THE SMALLVILLE FILES SEASON 6
Score: 7.9 / 10 
16: The Return Of Aunt Nell
Starring Clark Kent (Tom Welling) as Superlad, Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) as Sinead, Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) as TIAC, Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) as Bo, Martha Kent (Annette O'Toole) as Boring Old Ma, Lionel Luthor (John Glover) as Porthos, Kara Kent (Laura Vandervoort) as SBH and Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) as herself. For more information on these people and more, consult the scorecard.
All right. If there's one thing I like about the writers on this show, it's this: if they run short of a plot, they don't panic. They just adapt to the situation. Here we had enough plot for say, half an hour worth of show. So the writers simply showed us the same scenes over and over from different characters' perspective, adding new bits each time. It's a similar technique to that which made Groundhog Day a smash around the world and that ensured The Proclaimers had two number one hits with essentially the same song.
(Oh, and by the way, if you think that previous paragraph sounds familiar then you're right (and a little bit too spookily au fait with this site). For I used a variation of that paragraph several years back on an episode of Dawson's Creek that also padded out half an hour of plot into a full episode with the exact same technique. Screw it. If writers can rehash stuff from within the same plot, I can rehash commentary on that technique from within the same site. It's, whatchacallit, meta-commentary. Awesome stuff.)
Anyways, onto this plot they're padding out. It is, of course, Sinead and Lana's wedding day, so we open, naturally, with
SUPERLAD'S STORY
Superlad's all mopey about the upcoming nuptials, so he's listening to mopey music, worrying whether or not his mopey tux will fit him in the crotch, and throwing a mopey photograph straight into the opening credits (which are refreshingly free of mope).
After the credits are over, it's straight to the church. Sinead and Lana are exchanging vows, tear rolling down Sinead's eye as the enormity of his error begins to finally sink in. Suddenly, who should show up to put him out of his misery but the Kryptonian. He stabs Sinead in the back (like, literally), which leaves Lana with little choice but to stab herself in the gut, which, since Lana can never die, leads us to conclude this is simply a tedious dream sequence.
So Superlad wakes up and, lo, it was a tedious dream sequence. So it's off to the barn to hurl some bales of hay around. It's manly kind of hay bale-hurling, which is needlessly interrupted by TIAC, calling from the Luthor Mansion wine cellar.
"Shouldn't you be in the Luthor Mansion wine cellar by now?" says Superlad, who has read this week's script.
"I am," says TIAC. "Now come get me out."
Superlad sighs. Ever since TIAC discovered Superlad's powers, she's prone to summon him to help her out of the tiniest jams (eg opening a tiny jar of jam). It's really starting to give him the irrits.
Still, irrit is as irrit does, so Superlad's off to the Luthor Mansion at superspeed, straight past the pinochle-playing security guards and down to the wine cellar. He tears the door off its hinges, lets TIAC out and then welds it all back together again with the ol' heat vision.
TIAC, grateful as ever, goes on to call Superlad the most cowardly coward she's ever met.
"Oh, sure, you'll run into a burning building or leap in front of a building, because neither of those things can hurt your invulnerable skin, given to you by the yellow sun of Earth, rather than the red sun of Krypton, under which you were born."
"Huh?" says Superlad.
"But when Lana decides to marry a monster, you'll chicken out..."
"But when Lana decides to marry a monster, you'll chicken out and not tell her your secret or how you feel."
"Wait, wait, wait. Lana's marrying a monster??!?"
He sure hopes it's one of the Zoners.
Rather than listen to TIAC's response, or any more of her awkward expositionary dialogue, he zips back to the farm to play with Bo's old watch and chat with Senator Boring Old Ma. So, y'know, there are degrees of tedium within Superlad's life.
Senator Boring Old Ma begins to tell Superlad about the time she and Bo broke up for a year, during a Dukes of Hazzard hiatus.
Superlad stifles a yawn. "Why'd you get back together?"
Senator Boring Old Ma smiles. "The man was a bear in the sack," she says.
And Superlad is left with no choice but to sprint from the room, fingers in his ears, 'la-la-la'-ing all the way back to the mansion. There he finds Lana, who does not want to listen to Superlad's 'Do You Want To Know A Secret' talk.
Instead, she claims she understands everything, she's not going to marry Sinead and how she'll meet Superlad at the barn at sundown. She shoos him out of the room, idiot grin all over his melon.
SINEAD'S STORY
So let's try all that again, huh? But this time from the perspective of the younger Luthor. We open with him sitting in the Luthor Mansion Home Theatre, watching a giant IMAX-sized film of his unborn baby's ultrasound. So, y'know, that's not at all creepy or insane.
Suddenly the baby lunges at him, fangs bared! Boy, he sure regrets wearing those 3-D glasses now.
But of course it's yet another dream. Sinead wakes up and saunters out to see Lana, who is already up. They exchange morning lies ("How did you sleep?" "Like a baby." "Me too. Especially like a baby without fangs.") and Sinead suggests they elope.
"That would be a big waste of four hundred gay men," replies Lana.
"Que pasa?" says Sinead, who was sure he'd broadened out the guest list more than that.
"Game hens," hisses Lana, handing him an ear cleaner. He tosses it away and heads off to converse with Porthos.
Porthos, of course, rubs it in that Sinead doesn't even have a best man.
"You really don't have any friends, do you?" he says.
Sinead doesn't want to open that can of spray-on hair. Instead he reminisces about how when he was a child he used to come up to the Luthor Tower and dream about manipulating the lives of all the pathetic wretches who lived in Metropolis.
"Oh, you gorgeous beautiful child," says Porthos, suddenly overcome with the emotion of the day. "Let me assure you that I will personally ensure that nothing goes wrong today. Not. One. Single. Thing." He smiles. "It will be my Christmas present to you both."
"Wedding present," mumbles Sinead, pissed at both Porthos's absent-mindedness and his skinflintery.
"Okay," agrees Porthos. "That too." And he leaves, beaming. That's how you stay a billionaire.
Sinead ushers him out and takes a call from one of Lana's many obstetricians. After some small talk ("Want to be my best man?" "No") they agree to meet in a morgue beneath Sinead's church.
There, with a CD of Great Background Organ Music blaring incessantly, the obstetrician tries to blackmail Sinead into giving him two million dollars in exchange for his ongoing secrecy about the horrors of Lana's pregnancy (ie her horrific case of hemorrhoids).
"Only if you'll be my best man as well!"
"Never!"
So Sinead murders him and stuffs him in a convenient tomb. This makes him a little late for the wedding, but that's not a problem, because TIAC shows up to informs us all that Lana is nowhere to be found.
LANA'S STORY
Sigh. I suppose we should see how Lana spent her day. She started with a dream sequence as well. Needless to say, she was dreaming about the Season Two opener, something we all do from time to time (as Freud pointed out in The Interpretation of Dreams).
So we go though her morning lies with Sinead and then... the moment for which all Smallville Fans have been waiting... The Return Of Aunt Nell!
They hug. Lana immediately starts talking about herself. "If there was something you had to put past you to get on with your life and you'd tried every way that was fair and honest to do that and nothing worked, is it really wrong to bend the rules just once?"
"'Hmmmm?' says Aunt Nell"
"Hmmmm?" says Aunt Nell, who, now that we think about it, may not have been such a great loss to the show after all.
So we get rid of her. Lana hooks up with TIAC instead and locks her in the wine cellar. Then hides behind a bottle of Stormhoek Sauvignon Blanc 1982, so when Superlad shows up and pulls the door off the hinges and TIAC awkwardly tells him about his own powers, she can be witness to all of it.
Onto another scene we've already seen before. Superlad showing up, Lana making her promise to meet him at the barn at sundown, then shooing him off.
After that scene Porthos appears in a puff of smoke. "If you're thinking of not marrying Sinead then you've got another think coming," he says.
Two thinks in one day. That's good stuff for Lana. Porthos then goes on to wildly deduce that Lana knows Superlad's secret. I suppose it's not that wild a deduction. After all, everybody on the show knows it by now (even if some have forgotten several times over. Looking at you, Sinead Luthor). Hell, I'm sure even Aunt Nell worked it out shortly before her cameo ended.
Regardless, Porthos goes on to tell Lana that if she ditches the wedding, he'll kill Superlad. "So put that in your pipe and smoke it!" he says.
Damn, thinks Lana. The wedding pipe! She knew she'd forgotten something. She scurries off.
Needless to say, however, Lana finds the wedding pipe, puffs it down greedily and marches her way down the aisle, while Superlad, having spent the afternoon proposing to the dog for no clear reason, shows up to watch them exchange vows.
After the ceremony, Lana is so overcome with joy that she's sobbing like a Sob-a-tron 4000™. At least, that's what Sinead assumes she's overcome with. He ushers her into the wedding car (now with bulletproof windows) and shoots a victorious smirk at Superlad. He shoots one back, waving a photo of Lois and mouthing 'Wrong One' at him.
"Damn, blast and double damn!!" says Sinead.
And that's how it's done people. I give this episode four stars (Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts and, controversially, Nick Nolte)* and look forward to
Next week: Superlad meets Fight Club.
* Yeah, I've done that joke before too. It's called meta-commentary people!!
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