#9.15 “Escape” Review

NOTE: This review contains some big spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the episode yet, it may also work as a warning.

When I dislike an episode upon watching it as it airs, I can usually find reasons to love it each time I see it after that. I tend to watch the episode multiple times, sometimes only watching particular parts more than others if I’m trying to figure something out about the scene. So I can sometimes find reasons to love things even if I hate the episode itself, I’m not sure that it is the case here.

While I did like some parts of the episode quite a bit, even loved very few other parts, the parts I didn’t like only got worse upon re-watching. So, I think it’s pretty safe to say that this isn’t scribe’s Genevieve Sparling’s best work. Not nearly.

I absolutely hated how this episode started with Chloe in the car with the driver being some sort of secret surprise since they didn’t show his face until the end. Why?

I know there aren’t as many people out there watching the show as there used to be, but I’m pretty sure it’s no secret that Oliver and Chloe are an item. I suppose it did carry on that stupidity from ‘Conspiracy’ which had Chloe’s surprise guest at her place being Oliver, although as the end-of-tease tease showing us the face of the man everyone would have known was with Chloe is an extremely weak one.

Things didn’t really get any better after that. As villains go, Siobhan McDougal, or the Silver Banshee, isn’t the best villain. I mean the body count was too low for a good villain. So, there was little peril or even anything like real suspense. Also, her origin doesn’t match the comics very closely at all. Not that I’m all that strict about things lining up perfectly, but what was weird about it mostly was how she manifested. It just seemed off, somehow. What she did seemed inconsistent from the first victim to her intended latter ones (Clark and Oliver).

If you’ve been reading my reviews for any length of time, you know I don’t like something that doesn’t make sense given the rules laid out at the start of whatever it is. Early in the first act we saw Siobhan taking over that woman’s body and her boyfriend becoming a desiccated corpse in the aftermath. She did nothing for hours, I suppose, then decided to take over Chloe’s body to hurt another man. Then later, when she couldn’t do whatever she was going to do to Clark, she switched to Lois.

Yet, I’m not sure why she didn’t try to do anything to Clark. The bathroom was private, at least she and Clark were alone in the bathroom until Lois showed up. If she needed to take Clark to the woods before trying to kill him (she did say something to Clark about taking a walk), Siobhan changing into nothing except a towel doesn’t make sense.

What was her plan? Have Clark walk half naked through the inn with her before getting outside? Or was she going to kill him in the bathroom? Whether or not she was going to kill him there, why did she need to get naked herself? Her power doesn’t apparently require her to be in physical contact with her victim. Maybe she was trying to tease him sexually before killing him, but Siobhan didn’t try to do that before trying to kill Oliver. She could have easily used her sonic scream to kill Clark from the doorway, so I’m confused on why she did what she did.

This tactic was an extremely flimsy contrivance to get Clark naked and wet from the shower. Not that I mind the change in scenery and all the cuteness that happened because of it, good to see he’s keeping his figure since we don’t see his bare chest nearly as often as we’ve seen Justin’s this season, and the scene was cute if you look at it for what it was. Yet, where’s the logic in what she did? There is none and that makes me scratch my head. I can’t believe someone thought this was a good idea.

I know this is a TV show about alien with superpowers, but I would think things still need to make sense to an extent. Did Genevieve (or whoever’s idea this was) think we’d be so distracted by the nearly naked states of Clark and Chloe to notice the lapse in logic?

Added to that, from what I’ve been able to find online Silver Banshee doesn’t normally take over people like she did here. Yet, almost worse than that was this kind of thing had happened so many times before. The show’s really been-there and done-that with characters getting possessed by beings with evil intents. Whether it was Phantom Zone phantoms, ghosts, or witches, it’s just so tired. Couldn’t they think of another sort of story to show Clark and Lois in bed and get Clark naked in the shower?

And just where did Lois get that Scottish outfit? She had packed several bags not knowing the surprise location of Clark’s intended weekend getaway spot. Are we supposed to believe that she just happened to have packed a Scottish-highlander skimpy Halloween costume on the off-chance she went to a Scottish themed Bed and Breakfast? Or did she buy it in the inn’s gift shop? How likely is it that any such store would carry costumes? It’s ridiculous. It would have made more sense if she’d brought along the French maid’s outfit we’d previously seen in ‘Warrior’ and ‘Odyssey’. At least we’d seen that before, if she has a role-playing fetish that particular costume would have made more sense.

And thinking of that part of the tease, if Clark picked the place because he thought Lois wanted to go there, why didn’t he react when she showed no recognition of their destination? It was a momentary thing that happened as the scene was fading to black, but in retrospect that pretty much invalidated the later breakfast table discussion between the four of them regarding the reasons Clark chose the place.

Another problem I had was after Chloe was freed from Siobhan’s possession by her passing to Lois, the Silver Banshee waits long enough before trying to kill Ollie that it gave Chloe and Clark time to investigate and then try to find where she took Oliver. And then when Clark sees the second portrait under the visible one, why didn’t that desk clerk react to that? Unless you knew Clark had X-Ray vision, it would have been inexplicable, yet she showed no confusion at all at his discovering the second painting under the first.

That was weird, but then when Clark figures out where Siobhan might have gone and Chloe is back in the inn becoming like one of the Winchester brothers trying to exorcise a ghost by burning any remains, she apparently leaves Lois’ body and becomes corporeal, yet Lois is nowhere to be seen and is absent for the rest of the act. She disappeared for what seemed like a very long time as Clark battled the now physically manifested Siobhan before Chloe burned that painting which made her go up in flames.

Then, after all this, Clark and Lois don’t end up doing it? At one point they had Clark in the shower waiting for Lois to wash his back, yet nothing happens? Are they trying to take us on a Clark and Lois will-they-or-won’t-they roller coaster ride like they had with Clark and Lana? If they are, then color me disgusted.
That mess got so bad in the third season I had almost stopped watching the show. Do they really think people like being teased like this? It’s aggravating.

And actually, I liked them as a couple better before this episode. I think the sexual tension is far more interesting, and more importantly, far more entertaining, than what we ended up with here. For example, I liked the scene in ‘Conspiracy’ where Clark and Lois were talking about having lunch. They had LOADS of sexual tension in that scene, it had a great dynamic. So I hope they don’t do anything like this again, but they probably will. The show was just renewed for a tenth season, so they’ll probably have Clark and Lois dating for another year before they finally see each other naked in the present.

And I’m not sure I’d ever say this, but I entirely didn’t love Tess and Zod together. The way they’d been teasing them all season, I thought I’d like it a lot more than I do. Initially, somehow I got bored with their scenes.
Although on subsequent viewings I did like them better together. I did like it that he didn’t fool her about finally having his powers. It seems that Zod’s acting as a substitute for the other Kryptonian she knows, Clark. She met him in Clark’s barn, so maybe that’s a fair guess on his part.

It’s also nice to see that Tess is still keeping Zod a bit at arm’s length and is still scheming. She seemed almost excited by the danger of getting into a physical relationship with him. And I loved that Zod was trying to figure out why Clark is so beloved even when no one knows who he is. It isn’t the power he wields in their defense and Zod doesn’t understand that. It’s probably typical of a villain that he doesn’t understand someone who utilizes their power at no benefit to themselves.

Zod has the exact same powers Clark has, well except for that one really important one that Clark doesn’t have control of yet, and he’s not using them to help anyone but himself. Zod hasn’t done a thing to help any humans and it’s not even really clear whether he’s even told his followers about the return of his powers yet, so maybe he’s not even helping them. His instinct to keep that secret is interesting, I wonder if he’s worried it might not be permanent (although that’s not supported by anything he’s said so that’s a complete supposition on my part).

It’s interesting that Zod is trying to play Lois against Tess. He must be looking for leverage against her to get her to tell him what he wants to know. Lois and Tess don’t get along at all, so I wonder how far she’ll go to feed her anonymous source information on Tess.

I didn’t like Chloe’s attitude toward Oliver. She’s a passionate and emotional person, I think her holding him at arm’s length like that is out of character. I can see her maybe being cautious after what happened with Jimmy, but being so businesslike in her love-life? I’m not sure she would do that. Thing is, she seemed more like her normal self at the end of the episode, so her characterization felt inconsistent.

One of the few things I did like about this episode was all the cute banter between all the characters at the Bed and Breakfast. It was wonderful, but some of the other dialogue I didn’t like as much. I hate that Genevieve had Chloe go back to her trademark out-of-left-field style of similes.

I think those used be cute, but they’d been taken down a few notches the last few years. With Chloe’s more serious turn lately, especially the darker stories for her this season; it makes sense to cut back on her cuteness factor. So her saying her memory hit a ‘roadblock’ and the phantom rode her ‘dune buggy’, among other things she said like that, is more than annoying.

Either she’s dark or she’s cute. I think you have to pick one and go with it, yet she had her dark moments in this episode on top of those humorous ones. I was confused what Genevieve was doing with Chloe in this episode because by the end she was back to being a far more likable Chloe.

I think the overall story was probably a fine idea, bring in Silver Banshee and introduce some cute romantic complications for Clark, Lois, Chloe and Oliver, but I think it was poorly handled. Silver Banshee wasn’t given a good outing. She was dispatched far too easily by Chloe, which left Clark apparently ineffective against her powers and unable to do a thing but look on.

Yeah, I know Clark has to be rescued at times, it makes the show exciting and he’s always getting saved by someone in the comics so it’s nothing new. Kryptonite and magic are his two biggest weaknesses so the comic villains usually try to exploit one or the other, but when the need arises in the show they need to give him more dire peril, higher stakes to face, before they leave him lying on the ground at the villain’s feet.

He was knocked down once and the fight was over. Maybe having Clark lying on the ground like that might have worked better if they had at least given us a better fight before he got saved. So maybe the staging of the fight wasn’t her fault, but this outing still wasn’t probably one of Genevieve’s best.

Tom Welling did some very fine work in an episode, despite there were so many things I hated about it. He was charming and cute and had some great bantering with Lois and with Oliver. I loved the cute brunch scene the most, I think. And as much as I hated the idea of Siobhan thinking that showing up in the bathroom nearly naked was a good idea, I loved what Tom did in that scene. It was very funny and very cute and it makes me hope that Tom Welling will do a romantic comedy after he’s done with “Smallville.” He can be very funny.

Erica Durance was very good, I really enjoyed her performance. Although I regret them again having her be possessed again, I don’t have any complaints what she did with the part. She was also very fun to watch in the scenes between Clark and Lois.

Allison Mack did a very good job with what she was given to her. Probably my favorite scenes of hers were when she was possessed, even though I didn’t like the storyline much. It seemed like Allison was having fun and it made those scenes far more enjoyable than they would have otherwise been. She was very funny in the bathroom scene.

Cassidy Freeman was again a joy to watch as Tess. I like her take on the part a lot and I loved how she played the give and take Tess had with Zod. I liked how she played Tess enjoying the danger. It was like it was exciting to Tess. It was very well done.

Callum Blue was excellent as Zod. I liked the scene where he was in bed with Tess best. He gave Zod a bit of post-sex bliss with the way he was praising Tess, but then he was still trying to find out how she weakened him.
I really liked the way that Justin Hartley played Oliver’s banter, especially as the Silver Banshee was trying to kill him. He plays Ollie as so charming. I like the light touch he has for the part.

I’m not sure I have much to say about the directing, production design, photography and music. I suppose it was all competent, but I don’t really want to watch this episode again to try and figure out what else to write about it. I’d really rather start thinking about ‘Checkmate,’ which was a far better episode. I’m glad it will probably help wash this one out of my mind.

I know a lot of people liked this episode, but I really didn’t. There were some things I liked, fewer things I loved, and so much I hated. I’m not sure at the start of this season I would have believed that they could have produced an episode worse than ‘Roulette’ and ‘Pandora’, but I have to give this 2 cursed portraits 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.