I watched the Smallville finale the other week. It’s been a pretty average series over the years; moments of ‘alrightness’ interspersed by fairly long tranches of mediocrity. But the cast and story lines have been kind of fun, and I’ve always found it hard to walk away from a DC superhero franchise (I even watched the woeful Green Lantern).

The finale delivered all it promised – the final resolution of the various story lines – and was therefore appropriately triumphant, original John Williams score playing and all. But it was extremely cheap – essentially the same story told every season about how Clark needs to embrace both his Kryptonian and Earth heritage to become the hero he needs to be.

[Worse spoilers follow, so turn away now if you need to…]

Which, by itself is fine. However, the resolution to the ‘final crisis’ in the series involves Clark pushing Apokolips out of orbit.

Really???

First, that makes his power scales meaningless. Second, it totally demeans the entire season and half they’ve spent building up Darkseid’s arrival. Also, Oliver Queen taking out Granny Goodness, Desaad and the other avatar of Darkseid who’s clearly not that memorable with a single shot (admittedly of three arrows) seemed a bit too easy… And third – it’s Deus Ex Machina in the extreme. They ran out of TV minutes so they resolved everything stupidly quickly with a meaningless and internally inconsistent display of ‘magical’ powers.

Garr. Ah well, it’s done now. What’s the next thing? Running low on series to follow, other than Torchwood (which I still like, despite the fan fall-out on this blog). Doctor Who starts again soon too…