Smallville “Fortune” Review

As friends gather to celebrate Clark and Lois’s engagement, a bottle of magic wine sent by Zatanna gets everyone, including Clark, drunk.  When they all awake the next morning amidst wedding dresses and stolen armored cars, Clark and company have to piece together the events of the previous night in time to save the life of Dr. Emil.

Smallville: “Fortune”

Okay, let’s be honest, this was a total filler episode.  It had nothing to do with the overall plot, and for that matter, Tess’s good-time girl personality takes a little of the edge off the Lex-Clone storyline we last saw her stressing over.  But having said that, this was a pretty entertaining episode with a lot of great character moments.

Smallville has always had a habit of imitating popular films of the day, such as The Matrix and Saw, but frankly The Hangover is not one I would have expected to see on that list.  However, the overall tone of the episode was pretty good, and more important, it was genuinely funny.  Smallville has tried to do humor before, and it usually hurts, but they nailed it with this one.  Drunk Clark super-speeding into a wall and stealing the LuthorCorp sign.  Oliver dressed as a chick and still kicking everyone’s asses.  And my personal favorite, the always uptight Emil and Tess rocking out in front of a crowd and doing a damn good job of it.  For a show that has taken itself WAY too seriously in the past, the opportunity for everyone to let their hair down and have fun was a welcome change of pace.

At it’s heart, this was a Clark and Chloe episode.  Possibly the last Clark and Chloe episode ever, as you get the sense that this was their last team up before going their separate ways.  Chloe’s return draws obvious comparisons to Lana’s in Season 8.  But I would dare say that this time around, the writers finally figured out how to do it right.  Lana’s return stopped the Season 8 storyline dead in it’s tracks and killed all it’s momentum.  Chloe’s return has added to this season and moved it forward.  And again, unlike the Super-Lana mind-freak, Chloe’s swan song reward actually fits with her character and personality.

Chloe has done a lot and things and been a lot of characters.  Her identity crisis of last week brought this fact to the fore and set down the question, Who is Chloe and who does she want to be?  And the answer was simple, all of them.  So now we get a Composite Chloe, who gets to live her childhood dream as a reporter, AND be a Superhero Den Mother, AND gets to be with Oliver. It’s really the best ending you could want for her.

The obvious references to Batman and Wonder Woman kind of confirms a long-held theory of mine.  That Bruce and Diana do exist in the Smallville universe, and that they are just “over there” forming their own little cells of heroes and having their own adventures.  For all we know, they’ve even met other JLA and JSA members and some time in the future, all these groups will combine into a real DC Universe.

There were so many ideas tossed into Season 10, I was worried it would overflow and lose focus on the fact that they should be closing out some of these open ended storylines that have been running for ten years.  I’m not sure if this is the last status change we’ll see for Chloe, but if it is, it’s a great one that shows an enourmous amount of respect for her character and her contribution to the show.

Tags: Comic Book TV Smallville Superman