- Tonight was the night of the undead on Smallville, a tale that the writers and producers regrettably tried to show through my least-favorite plot setup for a TV show. That setup is, of course, having the first few minutes of the episode tell a story only to then spend the rest of the episode as a flashback leading up to the point where the episode started. It’s disjointed, it doesn’t build nearly the suspense and intrigue that these yahoos think it will and it removes the interest of not knowing where the episode is headed. So I’m going to blow right past the way the episode was structured and start at the beginning of the story, chronologically speaking. The Kandorians, i.e. the outer-space visitors from Clark Kent’s neck of the universe, release a deadly virus on Metropolis that turns everyone who is infected into a super-strength zombie. The virus is airborne, so it infects everyone, and it incubates while they sleep. Because the virus is released at night, that means by the time the city wakes up, zombies will abound. The first victims of the virus are the 12 ex-Navy SEALS that Tess Mercer has sent out in her latest attempts to track and locate the Kandorians. The SEAL team returns to the Luthor Mansion as zombies, killing every member of Tess’ security team they encounter and attacking Tess in the mansion’s main room. She tries to fend off three zombie SEALS, but one of them manages to sink his teeth into her shoulder and infect Tess with the virus. She apparently makes it through most of the night okay, but when she wakes up and heads to the Daily Planet to start her day, Tess begins to suffer some symptoms of the virus. She calls 911, is taken to the hospital by ambulance and falls asleep. While in her room, Clark and Lois come by the hospital after hearing about what happened at the Luthor Mansion. They enter Tess’ room but when Lois wakes the sleeping beauty, Tess goes full-on vampire and throws Lois across the room. Clark is able to subdue Tess long enough for the doctor to knock her out with anesthetic. The hospital is quickly quarantined because the doctors have no idea what has infected Tess and how. For answers to that, it’s up to Chloe and her new friend, Dr. Emil Hamilton. Clark nabs a vial of Tess’ blood from the hospital and the Chloe/Hamilton tandem tests the blood and maps out the pattern in which the virus is spreading around the city. The pathogen is like nothing anyone has ever seen and after detailed analysis, Dr. Hamilton determines that the only antigen he’s ever seen that could formulate a cure was in the blood of none other than the now-dead Davis Blume. Chloe tells him that she knows someone else who has that type of blood, but doesn’t tell him who. Perhaps Hamilton should have known, what with Clark using his super speed powers to whisk Hamilton from Chloe’s Watchtower apartment/lair to the hospital so the good doctor can dig for information on Tess’ condition with the doctor from the Center for Disease Assessment. Clark’s night has already been busy, as he and Lois were on the clock at the Planet and he took time out (a few seconds with his super speed) to first put out a five-alarm fire and then respond to a report of a high-speed motorcycle chase on the police scanner. At the scene, Clark pushes a huge flatbed truck piled high with metal piping out into the path of the biker, causing the speed demon to screech to a halt. That speed demon turns out to be Oliver Queen, still in his self-destructive phase and out for a late-night drive on his Ducati. Clark admits to Oliver that he was right, that Clark should have killed Davis when he had the chance instead of belieiving in him, but Oliver is not swayed. He repeatedly accuses Clark of having a God complex, then speeds off with the police in pursuit. Ollie is able to avoid a speeding ticket and other charges by seducing the über-hot female cop who is chasing him, but their rendezvous is cut short when she notices a camera lens on his belt buckle and assumed that Oliver was looking to make his own sex tape. He counters that he had no idea the spy lens was there, but the chick leaves and only then does Oliver realize where the implanted camera came from: Tess Mercer. Back at the Planet, things have gone to hell. Tess’ visit seems to have brought the virus to the staff and now a building full of zombies is going bat-sh*t crazy. Lois is under siege and figures out the trouble she’s in when she tries to revive Randall, a sleeping co-worker, and he too is a zombie. Clark returns just in time to help Lois beat back the zombies and escape, but she suffers a bite from one of the zombies and Clark realizes that if she falls asleep, she will be one of them when she wakes up. Moments later, Oliver arrives on the scene, shotgun in hand, and begins blasting zombies. Clark offers to go for help and sequesters Oliver and Lois in the elevator, figuring they’ll be safe there. He orders Oliver to keep Lois awake so that she won’t doze off and wake up as zombie Lois. CK then speeds off to Watchtower to respond to a text from Chloe. He readily admits to Hamilton that he is the one whose blood can be used to create an antidote, but wonders how his blood can be drawn because no needle can pierce his impenetrable skin. Chloe is one step ahead, having acquired liquid Krytponite from a contact of Hamilton’s. The needle is dipped in the liquid green goo, the blood is drawn, but Dr. Hamilton draws so much blood and has the needle in Clark’s arm for so long that Clark blacks out from the Kryptonite’s effects. Chloe wants to stay with him until he regains consciousness, but Hamilton says that they must mass-produce the antidote and get it into the city’s water supply ASAP. Clark is left alone to recover while Chloe and Hamilton take to the air in a jet, having put the antidote into the water supply but with one key element of the plan still to complete. For those Metropolis residents who haven’t taken a shower or drank tap water, Hamilton plans to use his scientific know-how to incite a rain storm and release the remaining antidote into the sky, to be rained down on the city. Chloe assists him in carrying out this risky tactic while Clark finally wakes up and is stunned to find a text from Oliver saying he’s “lost her.” The “her” he’s lost is Lois, whom Oliver allowed to fall asleep and who is now a zombie. Clark returns to the Planet and finds an angry zombie Lois ready to do battle. She throws him out a window and to the street below, where the fight continues. Clark manages to subdue Lois and hold her under control while Hamilton’s healing rain begins falling. Lois is indeed cured by the Clark-powered rain, as are any remaining citizens still with the virus in their bodies. Lois and Clark share a tender moment together and all is well - or so it seems. Ms. Lane even stops by the Kent Farm the next day to officially than CK, who fills her in on what a belligerent, badass zombie she was. Before Lois arrived, Clark was pulling an old picture of the lovely Lana Lang (the über, über-hot Kristin Kreuk) out of his wallet for good and putting it into a photo album, which was cool with me because any way to keep Kreuk as part of the show is a-ok with me. Once Lois says what she wants to say, she steps out the front door and has another of the trance-like flashbacks she’s been experiencing ever since her three-week sojourn to the future at the end of last season/beginning of this season. The visions are all basically the same: post-apocalyptic world, Clark and Lois naked and getting after it, Chloe dead or unconscious on the street, Oliver doing some manual labor with a shovel and the world in chaos. Not sure what any of this means, so we’ll have to wait and see on that. As the episode ends, the Kandorians make their first on-screen appearance of the episode. At the deserted Metropolis warehouse (where else, a deserted warehouse - shocker!), Major Zod meets with one of his men, Kurtz, who admits to having been the one that released the virus. Zod berates his subordinate, but Kurtz explains that the virus was part of a bigger plan. He had previously discovered the Kryptonian symbol that Clark has been burning into walls, buildings, etc. after saving people around Metropolis and recognizes the symbol as that of the House of Jor-El, Clark’s Kryptonian family. Kurtz deduces, wrongly, that it is Jor-El who has come to Earth along with the Kandorians and has somehow managed to figure out how to get his Kryptonian powers back on Earth. By deriving his powers from the sun, Jor-El (actually Kal-El) is able to run around saving people and the Kandorians believe that in so doing, he has turned his back on them and left them to flounder, powerless and alone. At first Zod ripped Kurtz for unleashing the virus because the humans would hunt them down and look to kill them once they knew the truth about who unleashed the virus, but Zod appears impressed once Kurtz produces a vial of the antidote and explains that the blood was taken from the being they are looking for. If they can hunt him down, Kurtz reasons, they can get their powers back and get revenge on Jor-El (again, actually Kal-El). Zod seems impressed….but he then has Kurtz kneel before him and proceeds to break out a sword and kill him. Insolence will not be tolerated in the Zod regime, I suppose. The last loose end to tie up comes when Clark finds Oliver in an alley after the city has been saved and proceeds to tear into his former friend for not doing what Clark asked him to do in keeping Lois awake. He challenges Oliver about how far he’s really fallen - scruffy, booze-swilling, pill-popping, cage-fighting - and Oliver ‘fesses up to the fact that Clark was right, that he has in fact been running from who he truly is and needs to face the truth. Clark challenges him to step up and do what he knows needs done, but it’s clear these two don’t have the same thing in mind. CK leaves thinking Oliver will return to his hero ways as Green Arrow, but instead Ollie douses the Arrow costume with some of his liquor, breaks out his lighter and burns the green-and-black leather get-up. He has no intention of being a hero, so Clark/The Blur will have to continue to be Metropolis’ savior. That was all for this episode, so until next week, when the Toy Man, one of last season’s more heinous villains, will make a comeback………….
- Maybe I’m just being cynical, but if Mexican authorities really do succeed in cleaning up the Baja California cities of Tijuana, Ensenada and Rosarito with their new task force thingy, won't that eliminate a lot of the fun that people go to their towns for? Sure, having American tourists heading to Mexico's Baja California state and end up dead or seriously injured may scare off a few wusses, but you don’t want those pansies hanging around anyhow. Had Mexican authorities had the foresight to seek my advice on this, I would have told them to forget their new task force, which will be made up of bilingual officers and will be designed primarily to serve Americans. What Americans heading to TJ want it more beer, more X, louder music in the clubs and cheaper tequila, not a task force. But alas, authorities are plowing ahead with their plan to create a force that patrols a 50-mile tourist corridor from Tijuana through Las Playas Rosarito to Ensenada in Baja California. No word on when this terrible idea will actually be put into play or how large the police force will be, but apparently the city of San Diego (I believe it’s pronounced San Dee-ah-go) is also on board with the idea. "We've always prided ourselves in our working relationship with our friends to the south," San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders said. "When you look at it, we're really one community." Hey Jer, know who else is one big community? The drunken, high and out-of-control Americans would routinely flow across the border to TJ precisely for it’s lawless, “anything goes” atmosphere. I suppose the troublemaker among you could argue that what the authorities are really targeting here is the drug-fueled violence that has engulfed most of Mexico, but I prefer to be difficult and disagreeable. I don’t think that this new task force will do a damn thing to help boost Mexico’s $13 billion travel industry or cause an increase in the number of Americans (18 million last year). Even Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos admitted that tourism in Baja, California in the past two years has remained steady, so what’s the problem? I say we keep Tijuana lawless, rowdy and reckless and don’t try to rob it of its personality, who’s with me? Everyone, that’s what I thought…………
- Would you like to own a piece of American criminal history? If so, the family that purchased one gangster legend Al Capone’s old hideouts, Wisconsin lodge located on 407 acres in Couderay, Wisconsin, has a sweet deal for you. Whether Capone carried out his bootlegging, gang murders and tax evasion schemes on the property is up for debate, but what you can't argue is that tough financial times have forced owner Guy Houston to put the property on the auction block. It went into foreclosure in April 2008 and now this picturesque two-story stone lodge, tucked away in the woods, can be yours for the low, low price of $2.6 million. Actually, that’s just the starting bid. Odds are that the winning bidder will have to go above and beyond that when the property is auctioned off on the steps of the Sawyer County Courthouse, three hours from Minneapolis. It’s been 60 years since Capone's death, but it’s fitting that one of the most notorious gangsters of all-time still can't escape one of the inevitable realities of life in 2009: foreclosure. Because the Houston family can no longer afford to keep the property, it will now be auctioned off to the highest bidder. That bidder will receive a property that includes a 37-acre lake and eight-car garage. In reality, the Capone family only owned the property in the 1920s and the Houston family has owned it since the 1950s. The bank that is auctioning off the property claims to have received interest from more than 100 buyers since it was initially advertised in September. Hopefully one of those buyers is an über-rich devotee of the mystique crafted and fostered by Capone and other gangsters of his era. That way, the person dumb enough to shill out several millions of dollars for this property can then turn it into their own personal tribute to the good old days, when gangsters ran the big cities, smuggled illegal whiskey in from Canada and dressed in sweet pinstriped suits. I say that whoever is pathetic enough to make this purchase should be forced to dress in 1920s gangster swag 24/7, speak only in terms and language used during that time period and forced to eschew all modern conveniences - color TV, computers, the Internet, reliable indoor plumbing, etc. - that came to be since Capone’s death. Suffice it to say I just don’t get the allure of this sort of purchase, especially given that the home was merely one of Capone’s hideouts and he often chilled at properties in Indiana, Michigan and Florida, too. Oh, and no one can definitively verify that Capone ever stayed in the Wisconsin lodge, so you could be wasting your money entirely. That being said, I look forward to seeing which schmuck ends up winning the auction and whether he or she will be willing to accept my terms and conditions for living in the house…………
- Who knows, maybe I’m just piling on here, but calling Wednesday night TV a vacuous wasteland of bad programming is just how I feel. The past few weeks, I have found myself scanning through the major networks and channels on Wednesday night, trying to find something - anything - worth watching between 8 and 10 p.m. Every single time, I have come up empty and elected to read a book instead. What exactly is so bad about Wednesday night television? Let’s start with NBC, where the network’s deep thinkers clearly could not bear to be without a hospital-themed drama now that ER has gone the way of the dinosaurs. In its place, they have inserted their new medical drama Mercy. Let’s just say I tried to plow through a segment of this show and found the humor nonexistent, the “drama” as riveting as wondering whether all of the Pringles in a can will be broken to pieces by the time I eat them and the overall quality of the show to be one star out of five at best. Chasing that winner for NBC is one of the network’s old standbys, Law & Order: SVU. Every incarnation of Law & Order is tired, clichéd and worn out by this point, so this is a no-go for me. Plus, watching a show fake sexual assaults isn't exactly what I call a pick me up. Still, NBC’s Wednesday night lineup is downright epic compared to the crap that CBS is running out there. The first hour of prime time is held down by two prime examples of why I absolutely, unequivocally hate half-hour sitcoms. They’re predictable, they are too short to develop any real storylines and the entire show is basically the writers trying to execute comedy that inevitably falls short. That being said, Gary Unmarried and The New Adventures of Old Christine are especially bad and the latter half of that crap-tastic combo is almost lame enough to make me hate Julia Louis-Dreyfuss in spite of her Seinfeld days (one of the few, few half-hour sitcoms that ever worked). On the heels of those two winners, the nation’s most-watched network calls in
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