.
Especially, when some people get like kids with ‘but why this’, ‘but then why that’, and so then you give them the long drawn out answer, and they get annoyed as they don’t like it, and had to listen to too much geeky stuff.

Sticking with Frank and Batman, I had a friend complain to me that he love DKR, but hated Klaus Janson’s art, and really wished they’d just let Frank Miller draw it.
He kept bringing this up across a number of months, no matter how many times I explained that Miller drew it, Janson was inking off his work, over and over. Even showing the credits didn’t get it across.
So I did the only thing I could, I lent him DKSA, and told him it was everything he wanted – a continuation of the story, and all the art was Frank Miller’s.
Now I think it’s a fine book, but I know it’s not for everyone.
He never mentioned wishing Miller had drawn DKR again.

The other fun-filled one is that I can’t just dislike a superhero movie because I just didn’t like the film.
Any time I do, it’s ‘yeah, but you just wish it was more like the comics’.
This was particularly infuriating around the time of Spider-Man 2 – I thought it was the film that felt most like reading a Spider-Man comic, but I still thought it was a terrible film in it’s own right…. not that anyone I knew would accept that as the reason.

All whinging aside though, most of the time I love it when people ask a comics related question – I’m like an evangelical Christian waiting for someone to say they are feeling down – any excuse to preach the good word of comics.

Seriously? Hawkman? The Star-Spangled-Kid? Neat.

It kinda makes me want to watch Smallville, something I’ve never done, because it looks like a really terrible show.
Fun maybe, but really terrible.

Agreed about the above comment. If a show takes more than several seasons to get good, you can’t complain about people not wanting to watch it.

I was a little shocked on the boards the other week, when explaining why I didn’t read a series – I’d got the first trade, found the characters uninteresting and unlikeable, and the story moved at a glacial pace and didn’t get resolved – a poster told me I was silly to judge it based on one trade, I owed the series to read more than that.

I get some stuff takes longer to kick off, but I’m supposed to read more than six issues to form an opinion?

“Also, a lot of the deal with Zod was that he was a clone of himself, so there was the moral argument of whether he would automatically be a war criminal capable of decimating an entire race, or if he could be saved from himself. There was also the question of whether Clark was capable of saving Zod (given their history), and Clark learning that saving a person involved more than simply removing them from danger — i.e. one must be prepared to forgive all their sins. This was really a different approach than the one they took with Lex (whom he went from willful naivete with to constant moral indignation/castigation). It’s an interesting question, if a rather convoluted one.”

Points taken, but to me Clark’s responses aren’t all that different than when we had Lex in the show over Zod (mostly because Clark never seems to develop trust in anyone despite his experiences with how badly not trusting people works out…they write him so friggin’ thick sometimes). The difference to me is mostly in background. With Lex, it went from trust to mistrust while hearing constantly about what a bad guy Lex was from his parents. With Zod, Clark didn’t trust him, then he decided to trust Zod largely because he saw what not trusting him would do, but then he never trusts him completely with everything because he interferes with Zod constantly. This to me is almost a mirror of Clark/Lex.

In short, the writers always seem to make Clark at least partially responsible for his key villains being key villains. Did Lex need to be the bad guy? I doubt it. He wanted Clark to trust him and Clark never did. If he had, who knows (and a two-parter in season 3, I think, actually showed that Lex was more grateful than anything to find out about Clark…before his mind was wiped)? Maybe it works out better for Lex. The same stands for Zod in several parts. Clark, in no uncertain terms, is a jerk, and his jerkiness causes half of his problems. If superdickery.com did Smallville moments, they could fill a few pages.

By now (2008-2010), the CW has the new 90210, Melrose Place, and the Vampire Diaries, which means their plate is full of teen-soaps. Sorry to say, but now Smallville is the stale show as the teen audience moves on to newer shows.

I dunno if I’d go that far. Smallville has proven itself to be amazingly resilient. It survived the Friday night Death Slot and even improved the Friday night ratings for the CW pretty dramatically.

This is a list of the ratings (live +7) for the top CW shows for the 2009-2010 season:

82 AMERICA’S TOP MODEL 7 CW 1.8/5
88 AMERICA’S TOP MODEL-8 CW 1.7/5
95 VAMPIRE DIARIES CW 1.6/4
111 SMALLVILLE CW 1.2/4
111 SUPERNATURAL CW 1.2/3
111 GOSSIP GIRL CW 1.2/3
115 ONE TREE HILL CW 1.1/3

And a blurb that the network put out with the season 10 announcement:

“Smallville,” a modern retelling of the Superman legend, stars Tom Welling as Clark Kent. The series moved to Friday nights this season, where it currently ranks as network television’s #1 show in its time period among men 18-34 and men 18-49. Additionally, “Smallville” has dramatically improved The CW’s ratings performance in its Friday 8:00-9:00p.m.time period by 67% among adults 18-34 (1.5/6), 200% in men 18-34 (1.8/7), 75% in adults 18-49 (1.4/5), 183% in men 18-49 (1.7/6) and 74% in total viewers (3.12million).

Suffice to say that while it lost ratings from its prior timeslot, it still held its own.

In short, the writers always seem to make Clark at least partially responsible for his key villains being key villains. Did Lex need to be the bad guy? I doubt it. He wanted Clark to trust him and Clark never did. If he had, who knows (and a two-parter in season 3, I think, actually showed that Lex was more grateful than anything to find out about Clark…before his mind was wiped)? Maybe it works out better for Lex. The same stands for Zod in several parts. Clark, in no uncertain terms, is a jerk, and his jerkiness causes half of his problems. If superdickery.com did Smallville moments, they could fill a few pages.

Yeah, one thing I struggle with is that the Clark/Lex relationship has been all over the map in the 7 years it was featured on the show, so major inconsistencies tend to surface. I think we could point and counterpoint each other for days. I’d like to think that Clark has grown in his attempts to save both Doomsday and the Kandorians/Zod in the past couple seasons vs. his half-assed attempts to save Lex in the earlier years, but I agree that he did have long moments of wishy-washiness in S9. I think that ultimately his greater heroic instincts won out, as they did with Davis in S8.

***

One thing Vesper loves about Smallville (that I wrote awhile back):

The premise. It’s much more than a simple origins story (although it’s hard to go wrong with the Superman origin). Tom Welling said he was initially hesitant to take the role in part because he was worried it would simply be “Superman in high school,” but finally did because he saw a lot more in the script.

Telling a story where almost everyone in society already knows the details of the mythos is a fairly unique situation. You see it in reinterpretations of history or famous stories (epics, Shakespeare, or otherwise), certain iconic pop culture stories (Batman, Superman), or in the conversion of a story from one narrative medium to another (Harry Potter from book to movie). Even those don’t have huge pockets of dramatic irony, simply because generally speaking, the writers are trying to either a) be as true to the original story as possible or b) veer off into a new storytelling direction after establishing the classic origins.

Smallville, however, has firmly established that its storytelling goal is taking its characters from the reimaginings of point A to the iconic, popular vision of the characters at point B.

Most fiction shares common narrative premises that can be played upon: Scream, for instance, was hugely tongue-in-check about imploding horror movie stereotypes. Buffy always found it difficult to tell a straight story, undermining dramatic moments with snark, reversing roles, toying with viewer expectations, etc.

Smallville has the privileged position of going beyond those isolated moments. It can show, in gory, glorious detail, Lex Luthor’s journey (sometimes glacially paced) to inevitable villainy. It can explore the effect fathers have upon their sons: the rites of passage of manhood, the physical and psychological violence wreaked, the demands and compensations of paternal love. (One thing I find fascinating is that Lionel Luthor — a brilliant insertion into the Superman origin story — finally succeeds at shaping his son into his capable, monstrous successor, and then immediately starts to bond with Clark instead.) It can ask questions of nature vs. nurture. It can show an increasingly damaged Lana Lang. It can juxtapose fatalism, destiny, causality, free will, etc. ad nauseum.

***

Yeah, I didn’t get much further than that.

Bah, forgot to close out a quote somewhere, sorry. I really miss the preview function!

Smallville is an excellent show, and has an excellent run. It’s my favorite show ever.

The comic fans who most hate Smallville are those who want, no EXPECT, the series to fit perfectly with thier own favorite comic-continiuity era. It HAS to end with Superman in tights, Clark in glasses, and all of the standard supporting cast on-canvas and oblivious to the secret of his double-life. Any deviation is grounds for the shows producers to be executed by firing squad!

I just accepted the show as taking place on Earth-14(the channel I get the CW on) and let myself enjoy the anything-goes reimagining of it all.

So to all the haters I say: break into the JLA satellite, use thier transmatter cube to transport yourself to the appropriate parallel unviverse, ask your counterpart there to let you watch his TV and enjoy. The same old rules really don’t have to apply!

Kristin Kreuk really made the show for me.. When she left, the show became just another Superboy series you
used to see on weekend reruns. The ratings drop says it all after season 7 ended….. Good luck to the
remaining cast when the show ends….at least the got some money out of the last few seasons.

[...] in its tenth and final season, will be on TV longer than any other Superman show. And then I read this blog post that blew my mind by showing how Smallville will end up with more hours of screen time than all [...]

From someone who followed the “Death of Superman” when in came out, I think Mr. Hatcher has the best theory about the success of Smallville. It gags me to think more people and more generations will think of Superman’s world as a sappy soap. And yes, it is like X-men since the 90′s. Cyclops has his own record of shack ups. Jean , Madeline Pryor, Jean back from the dead , and now Emma Frost and later who knows if Emma goes for Namor. Well , maybe Namor and Inivisible Woman next since FF tragedy recently. Sound familiar? The “supergirl” 3rd episode of this last season nailed it. Lois says just “another meteor freak?” Meteor freak and Mutant gene X now interchangeable. And the whole episode about mistrust of costumed “freaks”. Plus that episode in season 8 where Clark revealed himself and later had to go back in time to backtrack.
So Doomsday is buried in the ground. (his fight with Clark about 10 seconds), ready to appear out of nowhere in the canon future. Ollie revealed himself. Guess it won’t matter when he’s poor later and JLA have their own mansion in the future. (Tess’ mansion becomes the JLA mansion?) Maxwell Lord seemingly the only survivor of Checkmate of the kandor-clone wars. At least the show writers did their homework and put a lot of the past and recent storylines of the past 20 years of Superman and Action Comics. In the end Psychic Girl of the Legionaires will have to mind wipe most everyone.

But they lost me in the second season with that mystical bullshit about the Kryptonian cave shamanism or whatever the hell that was.

Season 2 is when Jeph Loeb joined the show, so it couldn’t not be bad.

Season 2 is when Jeph Loeb joined the show, so it couldn’t not be bad.

I know that you are kidding, but Loeb is actually a pretty decent candidate as the person that turned SMALLVILLE from a good WB-style show into a guilty pleasure around the end of Season 3.

The original producers had limited Superman knowledge beyond their love of Donner-Reeve films and their distaste for LOIS & CLARK. So, they made a bunch of stuff up. In that process, they had a half-dozen really good ideas. The show was pretty good when it was progressing along its own path, but it started to have problems when they bumped up against what were clearly mandates from DC not to go too far away from “canon”. That meant Lana and Clark couldn’t have sex (like every central couple in every teen soap ever) at the end of Season 2. Lex could not remember Clark was a Kryptonian after the events of Season 3. The narrative couldn’t go off in its own direction.

Meanwhile, Jeph Loeb seemed to become the de facto “comic book guy” on the SMALLVILLE staff. He brought the “John Broome on Meth” style that had become the DC house style around that time. It made sense. After all, SMALLVILLE was only drawing 7 million viewers while a big seller for DC was reaching an almost 1.5% of that size.

Dean, are you saying Loeb hurt Smallville or helped it? I’m not sure.

Actually, Clark and Lana finally had sex in one of the later seasons. Can’t remember if it’s Season 5 or 6. Thank God for that! It’s a pet peeve of mine. Sometimes I truly don’t understand Marvel/DC attempts at being even more prude than most religious fanatics.

“Superman shall be a virgin until he marries Lois Lane!” is such gigantic idiocy. Even more idiotic is the noises about Spider-Man only ever having sex with Mary Jane after their marriage (or moving in together in the revised continuity), when it’s clear that he had sex with the Black Cat and Betty Brant at least, and most likely with Gwen Stacy too.

That was actually one of my biggest pet peeves with Sins Past, even moreso than the Norman Osborn thing, was that it established explicitly that Peter never had sex with Gwen ever. That was beyond dumb. When will they get around to explicitly retconning that story? Ignoring it isn’t enough.

@Rene:

Actually, Clark and Lana finally had sex in one of the later seasons. Can’t remember if it’s Season 5 or 6. Thank God for that! It’s a pet peeve of mine. Sometimes I truly don’t understand Marvel/DC attempts at being even more prude than most religious fanatics.

\

I really, really agree with you.

The whole idea of Clark Kent is that he is normal and, therefore, unremarkable. The U.S. has had a pre-marital sex rate of over 95% since the FIFTIES. A higher percentage of the population has 14 or more lifetime partners than zero. Clark delaying sex until marriage (or at least with the woman who would ultimately become his wife) has not been a normative choice in a long, long time. Therefore, it changes the character and without any clear reason.

Spidey is an odd case. He has had a pretty normal series of relationships (Betty Brandt, Gwen Stacy, Black Cat, Mary Jane Watson). However, those relationships was addressed in considerable detail in a very PG-Rated manner.

Dean, are you saying Loeb hurt Smallville or helped it? I’m not sure.

I think that Loeb hurt SMALLVILLE, but mostly indirectly. His actual work on the show was some of the better writing he has done.

To me, the charm of SMALLVILLE was that the creators had re-thought the world’s first superhero from the ground up. They seemed to have limited information about the character beyond an affection for the Donner film(s), so they filled the gaps with their own ideas. A good half-dozen of those ideas were terrific.

However, the show was not allowed to progress down its own path. You could almost see DC fencing the show in. When Jeph Loeb came aboard, he was seemed to be the guy behind the early attempts at doing SMALLVILLE versions of the whole DCU. It slowly became a TV version of the “DC Comics Presents …”.

Once it was clear that was going to be their prime focus, I sort of lost interest.

Dean,

I was just confused because you said in a previous comment “I know you are kidding, but…” in response to my comments about Loeb. I wasn’t kidding. I truly believe when Jeph Loeb joined the show, the show could not help but jump the shark. But I feel that way for any season of any show that Loeb joins. I saw Smallville 1st season on DVD and enjoyed it, but never saw Smallville second season, because I read somewhere that Loeb joined the show that season.

His actual work on the show was some of the better writing he has done.

That must mean it was just somewhat disappointing rather than monstrously incompetent. That’s the best I’ve ever seen Loeb do.

@ T.

To me, SMALLVILLE had an odd double Shark Jump.

The second and most of the third seasons were about as good as the first. There were odd subplots, but there were many more good episodes than bad. However, the Season 3 finale introduced a character named “Kara” with super-powers who somehow wasn’t Supergirl. That was Shark Jump #1 from “Good Show” to “Guilty Pleasure”.

In retrospect, it was the same style that ruined my enjoyment of DC Comics at around the same time migrating over. They took a Silver Age character, ditched everything distinctive about her and turned her into a “bad girl” in the mode of the ’90s X-Men comics. They tried to disguise sloppy plotting and “world building” by giving everyone a ton of attitude. They tried to disguise the exploitive spirit of the whole enterprise by coating it with the warm wash of nostalgia. Ick.

From there on, the good episodes were fewer and further in between. More elements of the DC Universe were brought in even when they didn’t make any sense with the premise they had set up. To be fair, they were a little stuck. Neither of the two major relationships could really progress, the Freak of the Week business was wearing thin and there were only so many times that the characters could be exposed to a substance that changed their personalities and/or erased their memories.

I am not sure if you can pin that on Loeb, but he was in both places when the change happened.

In retrospect, it was the same style that ruined my enjoyment of DC Comics at around the same time migrating over. They took a Silver Age character, ditched everything distinctive about her and turned her into a “bad girl” in the mode of the ’90s X-Men comics. They tried to disguise sloppy plotting and “world building” by giving everyone a ton of attitude. They tried to disguise the exploitive spirit of the whole enterprise by coating it with the warm wash of nostalgia. Ick.

You totally nailed it. It reminds me of your theory about DC and their “Scrappy Doos.”

I am not sure if you can pin that on Loeb, but he was in both places when the change happened.

I would. He may not have created it and may not have been the sole practitioner of it, but he was hands down the most prolific and influential “writer” using that style. Also, unlike some of the other writers who use that style, for Loeb that is the ONLY tool in his toolbox.

@ Dean and T

It’s not a “shark jump” if you keep on flying.

I preferred the early seasons, also. When Jonathon was still alive and before the “real” Kara was introduced. But I like the later season, too. I DVR most of the shows I watch. Sometimes I fall a week or two behind on “V” or “The Cape” but I never wait past Sunday to watch “Smallville.” There’s things about the show I don’t care for… I feel he spent way too much time pining for that faithless twit Lana… but I love far more episodes than I loathe. Overall I just consider “Smallville” to take place on Earth-14. It doesn’t need to fit into any other continuity, it’s just a new take on an old story.

Oh, and Clark tapped Lana when he was without his powers. He stopped when he got his powers back because he lacked confidence in his control in that situation. He has more control now, which is why he and Lois have been having sex regularly since she moved in with him.