What I’m Watching: Smallville

Smallville: Season 10, Episode 19 “Dominion” (C-)

Three episodes to go, and we have to spend an entire hour in the Phantom Zone rehashing old relationships and skipping time in the real universe? It felt much more like filler to me than legitimate plot development, even with a chance to see Zod, a character who started out great and then went wrong, again. Oliver’s involvement with Clark and this whole field of superheroics has always been tangential at best, and to put him on a level playing field with Clark is just unnecessary since the two have been good friends for such a while now that they don’t need to come to blows over who might be more powerful or deserving of sovereignty. Lois pointing guns at Tess at Watchtower just adds to the peculiarity of Miss Mercer’s allegiances, that she’s so immediately trusted after being a mega-villain for a few seasons, and that she’s actually doing exactly what Clark told her and contending with a frantic, stubborn-as-anything Lois instead. When Clark and Oliver did finally make it back to our world, it seemed more like it was finally time to get started and dive back into the regular plot again rather than that he or Lois had achieved any sort of personal growth as individuals or as a couple. Next week marks the penultimate episode, followed by a two-hour finale that will hopefully utilize the show’s strongest elements from the past ten years and make having stuck with this show all these years seem to have been worthwhile.