Dan Liebke's Astonishing Tales

Want to get up to speed on the Smallville storyline so far but can’t be bothered to go to the effort of actually watching the episodes? Then you’ve failed to come to the wrong place. Here’s the Smallville story so far in full (beware! the details of the Smallville plot are not for the faint of heart):

Seasons

• Season One
• Season Two
• Season Three
• Season Four
• Season Five
• Season Six
• Season Seven
• Season Eight
• Season Nine

Season One

(go straight to the Smallville Season One recaps)

It all begins with a meteor shower soaring through the sky doing all manner of damage to the quaint Kansas town of Smallville. Meteor rocks manage to kill the parents of a girl named Lana Lang. They also manage to kill the hair of a young man named Lex ‘Sinead’ Luthor. Somewhere in the middle of all this meteor showering a spaceship lands with a young Kryptonian kid (Clark ‘Superlad’ Kent) lazing in the middle of it. The kid is found by Jonathan ‘Bo’ Kent and Martha ‘Boring Old Ma’ Kent.

Everybody grows up in the usual, time-honoured fashion. Turns out that Superlad falls in love with Lana who, to be fair, is quite the hottie. Unfortunately she a) is in love with a footballing boofhead named Whitney and b) has a necklace made of kryptonite. As a result, Superlad tends to cough up blood and break out in welts whenever he gets near her, causing much mirth for his best friends Chloe ‘TIAC’ Sullivan and Pete ‘Good Ol’ Pete’ Ross.

When he’s not coughing up blood, Superlad spends a lot of time running around rescuing the other denizens of Smallville from all variety of super-powered freaks. The source of these freaks? Kryptonite. So y’see? Cause and effect.

And despite this, he still finds time to be hit by a car that was driven by young Sinead Luthor, tumble over a bridge, fall into a river, and then rescue Sinead from drowning in the aforementioned car. Sinead is grateful, but spends the rest of the season trying to find out the truth about Superlad (ie whether his cheekbones are real or not).

We also have a bit of a love triangle with Superlad, Lana and Whitney which sputters and spurts but never really gets anywhere thanks to such diversions as Whitney’s father dying. There’s another love triangle with Superlad, Lana and TIAC. This one doesn’t cost the lives of anybody’s parents but is equally unresolved.

The season ends with a trio of twisters sucking Lana’s car up into the sky, Bo chasing some fool criminal who knows Superlad’s secret into the forest and Sinead unsure whether or not he should save the life of his evil and twisted father, Lionel ‘Porthos’ Luthor.

Season Two

(go straight to the Smallville Season Two recaps)

Season Two opens with Superlad saving Lana, Sinead saving Porthos and Bo saving the fool criminal (only for Sinead to shoot him later – thanks Sinead).

This second season then cranks into play with a number of sub-developments. Good Ol’ Pete is welcomed into the whole ‘knowledge of superpowers’ loop and Superlad discovers that Red Kryptonite turns him into a bad ass.

We’re also introduced to the notion that Superlad’s arrival on Earth was predicted by Native American Indians and, y’know, scrawled on a cave for posterity. This piques the interest of, well, everybody. But most significantly, Porthos.

Porthos grows increasingly suspicious of Superlad’s superhuman tendencies as the season progresses. Despite the twin handicaps of going blind and hiring Boring Old Ma as an assistant, he eventually recovers and uses his wily ways to get into TIAC’s head and convince her to be a spy. This works a hell of a lot better than his other plans, which seem to consist of inexplicably cloning little girls.

Also, making a bit of a nasty appearance is Superlad’s biological father, Jor-El (aka The SS Jor-El). Jor-El’s spirit is embodied in Superlad’s space ship, which is a neat trick. Generally considered less of a neat trick is the SS Jor-El’s adamance that Superlad should, like, use his powers to conquer the planet.

As the second season comes to a conclusion, Superlad accidentally causes Boring Old Ma to miscarry, Sinead marries Superlad’s doctor (a woman, as it turns out) and then crashes on a desert island on the way to his honeymoon and Superlad dons a red kryptonite ring, turns nasty, and roars off to Metropolis to make mischief.

Season Three

(go straight to the Smallville Season Three recaps)

Season Three opens with Bo gaining superpowers from the SS Jor-El and heading down to Metropolis to bring the wayward Superlad back home for the thrashing of a lifetime. After that, we settle back into a more normal season, with the possible exception of Sinead who goes insane and gets locked up in an insane asylum, but not before witnessing Superlad’s superpowers in action.

Fortunately, Porthos gets it in his head to fry Sinead’s bald synapses, causing him to forget all about that. Which is a stroke of good fortune for the Kryptonian, really. Meanwhile, Lana is hanging out with a Creepy Physiotherapist who turns out to be (obviously) an undead zombie spy sent to Smallville by Porthos to keep an eye on Superlad.

The whole zombie plan proves to be a disappointing failure, to the surprise of nobody other than Porthos. Sinead, meanwhile, is determined to bring his father to justice for the murder of his (Porthos’s) parents. A timely helper in this quest is TIAC, who luckily manages to develop for a short time a superpower which forces everybody to confess to murdering their parents (where applicable).

The third season winds down with an eventual bang, with Porthos going to jail for the murder of his parents, but not before Good Ol’ Pete leaves the show forever, TIAC gets blown up in a house, Lana wanders off to Paris, Bo falls into a coma, Sinead swigs a hefty dose of poison brandy and Superlad is swallowed by the spirit of the SS Jor-El in those bloody caves.

Season Four

(go straight to the Smallville Season Four recaps)

Rolling straight into the fourth season, things start very promisingly with a buxom young lass named Lois Lane tracking down a naked Superlad and talking non-nude sense into him. Her appearance inspires the undoing of vast chunks of last year’s cliffhanger. Bo wakes up from his coma, TIAC turns out to be alive and Sinead’s poisoning also proves ineptly non-fatal. Happily, Good Ol’ Pete’s abandonment of the show remains intact but, alas, Lana’s does not.

In fact, Lana remains not only frustratingly non-absent from the show, she also drags forth perhaps the most tedious season-long plot throughline seen to date. Some gibberish about magic stones that neither you nor I will ever completely comprehend, so let’s quit trying, huh? Also, she might be the reincarnation of a witch that was burned at the stake by an ancestor of her new idiot boyfriend’s mother. As I say, let it go.

Sensibly ignoring Lana, the rest of the gang go through the usual brand of nonsense. Superlad and Porthos switch bodies for a bit, with predictable (ie immensely disturbing) results. A young kiddie called the Flash shows up, as does the arch-foe of the Microsoft Word spell-checker, Mr Mxyzptlk. Superlad gets married, but, y’know, only for a bit. Oh, and TIAC (now that she’s not dead) discovers all about the Superlad powers. And, for a bit of a laugh, doesn’t tell Superlad that she knows.

Tragically, despite the best efforts of viewers worldwide, we cannot escape from Lana, her witchy past and those bloody stones. As the season ends they, along with a brand new meteor storm that’s decided to land on top of Smallville, combine to bring about the following non-intersecting set of events: Superlad in Antarctica, Bo and Boring Old Ma fighting off Lana’s insane ex-boyfriend, Porthos catatonic with Kryptonian symbols flashing through his eyes, TIAC and Sinead having a wrestle in those damn caves, Lois crying into her ubiquitous singlet (aka tank top) and Lana (having survived a helicopter crash!) finding yet another spaceship.

Season Five

(go straight to the Smallville Season Five recaps)

The fifth season begins, sensibly enough, with the opening episode. This episode undoes great chunks of the previous year’s finale in accordance with Smallvillean law. Some Kryptonians come bursting out of a spaceship and start messing up the place until Superlad hurls them into the Phantom Zone.

However, as the result of a typically poorly thought out deal with The SS Jor-El, Superlad loses his powers for a couple of episodes and takes the opportunity to bone Lana. Then he gets them back (again via an even more poorly thought out deal) and refuses to bone her again, lest his super-manhood do irreparable damage.

Sensibly ignoring that worrisome image, Bo decides to run for Senate on the advice of his former fellow Duke, Luke Duke. He opposes Sinead in this Senatorial race, but, despite having Lois as his inexplicable Campaign Manager, he wins. This may well be due to the fact that Boring Old Ma had secretly hired Porthos to help out. Regardless, the sweet taste of electoral victory is soon washed away by his untimely death as the result of drunken barn brawling with Porthos. Oh, and Superlad choosing him to die rather than Lana (see ‘poorly thought out deal’ in the previous paragraph). This astonishingly poor choice has even more tragic consequences when Boring Old Ma takes on Bo’s hard-earned Senatorial duties.

While Superlad deals with that and the impending arrival of General Zod, Sinead seduces Lana and allies with the evil Kryptonian robot Milton ‘Spike-iac’ Fine. As you’d expect, this all leads to utter chaos by the 22nd episode with Sinead possessed by Zod, villainously causing power blackouts (and, hence, riots all over the world), Porthos and TIAC being dragged out of the Porthosmobile by the aforementioned rioting mobs, Senator Boring Old Ma and Lois in mortal, uh, flight diversion peril (Lois: “We’re not landing in Washington!” Ma: “No!”) and Superlad floating out in space, trapped in the Phantom Zone.

Season Six

(go straight to the Smallville Season Six recaps)

The half-dozenth season opens with Superlad trapped in the Phantom Zone. He swiftly escapes by sacrificing the only ally he finds there – namely, the SS Jor-El’s former secretary and bit on the side. He zooms back to Earth where, with a combination of Kryptonian daggers and dumb-ass luck, he defeats the combined evil of Sinead and the SS Zod.

The next few episodes are taken up with the arrival of new kid in town, The Green Arrow. Turns out GA is an old school chum of Sinead’s (where ‘chum’ is used in the non-Batman sense of ‘lifelong enemy’). He’s devoted his life and millions to bringing down Luthorcorp, while dressed as Robin Hood. He also decides that, in his spare time, he’ll seduce Lois. She, as expected, is totally up for it.

After much cajoling, Superlad eventually agress to join GA and a ragtag team of former guest stars he’s assembled. They include Flash, Cyborg and Captain Fish-head. After some squabbling over what they should call themselves (Cyborg endlessly putting forth the name ‘Teen Titans’, despite the objections of the others that this was ‘totally lame’), the five of them head off to blow up one of Sinead’s buildings. Can’t remember why, exactly, they did this, but who cares? It was clearly the best episode in a long, long time.

While all this was going on, Sinead and Lana have been falling in love and getting pregnant and deciding to get married. As with most weddings, there were a couple of minor mishaps along the way – a red K-crazed Superlad kidnapping Lana during the rehearsal dinner, Lana finding out about Superlad’s powers, Sinead murdering a blackmailing scientist and, of course, Porthos forcing Lana to go through with the wedding despite her new-found loathing of the groom. The season finale couldn’t really match such tedious melodrama, so barely even tried. Instead, Senator Boring Old Ma fled the show, Lois died, then TIAC died instead, then Lana (apparently) exploded. While the chicks were all ‘dying’, Superlad and Sinead had a confrontation, which led, as you’d expect, to the creation of Bizarro Superlad.

Season Seven

(go straight to the Smallville Season Seven recaps)

Season Seven! Lucky for some. Unlucky for Smallville viewers as nonsense scales new heights of tedium. It starts promisingly enough with a blonde piece of superpowered crumpet showing up. Her main superpower? Flaunting her bare midriff all over the place. After this critically acclaimed start, however, things start rapidly falling apart. For starters, Lana’s not dead (obviously). TIAC neither. They try to explain Lana’s non-death with gibberish clone talk, but don’t even bother with TIAC, instead having her simply waking up in the morgue. Whatever.

Superlad is ordered by the SS Jor-El to train the super-blonde hottie (SBH), who, it turns out, is his cousin. So that takes rather the sexual tension out of everything (or does it? show your working, Europeans). Naturally, this whole training thing is a shambles, with her entering a modelling competition, meeting her mother (former Supergirl: The Movie starlet and all-round terrible actress Helen Slater) and carelessly losing her memory and travelling back in time.

In non-SBH storylines, Jimmy-James Olsen and TIAC have a boneheaded relationship in which TIAC lies to him all the time about Superlad’s powers and the fact that she may also be a kryptofreak. In retaliation, he leers after every other female on the show and gets embroiled in some bizarre spy episode with her. Also, Lana gets superpowers for a bit and a clone of Sinead Luthor’s baby brother, now all-grown up and running the Daily Planet, shows up in time to be murdered. Both these storylines are equally stupid (to nine decimal places).

Desperate, the writers summon all manner of guest stars (Good Ol’ Pete! Dean Cain! Spike-iac! Black Canary!), but none of it really works, so, Porthos, as a farewell gift, instead makes up all kinds of lies about a secret society called ‘Veritas’, which apparently has been devoted to secretly looking after stray Kryptonians, and which boldly ties together mysterious characters and storylines, including Dr Quinn, Dr Christopher Reeve, Porthos himself and Green Arrow’s dead parents. Having provided an over-structure to the entire freaking series, Porthos is then gratefully murdered, escaping the show. Following him is Kreuk, who plays a brain-dead Lana with eerie convincingness. And finally, Sinead himself bids farewell in the season finale, bringing the whole damn fortress down on Superlad’s head with him.

Season Eight

After the traumas of Season Seven, I gave Season Eight a miss. I’ll come back to it later (maybe/probably/let’s just see). From what I can gather, we had Green Arrow, Doomsday, Zatanna, The Legion of Superheroes and far more entertainment than anybody could reasonably have expected. Huh. Who knew one absent Lana would trump two absent Luthors.

I’ll elaborate further, once I go back and watch these episodes. Promise.

Season Nine

(go straight to the Smallville Season Nine recaps)

In progress…

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Related Pages

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1. The Smallville Files: Season Two
2. The Smallville Files: Season One
3. 3.06 You Can’t Spell Smallville Without ‘Vile’
4. Smallville Season Five Spoilers
5. The Smallville Files: Season Five