Episode Report Card Omar G: B | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Oh My Zod!
By Omar G | Season 5 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.28.2005
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.When last we left Smallville, it was an absolute wreck. And the town wasn't doing so hot either. Ha! I kid the long-running, revival-needing WB show. The town survives a crippling meteor shower only to be served by two pissed-off Kryptonians who are Brother From Another and Angry PR Lady. They lay waste to a helicopter, horrifying limping Lana, who badly acts on her way to try to save the town from these warriors of Zod (or Apple's iZod or some damn thing), who came out of a spaceship. Pissed. Clark finds the Fortress of Solitude which, unlike with most teenagers, is not an internet connection and a box of Kleenex. He holds an icy dildo of knowledge (first rule: thaw before inserting), and is suddenly scienced by floating symbols of schoolin'. Chloe is there, too, freezing her ass off. Clark tells Jarnelle that he wants to save her even if it means coming back and doing whatever his Kryptonian father says. Jarnelle is like, "Cool. Later." Clark takes Chloe to an Alaskan hospital (still counts as a hospital scene), and they have The Talk. Chloe accepts Clark completely even when she is surprised to discover that he's an alien and not a Kryptofreak. She tells him, in effect, to go get 'em Tiger, but with a little less Mary Jane. Bo and Lois find MamaKent in the wreckage of the Kent home and take her to the hospital. She's fine, despite having an entire house fall on her. Lois, Bo, and MamaKent have a run-in with the iZods at the hospital. They really like to do the Darth Vader Lift-'n-Choke thing. Lex asks Clark if he was in the caves, and Clark's like, "What's a cave?" Lex asks, "Are you lying to me?" Clark is like, "What's a 'lying'?" Lex gets very upset that Clark is obviously the worst liar on this or any other planet. So he storms off. Clark is like, "Damn, I'm brilliant!" Lex finds Lana staggering down the road and takes her to his abode when she collapses, but not before she tells him she just saw a spaceship. Lana wakes up at stately Luthor Manor and finds Papa Luthor acting crazy and scratching a symbol into the floor of Lex's office. Then he tells her, with cloudy eyes, that home is poison to the iZods. Lana takes the hint and tries to trap the Kryptonians with Lex's vault of Kryptonite. But it's Lana, so the plan doesn't work, and they turn to kill her. Clark shows up and manages to throw them into a portal they created with a metal ring. It's like poetic justice. Without the poetry. Or the justice. The iZods are trapped in a Bee Gees album cover, a flying glass square (like in Superman II) that floats away. Clark realizes that, somewhere along the way, he lost his powers. Oops. Clark tells MamaKent and Bo that he's happy to be normal. They don't think the adjustment will be all that easy. Lex finds Chloe in her hospital bed in Alaska and menacingly offers to take her home. Clark visits Lana at the Smallville hospital and asks whether she meant what she said about loving him. She asks him the same. They kiss. Deep in LuthorCorp, a Depeche Mode song plays (appropriate, no?) as we see that Lex has hidden the spaceship there. A puddle of black oil (yes, very X-Files) forms into a human shape. A James Marsters-like human shape. The episode ends on his appearance. So, cramming a bit much into one episode, are we? At least we're not dragging a back-tattoo storyline along for an entire season. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Hope you all had a good summer. Let's dive right in, shall we?
Previously on Smallville: they had a season finale.
Some weird painted colored lines on the bottom of the screen announce that the show is in HD. Come on, DirectTV -- HD locals, dammit! I still watch the show in standard definition due to my distance from San Antonio, so I'll never know if Lex is any more evil in HD. The flying diamond shard from the end of the last episode flies down to the snowy tundra and burrows into the ground. Clark, in his standard blue shirt and red Members Only jacket, watches. Did his hair get shaggier? There's a huge snowy collapse. The camera superzips back away from Clark so that we can see giant ice shards shooting out of the ground. Frigidaire's president at home yells, "Great God! The next level!" Many CGI shards form a giant...what would you call it? A fortress of some sort? Yet lonely in some strange way. This really could just be a Dentyne Ice commercial. Superzip back to Clark's mild face. He starts trudging in the snow instead of, you know, speeding the fuck past it. We pull back to reveal...ugly modern architecture. It's a fortress of spikeitude. Elaborate music plays. The ice weasels cry, "Goddamn gentrification!"
Clark is inside the ice palace. Beams of icicles criss-cross above. Everything is tinted aqua-blue. Clark steps forward and finds a rack of jutting ice spears with a light coming from within. If you've seen the Superman movie, you've seen this set. An icicle floats out of the rack by itself and presents itself to our alien. What the Kryptonians need is a tasteful and simple labeling system. Clark gives the ice crystal a smoldering look like, "Hey, ice crystal. How you doin'?" The ice crystal tries to float away, but Clark reaches out and grabs it. It glows bright white. That's hot. Er, cold. Clark holds it in his hands, and in its brightness, it suddenly looks like the Giant Dildo of Ultimate Ho to the Yay. Use it wisely, Kal-El. You could rupture some blood vessels. "Kal-El, you have come far," Clark's Kryptonian dad suddenly says. Uh, we weren't doing anything! I was just, um, holding it. Geez, Dad, don't you knock? Heh, Clark has "come far." As Wing Chun says, they don't call this episode "Arrival" because they're trying to be subtle. ["Hey, you weren't supposed to attribute that to me! No one will respect me if they think I work blue!" -- Wing Chun] Jarnelle -- as I'm now calling him based on Clark's pronunciation -- says that one journey has ended and another one begins. Can this one be to an In & Out Burger? Because seriously, Jarnelle, we're starved up in this tundra. The camera pulls away. Yes, those are very pretty ice formations. "Welcome home, my son," Jarnelle says. Where do you guys keep the chips?