Smallville - Season 9: Part 2

(This is the second part of my three-part chronicle of the ninth, and potentially, final season of Smallville).

I'm a Smallville nut, I've grown up watching this show. In a way I find it that seminal show of my teenage years, it's seen me from 6th Grade all the way to my Sophomore year in college, and it's still going strong.

It's currently in its ninth season, and I've been watching it week-after-week, still enthralled by this reimagining as to how Clark Kent becomes Superman. While the show is very different than it was way back in 2001 when it started, it has managed to mature with its characters and become a show that is still worth watching, even after all these years.

Now, I'm gonna start this off by saying this isn't a review of this season, that wont come till the third part of this series next May, what this is, is my impressions of the first half of the season thus far.

Overall, I've been impressed with what the Smallville staff has come up with so far this year. The previous three seasons were pretty lackluster in my opinion, while they had their great individual episodes, as a whole they seemed to have lost the charm that made Smallville, Smallville. This season they decided to kind of forge their own path. The seeds they planted last season have begun to develop and bloom into this season, it actually feels like the show has a legitimate direction that the writers are wanting to take it in, which was one of the major struggles with previous seasons.

So far this season we've seen the arrival of the Kandorians, led by the future General Zod. Clark got to meet his biological father, Jor-El, in the flesh. Clark has now assumed the identity of the Blur, and is wearing a costume that bears the famous S-Shield of legend. Chloe has assumed the role of Watchtower for the JLA. Oliver re-embraced the Green Arrow and took on his sidekick, Speedy, this time in the form of a teen girl. And Lois and Clark have finally become a romantic couple. Whew! All that in just nine episodes.

I was really impressed as to how the Smallville writers incorporated Jor-El and the Kandorians into the story. The episode where we saw how the Kandorians came to be in the orb that transferred them to Earth, was one of the finer episodes of the past 3 or 4 seasons, not to mention the most recent episode, where we finally got to learn what happened to Lois when she jetted one year into the future at the end of last season. In all actuality, the plan that Zod executed in the future reality that Lois traveled to, actually made sense from a comic book standpoint.

The Kandorians had no powers under the yellow sun of Earth. In the future, they built a solar tower, harnessed the sun's rays, shot them back into space at satellites and morphed them, transforming the yellow sun to that of the red sun of Krypton, granting Zod and his followers powers, and stripping Clark of his. In the future Lois went to, Zod ruled Earth and planned to create a new Krypton on Earth. Luckily, Lois managed to return to the past in order to warn the rest of the potential fate of their beloved planet Earth. And in Clark's attempts to avoid Zod's plan, he finally revealed himself as Kal-El to Zod, and it looks as if, from the closing moments of the most recent episode, that they have forged an alliance of some sort.

Other cool moments included the story of Metallo, the Wonder Twins finding their way to Metropolis and unknowingly causing trouble for the Blur, and the hilarious romance that has escalated between Lois and Clark.

As a whole, this first half of season nine was very solid, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. Unfortunately, I'll have to wait for the show's return, next January.