#7.18 “Apocalypse” Review

WARNING: This is an awesome episode, but my review will spoil you rotten if you read it before you see it. So, warm up the TiVo or the VCR and watch this RIGHT NOW! This episode is not to be missed.

WARNING:

I’ll get to the Review in a bit, but first I want to send an Open Letter to the person, or persons, at The CW who is responsible for the Official Episode Descriptions. I include the Official Description for this episode as a reference:

CLARK SEES WHAT LIFE WOULD BE LIKE IF HE HAD NEVER ARRIVED ON EARTH; TOM WELLING DIRECTS — Clark (Tom Welling) discovers that Kara (Laura Vandervoort) sent messages from Krypton in the past that indicate that Brainiac (guest star James Marsters) wants to kill Baby Kal-El so Clark will not exist in the future. Clark is torn because he thinks the world would be better off if he had never arrived in Smallville. Jor-El arranges for him to see what life would have been like if Clark hadn’t existed – Lex (Michael Rosenabum) is President of the United States, Kara is raised by the Luthors, Jonathan (John Schneider) is alive, Lana (Kristin Kreuk) is happily married and Chloe (Allison Mack) and Lois (Erica Durance) are ace reporters. Aaron Ashmore also stars. Tom Welling directed the episode written by Turi Meyer & Al Septien (3T6318).

Dear Madam or Sir:

I don’t know if you are aware, much less whether you would really care, but I’m trying hard to be as spoiler free as possible. Up until now, I had only allowed myself to read the official descriptions and view the episode trailers.

But, I’ll have you know that given the bang-up job that you have been doing with the Official Descriptions this season, I’ll be avoiding them from now on. Lately, they’ve simply given too much away, especially the way you wrote the one for this episode.

I have heard that the producers aren’t at all responsible for the descriptions and have no say in how they’re written. I’ve heard that you are actually a marketing flack based at the network that doesn’t actually work directly with the Smallville series producers or writers.

If true, that makes sense. I mean the Official Descriptions are often incredibly inaccurate. You often misrepresent facets of the story and at times even get the names of original characters completely wrong. Other times, you include very specific details that possibly got left on the cutting room floor. Just reread the part of the description above that covered Chloe’s “Ace Reporter” status, for an example. Did anyone say anywhere she was an Ace in this world?

But that wasn’t the biggest problem with this one. No, what got me so peeved about how you wrote “Apocalypse’s” Official Description was that once I started watching the episode, I realized Clark had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. Yet, in the Official Description you had said that Jor-El had arranged Clark’s trip into an alternate reality.

When I had read that, I had thought (wrongly) that Jor-El would tell him, sorta like Guardian Angel Clarence told George Bailey that he’d never been born in “It’s A Wonderful Life…” However, it was pretty clear right away that Clark hadn’t a clue how he’d gotten there.

It wasn’t until Brainiac had “killed” Clark in the Alternate Universe and Clark woke up in the barn that he finally realized something else was up other than him having impossibly survived Brainiac murdering him as an infant. It was only then that Clark had known what anyone who’d read the Official Description already knew: that it was Jor-El who had been responsible for the alternate universe he had found himself in.

That made me really annoyed because I had suddenly realized that the “reveal” to Clark that dear old Dad had been behind the AU had probably been intended to be a surprise. I’m almost positive from how the episode played out that we (the audience) were originally supposed to learn about Jor-El creating that Alternate Universe the same time that Clark did. That would have made that moment a lot more powerful, but you including the fact that Jor-El was behind it in the Official Description ruined that.

But actually worse than that, I think I have a pretty good idea of what might be going on with Kara and what had happened to Brainiac when Kara had “destroyed” him. I know that because of a major spoiler that you had revealed in the Official Description for the Season 7 finale, which I seriously regret having already read.

I should have heeded Craig’s warnings about a major spoiler being in the description, but silly me. I was expecting something a lot less profound. No way did I think you were stupid enough to actually release *that* important of a spoiler in an Official Description.

I don’t know how any of the producers/writers/actors/crew feel about the copy you write that ends up as the “Official Description.” However, the way this one and the one for the season Finale, “Arctic,” were written definitely deflated the power of the episode’s surprises. I suspect that they might not be happy about it.

I am officially disgusted with you, The CW Official Description writer, or writers, or whoever you are.

Someone should buy you a freakin’ clue so that you do a better job next season.

Sincerely,

– C.M. Houghton, aka “triplet”

Ahem…

Anyway, this episode was almost completely awesome and I’m very glad of it. It’s so good, that it actually washed the travesty that was “Sleeper” out of my brain. Given how much I didn’t like “Sleeper,” that’s probably a minor miracle right there.

I’m so glad it was that good mostly because it was such an important episode. And it wasn’t important just because it was the 150th episode or just because that Tom Welling directed it. No, it was important because it was a key turning point in Clark’s series long character arc. He learned one very important lesson here.

The scribes Al Septien and Turi Meyer had penned a storyline that picked up a thread that been present in the show since the Pilot: Clark’s ongoing guilt over how his arrival on Earth had harmed so many. It’s something that has come up time and time again, especially given all the meteor freaks that have caused so much death and destruction throughout the entire series. The meteor strike clearly wasn’t his fault, he was a toddler at the time, but he’s never really let it go. In a perfect world, in the real world, the guilt he feels over things he couldn’t control is something Clark probably would have gotten over a very long time ago.

I think that the events in this episode will help him to finally do that. That is important because I think this guilt has a lot to do with why Clark’s rejected his “destiny” up until now. Let’s hope they don’t drop that little piece of character development the way they dropped Clark’s promise to never stop watching Lex. He only kept that promise for the rest of the episode before he let him go to Zurich to get open that safe deposit box in the very next one.

I hope they don’t forget this lesson and Clark goes back to feeling guilty about things he had little or no control over. If they do that, I think whatever faith I have left in the Smallville writers will be completely gone.

Anyway, I think the way Turi and Al had structured this episode was brilliant, despite the unfortunate “official” spoiling of the major reveal in the fourth act. It was similar in some ways to how they’d setup “Labyrinth,” actually. They presented Clark with ideal happily-ever-afters for his loved ones: his parents, both still alive, had a son; both Chloe and Lana were blissfully happy in new relationships; then he found Lois where she belonged, at the Planet, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Even Jimmy seemed happy and content with his job.

Everyone, it seemed, indeed had been happier without ever having known him and he was glad, as he would be. Clark has always put the happiness of others ahead of his own and he was reassured that his decision to let Brainiac win was the right one, despite the fact that he had somehow escaped death so he could witness their happily-ever-aftering. Then, as Al and Turi tend to do so well, they turned the screws on Clark a lot tighter.

First Lois gets arrested by Kara, who it turns out hadn’t been improved at all by Clark dying as a baby. And then Clark finds out Lex is the President and that the meteor strikes (and the resultant meteor freaks) still happened. After rescuing Lois, he discovers more detail that shows things are even worse than he’d thought: Lex is a madman who is poised to launch a nuclear war. Then, as if it couldn’t get any worse, he discovered that Milton Fine is Lex’s Chief of Staff and is close to his goal of wiping the Earth clean of humanity.

Clark is horrified and angered to find out that life really is NOT better without him than with him. He became resolved to try and fix what he could. He was confused about why he hadn’t just disappeared, but he was going to make a go of getting things back on track even if it killed him. And well, it did.

He came out the other end of the events in the Alternate Universe (AU) alive and more determined to do what he could to make the future better. What he had said to Kara about not looking to the past to fix things showed a remarkably more grown up attitude toward his place in the world than he’d previously shown.

Although I loved this episode and found few problems with the script, I thought it was a bit unrealistic that Lex would be quite that crazy especially since I thought they’d established that it wasn’t really Clark’s fault that Lex has turned out the way he did. At least Clark finally realized that in “Descent.” However, seeing that this AU was Jor-El’s perception of how things might have gone wrong without Clark, maybe that makes sense. Even though the Artificial Intelligence that is Jor-El is not really a person, he is the “impression” of Clark’s birth father so it might be logical that he would have a bit of an overinflated view on how Clark fits into the world.

I like the nods to comic and film canon from this episode. In the AU world Kara, the head of the Department of Domestic Security for Lex, went by the name Linda Danvers. That was one of Supergirl’s secret identities in the comics. Also, in the AU world Lois and Clark “meet cute” by bumping into one another at the Planet, very similar to the way they did in the first Superman movie. Then Jimmy was back to wearing his signature bow tie like he does in the comics and in all of the films, including the newest one.

I loved how swept off her feet Lois was by Clark as well. They’ve shown her to be a sucker for men with hero complexes, which also goes along with comic canon (she’s dated just about everyone else in the comics at one time or another before she ever dated Clark). So that line about her having more heroes exiting stage left than a Greek tragedy was very funny.

I also liked the symmetry of Lois asking Clark out for a drink in both the AU world and the real one. That second time was a really nice touch too… I’d like to think that Lois has true affection for Clark, despite her sometimes snarky attitude toward him. It was really nice to see her support at this time of crisis for him and I’m glad Clark was so comforted by it.

I LOVED Brainiac’s line about not being in Kansas anymore as a way to explain why Clark’s powers weren’t working in the Red sunlight of Krypton… That was completely awesome.

I also liked the continuity of the episode. It’s nice when they bring back past recurring characters like Sheriff Adams (Camille Mitchell) even in what effectively are cameos.

Oh, and I loved that Clark is not really the Big Dumb Alien anymore, “Sleeper” aside. He’s using his own brain power to figure things out for once. He depended less on Chloe’s Superhuman-Google abilities in this episode. Thank Goodness. I’m glad someone in the writer’s room has heard that Clark is supposed to be smart.

Al and Turi have again turned in another wonderful script. The act breaks were all terrific, they had some nice comic relief moments and they had escalating stakes throughout the entire episode up until the final cliffhanger with Kara lying in a puddle of spilt milk on the Kent kitchen floor. What a great script.

Actor and Director Tom Welling did a remarkable job with all that was asked of him. Not only was this a far more action packed story than the other episodes he’d directed previously, he also had a lot more screen time than he’d had in either “Fragile” or “Hydro.” Those episodes were essentially “filler” which aired in non-sweeps months (April 2006 for “Fragile” and January 2007 for “Hyrdo”). They were fairly Clark-light and they just weren’t important episodes, in and of themselves.

While they had been very important to Tom as he stretched himself a bit and tried to do something new, and he did it very well from the start, but they arguably hadn’t been all that important to the show as a whole. The show could afford to indulge their lead with directing those. Yeah, they were still episodes of a network TV show that probably cost a lot of money to produce, maybe millions, but how much really was at stake? The risk was relatively minimal, all things considered. However, those episodes were clearly not in the same league as “Apocalypse.”

With giving such an important episode to Tom, it shows that they have a lot of trust in Tom as both an actor and a director. Not only is it an important episode for his character, moving Clark past a seriously huge hurdle in his journey to Superhero-hood (the lasting guilt over how he may have negatively affected others), it’s the 150th episode, a huge milestone for the series, and it aired during the most important sweeps month of the year. Tom had a lot of pressure he needed to handle for this episode, so I’m not sure how anyone else could have done it all as well as he did.

With all of that to consider, it’s amazing that this episode was such a clean one for him both as an actor and a director. He was again amazing as Clark, who went through an incredibly difficult story arc in this episode, and he did an amazing job as director as well.

I would say probably his only failing in this episode came as the director. I didn’t like how poorly Kara was portrayed in this episode. She hadn’t been played Kara much differently in this episode than she had in any other. However, I’m not sure how much of that was Laura Vandervoort’s fault and how much was Tom’s as the director. I will probably never know the answer to that for sure, but all the other actors turned in nearly perfect performances so I have to think that most of the fault lies with the actor than the director in this case. I’ll talk more about that later when I get to the acting.

I did love the visual touches in this episode. I loved the way the Lois rescue was staged and I loved how Jimmy’s playing with his camera turned into Point-of-View shots in the show. I also liked all the low angle shots and point-of-view shots… It was especially noticeable in the final scene of the Alternate Universe. When Clark got shot and laid on the floor of the library, the camera was on his level for a lot of the scene. They had shots of him as he lay there from a camera shooting from the floor, and then when Brainiac started taunting him, the angle seemed to be just reversed and we saw Milton Fine from Clark’s perspective. It was really well done. It’s scenes like this that made the camera work feel far more dynamic, and more mobile, than is usual for Smallville.

As an actor, Tom’s excellent comic timing as an actor also helped the Lois and Jimmy moments be more humorous than they would have been otherwise. However, probably his best scene acting-wise was the ending scene with Lex.

The way that Tom played that, I could see that Clark was torn. Lex had been offering to get help with the world’s best doctors and scientists if only Clark would give him some clue about what had happened to Lana. Of course, Clark knows exactly what had happened to Lana and he lied to Lex about it, but he really had no choice. Yes, perhaps the lie was at the expense of Lana, but he couldn’t tell Lex. Clark couldn’t confirm Lex’s suspicions about his true origin, the danger is just too great. Clark knows he’s already close to figuring out his secret. Tom played Clark’s emotional turmoil perfectly and the last shot of Clark as Lex walked away was extremely powerful…

He was awesome as the lead and he had a lot more to deal with than normal because of his extra workload in this episode. Although it was not a perfect outing for Tom as a director, I can’t complain too much. It was another strong outing for him from both sides of the camera.

Michael Rosenbaum was fantastic as a crazy President Lex Luthor. Again, I think it would have been so easy to turn this AU performance campy, like it would have earlier have been in “Fractured,” but Michael managed to do crazy things (like wanting to blow up the world in order to rebuild it) and still play it like Lex thought it was the most sane thing in the world to do.

And that’s probably how, as an actor, that you should play it. I mean, to Lex in that AU annihilating the world was the sane thing to do. He wouldn’t have perceived it as crazy, so Michael played it straight as it was the right way to play that. No maniacal cackling or rubbing his hands together…

Probably Michael’s best scene was the one at the end between Clark and Lex. He went there to try and get Clark to slip-up and maybe reveal more about himself. After the events in “Descent,” it seems that Lex is suspicious about Clark, maybe even already suspecting he knows something about the Traveler. Michael made it clear that although the scene seemed to have Lex showing compassion (at least outwardly) toward Clark and Lana, that Lex’s real intention was more complex and far less altruistic than that. He’s closing in on Clark’s secret and didn’t mind tormenting Clark over Lana to try and manipulate him into revealing the truth.

As a side-note:

This review is going to “press” after the shocking (or maybe not so shocking) news that Michael Rosenbaum won’t be coming back next year. It’s scenes like this, and the great episodes this year where Tom and Michael have had such wonderful moments together, that makes me already mourn his loss to the show.

Yes, I am an unashamed Tom Welling fan. Anyone who reads these reviews would know that, but I’m also a Michael Rosenbaum fan. The show won’t be the same without him. After all, the hero isn’t as heroic without a compelling villain to fight.

Michael Rosenbaum has added an incredible amount to this show and is a major reason it has been so successful. I hope there is still hope left that Michael can be persuaded to return at least for part of next year. If Michael’s resolved to never return, I’m sorry because I will miss seeing Michael dish up possibly the best, and definitely the most complex, Lex Luthor portrayal ever.

I absolutely adored Erica Durance in this episode. Lois was different than her normal self. While Clark didn’t seem to have a huge impact on the course her life took, she was still going to end up a reporter at the Daily Planet, but Erica still made subtle changes to Lois. Erica played her as more self-assured, cockier, and bold enough to hit on a guy she’d literally just bumped in to.

I liked her reactions to witnessing Clark’s powers. Instead of getting freaked out or scared, she gave Lois a sense of awe and wonder. It’s reminiscent of when Lois was on Red-Kryptonite back in “Crimson” and saw Clark do impossible things.

I also liked her reaction to Clark needing to change. Despite the danger to the world, and the high stakes of Clark and Lois’ mission to stop the launch, she still tried to get a peek at the cute guy changing clothes in the next room. It was adorable. However, my favorite part of the episode from Erica was the final scene between Clark and Lois. She had Lois be sympathetic and supportive the best way she knew how. It’s funny that her way was to take Clark out for a drink and Erica played that choice as perfectly sincere and honest. What a wonderful performance.

Allison Mack’s Chloe didn’t have a lot of screen time, but she definitely knocked it out of the park whenever we saw her in this episode. She played Chloe as passionate and desperate in the opening barn scene with Clark. She had Chloe nearly in tears at the very thought that Clark wouldn’t listen and make the biggest mistake of his life in deciding to remove himself from the world. What a great moment for her as an actress and for Chloe as a character.

Later, it was clear that Allison had gotten the memo that Chloe was supposed to be different in the Alternate Universe because she really was. Allison made Chloe seem blissfully happy. Chloe is never that happy in the real world. Makes me wonder why the writers think that knowing Clark is so tough on her… But, in any case she was wonderful.

Aaron Ashmore’s Jimmy was terrific. He was different enough in the AU world for me to see the changes in him, but it was like he was less friendly or less concerned about pleasing others. He was willing to let Lois go to prison without trying to help her, despite the part he played in her “crimes.” I don’t think that the real-life Jimmy would do that…

Unfortunately, I think Laura Vandervoort has finally reached the limit of her abilities. I don’t know what she was thinking, but playing Kara as essentially the same, just dressed more like an adult, was totally a bad move. Kara wasn’t that much different in the AU world without a Clark than the real one with him in it.

The thing is, I don’t think she’d been written like the same old Kara. There was a hint of a colder, meaner Kara when she had confronted Clark in the hallway. She said that she had been sent there to kill him and then she got furiously angry that he was still alive… She tried to hit him and ended up smashing the granite column in the hallway she had been so furious. That fury was forgotten moments later.

She played Kara as whiny and petulant when she should have been badass and as smooth as silk about it. She was raised by Lionel Luthor and was competent enough at doing bad deeds that Lex made her the head of his secret police. I don’t buy Kara being that from how Laura played her. Not at all. She was the weakest part of an otherwise stupendous episode, which is a shame. She should have taken this opportunity to show what else she can do and yet she chose to do everything exactly the same. She showed us absolutely nothing new about Kara at all. What a wasted opportunity for her as an actress and for her character’s development.

This review will get posted after the show has stopped production for the year so nothing I say will affect the rest of the season. Her status is apparently up in the air, but if Laura comes back I hope she takes my comments to heart, learns from her mistakes, and tries harder next season. With Lex likely being completely gone along with Lionel, and Lana only coming back for a handful of episodes next year, Kara will probably have more screen time. If she’s returning, I’m seriously hoping that Laura will be up to the task.

James Marsters wasn’t really in this episode long as Brainiac, but every moment was pure gold. I loved how he played with Clark at the end of the AU and again in that scene on Krypton. He’s just so casually evil. He acted as if killing an infant was the same as putting the baby to sleep. Awesome.

The photography was terrific. Glen Winter shot this episode and he always does a great job and this was no different.

One moment I loved was when Clark woke up in the barn. The shot faded up from Black on Clark as he was just waking up, but the short was from above with Clark shown upside down… As Clark stood, the camera rotated and pulled back and tilted up to follow him as he stood. I don’t know how difficult a shot that is, or whether it was hand-held or whether it was on some kind of crane, but it looked great.

At the end of the AU world, when Fine walked toward Clark as he lay on the floor, the shot was from Clark’s Point-of-View and the camera tilted up to show the ceiling of Lex’s Luthor mansion office. It reminded me a bit of some similar low angle shots in “Citizen Kane.” That reinforced Clark’s powerlessness. What a great shot.

The Alternate Universe also had a softer, more romantic feel, but back in the real world the light and photography got harsher and clearer. That was a terrific choice.

This is about as close to perfect as an episode can get, so I can give it nothing less than 5 Brain-Interactive-Constructs out of a possible 5.

Note: The views of Triplet don’t necessarily represent the thoughts and feelings of everyone at KryptonSite. Send her feedback.