We open on Clark brooding in his loft at night. The sky is clouded over, and the music is ominous, reflecting his mood. He is reading a book through which Kara has been sending him messages from the past.
One point on consistency: Clark tells Chloe that she won't miss him, because if he was killed in the past she wouldn't notice he was gone because from her point of view he never would have existed (so far, so logical) — so, according to Smallville, Clark shouldn't notice that Kara has written 'another' message, because from his perspective it has already been there for some 20 years by the time he first cracks open the book.
Chloe shows up, and Clark gives her the content of Kara's message: "Krypton will be destroyed any minute. Brainiac is getting closer. Please hurry. Your life depends on it." Then Chloe patronises the audience — can I say? I don't think that Chloe is smarter than Clark, or joining the dots for him. I think a lot of the time Chloe says out loud what Clark [and the audience] considers so obvious it's not worth saying, because Smallville thinks its audience is stupid, and that we need everything spelt out for us, and Chloe is a convenient mouthpiece.
Then we get the kind of exchange between Clark and Chloe that we've had countless times in the past: Clark pouts that everyone he knew would have been better off without him, but Chloe disagrees. "We need you," she says to Clark — but she doesn't really explain why, taking for granted that Clark views himself in the same way as Chloe does – as an infallible hero – and that he'll grasp what she's getting at. He doesn't.
One thing Smallville didn't really address: at the start of this episode, Clark is literally suicidal. However, he is worryingly chipper when his self-opinion is apparently affirmed later on, and at the apparent 'proof' that he will have to die for Chloe and Lana to be happy. Does Clark hate his life that much?
Cue the It's a Wonderful Life plot. I thought this was a nice touch from Welling going into the AU: when we first see Clark, the set is dark — then, as he gets up and turns around, the set is illuminated, lighting up a machine used to stack hay, which is our first visual cue that we're looking at a world where Clark never existed. The bright lighting here also contrasts with the moody darkness which we opened on.
Here we are introduced to an alternate, human, "blond Clark Kent". He is wearing a Letterman jacket, indicating that he is on Smallville High's football team. He asks Clark what he's doing on Kent property, and Clark reacts with understandable confusion.
After the credits, Clark bursts into the farmhouse, where he finds a [Photoshopped] picture of "Clark" with Jonathan and Martha. "Clark" drops some dialogue which indicates that Jonathan is still alive, and Clark reacts with glee.
Real World: 0 | AU: 1
However, because Smallville didn't get John Schneider or Annette O'Toole for this episode, Jonathan and Martha are on a cruise. Clark asks "Clark" if he can use his phone book, to make sure his friends are OK, and we cut to Chloe telling her fiancé that she'll wait for him and going to look at some flowers.
"You may not remember me," Clark says to her, as he approaches, as if anybody could forget his sense of style. Sure enough, Chloe's "internal database [comes] up empty". Clark asks for her help in tracking down Lana, who Chloe was never friends with in this AU, but she has somewhere to be. She reveals that she is engaged, which Clark seems genuinely pleased about. It turns out he was right that Chloe would be fine without him.
Real World: 0 | AU: 2
We cut to the Daily Planet, where Jimmy has his camera trained on Lois in a scene which seems to be a homage to the first time we see the Daily Planet in Christopher Reeve's Superman: the Movie. His view is blocked by Clark, who learns that flattery will get him everywhere, as Jimmy will do anything for a "loyal fan", including use the Daily Planet database to track Lana down.
One thing to note here: apparently Jimmy and Chloe also dated in this AU, as Jimmy mentions his bow tie was a gift from an old girlfriend. In "real world" Smallville, Chloe had gifted Jimmy with a bow tie in "Crimson".
Jimmy looks up Lana, and then tells Clark to "brace himself". Clark expects bad news — but it turns out that Lana is married to Pierre [Pete] Rousseau [Ross]. When Clark reacts with relief, Jimmy makes explicit what he is thinking: "I guess things turned out pretty good for her without you around." "It's the best news I've ever heard," says Clark, who, what? Thought he could die in peace now?
Real World: 0 | AU: 3
Cue Lois. As Clark turns, he knocks her over, catching her in his arms. "Clumsy," she says, looking up with him, "but," and Durance gives this a very sweet delivery, "cute". Clark goes from bemused to apparently confused that Lois would take such a shine to him. He sets her back on her feet. "Name's Lois, Lois Lane," she says, sticking out her hand and echoing our Lois's first introduction to Clark back in "Crusade". "Clark Kent," Clark says.
Lois flirts with Clark, and Jimmy, who clearly has a crush on her, points out that Clark was looking up an ex-girlfriend. "It's not what you think," Clark starts, but Lois cuts him off. Apparently she's had more heroes exist stage left than a Greek tragedy — in this AU, Lois is the only one of Lois, Chloe and Lana who is single, because she is the only one whose soul mate never existed.
Real World: 1 | AU: 3
Just as she's asking Clark out for a drink, a set of government agents headed by "Linda Danvers" (Kara) appear to arrest her. It turns out that Lois is a Puliter prize-winner.
Real World: 1 | AU: 4
"Back off," Kara says to Clark, as Lois is manhandled out of the building. Clark asks Jimmy who would promote Kara into government, and he reveals that Lex Luthor was elected President of the United States (as predicted in "Hourglass" —
Real World: 1 | AU: 3
— and that there was still a meteor shower.
Real World: 1 | AU: 2
Clark wants to help Lois, but Jimmy, who I intensely dislike in this alt-world, is more interested in saving his own skin. "Aren't you sipping the poison a little quick there, Romeo?" he asks of Clark, combining both jealousy and unheroic selfishness — what a guy.
I have to wonder if Tom Welling directed Aaron Ashmore to play Jimmy as somewhat of a creep in this. I think that if Ashmore had played it differently, Jimmy could have come across as more sympathetic — but then Clark would have seemed less justified in slamming him up against the wall.
So, Clark rough-houses a lead out of him, and zooms off to the Ace of Clubs, a bar which appears in several versions of the Superman mythos. Here he meets ex-Sheriff Adams, who is apparently trying to bring down the government from the inside by passing leads to Lois.
And Sheriff Adams is still alive, so:
Real World: 1 | AU: 3
Sheriff Adams tells Clark to give up on saving Lois, but Clark has his hero pants on today: "I don't give up." Here we cut to the scene they released as the director's cut: Clark disposes of the guards escorting Lois and superspeeds away with her. There's a nice shot as Clark speeds through a puddle and comes to a stop, and then the camera pans up.
"Are you OK?" Clark asks Lois, who is very 'into' him right now (as evidenced by the lip bite). "Yeah," she says. "Talk about sweeping a girl off her feet." Clark seems both proud of himself for impressing Lois, and pleased at her reaction to him. The music swells as they smile at each other.
Lois takes Clark back to Jimmy's apartment, and accuses him of being a meteor freak. "I'm not a meteor freak," he says, and seems hurt that she would suggest it. He asks Lois why she is being arrested by the government, and she reveals that she has classified information that Lex wants to keep safe. She shows him a clip of Lex accusing "the enemy" of planning a strike against the country, which she can prove they weren't, and then says that she overhead a guard saying they were "taking the eagle to the mountain top".
"That sounds like some kind of code," says Clark, who momentarily takes on Chloe's role as the person providing almost insultingly unnecessary exposition. It's to Lois's credit that she doesn't say, "No, duh". Instead she explains that Lex is preparing to launch nuclear missiles at "the enemy", prompting a Dr Lovegood or Terminator or, let's-face-it-this-is-a-common-device scenario, as predicted by "Hourglass", in which the whole world would be destroyed by strike and counter-strike.
Real World: 1 | AU: -∞
Lois and Clark work together to figure out what's going on. They have a very interesting dynamic to watch, both filling in pieces of the puzzle based on their own knowledge, pushing against each other until they have a complete picture. It's a refreshing change from the very bland way Smallville usually provides exposition.
It turns out that Milton Fine (Brainiac) came to Earth in this AU, and is Lex's Chief of Staff.
Real World: 1 | AU: -(∞+1)
Here Clark comes to the realisation that, although individual people — Chloe, Lana, Jonathan — would be better off without him, things are in fact "worse than I ever imagined". Not only did Lex go bad without Clark's influence — addressing one of Clark's core sources of guilt: that he couldn't help Lex — but the world is teetering on the edge of total annihilation.
Lois doesn't understand how what's going on relates to Clark, but he asks her to trust him.
That almost reminds me of the comic Superman: Birthright in which, although Lex was working overtime to make the people of Metropolis believe that Superman was a hostile alien attacker, Lois had an implicit trust in him which kept him going even when the whole world was against him. Here she decides to help him, and provides him with a disguise so that he can slip past security.
She grabs a suit for him out of the wardrobe — "Jimmy's room mate should be about the right size," — and tells him to strip. She begrudgingly leaves him alone in the room when he gives her a look, but then goes to peek in. He opens the door on her, fully clothed. Busted. "Well done," she says — you can dress yourself without Chloe's help — and hands him her press pass.
You know what this means.
This means that Clark is Iconic Lois Lane.
"Something's missing," she says.
Cut to Clark in glasses. He's at the White House, where Lex is about to hold a press conference.
Clark takes off the glasses to listen in to Lex and Kara talking. I thought this was interesting — because of Superman's influence on popular culture, there is a trope known as the "Clark Kent Effect" where a protagonist who wears glasses will often take them off when they are doing something heroic, as Clark removes his glasses to become Superman. Although the Clark/Superman dichotomy does not exist on Smallville yet, this seems like a deliberate visual reference to Clark 'becoming' Superman in this scene to use his superhearing.
Lex accuses Kara of letting Lois go deliberately, and of not having faith in him.
Kara's arc this season has been set up as a condensation of Clark's character journey, and his relationship with Lex, over the past seven years. As parallels are drawn between Clark and Kara, an because of Smallville's emphasis on Clark's upbringing as what makes him as a person, it almost seems as if Smallville is presenting through Kara a "what if Clark had never been found by the Luthors," as well as the explicit "what if Clark never came to Earth" which we're getting through the main plot of the episode.
Although Lex is accusing Kara of lacking faith in him, he is the one who doesn't trust her: this is parallel to his relationship with Clark in the real world. He accuses Clark of not trusting him because Clark won't share all his secrets with him, but Clark has promised time and again to see the good in Lex, while Lex engages in paranoid behaviour re: Clark. Here, Kara tells Lex that he is like a brother to her, but he has apparently been keeping kryptonite for the eventuality that she could turn on him.
"I've already seen one planet destroyed," says Kara. "I'm not gonna let it happen again."
It turns out that Milton Fine is behind the missile deception, but that Lex already knows about it.
The music in this scene as Lex burns the evidence has strains of the music which played during the Christopher Reeve Superman movies when something bad was happening — specifically during the scenes with Zod in Superman II.
"Great leaders," says Lex, "are defined by the difficult decisions they make," defining the core conflict of this episode: the difficult decisions Clark has to make about whether to change the past, and the difficult choice Kara is about to make between Clark and Lex.
Clark reveals himself as Kal-El to Kara, but she is wary. "I was sent here to kill you," she says, referencing some of the events of "Lara" and "Blue", and an arc which I disliked in the Supergirl comics. She swings at Clark, but he moves out of the way, and her fist connects with the wall.
Kara says that she will stand by Lex, after everything he has done for her over the years, but Clark tells her that Milton Fine is Brainiac. They go to Lex, to try to convince him to stop things. He is without reasoning with, revealing that his plan is to rebuild the world after killing off all but humanity's "best and brightest". He shoots Clark with a kryptonite bullet, and then Kara, and has her taken away in kryptonite handcuffs.
He then hits Earth's self-destruct mechanism, and leaves Clark alone in the room with Brainiac, who reveals to Clark that Zod is still alive and trapped in the Phantom Zone. He plans to use Lex as the vessel for Zod, referencing his original plan in — shocker — "Vessel" and "Zod", and to have Kara as his mate so the two can repopulate Earth with Kryptonians.
Then he points Lex's gun in Clark's face, and says, with Jor-El's voice: "You cannoy change the course of history, Kal-El."
Reality crumbles and Clark finds himself in a discussion with Jor-El back in the real world. However, he is not at the Fortress of Solitude, but instead standing in an intersection of beams which used to signify that Clark was speaking to Jor-El before he had the Fortress. I thought that was an interesting visual reference to Smallville pre-season 5. Jor-El tells Clark that he must stop Brainiac from killing him as a baby: "This time," he says, referencing the events of "Reckoning", "there will be no second chances".
Clark then finds himself back in the loft with Chloe. He is convinced he must save himself, and goes back in time to Krypton, presumeably through the portal which Brainiac and Kara used. We cut to a shot of a blue planet orbiting very close to a red star.
And apparently nobody worked the maths on that model, because the scale is screwed up, but it looks cool enough so I'll let it slide.
Brainiac is approaching the baby Kal-El — I assume that Brainiac already killed Jor-El and Lana — but as he goes to kill him, Kara tackles him. "Kal-El will die on Krypton," he says to her, "and now you will share his fate."
"I won't let that happen," says Clark. He fights Brainiac, who reminds him that he has no powers under the light of that very small red star.
"You're not in Kansas anymore," says Brainiac. Kara stabs him from behind and tells Clark to put his baby self on the ship while she takes care of Brainiac. Then, as Kara flattens Brainiac with a large rock, Clark launches himself towards Earth. Kara and Clark leave, and we cut to a shot of Krypton exploding from space as the space ship zooms past the camera.
I think that's the first time we've seen the moment Krypton was destroyed on Smallville.
Kara is convinced she killed Brainiac, but Lana is still comatose. Kara tries to convince Clark to go back in time to try to save Lana, but Clark's been there, done that, and well, OK, so he wasn't going to replace his red and blue t-shirts but I think we all get the picture. "As much as I want Lana well again," he says, "there's no going back."
Kara then tries to convince Clark that they can save Krypton, but Clark has learnt his lesson about stepping on butterflies: "We can't change the past," he says. "We can only affect the future."
Kara tells him that she's there for him.
OK, this scene between Lex and Clark bored me. Blah, blah, blah, Lana. Secrets. Lana. Lex shows the same passive-aggressiveness here with Clark as he did in the AU with Kara.
Cut to Clark at the Daily Planet, using a computer that Jimmy set him up with to try to help Lana. This parallels Jimmy in the AU allowing Clark to use the database to try to find Lana. "This is a new side to Clark Kent," Lois says, "mild-mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper."
That line is typical Smallville heavy-handed fare, but I think the way Erica Durance delivered it was interesting, because I think it set the tone for the rest of the scene. It's the kind of line I would usually expect Lois to deliver sarcastically, to try to rile Clark up,. However, Erica Durance inflects it in this scene as a fair observation. That meant that Clark didn't have to react defensively, so that Lois wouldn't have to feel like she had put her foot in her mouth when she found out why Clark was there.
The delivery also seemed to tone the line down, so that it felt more organic and like something Lois would actually say.
"I'm not good with sad," Lois says when she sees that Clark is trying to help Lana. Clark says it's OK, but Lois disagrees: "Smallville, you were there for me when I needed a shoulder to cry on," back in "Siren", "and I am blowing this bigtime. I just wish I could make everything all right."
"You're a good friend," Clark says to Lois, and she smiles awkwardly, and then punches him on the shoulder and tells him she'll buy him a drink so that they can drown their sorrows together.
I thought it was interesting the way a parallel was set up between this scene and the scene between Clark and Lois in the AU: Jimmy sets Clark up to try to help Lana, and then Lois appears and asks him for a drink. In the AU, Lois was open about being attracted to Clark, but in the real world, because Clark's girlfriend is in a coma and he has all this baggage, Lois has to defuse the tension between them like she did at the end of "Lucy" by giving Clark a friendly punch on the arm — but she still asks him out.
And instead of being annoyed that Lois has hit him, or laughing at her like Clark has done in the past, he looks down at his shoulder and then at Lois with a frown, as if he is also making the connection between his Lois and the AU Lois.
The very final scene is of Kara getting a glass of milk from the fridge, and then collapsing on the floor. I did like the framing of the last couple of shots, with Kara in white and the milk spilt on the floor with the shattered glass.
Overall, I felt that "Apocalypse" was a very strong episode, and more layered than we're used to from Smallville. It referenced a lot of continuity from episodes past, and gave answers to a lot of "what if" questions: we now know, and Clark now knows, that it was not his fault that Lex was bad or what happened in the meteor shower. He also understands that although bad things may happen to the people closest to him, and that's sad, it doesn't mean that his influence on the world is wholly bad — and it could never be wholly good.
It seems like, and I hope this is true, "Apocalypse" represents a turning point for Clark's character development, and for Smallville as a whole. We've seen a glimpse of what aspects of the future could be like. I just hope that what Smallville has in store for us is built on these foundations, and not rooted in discontinuity.
