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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

UK Smallville

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15:54 / 16.01.02

So what do the UK people think of Superman the Monster slayer then? I'm quite enjoying it to be honest, the monsters are pretty cool... its kinda really Buffy though with young Clenty at the helm...

Pin

17:13 / 16.01.02

Awful. Awful awful awful. Hate it. Why do I watch it every week? I can't stand it. Awful dialogue. Awful premise. Awful "Lois Lane - ONLY NOT!!" character. Awful soundtrack. I hate it. Grr. Go die.

Why do I do this to myself?

The Natural Way

17:35 / 16.01.02

The Big Issue described it as "Buffy for girls" - which is arse, seeing as the vast majority of Buffyfans I know ARE girls.

It's a bit lame, really: post Dawson's Creek men-not-in-pants.

17:43 / 16.01.02

Crap show.

I am intrigued by their take on Lex Luthor though. He's the one interesting character in the show, kinduv played as an anti-hero at the moment. The actor's alright too, but then he hasn't really been tested by the script yet (and with scripts that bad, I'm not sure if he ever will be).

17:54 / 16.01.02

There's something really frustrating about it - which, essentially, is that he's ALREADY much more powerful than he should be to be able to identify with him clearly...

While of course Superman (at any stage in his development) needs to identify some superman-like traits, the ones he has are too well developed.

It would make much more sense to me to have him discover he has any abilities at all in the first episode, and for his parents to be as surprised as him. I'd also have liked it if he'd kept it from them - just for half a season or something. That would have made it a much more interesting metaphor - and if they'd got past that quickly it would have been kind of cool...

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss some of the Byrne era stuff. Why is it that (for example) we don't get to see him excelling in sporting events, and then having to give them up - rather than being told he can't participate from the beginning. It could have been really interesting in a two hour pilot episode to see him go from cocky jock with a good heart to someone who has to withdraw from his popular life a bit and deal with what it means to be different.

Too much too quickly, is my opinion. Too white-bread in a 'never had to fight for anything, no real identiable internal struggle' kind of way.

The Natural Way

17:57 / 16.01.02

But he has such a great Dad!

Backslaps and Gillette razors.

18:01 / 16.01.02

Oh dear everyones running the other way from me and now I feel like explaining myself or pretending - Oh that Smallville yeah thats crap, but yeah it is crap but enjoyable crap but then thats just me I'd watch anything really...

The superdude himself is terrible and if he doesn't get that hair sorted out I'll have to write to Terry Wogan ....

Ah well nevermind I'll watch it... apart from maybe the Kelly Brooke episode...whats that all about?

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

00:04 / 17.01.02

I think we're losing track ofthe most important thing here (and thanks to Flyboy for this vital single datum).

Lex Luthor is played by Michael Rosenbaum, who also played the arrogant and seemingly worldly Jack in Zoe, Duncan, Jack and Jane, perhaps the most important single cultural itemn in this or any other age. And, later in the series
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S

He will be stalked by an obsessive Lex fan, played by Azura Skye, formerly his scratchy twin Jane, whose wierdly quasi-incestuous relationship with Jack was the fulcrum of the aforementioned cultural artifact.

Pomo as fuck...

00:17 / 17.01.02

I've watched far too much of this show. It's probably because my favourite parts of the Superman movies (and the first cartoon) were set in Smallville.

Though I love Lex, Pa Kent takes the cake for me. All that homespun, good ol' boy advice. I also liked the Lana's wandering kryptonite pendant from the pilot. Poor Clark.

Still, overall the show treads over the same ground over and over, every week. Why do all these villains of the week go insane when they get their ridiculous powers. It seems as if we aren't supposed to feel any sympathy for them, but their insanity is rarely based upon any prior dysfunction. Clark always gives them that chance to give themselves in and get better, then a fucking crane falls on them. And no one, including Clark, gives a fuck that a completely innocent person just bought it. Sorry for ruining every episode for you, but there it is.

And every episode someone gets in a car accident. There should be a drinking game.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

00:18 / 17.01.02

I vowed not to watch it again. It's such an absurd show. Oh, the coach can make things come on fire, and he just died (or any of the other foolish side-plot "villains of the week") but instead of lingering on that at all Clark and Lana will surely talk about how her new waitressing job went... but not before - immeadiately after said event (the coach - the fire - nearly killing Pa Kent - coach dying - etc) - Clark and his dad talk about football...

Wafer thin, in fact.

[ 17-01-2002: Message edited by: Jonny Suede ]

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:10 / 17.01.02

I actually really like this show, on the basis of the two episodes I've seen.

It's a first season, though. You can forgive it for being a bit villain of the week. I think it has quite a lot of promise, and if they look to something like Buffy for inspiration (already they are a bit), and if they don't give a fuck about the comic and the traditional story (already they're admirably cavalier), season 2 could be great. What we want is out-of-leftfield, traumatic plot twists: for example, Chloe (like Lois but not) is clearly Marked For Death, and Lex will probably be indirectly responsible for her death in some way. There's certainly going to be a "great betrayal" of Clark by Lex, hopefully with lots of homoerotic undertones.

It's miles, miiiiiles better than the truly dire New Adventures Of..., at any rate.

08:52 / 17.01.02

Not watched it, but from what I'm reading it sounds exactly as i suspected. It's interesting that the mythos that, in the 30s, influenced (created? every other superhero, is now in a show that seems to be influenced by everything else. Dawson's Creek, the X Files, Buffy (Which in itself was heavily influenced by Spiderman).
Why set it in the modern day and have Clark as the same well meaning dope? Why not make him a nerd, or a goth, or a beer swilling, cow tipping jock?

08:52 / 17.01.02

it's OK, I've enjoyed it. echoes Roswell High pretty much, without the same endless teenage angst.

liked the "Deep Impact" meteor shower.

young Supie is alluring and looked particularly fetching tied to the scarecrow pole in the cornfield in his underwear. Mmmmmmm...

but can it be true that there is only one black person in Smallville? and where do I know Jonathan Kent from? was he a Duke of Hazzard or similar?

10:17 / 17.01.02

Well I'll be damned your right, he was Bo Duke somehow that changes everything

09:24 / 18.01.02

I really like the first episode, but I concur absolutely that the rather ham-fisted weekly kryptonite-based plot device (look! they've left some! in the sauna!) is getting pretty tired already after about 5 episodes. I suspect that the whole X-files / Buffy schtick is taking a back seat to the Dawson's Creek angst. Not healthy. Target audience.

Reason I am subliminally happy about spectacle? Mark Snow - erstwhile Badalamentiesque X-files / Millenium composer doing the recognisably incidental music. probably.

09:15 / 20.01.02

"Krypton's Creek", surely ?

DBC

Our Lady of The Two Towers

08:26 / 22.01.02

Last Sunday, boy gets spurious Kryptonite mutant thing that makes him sick and need to suck other peoples cold. Does anyone for a microsecond think, how can we help this poor lad? Certainly not the writers, who seem to take the view that it's probably the fault of the individual that this nasty thing happened to them.

Otherwise, it's like Star Trek: Enterprise. They start the series off with too high a level of technology, (or in Superman's case) too much control over his powers already. Pretty much all Clark has got left to master is flight, then the rest of the show will be about trying to hide his identity from the rest of the world.

But his Mum is hot! </geekboy>

The Natural Way

08:30 / 22.01.02

I suspect that the whole X-files / Buffy schtick is taking a back seat to the Dawson's Creek angst.

Yeah, Buffy really doesn't have that much to do w/ Smallville.

08:30 / 22.01.02

quote:Last Sunday, boy gets spurious Kryptonite mutant thing that makes him sick and need to suck other peoples cold. Does anyone for a microsecond think, how can we help this poor lad?

Well to be fair he was going around sucking al the heat out of people and killing them, but I know what your saying..

08:30 / 22.01.02

quote:Originally posted by ZoCher:
but can it be true that there is only one black person in Smallville?

it's the midwest. a very small town in the midwest, at that. i'm amazed that lana looks so eurasian -- can't be so many of them, either. (as my eurasian flatmate pointed out)

Regrettable Juvenilia

13:49 / 22.01.02

This week's was really disturbing and amoral - Clark basically just outright killed the guy as far as I can tell (punches him so far he lands in the lake, the lake freezes over with him stuck there, although it's never explained if he is dead or not).

Now, I'm not one to get all picky about how Superman would never do this or that (on the contrary, I'd quite like the show to fuck with the mythos as much as possible), but it does seem to me that a Clark Kent who's far more worried about copping off with Lana Lane than the sanctity of human life doesn't work if he's also supposed to be the moral centre of the show. You can only get away with moralizing in a show like this, I think, if the morality is either so idealistic as to have a certain naive charm, or as close to the horrible twisty comlicatedness of real life as possible (see: Buffy).

Whereas actually I'm starting to wonder whether the morality at the heart of Smallville isn't horribly telling and of its time...

"Oh no! Someone funny-lookin' is disturbing the American way of life! Shall I try to find out why, or shall I just hit them very hard?"

[ 22-01-2002: Message edited by: Flyboy ]

13:55 / 22.01.02

Well maybe instead of slaying vampires Buffy should be using Willow to give all the vamps souls like Angel, that would lower the body count a fair bit..

I know what your saying though..but I didn't see the start of the last episode where I joined Iceboy had just frozen a girl in the shower and let her shatter and before he punched him into the lake didn't Iceboy say he was going to murder Clarks mother and father?

20:23 / 24.01.02

I've only watched it once but was amazed at how tacky it is. Although I was intrigued to find that Clark's vocal chords seem to produce a sound almost identical to that of Mr Kent in The New Adventures of Superman.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

08:16 / 26.01.02

Bear, yeah, but in the comics you could have someone kills Superman's entire family slowly over a 72 hour period and he wouldn't even say "fuck!"

Ok, I'm overanalysing waaaaaaaay too much here, but it was like Superman was fighting someone who had a disease which was making them non-rational which they didn't ask for yet the show treats it like it's their fault. The only baddie out of the first four episodes to survive was the shape-changing girl, the only one that was sane and entirely aware all the way through of her actions and their reprecussions.

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

11:12 / 28.01.02

Yeah, but did anyone see last week's? *Nice* Lex dream sequence...

Barring the possibility of wrong feelings for Clark or Chloe, or indeed Bo Duke if you like that kind of thing, Lex is the thing to watch this for.

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:25 / 28.01.02

The geek in me liked the little nod to teh fact that Lex is President of the USA in current DC comics - is that the bit you're refering to, Haus?

But for fuck's sake, I know the de-aging guy was a serial killer, but he's yet another person whom Clark has shown no interest whatsoever in keeping alive. We're not even told if he's dead or not... all very odd, and disturbing in a bad way.

11:28 / 28.01.02

When's it meant to be set, what year I mean - maybe your just meant to forget about that, but it looks like its set *now* apple macs and all that?

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

11:34 / 28.01.02

I rather like it - he is meant to be a teenager, after all. Would you be at all concerned by the deaths of people you didn't even now if you were a superhuman teenager?

Besides,what we have here is the law of contiguous circumstance. The same thing happens in Buffy, particularly early Buffy. If Clark were to pop somebody's head like a grape, that would be wrong. But if he hits them and they happen to fly somewhere where they will be crushed by falling cans/frozen into a block of ice/blown up by beans, that is a contiguous circumstance (if he hadn't thrown them into etc) but not his fault. Tenuous, I know, but otherwise every bugger will know he is not like other people (find out and die!).

And yes, liked the presidency thing in the dream sequence. And the fact that he is wearing one black glove, on account of having had his hand amputated. But the apocalyptic stuff was positively Peter St. John-ish. Very cute...

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:43 / 28.01.02

Yeah, I figured the black glove thing must also be a reference, but my knowledge of Superman continuity ain't all that, thank God.

I dunno, it just strikes me that in Buffy you start off with a fairly plausible black and white morality (vampires and demons aren't real people) that then becomes very grey (er, maybe they are). I can't see Smallville doing the same thing.

I'm extremely grateful that Cassandra didn't have any visions of Clark in the red and blue wrestler's outfit. What strikes me as an interesting possibility is that the more successful this show is, the more they will have to fuck with the Superman 'mythos' by definition - as Bear points out, they're already doing that by having it set in the present day.

I want teenage General Zod to turn up, played by the evil shallow New York guy from Dawson's...

Our Lady of The Two Towers

13:21 / 28.01.02

Lex; "What's the matter Clark?"
CK; "Cassandra said someone close to me would die... I just thought... screw the parents, but if anything would happen to you..."
Lex; "Hush. It's OK, Daddy will make it better..."

In my twisted dreams perhaps...

13:39 / 30.01.02

Success in this show is going to come from more getting more like Dawson's Creek and less like Buffy. Kryptonite is Smallville's version of the Hellmouth, a ridiculous black box for explaining why challenging villians show up each week. It's already gotten so boring that even the producers of the show realized it and promised fewer monsters of the week.

Lex Luthor is definitely the best thing about it, and if they can truly keep him and Clark friends for a few seasons, it could be really interesting.

I'll give the second season a try. Afterall many sci-fi shows that went on to be good have sucked worse than this in the first season.

p.s. Flyboy, the Teenage General Zod is brilliant! But let's hope they give him a sexy teenage Ursa to pal around with....

15:26 / 30.01.02

I can't see many people liking this episode...another fat suite..lets see how it turns out though only about half way through...

23:12 / 17.02.02

Bumping this back up a bit.

Anyone still watching? If not, too bad for you. The last three episodes have been about ten times better then the previous ones. Not sure how far ahead North America is over here so I'll say no more. If someone could give me a hint to where you're at...?

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

23:28 / 17.02.02

We just had the one with the corrupt cop...

It's not as bad as it was before. But it's not exactly "oh! oh! Must watch Smallville!".

Although my friend insists it's better than Buffy.

23:38 / 17.02.02

The next two are excellent. The episode after the next one has one of those "Superman" moments that always chokes me up.

And there's a Lex-centric one coming up soo, supposedly.

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