sdelmonte | Not So Super Thursday

Watched the last of my season finales. Smallville was a mess. Supernatural was OK, but it was somewhat predictable and a little unexciting.

I am not quite sure what happened on Smallville. They blew up Doomsday and Superman - sorry, I mean Clark, since he's never going to be Superman - but Clark walked away? And then he decides to go all Vulcan on Chloe and cut himself off from humanity? Where did that come from? And they finally did something surprising and killed off an established character from the Daily Planet days of Clark Kent, only to tell us that this Jimmy is the older brother of the real one. That was disappointing. So was the big fight between Clark and Doomsday. So was the return of the JLA. (I cannot stand what Oliver has become.) And did Lois really get zapped in the 31st century? What for?

Smallville is not a great show. It's always had moments of greatness, and a strong cast, but it's far past its sell-by date, and the hodgepodge of the Superman mythos, combined with Clark's almost paranoid refusal to embrace his destiny, have become almost impossible for me to take. But I fully expect to do next year what I did this year, and watch the last ten minutes before Supernatural, and occasionally watch a full hour if it sounds interesting. When it comes to all things DC Comics, my resistance is low.

As for Dean and Sam and the apocalypse, I liked some of what we saw, like Castiel finding his backbone, and Bobby hitting Dean with a clue-by-four (and also not dying!). The acting was as strong as usual. But there wasn't much suspense, compared with previous finales (and compared with what I saw 22 hours earlier on Lost). We knew the angels were real jerks, we were pretty sure Ruby was a plant, and we knew Lilith - one of the worst acted baddies this show has ever had - was going to die (she told Sam!).

And I still can't say that the Angels and Demons thing is doing much here. It's not a bad idea. We've seen it done really well, in fact, many times in Vertigo books like Hellblazer and Lucifer. But there are things missing. Like someone taking note of how the apocalypse might not be something you stop, or how it might be God's will - check your Bible, folks. Or like having Dean go all Hellblazer and tell off both sides on behalf of humanity. We get large ideas, but reduced to a size that makes it just a bunch of jerks fighting a bunch of jerks. (I would have loved it if, instead of being told that "God has left the building," we were told it was His order.) And we don't get the stories we used to, with people sometimes being innocent victims and sometimes being more than they expected, and with all the urban legends and rural myths you can find at Snopes and in folklore.

I still like this show. But I want it to not spend another year in the middle of cosmic events. I want it to get back to what it was, even if Sam and Dean can never be what they were.

Oh, and that cliffhanger? I can't say I am waiting to see Lucifer. I'm curious as to how he'll be cast (somehow I doubt it will be Ray Wise or John Glover). I'm curious to see if it's really Lucifer since Lucifer by some demons as merely a legend (like God is with the angels). But otherwise, the cliffhanger didn't do it for me. I did note, though, that the closing title card was inverted to black letters on white. Just like Lost's finale. Weird.