Original Air Date: November 15, 2007
Phew, what an episode to end on before the hiatus! I’m not sure whether it was planned that way or whether it’s due to the writers’ strike, but the next episode, “Gemini” isn’t scheduled to air until December 13, and the following episode “Persona” is now scheduled for January 31. According to Buddy TV, co-creator Al Gough states that they were able to complete a total of 15 scripts prior to the strike, with the 15th episode ending with a cliffhanger. “To the best of my knowledge, the studio plans to produce all of them,” Gough said. “If there isn’t a quick resolution, then the season ends in February. It is our wish that this strike will be resolved quickly so that we can get back to doing what we love — writing.”
Spoilers follow.
Official CW episode description:
Helen Slater returns as Lara-El; Clark meets his biological mother for the first time — Clark hears the voice of his biological mother, Lara, calling for help from Kara’s crystal and decides to release her, despite Jor-El’s warnings. Lara and Clark reunite and she gives him Jor-El’s ring, which contains blue kryptonite. As Clark puts it on, he realizes Zor-El manipulated the whole thing and that blue kryptonite strips him of his powers, enabling Zor-El to take control of the Fortress of Solitude. Meanwhile, Chloe and Lex each discover Lois and Grant have been seeing each other and warn them to stop.
By the time this episode ends, Clark has brought back his mother and lost her again, faced off against the psychotic Zor-El without the aid of his superpowers, gotten brutally beat up along with Lana and Lionel, and Kara finds herself alone in Detroit with no memory and no powers! As if that weren’t enough, Clark tries to locate Kara only to be told by Jor-El that Kara’s well being is no longer their concern, and that his “defiance can not go without consequence.” The episode ends with the fortress shaking and music playing ominously: Daddy’s pissed. Is Jor-El going to destroy the fortress? How will Kara get back? Duh-duh-DUH!!
On the non-superpowered front, we find out that Grant is really Lex’s (half) brother Julian. So that’s how he got that position so young (and why he’s got such an attitude). Unfortunately for Grant/Julian, Lex has learned of his relationship with Lois and tries to force him to break it off, but he and Lois both defy the naysayers in their lives and continue their relationship in secret. This should get interesting.
This episode had so much going for it: a genuinely scary bad guy, a chance for Kara to confront her father, lots of beautiful scenes in the fortress, another kryptonite, and Clark’s historic first meeting with his mother (or her clone: but she has all her memories from just before she died, so close enough). So with all this awesome stuff, could there be anything lacking?
Um, yes. Something interesting for the super women to do. They give us two superpowered Kryptonian women from the house of El and make them absolutely useless. Why’d they even bother to have Helen Slater on the show if they weren’t going to let her do a damn thing? She doesn’t use her superpowers or fight AT ALL. As for Kara, they very quickly and conveniently take her out of the picture by having her fall for her father’s lie that he’s “changed”. I honestly believed that she was playing along when she said she wanted to trust him, and that she wasn’t really going to go to the Fortress and sit on her hands like a good little girl. This is Supergirl for gosh sake: have her be super! Don’t make her look dumb just so Clark can be the big hero man. So that’s one superheroine taken out of the running. What about Lara? Unlike Kara, she has no illusions about Zor-El’s true intentions. Surely she’ll be an example to Clark and face off against Zor-El – right? Actually, no.
Lara gets to do absolutely ‘super’ nothing in this episode, to the point where I began to wonder if she even had superpowers (I can totally see Zor-El bringing her back powerless, but there’s no indication of that). Clark rallies the troops by stating that there’s only one of Zor-El and three of them. Them’s damn good odds, even after Zor-El evens them a bit by tricking Clark into losing his powers with blue kryptonite. All the more reason for Kara and Lara to take charge and kick some ass. But not once do we see Lara getting physical. For all Lana’s talk about Lara being stronger than her, and a better person (after only 2 minutes with her, I’m not sure how she can tell), we don’t actually see Lara doing anything to prove that. Lara tells Clark to “Let Zor-El come and find me, I have nothing to fear” which is surprising after her previous confrontation with him. I would have loved if she’d followed that statement up with some gutsy action when he does inevitably appear.
She doesn’t even get to fly! Zor-El is flying around and beating up people left and right, but Lara just stands there and agrees to let him keep her, Kara and Clark captive in the fortress. WTF?! As suspected, Zor-El’s got some pretty nasty plans in store for Lara. He wants the four of them to be “a family”: we know what that means, and it ain’t pretty. The show spells it out for those who don’t grasp the creepy implications: Zor-El says wants to repopulate the species with Lara. Which is horrific, and understandly Lara blows him off. Good one! But then he threatens Clark and she instantly caves. “You have me here”. NO. Lara, supposedly this brave woman, is going to submit to a life of – to put it bluntly – continual rape and forced breeding? Just like that – not even a superpowered knee to the groin? She and Lara can both fly: why don’t they punch his lights out and go get Clark. I wanted to throttle the writers for making Lara and Kara so weak and helpless in such a gendered way. It was an entirely artificial dilemma, because Zor-El couldn’t have actually forced Lara and Kara to do anything if they’d teamed up against him instead of letting him intimidate them into standing around until Clark showed up to save the day. It was just a poor excuse to render them powerless.
In comparison, we have Clark’s bravery as he finds a way to defeat Zor-El with his brains, while completely powerless. Chloe gets to help him, and Lana makes a futile attempt at defending Lara (who should be defending her), but the women with the big guns aren’t allowed to actually do anything but be defeated in their one attempt to kill Zor-El. There’s a half-assed attempt to make Lara look effective by having her pull out a hidden dagger in the fortress with which to stab Zor-El. Cool. But the show undercuts her attempt at assertiveness by rendering by her and Kara helpless very quickly. At first I was excited when she resolutely pulled out the dagger, thinking there was an inner strength to Lara we were finally getting to see. But it turns out it was actually Jor-El’s knife: her husband was “a peaceful man” (wow, he’s sure changed since he got resurrected as a disembodied voice), but always kept a gun dagger in the house to protect his family. Real subtle bit of macho pro-gun propaganda there. Note that it’s not their dagger either, it’s her husband’s. He’s the one who protects his family. She’s just borrowing his tools. Add this to the line about Jor-El’s ring being handed down to the eldest son (eldest daughters being second-class citizens, apparently), and we get an uncomfortably clear picture of a patriarchal Kryptonian society. You’d think the portrayal of Krypton would have changed from the 50′s, but nope, it’s still a man’s world just like ours.
So of course, Kara fails to stab her father, like some weak woman in a 50′s film noir, making all her talk about protecting Lara look like a bunch of hot air. Lara tries to stop Zor-El but he tosses her across the room and she loses consciousness. Clark, even though he’s depowered, has to come in and save the day. Conveniently, he’s the only one who can remove the blue crystal which is causing an eclipse which will black out the earth and kill all the human “detritus”. (There’s no grey with this Zor-El: he’s 100% bad. I kind of miss the ambiguity of the comics Zor-El. It made their family story far more tragic.) Kara helps the hurt Lara to her feet, who Lara tells Clark he has to destroy the crystal to defeat Zor-El, even though it surely means she’ll go with him. Clark does what he must, but to his horror Kara has disappeared as well.
So, a very exciting episode in many ways, but when it came to the portrayal of women, sadly lacking in the heroics department. Heck, Lana did more to stand up to Zor-El than Lara did, and she doesn’t even have superpowers! Of course she got tossed across the room for her effort (who didn’t see that coming: it was an awfully dumb thing to do). How does that woman not end up dead, paralyzed, or in a body cast more often? It’s almost like they went out of their way to render the women useless just so Clark could appear more heroic. Actually, it’s exactly like that.
Miscellaneous thoughts:
- I really liked the opening scene with Clark sitting alone in the darkened house. And what a wonderful shot of Clark pulling the glowing crystal out of the floorboards in the barn, echoing that famous scene in the first movie.
- Kara finds out that Clark has had the crystal all along, and is rightly pissed, but he doesn’t face the consequences of that betrayal due to more pressing matters of plot. I’m awfully disappointed that the writers cheated us out of a resolution to that deed. At the end of the episode Clark is forced to destroy the crystal, thus depriving Kara of any personal connection to her family and world. I was really hoping to see some more neat stuff pulled out of that plot device. And there’s no place for her in Jor-El’s fortress (assuming it still exists). That sucks for her. I would have liked it to be their fortress together.
- Lara apparently has super-intuition because she immediately senses Lana’s “darkness”. Oookay.
- Zor-El is so obviously evil in this episode, it’s inconceivable that he could have hidden that side of himself from Kara until she was a teenager. He clearly was unbalanced and sociopathic, going to the point of cloning himself and Lara so they could “be together” against her will. But he was always nice around Kara? What about her mother? If she was around into Kara’s youth, things couldn’t have been good between them. Speaking of Allura, we finally get a mention of her in this episode, although it’s just Kara saying that her “mom and dad will always be with me”. It’s left open as to when she died: when the planet exploded, or sometime in Kara’s youth (my guess).
- Whoever you are, Being “Jor-El’s vessel” really is bad for your health. I got a chuckle out of the way Zor-El delivered the line, “You’re just as stubborn as my brother. Soon you could be just as dead.” But Lionel tells him “Kal-El is following his own destiny, I will do nothing to stop his course!” You tell him Lionel!
- Lois gets reassurance that she was hired for her journalistic promise and not for personal reasons. Personally I never thought otherwise: the show made it obvious that Grant hired her for the kind of story that’s Chloe’s speciality, because he’s young and unconventional. Yet he is in no way willing to settle for tabloid journalism: he wants her to deliver what we know she one day will be able to.
- I like the way Lois pecking away at her keyboard, her hair in barrettes, resembles Margot Kidder from the first movie.
- Clark and Lana seem to be doing better than they were at the end of the previous episode. *crosses fingers*
- The fortress scenes really are nice. I love the lighting.
- Clearly I need the deadline of a new episode to get these things up in a timely fashion. New episodes soon, please?
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I missed it :(