- One thing you can say for Smallville is that the show isn’t afraid to change gears and direction from week to week. One episode, everything seems to be going in one direction, but the next week the entire episode could be about something completely different. Last week, the show was all about the return of Green Arrow to Metropolis and Chloe’s mission to steal files from Lex while Clark returned from the Fortress of Solitude and tried to patch things up with Lana. This week, all of those storylines were AWOL. The action started in Detroit, where Lex has apparently been spending a lot of time. He managed to locate Clark’s amnesiac cousin Kara, who disappeared earlier in the season, back before the show took its holiday break. Lex has tracked Kara down somehow and instead of taking her back to Smallville or contacting Clark (which he later claims he tried to do), Lex hides the fact the he knew Kara back in Smallville and tells her that he wants to use his influence and contacts to get her the help she needs to recover her memory. A busboy at the diner where Kara now works under a new name, Linda, doesn’t take kindly to Lex butting in and locks Kara inside a steel-fenced enclosure inside a warehouse/junkyard complex. Lois also manages to find her way to Detroit and into the fray by tracking Lex and the two of them end up trekking through a rain-soaked night to find Kara. Unfortunately, things erupt into a shootout between Lex and Finley, with Lex taking a bullet to the head and being rushed back to the Smallville Medical Center, site of more scenes over the course of the show’s seven seasons than damn near any place else outside of the Kent farm. There, Lex is being treated and deemed unlikely to ever regain consciousness...until Clark and Chloe realize that Lex may be their only source of information for finding Kara and Lois. Using information from Lana, they uncover a now-scrapped LuthorCorp program that Lionel Luthor himself funded before it was shelved. Using the program, a person can be tied into the brain functions of someone else and thus experience that person’s memories and see what he or she has seen. The only problem? That nearly everyone who has participated in this procedure has died after having their central nervous system fried. Clark literally finds himself inside Lex’s mind, which strangely resembles a crummy, dirty old warehouse with lots of empty rooms, doors and walls with peeling paint and exposed pipes. He’s warned by Lionel before being put under for the procedure that he must always keep track of the red door once inside Lex’s mind because it’s his only way out. Inside of Lex’s mind, Clark finds rooms with different memories from Lex’s life, including one of being abused by Lionel. He also encounters Alexander, who is Lex as a boy, and learns that Lex in his present form is trying to find this Alexander in his mind and kill him, i.e. memories of himself as a boy, because they are a weakness. Just as Alexander and Clark start looking for the memories that will tell Clark where Lois and Kara are, Lex appears inside his own mind in the form of a Lex in a white suit and with a certain glow about him. Since it’s his mind, he’s all powerful and Clark is weak, so Lex demands that Clark get out of his head and when Clark doesn’t, Lex forces him to see one of Lex’s memories that is excruciatingly painful to Clark: Lana and Lex having sex and Lana telling Lex that she will always love him. At about this point, the procedure to join Clark to Lex’s memories and Lex’s failing health causes Lex (the real-world version) to die, meaning that Clark dies as well. All looks lost until Chloe pulls out her magical power to heal, knowing full well that it could harm her to use it. But use it she does, using her touch to revive Lex and by association, Clark. Clark also manages to find Lex’s memories about Lois and Kara and to find the red door, which brings him back to consciousness in the here and now. Using the information he has, Clark super-speeds up to Detroit, saves Lois and Kara and is gone before anyone knows he was there. Meanwhile, Chloe is back in Smallville at her apartment, in the midst of an 18-hour coma that ends with her waking up to a waiting Clark. He lectures her about her power and how she can never use it again, but Chloe won’t agree to it. Kara also makes her way back to Smallville and surprise, surprise, who’s there to greet her but Lex. Kara confides in Lex that she doesn’t trust Clark because she doesn’t remember who he really is or anything else about her life before she got amnesia. Lex, sensing a chance to get a peek at the Kent family secrets under the ruse of helping Kara regain her memories, renews his offer to hook her up with doctors to help her get her memory back. With Kara in possession of all of her Kryptonian powers and unaware of it, it could be a recipe for disaster. Of course, as has become the frustrating custom for Smallville, the show ended with no teaser for next week and no hint of when the next new episode will be. Thanks for the lack of info, CW, you’re making it so easy to follow your shows, ass hats....
- The weird flash-forwards that are jacking up Lost big tie continued this week and this one played an even bigger role than any of the previous ones. As the action on the island heated up, we learned that in the future, Sayid will be one of the Oceanic Six, the infamous group of survivors from the crash who get off the island. In the flash-forwards, Sayid is some sort of well-paid mercenary, traveling the globe, enjoying a life of luxury and killing people for - Benjamin Linus. That detail isn’t revealed ‘til the closing moment of the episode, long after future Sayid has shot and killed a man at an exclusive golf course in Europe and then scammed a woman in Berlin and killed her after pretending to be interested in her for weeks, all at the behest of Ben Linus. Their last conversation of the episode hints that Sayid’s killing spree has a specific purpose, targeting certain people who are putting him and “his friends” in danger. But back in the present, on the island, Sayid is promised by Frank, a member of the rescue team that has come to the island, that he will get flown out to the rescue freighter if he can go find the other half of the Oceanic 815 survivors led by John Locke, get them to give him Charlotte, another member of the rescue team, and return to the clearing where the helicopter is located. Sayid, Kate and Miles, a member of the rescue party, go off to find Locke’s group while Jack, Frank and Daniel Fairaday, also from the rescue team, wait with the helicopter. In the meantime, Juliet treks back to the beach to get Desmond in the hopes that the prescient one can get information from the rescue team as to why they were carrying a picture of him and his former girlfriend with them to the island. When Des returns with Juliet, he doesn’t get the answers he wants and thus declares that when the helicopter takes off for the freighter, he’s going to be on it so he can go and get his answers there. As the group waits at the helicopter, Daniel decides to do an experiment. He has a fellow scientist back on the freighter fire off a small, unarmed rocket toward the exact coordinates where he’s standing on the island. But a funny thing happens for the rocket on the way to the island: it doesn’t arrive until 31 minutes after the scientist on the ship shows that it arrived. As this woman counts down the rocket’s distance to the island, Daniel waits and watches, but sees nothing. Then, more than half an hour later, the rocket crashes down and checking its timer against his own, he finds out about the 31-minute lag. That mystery will have to wait for another time, though, because no answers came this week. On the main front, Sayid, Kate and Miles made their way to the barracks formerly used by the others (where are those people, anyhow?) and found them abandoned...or so it seemed. No one was around, it appeared, until the trio heard grunts and thuds coming from a closet inside one of the houses. Inside, they found Hurley bound and gagged in a closet and he told them a tale of woe about how the rest of the group tied him up and left him behind as they moved on. Sayid and Kate believed Hurley and along with Miles, they went to search Ben’s former house for clues as to where Locke’s group might have gone next, since Hurley said the group was planning to stop by Ben’s old place before leaving. Once there, Miles, Kate and Sayid split up and were in different rooms when Locke and his group sprung their trap and revealed that the whole thing was a setup. Once captured, Kate, Sayid and Miles are kept separate. Sayid is taken to the barracks’ pool hall and thrown inside with Ben, also being held prisoner. Kate is held in a bedroom at Ben’s old house under Sawyer’s watch and Miles is questioned by Locke. Sawyer tries to convince Kate that staying on the island is the right choice and that there’s nothing back “home” to return to. Sayid uses his audience with Locke to negotiate for Charlotte’s release, which will earn him a spot on the chopper back to the freighter. He strikes a deal to give Miles over to Locke’s group and returns to the helicopter with Charlotte, safe and sound just as he promised. The episode ends with Sayid, Desmond, Frank and the body of the rescue team’s fifth member, Naomi, flying over the ocean, presumably in the direction of the freighter. So until next week, get Lost.....
- God bless all you wacky, zany high school students out there, mainly seniors, who pull those oh, so hilarious pranks at your schools. Heck, MTV has created an entire series about this topic, High School Stories. Stacking up desks and chairs to form a wall blocking a hallway, taking apart a car and then reassembling it inside the school, letting millions of crickets loose inside the school....the hilarities never end. This week some intrepid, as-of-yet-unidentified students at Northeast High School in Philadelphia joined the ranks of the pranksters, letting 50 hens and roosters loose in their school. The animals created such a mess than most of the school’s 3,600 students were sent home for the day because of the extensive cleanup required. Workers arriving to open up the school Monday morning found the birds, which means that over the weekend a few intrepid (senior) students. Yeah, it might be a bit derivative of other pranks and something that’s been done in one form or another many times before, but still major props to whoever pulled this one off. Four dozen farm animals walking around, crapping all over your school and forcing it to close for an entire day deserves some respect. Now you all had better hope that you covered your tracks and that everyone involved knows how to keep their mouth shut so you can get away with this.....
- Isn’t Switzerland supposed to be neutral? No army, obviously no need for a navy, being landlocked and all, not taking sides in wars, etc., that’s the Swiss way. It’s a peaceful, beautiful place and it should stay that way, but ass-hatted art thieves in dark clothes and ski masks can’t figure that out because if they could, they wouldn’t be bursting into the E.G. Buehrle Collection, a private museum of Impressionist art in Zurich and stealing millions of dollars worth of paintings. These wannabe Thomas Crown Affair hacks made off with $163.2 million in art from Cezanne, van Gogh and Monet, making in one of the largest art thefts in recent history. “This is an entirely new dimension in criminal culture,” said police spokesman Marco Cortesi in the hours after the heist. The thieves burst in shortly before closing time Sunday night and one of them pointed a pistol at museum personnel and visitors while the other two collected four paintings from the exhibition hall. According to witnesses, one of the men spoke German with a heavy Slavic accent, and that man then left to load the paintings into a white getaway vehicle parked in front of the museum. The theft may have actually been the easy part, because moving these kinds of stolen works of art is difficult, much more so than Hollywood portrays in its movies. So thanks for bringing violence and crime to a neutral, peace-loving country that gives us great cheese and chocolate, ass-hatted art thieves, you officially suck.
- Just say no, Black Keys. The garage rock duo from my hometown of Akron has put out five great albums (The Big Come Up, Magic Potion, Rubbery Factory, Thickfreakness and Chulahoma) and is about to head to the studio for a sixth one, but one famous-yet-terrible artist out there has thrown out an offer than the Keys need to reject like a hot girl rejects my offer for a date: swiftly and with prejudice. Geriatric, gravel-mouthed crooner and purveyor of some of the worst music (and music videos) in history, Rod Stewart, has decided that he wants to make a blues record and he’d like the Keys to provide backing on the album. “I want to make a blues record, and I want it to be backed by the Black Keys,” Stewart proclaimed. Patrick Carney, Dan Auerbach, allow me to answer this for you: NO. They are not interested in your pathetic attempt to revive your dead, never-should-have-started career, Rod. Your music blows and you sound like you’re chewing a mouthful of gravel and suffering from a bad case of laryngitis every time you try to sing - at least I think that’s what you’re trying to do. Sadly, it appears that the Keys would at least be open to discussing the idea with Stewart, as long as the album isn’t the standard, run-of-the-mill blues tune-fest. Honestly, at this point it should be the other way around, the Keys asking Stewart’s saggy, wrinkled a** to guest on their album in a minor role, so I hope they do the smart thing and reject this offer.
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