#10.12 “Collateral” Review

NOTE: Spoilers Note: I’ve said this before and I mean it; read no further if you don’t want to be spoiled. Important plot details will be revealed in this review.

I’m glad the show is finally back. I did miss it and it has come back in very strong form.

Written by Jordan Hawley, the episode started out strong going from when we’d last seen Clark and the other heroes after they’d been knocked unconscious at the end of ‘Icarus.’ I wasn’t sure what was going to happen at the start of the next episode after that, but a Straus waltz playing while Lois was on hold with the Vigilante Registration Agency certainly hadn’t come to mind. Her ire at the woman she’d been talking to showed how fierce Lois would be with Clark in danger. That was an awesome detail.

And the way the tease ended was terrific, I knew Clark was not going to have his powers based on the promos I’d seen for the episode, but Chloe apparently being involved in the experiments on Clark? Wow… that was a huge surprise I’m glad I didn’t know about ahead of time.

The ‘flashback’ that Clark had witnessed was freaky and so well done. I was impressed by the visual sense, the way the scattered, disjointed images were edited, how that fit in with the jerky hand-held camera, the de-saturated color of the scene and the strident music…

I’d be curious to read the script to see how that scene was written to see how much of that Jordan had laid out and how much Cinematographer Glen Winter and Director Morgan Beggs had contributed to it, but it was very well realized by everyone. Tom Welling did a fantastic job with the scene, especially back on the kitchen floor. Clark seemed disoriented and not quite with Lois when the vision ended, then there was his bombshell that ended the tease: that the person who had been experimenting on him was Chloe.
It all made for a perplexing start, not knowing the spoilers I didn’t have a clear idea of what was going on. Yet, it still all made so much sense in retrospect even after finding out that Chloe hadn’t actually been involved with the experimentation. Even with that red herring at the start, the tease held up surprisingly well to repeat viewings. A twist holding up after subsequent views can be hard. It’s not been something that “Smallville” has been real good at doing well either, but this twist mostly worked really well. (And I’ll talk about when it kinda didn’t later.)

For this episode Jordan leaned heavily on previous Sci-Fi tropes (read that as: he borrowed a lot from “The Matrix”). He had even a few bits there were reminiscent of the show’s 6th season episode, ‘Labyrinth.’ Oddly coincidental, that was the 12th episode from that season.

Despite the derivative nature of some of the episode’s plot points, Jordan gave them a new enough spin that it didn’t really feel that he had leaned too heavily on previous work. Yeah, there were the extra Chloes in white that at one point that were very reminiscent of the extra Mr. Smiths in black from The Matrix films. However, it wasn’t just that. There were a few other things that were similar (instead of a red pill, or killing the phantom, the way out of this rabbit hole was a leap of faith off of the Daily Planet roof), but the story allowed Jordan to believably have Clark learn to trust Chloe again.

For me, this was the right story to bring Chloe back into the show and allow Clark to accept her previous actions fully. The way he sees things, Clark was right to not trust her and it would have been a serious obstacle for her to overcome had she come back any other way. Chloe left with no explanation and then had come back under very suspicious circumstances. It would make even the closest friend doubt her.

The virtual world that Jordan had created was perfect since it brought her back in a way that Clark and everyone else (including Oliver) would accept. The situation forced everyone to trust her despite the fact, on the face of it, she had no longer seemed trustworthy. I liked the story mainly because it externalized what would have gone on in everyone’s head, not trusting Chloe, but then the stakes rose and they were forced to see that she was still a friend.

I don’t think Clark ever completely stopped trusting her, despite what happened, but the doubt he had felt had kept him from taking that first leap. There were just too many unanswered questions, so I can understand why he acted the way he did.

That said, however, I do see what caused so many people online to not like this episode very much. Clark did come off as passive. Others were taking action, while he was a bystander in much of the story and was the last person who needed to be convinced about Chloe. However, in the end I don’t think that weakness negatively affected the way I felt about this episode.

Maybe it’s episodes like this that are why people paint my reviews as too positive, I actually like an episode when it seems to be reviled by certain segments of the fan base. However, I see the writer’s point-of-view in this case. Maybe it might not make complete sense because most of the time you have to show, rather than tell, in order to have a more compelling story. However, as a writer I can see when it’s justified to have characters talk instead.

Yeah, Clark had to wrestle with the decision to trust Chloe, and he had to have faith in her so that he could learn to distrust what he could see and feel as reality while still weighing the alternatives. Yet, how do you show his thought process unless he talks to others about what is going on? Jordan did a good job squeezing in some pretty dense exposition in with the action and there wasn’t too much talking for me. It had all seemed pretty organic.

And even though it wasn’t real flying, I have to like the episode for Clark’s flight almost all by itself. It was a beautiful glimpse of what will be in the future when Clark will take Lois flying. That was terrific and it was thanks to Lois finally convincing him that Chloe had been telling the truth. What a great little speech she had there too… It was her love and her belief in him that got him to take flight.
The flight was a very nice payoff of the story in the episode, instead of jumping Clark and Lois flew through the portal. Which was fitting: it wouldn’t have seemed right for Clark to jump. And it was a fantastic flight, despite the fact that it was only in cyberspace.
I also liked how this story had brought Chloe back into the show. She was given the chance, which she had anticipated thanks to what she had seen with Dr. Fate’s helmet, to rescue the team. If she had been with the team at Carter’s funeral, she would have been captured along with the rest and they probably would have had no chance.

Maybe it wasn’t a perfect choice, but it sure gave Chloe a great reason to stay away while Allison Mack took some time off to do some theatrical work. It was nice to see Chloe back, by the way. Allison Mack did a great job with the episode and she sure looked great.
This probably wasn’t a perfect episode, but I don’t have much else to complain about in terms of the storytelling. The tease and all the act breaks were very strong, the pacing was good and the dialogue was pretty tight.

Well, except for a couple of what seemed like errors, but I’d like to think the actors misspoke instead of Jordan having made a mistake. For example, in the scene where Chloe and Oliver are trying to get out of the hospital she says to him that her ‘rabbit hole’ was 800 feet above Broadway.

If that was true, then I don’t think the Daily Planet is tall enough and everyone should have flown up, instead of falling toward the street. I’m not sure how many stories high the Daily Planet building is, but being over 800+ feet high would mean it would have more than 80 stories. With an older building like that, maybe built in what looks like the 30s with its Art Deco touches, I doubt it would have be tall enough for a fall to get anyone to 800 feet. Maybe the Luthorcorp tower behind it is that tall, but it just seemed off that Chloe suggested that the Daily Planet is taller than that.

I hope she was supposed to have said that the portal was 80 feet above Broadway, which would be about seven or eight floors up. That would have made a lot more sense, especially since where that flash took place that indicated the portal opening looked to be about eight stories above the street.

And then there was another oopsie when Chloe and Oliver tried to get Clark to jump. He said that he didn’t have powers ‘here’ as if he knew the reality he was currently in was a virtual one. That line didn’t really make much sense… Clark didn’t really accept that he was in a different reality in that part of the episode, so hopefully that was just Tom misspeaking (or adlibbing) and not Jordan’s choice of wording.

And I’m not sure I completely buy Chloe having an avatar that could interact physically with the others, yet she was only sitting at a terminal in some lab. I would have to think that she would have to be literally plugged in like Clark, Lois, Oliver and Dinah for that to work.

It just didn’t like it would make sense because I would think it would be more like how it worked in “Avatar,” James Cameron’s film, or even in the “Matrix” films: her entering the world should have required her to ‘plug in.’ However, the krypto-technobabble doesn’t always make complete sense in the show so I guess that probably isn’t all that serious especially since it didn’t really interfere with my enjoyment of the episode.

Maybe this wasn’t a perfect episode, but it was a very strong one and I enjoyed it. It held up very well to repeat viewings too, so I think Jordan did a good job in what was an important episode coming out of the winter break.

Director Morgan Beggs is normally a First Assistant Director on the show and this is his third episode behind the director’s chair. I think his previous episodes maybe weren’t that strong (‘Bulletproof’ and ‘Pandora’, while I liked his freshman effort far more than his sophomore one), but this one sure was. I thought the way the scenes were staged took very good advantage of the mobile camera. The scenes in the virtual world also used slightly unusual camera angles and more hand-held camera work. On the first viewing it wasn’t clear that they were in a cyber-world, but it was different enough that it made sense upon repeat views. Morgan also got great performances out of the entire cast, so he did a fantastic job.

Cinematographer Glen Winter’s work was stellar. I adored the scenes in the cyber-world being so dramatically lit and shot. The lighting in the show is usually softer and photography doesn’t have such a high contrast ratio, but the light areas on the screen were so bright and overexposed they almost glowed. It was a terrific choice since it helped to set the cyber-world apart from the real one. And I liked how mobile the camera was. His camera operators also did a terrific job with that aspect as well.

This cast is one of the best looking on TV, not even “Gossip Girl” and “The Vampire Diaries” can compete with it, yet he somehow managed to make the normally gorgeous cast look even more breathtaking than normal. Glen did a fantastic job.

I usually don’t have complaints about the costumes Costume Designer Melanie Williams puts the cast in and, for the most part, this episode was no different. Allison Mack looked awesome in that all white pantsuit. However, I loathed the costumes she wore in the final act.

That high-necked satin shirt paired with the tight cashmere or angora sweater that was exactly the same color fuchsia? I hated that combo with a passion. And the halter top she wore in that final scene with Oliver looked pretty good from the front, but I detested the back.

I completely adored the music in this outing by series Music Composer Louis Febre. I think my favorite parts were the glimpses of Clark and Oliver in the lab and the final flight. The weird flashbacks were disjointed visually and that was perfectly supported in the music. And the flight was perfectly scored. The music soared and felt majestic. I like how it ended with the flash as Clark and Lois entered portal. What an awesome way to end the act.

I know I probably liked this episode a lot more than most people, it had a few logic problems, but in the end I have to grade something on how much I enjoyed the episode. And I really liked this one a lot so I give this episode 4.75 leaps of faith out of a possible 5.

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