Episode Review: Sacrifice

I hate this mainframe, Tess. It's consuming my life. Here, let me shoot it with you.

It may seem a peculiar sequence to which to devote an entire paragraph, but I’d like to give kudos to the person on the writing team who came up with the idea of beginning an episode of Smallville with a real-life, down-to-Earth situation for once.  Having someone as familiar to us all as Chloe Sullivan walking casually along a street that she knows so well, interacting with a peripheral character who’s only been seen in a few mere glimpses this year somehow works in all kinds of ways for me.  It plants these characters that we all care about into a world, not just a generic Metropolis backdrop.  This scene at the coffee shop does nothing to forward the plot of “Sacrifice”, nor does it have anything to do with what comes after it, but it nonetheless establishes time, space, and indeed an entire world far more than all the “necessary” scenes in the world.  One thing Smallville has done consistently well this season is remembering that these characters are ones with histories so fleshed-out and detailed now that they occasionally warrant a moment to themselves as people, not just plot catalysts.  They’re more than what drives us from key scene A to Z.  They have lives in this world that go on even when we’re not there to see every moment of them.  I couldn’t always have said that about this series, but then, we’ve rarely (if ever) had a season as masterful as the one we’ve had this year.

Our plot proper begins with Chloe entering Watchtower via a ridiculously high-tech series of elevator security protocols.  While this did make me momentarily wonder what fail safes were in place for someone instead simply opting to take the stairs, the action quickly takes off as Chloe finds that Tess has infiltrated the building.  And wouldn’t you know it, she’s already stolen Chloe’s gun.  Now, there is one thing I’d like to address here.  What is it about people storing weapons in this manner once they get a bit of power and a fancy room full of things worth protecting?  A gun stored in a custom-made case might look pretty awesome sitting there on the shelf, but it’s not exactly practical.  This is something we’ve seen time and again in this series.  Going back to Lex himself, I’ve never stopped wondering why these people in positions to potentially need a weapon at any moment don’t make them a bit more accessible.  But no matter.  Faking Tess out with the old “that gun’s not even loaded” bit, Chloe manages to get the upper hand, but only for a moment.  Before long, she and Tess are forced to depend on one another to deal with the bigger problem.  A security lock-down has been activated, putting Watchtower in control and trapping both of them inside.

After the opening cut, we’re treated to another Clark and Oliver scene.  I have to say, while once I found the interactions between these two a bit on the dry side, they’ve really grown on me throughout this season.  I think much of this is due to Oliver actually understanding and more fully respecting the higher moral plateau from which Clark speaks.  Ollie has real-world demons in his past now, and they’re of his own creation.  I like that he’s now aware of this without being the tragic figure of “Roulette” any longer.  I loved that when Clark mentioned that he knew what Oliver was capable of, there was no argument, no snappy comeback.  And, in fact, this leads right into one of my favorite things about “Sacrifice” and the series as a whole as it’s recently been executed.  These people are facing serious decisions that simply don’t have a clear-cut solution anymore.  In this scene, we hear Oliver speaking the words of the audience.  We know who Zod is and what a danger he poses to Earth.  Clark knows this, too, but he’s too idealistic, too ready to believe in the good of everyone, and frankly, a little too selfish in wanting fellow Kryptonians on Earth with whom he can relate to fully come around to what Ollie’s trying to tell him.  And there’s a little tragedy in that.  It almost harkens back to the situation with Davis from around this time last year, only this time, Oliver’s more willing to see past his own agenda and give Clark the benefit of the doubt.  That the writers have found a way to make Oliver’s standpoint more right than ever now while also making his character more willing to follow what Clark wants to do is a terrific, tension-building twist that serves two ends.  First, it shows us a Clark that’s closer to becoming Superman than ever before.  Despite what believing in people has wrought in the past, Clark is still willing to try to save Zod and his people if there’s any hope of doing so.  Secondly, though, this dynamic shows us just how much Clark needs Oliver and the rest of the Justice League to ground his lofty aspirations for the rest of the world.  Clark’s simply too optimistic for his own good, too quick to save first and judge later.  But guess what?  That sounds a lot like the world’s greatest superhero.

Our next scene finds Tess rather humorously emptying what looks to be an entire clip of ammunition harmlessly into a steel door.  Fortunately, Chloe has a great line about dying from a ricocheting bullet that makes that moment totally worthwhile.  In this scene, we find that Tess’s attack on Chloe wasn’t behind Watchtower’s automatic lock-down at all, but instead it’s something that Tess brought with her, most likely something planted on her by Checkmate.  Next, there’s a quick exposition scene in which we learn that Waller has enlisted the help of Stuart (referred to as “Agent Campbell” here) to get Watchtower into Checkmate’s hands by tracking Tess’s signal.  I’m not sure about this, but I’m fairly certain that I can’t remember a single season of Smallville that seemed as thought-out and meticulously paced as Season 9 has been.  I love how the smallest details and characters are actually fitting into the larger mythology and not being wasted solely on the episodes in which they first appear, never to be seen or heard from again.  It’s an extremely strong show that can weave a season-long story and have it all actually gel together in the end.  At first, I was worried that we’d get the Season 8 treatment again this year.  We’d have this phenomenal opening half of a season, and then when things got into Checkmate territory, they’d drop everything that came before.  Only that didn’t happen.  I love how Checkmate ties directly into the Kandorians, which in turn ties in directly with the first half of Season 9.  Sure, this type of storytelling might leave some viewers feeling a bit on the outside when they try catching a random episode, but it rewards the rabid fans who’ve been there from the beginning in spades, and it’s wonderful to see play out in this way.

Chloe and Tess locate the tracking device, which is apparently a mechanical contraption tied in with Tess’s bio-rhythms designed by Checkmate.  They determine that it’s impossible to deactivate while Tess is still alive, and we’re taken to the mansion where Oliver’s attempting to garner some intelligence on Zod’s whereabouts from Tess’s laptop.  Just a curiosity here, but how many people do you know who leave their laptops on their desks when they leave?  Isn’t one of the key benefits of owning a laptop the portability of the thing?  People in Smallville tend to treat laptops as desktops, and it’s a bit perplexing.  But this is, admittedly, a nitpick.  Zod shows up and interrupts Oliver’s investigation, and the two square off.  I really enjoyed how Oliver managed to get the upper hand on Zod.  Again, it reminded me a bit of last year’s Season Finale with Oliver shooting Clark with the Kryptonite arrow.  I’m sure glad Ollie’s back on Clark’s side this time around, because it’s extremely satisfying to see someone as conceited as Zod put in his place by The Green Arrow.

Next up is probably my favorite scene in “Sacrifice”, yet it’s also one of the most confusing and frustrating.  We get a wonderful scene here in which Tess and Chloe discuss their respective methods of “saving the world” and how the fine line between them has gotten progressively finer than either of them would like to have admitted.  I really enjoyed the way the writers tied these two people together here, and presumably gave Chloe a better understanding of the fact that Tess, misguided and misaligned though she’s always been, has always done the things she’s done from a real desire to serve some greater good.  Chloe’s position has been much the same, especially in these past few seasons.  As it happens, more often than not, Chloe’s decisions have led her to a higher path than Tess’s have, and they’ve had the net result of aligning her with people of higher moral standing, but they’ve really been no less dubious in their execution or motive.  I like that the people behind these episodes are at least acknowledging how blurred the line has gotten between good and bad in some instances.  And I like that Tess has become a better and more humanized character for it.  For all the clamoring for Lex to turn outright evil, the fact is that he was a more interesting character when he grappled with an internal conflict of whether or not to succumb to the evil that he had the potential for unleashing or to fight it within himself and become a better man.  That’s something that all of us can more readily relate to than a man who nonchalantly shoves his own father out of a window.  And as much as I miss Michael Rosenbaum’s portrayal of Lex, for my money, Tess is a far more relatable and nuanced character than Lex was in his last few years.

The reason I find this scene so frustrating is that it assumes that Chloe is seeing Tess in a new light (as, indeed, perhaps we are as an audience) for the first time.  It is certainly written that way.  And yet Chloe’s actions later in this episode really very nearly trash what this scene is trying to do, and that bothers me quite a bit.  But I’ll come back around to that.  Indeed, Tess even makes a few good points about Chloe’s relationship with Oliver and makes Chloe admit that she “lost her faith in people a long time ago”.  For Chloe, it’s become all about Watchtower, about saving everyone and knowing no one.  It’s turned into being all things to all people, yet tragically losing the ability to be anything substantive to any single person.  I think this informs the character of Chloe a great deal, and it even (partially) redeems her a bit for some of the detached, methodical actions she’s taken of late to serve some higher purpose that’s become just as dark and undefined as the one Tess pursues.  These characters are shown here not as light and dark mirrors of one another, but as two shades of gray, one only marginally brighter than the other.  That’s a very real way to present your characters.  And it’s this kind of thought-provoking duality with which Smallville consistently presents us in Season 9.  I do like the way this scene ends with Chloe actually having a moment of pause about destroying her work even though not doing so will mean certain death for both of them.  You can really see the indecision in her eyes for a moment, and it’s made clear that Chloe has begun to define herself only through what information she’s managed to store in a database.  A series of 1’s and 0’s has come close to stealing away Chloe’s identity.  I find it interesting that it’s Tess that has to snap her out of this no-brainer of a decision and remind her that two lives hang in the balance.

Our next scene is with Faora and Clark in the barn, and I have to say that I absolutely loved the way this was handled on every level.  Having such a long history with Zod, I just assumed that Faora’s character would do the cliché thing and betray Clark in the end, even after being faced with irrefutable evidence that Zod destroyed Krypton and must be stopped from doing the same thing on Earth.  It’s just the natural way these kinds of stories typically play out, especially with a child in play.  I thought surely this was where things were going, but again, the writers didn’t let me down with such an easy contrivance.  Instead, Faora’s shown here as a three-dimensional, sympathetic character who, while torn between her obvious love for Zod and the fate of her unborn child and Earth’s future, knows she really doesn’t have any choice to make in the matter.  That’s how a real person would react to news like this.  With sadness, but assuredness that the real choice was already made for them with stakes this high.  I’m so glad that Faora was given the opportunity to shine in this way.  It makes her far more interesting in the end.  I did find the shot of Clark using his super-hearing to listen to her baby’s heartbeat a bit funny.  It’s curious how Clark, in becoming more and more used to leaning on his powers, is losing a small part of his human intuitiveness in the process.  The Clark before super-hearing would have just known Faora was pregnant, but here he has to confirm it for himself before mentioning it or, you know, just asking.  That’s not to say that this makes Clark a more austere personality, just one who relies more on what he can do than what he can feel than he once did.  But then, that’s been an overriding theme of Clark’s all year.

Just as Chloe and Tess enter Metropolis General to get rid of the tracking device, Faora’s people are captured by Checkmate’s agents.  I really enjoyed how this scene tied in directly with the one earlier in which Faora told Clark that, while Zod had always been there to protect the Kandorians, all they’d ever gotten from humans was judgment and persecution.  You can really see how the Kandorians feel that they have no other choice but to align with Zod in this context, and it again makes the canvas of Smallville so much more intriguing that these people are presented as ones with a legitimate point of view that makes their decision the right one for them.  Zod may be evil, but he isn’t from their perspective, and it’s easy to see why their allegiance would shift from Clark to Zod under these circumstances.  The right road is rarely the easier to follow, and following Clark has, in their minds, done nothing to establish lives for them on Earth.  Checkmate, in attempting to circumvent a coming war with an alien race, is simultaneously providing all the motive the Kandorians need to deem a war necessary in the first place.  And sure, Clark might save them all from being captured, but the point has tragically already been made.

Back at MetGen, Chloe determines that the only way to get rid of the tracking device in Tess is to stop her heart.  Agent Campbell loses her signal and is thwarted for the time being.  Now, this is the moment that really bothered me.  At one point, after she realizes that Checkmate’s been thrown off of the trail and she’s in the clear, Chloe very nearly just walks away from the situation.  Seriously?  Is this how far they’ve taken the Chloe that I used to root for?  I know that part of the angle of “Sacrifice” is to compare and contrast the Chloe and Tess characters and establish that there’s perhaps not as much of a difference between them as there could be, but Chloe’s supposed to be one of the good guys.  She is still supposed to be on the right side of that line, for better or worse.  Going after a monster like Doomsday or a super-charged, power-hungry Zod for the sake of the entire human race is one thing.  Leaving a flesh and blood woman like Tess in a hospital room to die alone just to cover your own skin is quite another.  Here’s a character that Chloe was very nearly beginning to relate to and start to understand on a level more complex than straight-up good or evil a mere few scenes ago, and now she’s contemplating just leaving her to her death?  It makes me question why that earlier scene was even written at all, because it makes this even more heartless than it already is.  Is this the same Chloe that we’ve come to know over the years?  Is it the same Chloe that shocked us by taking a life in Clark’s name (when something was actually really at stake), and whose actions there only made sense to us once it was revealed that Brainiac was pulling her strings?  Surely I’m not the only one who’s thinking about that scene now in light of this one, wondering just how much of Chloe was truly being controlled at all.  It’s frightening what is being done with Chloe this year, and I can only hope that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for her character, because I can’t even imagine what Clark (or even the newly-redeemed Oliver) would have to say about this.  Fortunately, Chloe does do the right thing in the end and save Tess’s life, but as much as I appreciate how dark Smallville has gotten in Season 9, I prefer a little less anti in my heroes.

When we meet up with Faora again, she’s being questioned by Waller about Zod.  Faora vows to help Checkmate stop him if there is no other option.  Zod then shows up and hurls Waller into her own windshield.  Clark’s not far behind, though, and the two face off over Zod’s plans to attack Checkmate directly.  As Clark goes to check on Waller’s condition, Zod speeds away with Faora in tow.  It was here that I thought Faora’s determination would waver.  I thought that Zod would somehow convince her that his intentions were still good, remind her of their shared history together, and win back her allegiance.  I even contemplated the possibility that their child, though born of a different reality and circumstances, might somehow be Davis / Doomsday in another form.  The part human, part Kryptonian nature of the child would have worked brilliantly to that end, in fact.  But in the end, Faora doesn’t back down, and Zod takes both her life and the life of his child.  This really wasn’t something I saw coming, and it was pretty expertly done.  I’m just sorry that once Faora was actually given something worthwhile and interesting to do, that her character was killed off so quickly.

Now, the one thing I didn’t understand about the end of “Sacrifice” was the scene at Checkmate when Waller and Stuart meet up.  They arrive at headquarters to find that the place has already been pretty much decimated by Zod, their agents dead and their equipment lying in ruins.  I’m not sure if it was intended to be ambiguous, but I wasn’t completely convinced that Waller and Stuart died here.  I think they did, but it’s definitely a plot point that they could revisit if they wanted to.  I did like the shot of the heat vision from inside the eyeball, though.  It was very cool stuff, and seemed to me just like a page they’d draw in a comic book.  The thing I don’t understand about this scene is that Zod infiltrated Checkmate and slaughtered everyone there and Clark’s…at MetGen looking to see if Oliver’s okay?  This makes no sense.  Clark knew Zod was after Checkmate, and the last time he was in his presence, it was to save Waller’s life.  The first place that Clark should know to look for Zod would be at Checkmate headquarters.  Striking a blow to Checkmate and starting the war has been Zod’s goal for this entire episode.  And yet it never dawns on Clark that Zod would go there?  That bothered me a little.

After seeing footage of the burning Castle on the hospital television, Chloe tells Clark that Zod is assembling the Kandorians at The Fortress.  One thing I must say that I’m beginning to really love about Callum’s portrayal of Zod is that he truly doesn’t come across as though he believes he’s lying.  He’s being painted as such a thorough sociopath that he lies to himself and then convinces himself that the lies are the truth to justify his own actions, both to his followers and to himself.  This makes him far more dangerous in my view, because he is not only acting toward evil ends, but he genuinely believes on some level at the same time that his cause is just.  And that gives him far more of an arc and a determination than someone acting strictly out of arrogance or for a blind grab at ever-greater power.  Combine Zod’s charismatic demeanor with his belief, however sadistic and incorrect, that he is truly right in what he’s doing, and it’s not hard to understand why those banners at Luthor Mansion in “Pandora” were so closely modeled after Nazi imagery.  I thought that in borderline poor taste when I first watched that episode, yet seeing the monster of a tyrant they’re developing Zod into, I can see now what they were trying to accomplish with that kind of symbolism.  And it works.

Also noteworthy to me was how Zod’s now being referred to as a General by his followers.  I suppose fearful attrition is quite the effective way to ascend the ranks.  As the Kandorians flew off at the end, fueled by the anger of what had just happened to them with Waller, the dual tragedy of losing Faora and her unborn child, and the assurance that Clark had been lying to them and keeping them down all along, I had all I needed to buy into everyone’s motivations going into “Hostage” and “Salvation”.  I can’t remember when Smallville has taken the time in this way to develop each and every aspect of an imminent battle in such a way that every side is actually represented in a way that makes their respective motives understandable, but it’s fantastic storytelling.  Season 9 has been a monumental achievement, both creatively and critically.  And I absolutely could not be more excited to see how things end up in two weeks.  Somehow, I think the creative team has learned from the mistakes they made in “Doomsday” and will finally give us the finale we’ve all been waiting for.