What I’m Watching: Smallville

Smallville: Season 10, Episode 12 “Collateral” (D+)

I’ve seen episodes like this before, and this is nowhere near as effective as it could have been. I’m reminded particularly of a trippy episode of “The X-Files” where Scully and Mulder were buried underground and kept breaking through to the surface, only to have it revealed that they were still asleep and underground. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense, with a long-absent Chloe suddenly reappearing and determined to run the whole show, expecting everyone to trust her when she hadn’t contacted them for such a long while. It’s clear that the basis for this virtual reality is similar to that on the recently-axed “Caprica,” where Chloe is a ninja obsessed with showing off her skills simply because she has some strong hacking abilities. It seems to me that there are way too many inconsistencies in any kind of Superman mythology at this point in the show’s run, with way too many people being entirely aware of Clark’s identity. No one seems too concerned with that, of course, focusing instead on such things as asking Chloe to be a maid of honor and not actively battling the powerful evil forces determined to strip them of their abilities and pretty much annihilate them. This season has seemed excessively disjointed to me, and I’m not sure if it’s any more so than over the past few years or if it’s just seeming like that because the show has been off the air for a good number of weeks. Either way, it’s relatively incoherent, and hardly near the high note that a veteran series like this should be prepared to go out on at the end of the season.