- The two-hour mini-movie “Justice League” finally hit Smallville tonight and it was, without a doubt, worth the wait. The episode kicked off with Chloe Sullivan trying to contact Clark and set up a meeting of his group of superheroes with himself, Oliver Queen and Co. All of a sudden, the lights go out and she finds herself on the street, having a mysterious meeting with an eclectic, quirky man named Sylvester Pemberton. Before the meeting could really get going, the temperature suddenly dropped a huge amount and snow and ice began flying. Pemberton grabbed Chloe and in one fluid motion, grabbed her arm and swung her up over his head, landing her safely inside a large dumpster beside them and telling her to stay down. From her spot inside the dumpster, Chloe can’t see much, but she hears what appears to be a battle raging outside and once the bizarre cold snap lifts, she extricates herself from the dumpster and finds Pemberton dying on the ground with what appear to be bullet holes in his body, ringed by ice. Pemberton tells her that he’s a friend but warns that “they are after us.” Pemberton is rushed to the hospital and dies there. Clark shows up after a call from Chloe and after an argument about Clark being AWOL of late, they try to figure out who Pemberton was. Clark also spots a girl talking to the police officers who are taking Pemberton’s possessions into evidence and when he tries to talk to her, she spots his reporter’s badge and tells him to get lost. Meanwhile, Chloe uses one of her high-tech gadgets to scan Pemberton’s phone in the hands of a police officer while she pretends to chat with the officer. By cloning the phone, she finds out that Pemberton’s last call was to a man named Wesley Dodds. We see Dodds in his apartment, where he is waking up from a vivid dream about Pemberton’s murder. No sooner than he wakes up, Dodds is confronted by the Icicle, the same freak who killed Pemberton. Dodds too is killed and the Icicle racks up his second murder of the day. At Watchtower, Chloe is hard at work when Oliver finally responds to her superhero call. He tries to explain some, um, questionable emails from himself to Black Canary, but Chloe isn’t worried about his love life. She has found out the identity of the girl from the hospital: Courtney Whitmore, a high school student with a spotty attendance record. She also dispenses Ollie to the police station to steal the powerful golden staff that Pemberton had when he was killed. At Dodds’ apartment, Clark finds the aftermath of the murder and Dodds’ blood splattered on the wall, spelling out “JSA.” At the hospital, Dr. Emil links Dodds’ and Pemberton’s murders by the ice around the wounds on each body. He uncovers DNA from the wounds, meaning the ice has come from within someone’s actual person. The Icicle is shown laying out head shots of those he’s killed, placing a big X over each one. He then glares at a picture of his next target: Courtney. He is also sitting inside some sort of cell with a logo on the floor of a black chess piece, a knight, over a checkerboard background. At the Daily Planet, Clark and Chloe dig for information on the JSA in the archives and find old film of a series of prominent citizens being rounded up by police and arrested for crimes that seem totally incongruous with who they were. In the file, there are also names and Clark goes to the home of one of those named in the file, Carter Hall, to search for answers. He speaks to Hall about the murders, but finds Hall unwilling to offer much assistance. In the corner, a man who appears to be mentally ill sits, rocking back and forth, holding a bowling ball bag and speaking nonsense. When Clark inquires about the man, named Nelson, Hall shuts him down. Using his X-ray vision, Clark looks inside the bag and sees some some of iron warrior’s helmet. Hall claims to have not spoken to Dodds or Pemberton in years and all but throws Clark out to get rid of him. Oliver’s mission to retrieve the golden staff is equally fruitless, as it’s not at the police station. He calls Chloe to fill her in, but just then he spots Courtney rushing down the street with it. He confronts her and attempts to explain what he’s doing, but the bowling ball man appears from nowhere, grabs Courtney and disappears in a flash of light. Chloe departs from Watchtower to help Oliver and together they find Pemberton’s car, a classic whip with a license plate reading “STAR.” The car has decals declaring it to be the Star Rocket Racer and it appears that Pemberton may have actually been living out of it. Red, white and blue are all over the car, but the most puzzling discovery is a notebook in the glove compartment. Inside are pictures and notes about Clark, Chloe, Oliver and the rest of their team. Pemberton knew about them, it appears, which means that Courtney likely does as well. Back at Hall’s home, Courtney tries to talk him into fighting back against Icicle, but Hall won’t bite. She asks what Shayera, a.k.a. Hawkgirl to Hall’s Hawkman, would have done. Chloe and Clark are also hard at work, with Chloe having unearthed the file of a man named Johr Makent, whom she believes to be the Icicle. At Hall’s home, Nelson, Courtney and Hall argue about what to do next. Nelson, suddenly well-spoken, talks about someone named Dr. Fate and says he wishes he could remember what his life was like before Dr. Fate. With that, Nelson opens his bag, pulls out the helmet and puts it on. He undergoes a massive transformation into a helmeted, cape-wearing, blue-and-gold superhero – Dr. Fate. Over at Metropolis General, Clark and Chloe follow the lead on Mahkent and find him in a vegetative state in a private room. They are interrupted by Dr. Fate, who uses his superpower to see Clark’s fate and informs CK how important that fate is to the world. He then cryptically informs Chloe that, “You walk the same path I do.” With that, Fate and Clark disappear into another flash of light and Chloe is left solo. She calls Oliver to tell him about Clark’s disappearance, but he is off on his own mission, tailing Courtney. She’s looking hot, dressed in red, white and blue spandex decorated with stars. She walks down and alley and waits and Oliver senses that she is somehow using herself as bait. He tries to warn her away, but she tersely tells him to leave. Instead, a cold chill sweeps down the alley and Icicle shows up to do battle with Courtney, a.k.a. Star Girl. Back and forth they go, Icicle wielding a huge, sharp (what else) icicle and Star Girl wielding the golden staff. The battle is a standoff, but Icicle manages to release a hail of sharp chunks of ice that are about to turn Star Girl into a dead girl. Oliver saves her life by shooting all of the ice chunks down with some amazing archery, but and angry Courtney chides him because she was supposed to have the first shot to battle Pemberton’s killer because “he” said so. Who is he? That’s answered when Hall, clad as Hawkman, swoops down from the sky, snatches Oliver and flies off. He tosses Ollie through the windows at Watchtower, then barks at Oliver and Chloe to “stay out of our business.” Knowing they need Clark’s help, Oliver calls in Detective John Jones, a.k.a. the Martian Manhunter, to assist. As it turns out, Clark is at the massive mansion Hall calls home and finds himself in a large room full of objects covered in drop cloths. Pulling them off one by one, he finds all sorts of artifacts and pictures that reveal a legendary group of masked heroes – the Justice Society of America. Dr. Fate, Starl Girl and Hawkman walk in and Fate urges the others to believe, as he does, that Clark is special and important. We also learn that Pemberton, a.k.a. the Star Spangled Kid, was trying to form a new JSA, hence his notebook on Clark and friends. Just then, Oliver barges in, ready for a fight. On his heels is Martian Manhunter, who tries to settle everyone down. The original JSA members say they simply want justice for their murdered friends and then will step back into the shadows. They reluctantly agree to allow Clark and his group to help them. Over at the Daily Planet, Lois finally joins the episode. She heads to her desk at the Planet and finds a mysterious package with a note inside saying, “The truth will set you free.” It accompanies files and photos of the same JSA members Clark and Chloe have linked up with. Her find is spoiled by the arrival of nemesis/DP owner Tess Mercer. The two ladies have a very unfriendly conversation before Tess heads to her office and finds Checkmate’s calling card, a chess piece – a white queen in this case – on her desk. Back at JSA headquarters, Carter Hall dispenses a history lesson about the Society. He concludes by saying that there are still members of the JSA out there. Chloe crashes the party next, overlooking a rude greeting from Hall to share information on where Icicle might show up next. She suggests the nearest liquid nitrogen depot, where Icicle could refuel. She then returns to Watchtower with Courtney in tow and the two have an interesting chat. Courtney ruminates on how she got into the JSA (Pemberton’s sidekick was her stepfather) and remarks on how Watchtower is so cold and unwelcoming, not like the homey feel of the JSA lair. She muses that perhaps Clark’s group would be more effective if they had a warmer hideout where they could hang out and spend time together. The talk is interrupted by an incoming call from Oliver, who is staking out the roof of the hospital with Hawkman after Chloe set up a trap for Icicle by putting out word that his father had taken a turn for the worse. Ollie and Hawkman continue to get on one another’s nerves, while back at JSA HQ, Dr. Fate speaks with Clark about his future. He adds that Clark will provide hope for the entire world, lead this generation as Hawkman led the previous one and triumph over his ultimate enemy, Lex Luthor – yes, the one who is supposed to be dead. Clark thinks the same thing, but Fate doesn’t address the topic further. All of a sudden, Lois knocks on the door of the mansion and Clark wonders why she is there. Curiously, Fate says she is “the key” to it all. Clark isn’t about to allow Lois to find out he’s there and speeds off. Fate welcomes her in, then shares her own fate with her. She will be “the one for him,” and he “will be the one for her.” When Lois asks who the he is, Fate tells her “he” is the savior for the world, an all-powerful, sentient being. Then, just as suddenly as her visit came, Lois’ time with Fate ended and she found herself standing at the door of the mansion, on the front steps – visit over. At Checkmate, Icicle is visited by Agent Waller, a woman who is overseeing his mission and warns him that he is taking things too personally. Icicle reveals that he’s been killing for Waller for some time now and has no plans to stop any time soon. Over at the Planet, Tess rifles through the files Lois received in the mail but is interrupted by Clark, who chides her about respecting privacy. Clark goes off to find Lois, who hints at the top secret story she’s researching and shares some details. She fills in some blanks for Clark and he suddenly realizes that as bad guys captured and jailed by the JSA are being released under the orders of high-ranking government officials, someone must be collecting these villains for some reason. We then jump to the nitrogen depot, where Martian Manhunter and Dr. Fate are waiting on Icicle. The chilly villain does show up, but he steals the nitro he needs before ambushing the two heroes and impaling Fate from behind with a ginormous icicle. Right before impact, Fate saves Manhunter by opening up some type of portal and zapping him away. Icicle then stabs him and steals Fate’s helmet, which is the key to being able to see the future. Later on, Icicle visits his father’s hospital room, pulls the plug on dear old dad and puts on Fate’s helmet in his quest to defeat the JSA. Manhunter is over at Metropolis General under Dr. Emil’s care and in some sort of coma, called a “period of incubation” by Emil. Clark and Courtney keep watch and he tries to encourage her to keep fighting the good fight. The good fight is not what Agent Waller has in mind. She visits Lois in the DP archives and reveals herself as Lois’ source, but is unwilling to say why she’s doing what she’s doing. Instead, she presents Lois with a cell phone and promises to be in touch. At the JSA HQ, Hawkman and Oliver ready for battle against Icicle and Hawkman reveals that he is some sort of immortal being, having been cursed, along with his wife Shayera/Hawkgirl, to fall in love and watch one another die in lifetime after lifetime. Then, in the funniest moment of the episode, Oliver admits to never having known such a love and Hawkman snapping that it’s because Oliver doesn’t want people to know how much they mean to him and so, “You act like a jackass.” The new BFF’s head to Watchtower, where Clark, Chloe and Courtney are waiting on them. The meeting is interrupted by Icicle, clad in Dr. Fate’s helmet. All four superheroes try to take him out, but Icicle fights them off. That’s the cue for Martian Manhunter to enter the fray. He’s snapped out of his coma and courtesy of Dr. Fate’s final act, he now has his Martian powers back. Using those powers – which include becoming invisible and invincible – he helps the four other superheroes battle Icicle. Each uses their power to bring the villain to his knees and Hawkman strikes the final blow with his ball and chain, knocking the helmet from Icicle’s head. Back at the JSA lair, Hawkman admits that Clark’s team is better than he thought and also reveals that he is resurrecting the JSA to help train the next generation. At Watchtower, Manhunter cautions Chloe against her endless quest to gather and gain information, lest she end up on the verge of insanity, as Dr. Fate did. “There is a limit to how much knowledge someone can have,” he warns her. Oliver shows up and amazingly, it’s not because there is a problem with deal with. He just wants to take his friends to dinner – perhaps the start of the family feel Courtney suggest to Chloe? We then see Lois at the Planet, where she revels in her front page JSA story and shares with Clark Dr. Fate’s cryptic prediction of her future. The episode wraps in Icicle’s Checkmate cell, where Waller rejects his plea to continue hunting the JSA. She informs him that he has already done just what she needed, namely pulling the JSA out of hiding and back into the spotlight. With that, she welcomes Icicle to “the Suicide Squad” and puts a bullet in his forehead. She exits the cell and is met by…..freaking Tess Mercer, whom she addresses as Agent Mercer! Tess is apparently a Checkmate agent, which throws a whole lot of wrenches and twists into things. Overall, an amazing episode and unquestionably the best of this season, good stuff…………
- Beware world, Iran has allegedly had launched a rocket carrying a rodent, two turtles and some worms into orbit. You know a nation is serious about its space program and a legit threat in outer space when it can shoot a rat, a couple of turtles it ripped from someone’s aquarium and a few worms it dug up from the ground into space. Not only did Iran accomplish this “feat,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency publicized it at a ceremony to commemorate this month's anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew Iran's monarchy. The launch was hailed as a successful advance in the country’s space program, which has become a growing target for international scrutiny. The IRNA labeled the rocket the "home-built" Kavoshgar-3, or Explorer-3 rocket and Iranian Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi saluted the launch as a success and described Iran's space program as "peaceful. Iran will not tolerate any un-peaceful use [of space] by any country," he said. That runs very much contrary to sentiments expressed last year by the U.S. State Department, which expressed "grave concern" over Iran's announcement it was planning a series of satellite launches. "Developing a space launch vehicle that could... put a satellite into orbit could possibly lead to development of a ballistic missile system," State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said. "So that's a grave concern to us.” Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell chimed in as well, saying, "Although this appears to be [a] satellite, there are dual-use capabilities that could be applied to missiles, and that's a concern to us and everybody in region.” The launch comes as the United States and a collection of other nations are seeking to expand sanctions against Iran because of its test-firing of long-range missiles and a program of uranium enrichment. For its part, Iranian space officials say they are going to be using live video transmission and telemetry allowed the rat or mouse -- named Helmz-1 -- turtles and worms to be monitored during their space voyage. Call me cynical, but I have no doubts that all of these space-venturing critters could be part of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Just because they are small animals doesn’t mean they’re not evil and armed with bad intentions, Iran. We’ve got our eyes on you and this little stunt has done nothing to allay our concerns……………
- Being über-smart often means nothing more than you are able to waste money in much more extravagant and kooky ways than the average person. Thanks to some intrepid researchers at Harvard University for helping to illustrate this point by taking $9 million in federal stimulus money and using it to research and assemble robotic bees without creating any jobs, as stimulus money is supposedly intended to do. A different research group at Harvard pissed away $225,000 in stimulus money by studying Narwhal whale tusk function and a third group used its $176,000 grant to research pre-natal conditions in Gambian women. Again, none of these projects generated a single new job, which was kind of the idea behind the stimulus money. Ditto for a $94,000 grant at UMass-Boston that is currently funding a study of pollen. Wait, wait…..that grant did create one hole job, that being for a graduate student to count pollen grains and assess environmental changes in Northern Iceland during the Viking colonization – important stuff. State Sen. Richard Tisei looks at the way some of the more than $100 million in stimulus dollars were given to colleges and universities for scientific research were used in his state and he is oddly unhappy. “If that's going to put people back to work, I need to know how,” Tisei said. “That's a perfect example of wasted money. People are catching on to what this was all about.” In response to the senator’s comments, a Harvard University spokesman stated that the projects help "maintain our country's role at the forefront of scientific research and innovation" and that the projects "will lead to jobs." How very vague and elitist of you, Harvard spokesman. I don’t know if you know this or not, but just being an Ivy League institution doesn’t mean you are above the rest of us and can spend federal stimulus money any way you damn well please. So take your robotic bees, your ancient pollen counts and all your other wasteful spending and take it all away because we’ve had enough of it…………
- After Apple failed to impress anyone with its lackluster launch of the iPad last week, Google is proudly touting its own tablet computer ideas based on its Chrome operating system. According to Google, the Chrome OS-based tablet actually went live two days before the iPad launch, but no one seemed to notice. Google’s aspirations include a wide of devices for Chrome OS. "While its primary focus is Netbooks, Chrome OS could eventually scale to a wide variety of devices. Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power," according to the Chromium form factors site. Chromium, by the way, is the official name given to the open-source developer project associated with the Chrome product. The question for Google is whether Chrome OS will actually work better on tablets than on Netbooks, the device on which Google plans to launch Chrome OS. Chrome OS is browser-intensive, so it isn’t an ideal fit on Netbooks, which are typically used as general-purpose PCs. Tablets tend to be more unidirectional in their focus - reading books, surfing the Net and tasks that only require light typing – so Chrome could be a better fit in that sense. Right now, Google’s tablet ideas are just that – ideas. They are still in the development stage, so there is no real threat to other tablet computer makers at this point. These early tablet sketches show a virtual keyboard taking up the bottom half of the screen or detached and floating as a separate window, a slideshow mode, an application launcher, sidebar-mounted browser tabs, and a pop-up contextual menu. Google plans to debut Chrome OS in Netbooks later this year and work for that launch could also aid in the area of tablets. "Google Chrome OS is still in development, and we are constantly experimenting with various user interfaces to determine what designs would produce the best user experience. As we've said all along, the UI is still under development and will continue to evolve as we determine which designs work best for our users," the company said in a statement. Well, at least it won't be less impressive and worse of an idea than the iPad, so Google has that working for it…………
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