Graphic Novel Review: Batman, the Return of Bruce Wayne

An odyssey for one of the most iconic figures in comics stretches from prehistory to the end of time, revisiting and reimagining Batman's mythology through a complex narrative. Writer Morrison and a team of artists pick up from the end of Morrison's Final Crisis and Batman: RIP. Bruce Wayne is lost in time after killing Darkseid, a godlike being of pure evil. Piecing together the memories of his past that he's lost and slowly realizing he's been turned into a human booby trap meant to destroy the universe by Darkseid, Bruce is pulled through eras of Gotham City's history that include confrontations with cavemen, witch hunters, pirates, cowboys, and 20th-century cultists. These adventures culminate in a return to the present where he must rely on his fellow superheroes to save him from Darkseid's curse. Morrison's story is designed to add to Batman's aura as a timeless, mythical hero, but the time jumps and Bruce's amnesia sometimes create an uneven narrative. The story also asks readers to possess a wealth of familiarity with the character's decades-long history, making the book not as accessible to newer fans. Different artists—all strong, colorful storytellers—give each time period its own mood.

From the product description of
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne
at Amazon.com

I had originally intended to review the graphic novel Final Crisis and "Return" back-to-back, but "Crisis" had such a vast scope and such a twisted plot to follow, that I felt that reviewing it would be an injustice. I didn't like it very well. It assumed that the reader knew just about everything there is to know about the DC Universe going back decades (although I actually knew about the Miracle Machine from the old, silver age Adventure comics (featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes). For the first half of "Crisis", I had no idea what was going on, if I was seeing events on different "Earths" or just different places on one Earth or whatever.

However, reading "Crisis" was necessary to get the background for understanding how Bruce Wayne ended up in the stone age in The Return of Bruce Wayne. I love time travel stories and I love time travel mysteries. I figured this was going to be good.

It was. But it had its flaws.

I hadn't intended to read it all in one sitting, but a bout of insomnia changed my plans. My review is based on going through all of the pages of Morrison's product well after midnight and, writing this the following evening on three hours sleep, I'm still a bit punchy. But I digress.

The storyline is much more straightforward than "Crisis" but it's not completely straight. There is the little "side-trip" to Vanishing Point taken by Superman, Rip Hunter, and a few other JLA members to try and figure out where and when Batman is/was. I must have missed something, but Vanishing Point was on the verge of being destroyed at the heat death of the universe, so there wasn't a lot of...time (yeah, I know...that's going to come up a lot) to investigate.

There was mention made of the clues in history Batman left behind but no mention of how the JLA knew even to look. As far as they knew, Batman was dead. Why suspect that he was really back in time and how convenient it would be to suddenly start finding suspicious cave paintings just after his disappearance into the past? It would have been cleaner if we were told how and why anyone thought to look for a time traveling Bruce Wayne and what told them that A.) he was capable to traveling forward in time and B.) that he was accumulating Omega Energy as part of Darkseid's plot to posthumously destroy Earth.

Of course, maybe that was in the book and I was just too tired to pick up on it.

I liked the stone age. I'm still wondering how the rocket ship (which did not contain Bruce's body but just his stuff) ended up in the exact time and place that Bruce's body did when zapped by Darkseid's Omega beams. I may have missed the connection in "Crisis", though. There was so much going on in that book, it was hard to keep all the details straight.

It was a little campy to have "Boy" of the Deer People become "Boy" (Robin) of the Bat People, but endearing nonetheless. I did find it really incredible to believe that someone who probably lived about 10,000 B.C. could have started a legend that would be remembered by a small tribe native Americans in 1640 A.D., but it was also kind of cool.

I kept wondering why Bruce took such a big leap in time at the first event, tens of thousands of years, and afterwards, jumped forward only a few centuries or a few decades? Of course, there was all that time in between when he wouldn't have had any sort of adventure and we do want to keep the action moving.

I enjoyed all of his time leaps, but my favorite was when Bruce "played" private detective investigating the allegation that his father murdered his mother (the man with her that fateful night wasn't supposed to be Thomas Wayne). Batman was originally created in the late 1930s, so pulp fiction dieselpunk is his natural element. I did have a tough time figuring out the year though, since there were video stores in existence, which would have placed him in the late 1970s or early 80s, but his grandfather was in an iron lung, which would have put it more in the 1950s.

Oh well.

When Bruce showed up at Vanishing Point and stole Rip Hunter's time machine, stranding Superman, GL, and the others just minutes before the end of the universe, I was definitely thrown a curve ball. It's all eventually explained, but I'm still trying to figure out who that guy Carter was, how he invented a time machine and why, if this was supposed to be in the 1940s or 50s, he was wearing a "Have a nice day" t-shirt, complete with smiley face.

A few things really bothered me. One was how many times Bruce came really close to death. If he was that easy to kill, he would have died a hundred times over just by being Batman. Of course, he didn't have his memory and he was way out of his element, but as the book says, Batman is a survivor. That's what he does.

The one thing I hated more than anything happens when Bruce steals Hunter's time machine and strands the JLA members in a force field (which turns out to be a time machine in the making). Superman panics. He has a real look of fear in one panel followed by him pounding impotently on the force field while practically wailing. No one else loses their cool, not even Booster Gold. Superman would not have panicked, no matter what. He'd be the one everyone else looked to for courage. I felt sorry for him.

I kind of liked it that a 17th century witch put an everlasting curse on one of Bruce's ancestors (and in this book, his ancestors were less than noble). It kind of explains why his life and his family is always in such a mess. He's got a lot to make up for.

Like the "Crisis" story, there's a bad guy and a worse bad guy. In this case, Wayne arriving in the 21st century and blowing it up isn't the only problem. There was also that evil thing in the Bat Cave in 1640 that passed on an "infection" of evil (hey, I don't make this stuff up). It definitely plays a part in why Bruce is so messed up when he finally reaches the present, mentally and physically, although I'm not sure how it ended up becoming the "bat-thing" Vandal Savage killed in the stone age right before Bruce arrives (and which becomes the basis for Bruce's first "costume").

"Return" is a book that assumes you know what's going on. Although it's still exciting and compelling all by itself, there are too many questions it raises if you don't buy 50 DC comic books every month for ten or twenty years in a row and memorize all of the details. In spite of what I just said, it's still more or less a "clean" story that contains most of the answers to the questions it raises. It held my attention and was even a page-turner when all I wanted in life was to get a few hours sleep.

There's a lot I left out of the review, but if you haven't read "Return" yet, you'll need to get a copy and find out about the other connections that have now become part of the Legend of the Dark Knight. Despite all of my "complaints", I really liked it. I'm glad it was at my public library and it's a shame I have to return it. On the other hand, I have to give the next person a chance to experience the dilemma, the mystery, and the anguish of "the Return of Bruce Wayne."

Superman: The Man of Yesterday

I frequently see updates on the filming of both The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Superman: Man of Steel (2013) in my twitter timeline. Most of the time, I cave in and have a look at the latest spoilers and set shots, but occasionally I get a spine and resist, out of the desire to let the films surprise me by what they are as finished products. Having every little tidbit and nugget about the making of each film crammed down my throat on an almost daily basis is a kind of death.

I think Christian Bale's interpretation of Batman has made the transition into the 21st century quite well. Both Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008) have done extremely well and avoided the terrible curse of campiness to which many past superhero films have given way.

Then I think about Superman.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I've always been disappointed with the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. Granted, the first film was released in 1978, but it wasn't the lack of CGI or 3D technology that was at fault but the attitude of the film makers. Superman was played completely for camp. There was some taking him seriously in the first film but with each sequel, he became more and more silly. Here's an example.

Remember the first appearance of Superman in the original film? Lois's helecopter is disabled, the pilot is knocked unconscious, and Lois is suspended a hundred stories over the streets of Metropolis, hanging only by a seat belt and screaming for her life. Clark makes his magical transformation into Superman and lifts both her and the falling helecopter back to the safety of the roof of the Daily Planet building. Afterward, Superman gives Lois a supportive talk about how air travel is still the safest way to fly. Boy Scout as always, right?

The gag is, as Superman turns away from Lois and as he's walking out of the scene, he gets the biggest grin on his face. The whole Boy Scout speech was just an act. He's totally having her on (she passes out a few seconds later).

Cut to Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1981) which was horrible and total anti-nuke propaganda. Superman narrowly prevents a total subway disaster which would have killed hundreds. After the rescue, he gives an impromptu speech to the passengers he just saved about how Metropolis's subway system is still the safest in the world.

The problem is that here, he's totally serious. The campy "mask" he wore in the first film became his real "face" by the last movie. Superman became a clown in a cape. It didn't have to be that way. But what went wrong?

Part of it was that Hollywood never took comic book heroes seriously and it showed in the writing and directing. The actors did their best, but you can only work with the script in hand and those scripts made superheroes seem like...well, comic book characters. If you actually read a comic book from 1978 or before, they really did sound campy and sappy. The dialog could be terrible if said outloud in real life. Comic books don't translate into reality without a lot of massage work. Christopher Nolan was willing to take a completely different approach with his Batman films and it paid off magnificently. Let's hope Zack Snyder can pull it off with the next big screen incarnation of the last son of Krypton.

There's another problem, though.

Both Superman and Batman were originally created in the context of the 1930s. They both represent two sides of the same Depression-era coin. Batman represents the pulp fiction heroes popular during that time period and the darkness and dispair experienced by victims of street and corporate crime. The original Dark Knight had an almost "it takes a thief" approach to crime fighting, by becoming as menacing and as fear-provoking as the people he battled.

Superman was almost as "dark" in a sense. I once had the opportunity to read the first appearence of Superman in Action Comics #1 (June 1938) online (this was years ago and I'm sure it's been taken off the web by now). Superman was pretty heavy handed back then, extorting confessions out of crooked politicians by hanging them off the rooftops of tall buildings, threatening to drop them to the ground (sounds more like Batman). I understand that young, 21st century comic book Superman is doing similar things in the 2011 version of Action Comics 1. The original Superman fought rampant political corruption and criminal gangs by overwhelming them with his power. He was like everyone's big brother and protector. If a helpless person was victimized by a big, tough "bully", Superman was bigger and tougher than the "bully" and he'd beat the snot out of him. The victims were saved and they had someone who would always look out for them.

Times changed.

If you look at the development of Superman and Batman across the 1940s through the 1970s for example, you'll see their very natures and characters changed dramatically. Batman and Robin really were as corny as their 1960s TV show counterparts (it really wasn't Adam West's and Burt Ward's fault after all). The tough, action oriented, no-nonsense heroes of the 1930s became the clowns in capes of the 1950s and 60s. No wonder the movie Superman of 1978 acted the way he did. "Darkness" in comic books didn't return until the 1980s and 90s and certainly by the 2000s, it was time to try and take them back to their roots.

With Batman, that's certainly possible, but will it work with Superman? In 1938, there really were "great metropolitan newspapers" which were a force for "truth, justice, and the American" way. It was completely realistic for Clark Kent to work as a reporter to get the inside scoop on the latest emergencies and crimes happening in Metropolis and beyond. Today, newspapers are dying, and instead of being beacons of truth and information (OK, I'm exaggerating, there's always been "yellow journalism"), they're now (for the most part) propaganda machines, selling a single social and political vision of the world that hardly resembles the lives we really lead (kind of like "reality TV"). Who would Clark Kent be today, where would he work, and how would he act if we didn't have the model of the 1930s Man of Steel?

What would happen if we just tossed the 21st century into the trash can as far as Superman goes? What would happen if the next Superman film was set in 1938? Little Clark's spaceship would have crashlanded in a Kansas wheat field during or near World War I. Clark would have grown up in a world without the Internet, without TV, without microwaves, or iPhones, or Lady Gaga. In that place and time, his adoptive parents, the Kents, would have almost certainly been Christians, so Clark would have been raised with a specific set of attitudes. He would have grown up in a world where Chicago was completely dominated by the mobs. Tales of Capone and Dillinger would have been all over the news as would Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Joe DiMaggio.

The tough part for modern film makers would be to capture the essence of the era and the people living in it, including Clark Kent/Superman, without imposing 21st century politically correct attitudes on the movie. Superman would have to be a Superman who was completely a child of his environment. Who would he be like? The Superman of Action Comics 1, June of 1938? Certainly. But could we relate to him? Could we even stand him?

Maybe or maybe not. I love the time period and am a big fan of dieselpunk, so I think he'd work out just fine for me, but how about you?

Will Superman, the iconic image, the "greatest American hero", be able to survive, let alone thrive, in the 21st century and be taken seriously? We won't find out until 2013. I certainly hope so. I'm still hoping that someday the film studios will become bold again, groundbreaking again, and make Superman 1938. I think it would be a blast!

I am Number Four DVD Review

That was horrible.

Well, maybe not horrible, but I wouldn't have rented it had I known I'd be watching an extra-long version of Smallville.

Here we have high school alien from another planet whose powers are developing as he's getting older. He has to keep his secret and, being raised on Earth, he feels more human than alien. He just wants a normal life with a normal girlfriend. He doesn't want his powers or to be hunted down by every evil alien with an ugly face and destructive energy weapons.

Except for the fact that the guy was blond, he really could have been Clark Kent. The majority of the film took place in "Paradise, Ohio", which certainly could have doubled for Smallville, Kansas. Lots and lots of high school angst, being bullied by the Captain of the football team, wanting to take him apart with his super powers, wanting to play "smootchy-face with his cute, blond girlfriend (everyone is so blond..at least his best friend Sam has dark hair), and so on.

I know a lot of fans of the now-ended Smallville TV show wanted a Smallville movie made. Wish granted. Just watch I am Number Four. In fact, since the film ended just begging for a sequel (or sequels), you could have Smallville-like film experiences for years to come.

OK, Clark didn't have a "Krypto" dog on Smallville, but John, our friendly, hunky, handsome (funny how people who have evolved on another planet can look so human) alien has a beagle who, when the chips are down, morphs into a big alien critter who takes on the bad guys' alien critter. Also, another last minute save is the appearance of a motorcycle riding British "Number Six", blond counterpart to surfer-alien John.

I could go on, but why bother. I wasted a perfectly good bowl of popcorn on this movie. It can't get it back to the rental store fast enough. I will not be watching "I am Number Four-Two".

Batman: Under the Red Hood DVD Review

First of all, this is loaded with spoilers, so if you haven't seen this video yet and you want to preserve the mystery, don't read any further. You've been warned.

OK, it was fabulous, and I don't give out compliments lightly. The suspense in this tale had even me twisting in my seat. I was actually nervous about how it all would come out. Go figure.

Several major pieces of Batman comic book history are adapted for this story.

First, Jason Todd, the second Robin, being killed by the Joker. That happens right at the beginning and is the set up for everything else. Jason is beaten to a pulp with a crowbar, left for dead, and then, before Batman could get there, the place blows sky high. No fake death. Batman gets to the site of the explosion less than a minute later and picks Jason's broken body out of the rubble. He's dead. No faking it.

Second, we have the "Red Hood" origin of the Joker. There are a number of different twists on Joker's origin, but one of them...one that I hate, is that the Joker was a petty crook trying to reform. He was married (the back story wasn't in the film, but I thought I should fill you in) and his wife was pregnant. His "honest" work wasn't going so well and some of his old pals convinced him to help pull off a heist. The catch is that he had to dress in some stupid looking red mask and cape, pretending to be a crime lord or something.

Naturally Batman shows up. It's in a chemical plant. The "Red Hood" tries to tell Batman that he didn't want to do wrong. It goes bad. "Hoodie" slips and falls into a vat of chemicals. The Joker is born.

Oh, the entire movie starts with Ra's al Ghul. Yeah. Thousands of miles away from Bosnia, which is where Jason buys it, Ra's knows somehow that Joker is beating Robin to death and, get this, that Batman will be too late to stop it. The film never explains how Ra's knows that but it does explain that Ra's hired the Joker...but not to kill Jason.

OK, that's out of the way.

Five years after Jason's death, a crime lord named Black Mask has taken over all of Gotham's mobs. Unfortunately, he's just Captain America's Red Skull with a black paint job and a bad temper. Nothing really special. I was disappointed.

The interesting part is when a guy in an adaptation of the Red Hood outfit (without cape, thankfully) takes over the mobs with the promise to protect the gangs from the Black Mask and Batman. He cuts himself into Gotham's drug profits but with one odd demand, "Sell drugs to kids and you're dead." He means it.

It was immediately apparent that the new Red Hood was Jason (although it takes Batman a little longer to figure out). Even with Nightwing's help, the Red Hood is always one step ahead of Batman. He knows all of Batman's moves. He can counter all of Batman's toys. The clues are all there. Jason wants Bruce to figure it out. At one point (and Bruce has to analyze the voice recording of their encounter to hear it), the Red Hood...Jason, even calls Batman, "Bruce".

The mystery isn't really why Jason would kill. Bruce knew right from the day he recruited Jason that he was both gifted and dangerous. Part of turning Jason into Robin was to control him, to keep him from going "dark". It almost worked until he died. Yeah, he really was dead. I'm getting to that.

Red Hood uses guns and explosives. He doesn't have a problem with killing. He does what he thinks Batman is afraid to do and he thinks that while it's impossible to get rid of crime, it can be controlled. In some ways, Jason walks a finer line than Bruce, few morals and no inhibition about killing, but he's not in it for the profit or even the thrill. He has a plan.

The mystery is how Jason really came back from the dead and ultimately what he wants with his new life. The first was hard to figure out because I never thought Ra's would go that far. The second was a bit of misdirection.

Batman wasn't the only one who felt guilty for Jason's death. Ra's hired Joker to be distract Batman while Ra's was working elsewhere. He never thought Joker would kidnap and kill Robin while Batman was chasing him in Bosnia. Ra's took Jason's dead body from the morgue after Bruce left the country and transported him to a Lazarus pit (Ra's replaces the body with a very convincing replica..and Bruce is too guilty to look at the body a second time). Oh crap. It worked. That green slime really can bring someone back from the dead. It can also drive them crazy, as it always threatens to do with Ra's.

It would be easy to say that Jason stayed crazy, but he didn't. He escaped Ra's al Ghul's compound and managed to make his way back into Gotham. Funded by drug profits, Jason decided to become a better Batman than Batman. Now that the mystery of how a dead guy comes back to life has been solved, what about the next mystery: what does Jason really want?

To kill the Joker? He almost does. To kill Batman for failing to save him? It looks that way. But looks can be deceiving. I won't tell you the details. Watch the DVD and find out for yourself. I absolutely promise it will be worth it.

Stuff I liked:

I liked the various flashback scenes when Bruce recalls Jason first becoming Robin and even when they first met in "crime alley", when he caught a 10 or 12 year old Jason trying to steal the hubcaps off of the Batmobile. Batman is Batman. Hard as nails, but inside, he really loved that kid. It humanizes Bruce and yet lets him keep the darkness and pain of being Batman.

I liked Alfred, probably because he's always Alfred. He's part of what anchors Batman and keeps him Bruce. He's the guy who gets to tell Batman stuff no one else would dare. He knows all there is about Bruce and he can be trusted. He's the closest thing Bruce has to a father (it never happens in the film, but if Jason really wanted to get to Bruce, all he'd have to do is mess with Alfred..fortunately Jason doesn't take it that far).

Stuff I didn't like:

I could get past Bruce Greenwood doing the voice work as Bruce/Batman. I certainly think that Kevin Conroy is *the* voice of Batman, but Greenwood (and I like Greenwood as an actor...a lot) wasn't half bad. I really hated John Di Maggio as the Joker, though. He sounded just like any other thug, especially in the beginning of the film when he was killing Robin. He communicated nothing of the dangerous insanity that Mark Hamill brings to the role. He was just mean and sarcastic.

That is until Di Maggio laughed. It's creepy, which it should be. Di Maggio redeems himself somewhat as the film progresses, especially when Black Mask springs him from Arkham and hires him to kill the Red Hood. The sequence of Joker going from broken prisoner to multiple-murderer in just a matter of seconds was brilliant.

I still think Hamill was better.

There was a scene where three out of four assassins trying to take Red Hood/Jason out were using variations on one and two-bladed light sabres. Oh c'mon, we've all seen Star Wars. Can't you be more creative? The action, suspense, and danger held up, but it took the edge off the scene just having light sabres there.

Batman: Under the Red Hood. I was impressed. Very impressed. Very few flaws, at least that I noticed on a first viewing. Lots of little homage pieces to other films and the comic books. Very little Jim Gordon, which there wasn't time for in the story (too bad). Frankly, I loved it. If you're a Batman fan, or maybe even if you're not, you'll love it too.

Smallville is Dead!

I realize this is difficult for many Smallville fans to accept, but the series is over. It's over. Repeat after me: "The Smallville series has ended." Please try to accept it.

OK, OK, the Smallville Complete Series DVD Set won't be released for several months yet, but no new episodes are being made. While you will still be able to thrill to each and every telecast of the show online, on the DVDs you own, or after the complete series DVD set is released, those are old shows. Tom Welling, Erica Durance, Michael Rosenbaum, Allison Mack, and all of the other Smallville actors have moved on.

So should you.

Oh I'm not saying you can't continue to be a fan of an old TV show. I'm very fond of the original Star Trek series with Shatner and Nimoy, but I don't obsess about it on twitter or Facebook, either. I know, STTOS is decades old while Smallville died just last spring, but the principle is the same. What's dead is dead.

I've heard exactly one loose rumor on twitter about a possible "Metropolis" series, perhaps starring some of the other superheroes who originally appeared on Smallville, but I can find absolutely nothing credible on the web to say that it's even a possibility. As far as anyone can tell, there will be no Smallville spin-off. If there were, they'd have to be filming by now and news like that would be impossible to keep secret.

Face it. It's over. Clark Kent is dead. Long live Superman: Man of Steel. Starting in 2013, Henry Cavill will be the Last Son of Krypton (no, the photo isn't really Cavill in "the suit", just a photoshopped simulation).

Now please go watch a different TV show and let Welling and Co. get a well-deserved rest.

Peace, out.

The End of Smallville: A Review

I know. I'm terrible. I didn't watch the series finale of Smallville until last night. I almost didn't watch it at all, even though I had the time and opportunity. Let me explain.

My wife isn't a Smallville fan in any way shape or form. She's not a Superman fan. She's not into science fiction and fantasy (well, she does like Star Trek and the Indiana Jones films). We don't watch a lot of TV.

Here's another confession. I didn't start watching Smallville in 2001 when it first came on the air. I can't remember when Smallville first registered on my radar. I think I saw a friend's collection of DVDs of the early seasons a few years ago and started watching them just to see what they were like.

I was hooked. I blew through his DVD collection and then started renting the rest of the DVDs (up to the 6th or 7th season I think) from the local video store. Even then, I couldn't really make the time to try and watch the actual TV broadcasts. In fact, I stopped watching Smallville again until the summer before season 10 came out.

I had to go back to the video store and rent the rest of the videos, supplementing them with whatever I could find on the CW Smallville site. Eventually, I made my way to almost the "present" last fall. I was watching new season 10 episodes on the CW site and watching season 9 episodes on disc. I never got to see the last two episodes of season 9 because that set of discs was always rented out. Oh well, I might get to them some day.

I managed to watch most of the season 10 episodes via the CW but my schedule didn't allow me to watch the last two episodes, "Prophecy" and "Finale". Last night, opportunity arrived.

I figured I'd just sacrifice "Prophecy" and pursue "Finale" since that's where the whole answer to "How does Clark become Superman?" lived.

How did I like it?

The episode was sort of a rollercoast ride of "I like this" highs and "this sucks" lows. The experience reminded me of the patchwork Lex clone that Lionel (OK, he probably had some evil doctors do the work) put together (funny how he managed to find a "working" brain with all of Lex's memories, but he couldn't manage a heart). It was a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of the other thing.

I can't blame the Smallville writers too much for this. Michael Rosenbaum took forever to sign up to play Lex for the final episode, so I'm sure the writers had to scramble to move things around and figure out where and how to use him. It's pretty likely that they had a similar task to perform relative to Allison Mack, since she was originally scheduled to play Chloe in only five episodes in season 10, not including the finale.

I thought it was pretty lame that the show opened with Lois "suddenly" having doubts about her marrying Clark and then on the heels of her concerns, Clark resurrecting his own doubts (remember, I haven't seen "Prophecy", so maybe that's all explained in that show). I thought they'd gotten past all these worries. The "conflict" felt like so much filler material, written just to take up time until the actual wedding was supposed to happen (and Clark and Lois never got married on the show...so much for "Clois" fans).

A big pet peeve for me was how a planet-sized body could enter our solar system completely unnoticed. Depending on how fast Apokolips was traveling, the gravitational effects should have been observable on the various objects in our system for months. It couldn't possibly "sneak up" on the Earth. In fact, Apokolips didn't seem to cause any demonstratable tidal effects on Earth until it was inside the Moon's orbit! Amazing (though as someone on twitter pointed out, how can I bitch about all this if I'm willing to believe an alien from another galaxy with a perfectly human looking body can fly?)!

One of my other frustrations with the finale is that it seemed like Clark was going to talk everyone to death. Long conversations with Lois, his Mom, Lex, Darkseid (inhabiting Lionel's literally heartless body), Jonathan's ghost, and finally Jor-El. Oy. Just shut up, put on the f*cking suit, and stop Apokolips, you moron!

OK, Ok. What did I like?

I really liked the framing sequence with Chloe and her little boy, reading the "Smallville" comic book and with "Mom" explaining how Clark became Superman (if DC in her world really published this story, Clark's identity must have been completely sanitized from the magazine). Mack even successfully pulled off looking like a woman in her early 30s rather than her actual age of 28 (29 this coming July). OK, not much of a stretch here. She probably just cut back on the makeup.

I did like how the suspense managed to build until after about 80 minutes (including opening credits and commercials) I was about ready to beat up Clark around the head and shoulders with a kryptonite baseball bat while screaming "Just become Superman, already!" (the flip side is that if the writing had been tighter, the entire finale could have been compressed into a single, regular-length episode).

It could have been better. I felt like a lot of loose ends had to be quickly tied up in the last hour and a half (even with commercials, the running time of the finale was less than 90 minutes, at least as broadcast on the CW site) and how it was done was really uneven. In many ways, I'm just glad it's over. Smallville is a story about Clark's journey to become Superman but sooner or later he actually has to be the Man of Steel. Either that, or Smallville goes on forever and Clark becomes the only 75 year old "almost-but-not-quite-superhero" in history.

I did think that Smallville did nearly nail my biggest expectation for the finale in the last few minutes. An emergency is announced at the Daily Planet. Clark manages to get to an isolated area (in this case, the roof). He takes off his glasses and tie, the camera moves in on his chest, he opens his shirt, the Superman shield is flashed. Fade to black.

Good-bye Smallville. Hello Superman.

The end.