Dan Pulliam brings us his review of “Smallville: The Complete Ninth Season” on Blu-Ray.
The Plot
The future of “Smallville” was probably never quite as uncertain as it was after its eighth year on the airwaves. After a strong start, the 2008-2009 season seemed to falter greatly in its final run of episodes, setting up a story arc that never really delivered on a year-long promise to give fans the battle royale they wanted to see between Clark and his most lethal enemy, Doomsday. I personally enjoyed all of Season 8. I recognized that “Smallville”, for all of its aspirations of grandeur, was still a modestly-budgeted production given what it attempted to accomplish every week, and that an epic-scale, city-wide fight to the death with a Kryptonian death monster was probably never something that was realistic to expect. I can certainly see why some did, though. It DID seem like it was going there for 21 episodes. But Season 8 always felt like something of a proving ground for all involved to me. Lex Luthor was out of the picture (a rather huge problem, dramatically speaking), and the show suffered a massive budget cut that year, which dictated that reliance be put more on character and mythology advancement than super-powers and larger-than-life situations. For me, it was a great retro step for the series as a whole, one that necessitated a look back to when things were more about the people who led incredible lives and who harbored these extraordinary destinies. It was where I think the show needed to go after being hit with the roadblocks it faced that year. So perhaps I wasn’t expecting what others were from Season 8 and it helped the pill go down a bit easier. What I was hoping, more than anything, was that the show could find its footing again and find a way to lead into a Season 9 that would pay off Season 8′s meandering promises and storyline setups – maybe with some interest. Four months after the audience-bemoaned “Doomsday” aired, “Smallville” fans thrilled to “Savior“, the very-appropriately-titled inaugural episode of Season 9. I’m pleased to say that keeping the faith over the summer was the way to go.
Season 9 did two things very right that “Smallville” had very nearly forgotten over its last several seasons. First, it managed to balance its character moments and action perfectly, something I don’t think the show had really done to this degree since maybe back in Season 6. Part of this was probably aided by a higher budget for 2009-2010, something requested by the creative team after being thrown into the “Friday night death slot”. It was generally accepted that Season 9, however well it was received critically, would be the series’ swan song. Shows aren’t put into that time slot without the assumption that they’re ending soon, and The CW, by all accounts, was making room for some new blood (quite literally, as it turned out). It’s a testimony, then, to the strength of one of the show’s absolute best and most well-realized seasons yet that Season 10 is now on the horizon, complete with a “Final Season” promotional push that any series with this kind of longevity deserves. Secondly, Season 9 did the one thing that I’ve been dying for “Smallville” do to consistently ever since I began watching it: it stayed on task. There are, by my account, only two throwaway episodes in Season 9 (“Disciple” and “Escape“). And that’s not to say I disliked those two entries, but I think it’s safe to say that you could have skipped them entirely and not missed anything truly vital to the season-long story arc. But pretty much every other episode is necessary and, even if the main story doesn’t push things along, there are things about the side stories that one needs to understand in order to grasp larger threads down the road. Some may point to the season’s third episode, “Rabid”, as another throwaway show, but many forget that that episode’s final scene planted the seeds of Zod knowing that another Kryptonian existed on Earth and led him to Tess Mercer’s character, both points that are absolutely essential for making the rest of the season work. Likewise, a show like “Roulette”, while not a fan-favorite, was needed both to explain Oliver’s return to heroism and to begin Chloe’s Season 9 character arc. Nothing was thrown in frivolously, and it was extremely refreshing to see that come together for a change.
Of course, it’s not just about tying everything together into a nice little bow. “Smallville” is, first and foremost, a show about Clark Kent’s journey to become Superman, and fans expect comic book goodness. Season 9 is a DC comic book fan’s dream, with characters both well-known and obscure showing up to pave the way for Clark to become the iconic Man of Steel. Fortunately, none of these increasingly-frequent cameos detract from Clark this time around. It remains Tom Welling’s show from start to finish here, and that’s a very good thing going into the final year of the series. All too often, “Smallville” has fallen into the trap of allowing the series to feel like “The Green Arrow Show” or allowing peripheral characters to drown out what is supposed to be the main thrust of the show. Season 9 avoids those perils as deftly as Clark super-speeding out of a burning building, and it does so with a level of fun and tongue-and-cheek humor that somehow keeps things afloat after all these years. Speaking of fun, Season 9 stretches its budgetary legs with tons of great action sequences. For a TV production, these scenes are really impressively staged and executed, and those watching “Smallville” for its bigger moments will be pleased at how many things go boom this year. Of course, bringing the Superman mythos to fruition also means that Clois shippers should have something to crow about, and there are plenty of Lois and Clark-centric episodes on hand to keep the romantics on the edge of their seats as well. Welling and Durance in particular seem to be having the time of their lives playing off of each other and, despite opinions elsewhere to the contrary, have an undeniable chemistry that permeates through every scene they share together. I’ve read another review of “The Complete Ninth Season” in which the reviewer questioned whether he still actually enjoyed this series anymore. A few lines later he admitted to looking forward to Season 10. My two cents on the matter is that any television show that can keep a viewer engaged on multiple levels for a full decade and still have them anticipating a fresh set of episodes is doing something very right.
The Video
After a bit of an unsteady visual start with its Season 6, 7, and 8 Blu-Ray releases, I’m thrilled to report that “Smallville” finally looks as good at home as I had always hoped. Season 9 has all of the crispness and clarity you’d expect to see in a new production, with very few of the minor quibbles from earlier seasons showing up to drag things down this time around. I suppose, as with Season 8′s obvious superiority to Season 7′s presentation, much could be attributed here to advances in compression methods over the last few years. But whatever the cause, Season 9 sports a more stable, solid image than any of its predecessors have on Blu-Ray. As I stated in my review of Season 8, one of the first things you’ll notice here is the stability of backgrounds and the heightened awareness of fine object detail over prior outings. One scene in “Pandora” features a computer screen that flashes by with Lois’s medical history in extremely fine print. Freeze-framing this shot, I was astounded to find that every last line was perfectly legible. This is a clear indication of this presentation’s advances over the over-air HD broadcast or iTunes HD versions, and a testimony to packaged media being far from the dying horse some might have you believe. Blacks, as with Season 8 before, are spot on, deep and inky as they should be. Colors are nicely saturated without bleeding, and the series’ increased production budget over Season 8 really shines here. Most importantly, though, the digital noise and compression artifacts that tended to show up every now and again on prior seasons of the show are gone this time, leaving us with one fine presentation of consistently colorful and undoubtedly demanding hi-def material. I can’t imagine this series looking any better than it does packing over four hours of programming on each of the set’s four discs, and for the first time, I think Warner has finally struck the perfect balance between convenience and performance. “Smallville” has always looked more cinematic than the average television show, but never more so than it does in Season 9. If you’re a fan of the series and, especially if you’ve been satisfied with prior seasons on Blu-Ray, you certainly won’t come away from this video presentation disappointed. Super!
The Audio
My complaints about the absence of a lossless Dolby TrueHD track aside, the Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track provided here is, as stated in my Season 8 review, really quite strong for what it is. Again, I think Warner is trying to strike a balance between convenience and performance. The inclusion of lossless audio (while I certainly would have preferred it), would undoubtedly have led to either more discs in the set or a compromised visual presentation, so I reluctantly digress on the issue. Taken on its own, the Dolby Digital (at a healthy 640kbps) seemed to me to pack more of a punch than that on previous releases. Again, this could be because the show had more of a budget than in Season 8, I’m not sure. But I’ve just watched that season recently, and it just didn’t impress me as much as the audio does on Season 9 (frankly, had I seen both sets together, I probably would have reduced the score of Season 8′s audio by half a notch, making it a 3.5 and this a 4.0). There’s a fairly consistent level of envelopment here, especially for a TV show. Perhaps the sound design simply improved this past season, but I definitely found the audio quite pleasing, with always-intelligible dialog and deep, full bass when it was called for. That said, I would certainly urge Warner Bros. to consider a TrueHD track next year for the series’ final season to give the fans at least one collection of lossless scores by the great Louis Febre. His work in Season 9 was exemplary, and a huge part of why the show works so well emotionally. Given the subject matter of the series, the audio component is nearly as vital to the show as the visuals, and I was pretty happy with these episodes aurally, lossy though they are. In any case, this is how the series was originally broadcast, so the purist in me really can’t scream too loudly.
The Extras
“Smallville: The Complete Ninth Season” comes in an outer slipcase, housing the same slim line case as Season 8 did, so if you own that set, you’ll know what to expect here. There’s a very nice booklet included (again, par for the course for this show), and a few great behind the scenes shots accompany the artwork. There are a few minor deleted scenes interspersed through the episodes, marked in the booklet, as before, on the episodes for which they are offered. I was a bit surprised not to find any deleted scenes for the season’s eighth episode, “Idol”, as, being the uber-fan that I am, I know of a few entire sequences that were filmed, but eventually cut from that particular episode. It’s the same kind of confusion I felt at not seeing the alternate footage of Lex discovering the fortress that was shot prior to the writer’s strike for Season 7′s Blu-Ray set. It just feels a bit like a missed opportunity. Commentaries are offered on “Kandor” (Callum Blue with writers Turi Meyer and Al Septien) and “Idol” (Erica Durance and Exec. Producers Brian Peterson and Kelly Souders). Both tracks are, as expected, going to be far more interesting and engaging for us hardcore devotees than the uninitiated, but really, who else is going to be listening to these? Personally, I don’t think anything can really top the self-deprecating girls-only commentary that graced the Season 4 DVD presentation of “Spell“, but one can’t realistically expect lightning to strikes twice, I suppose. Two featurettes are also included in the set. The first, “Kneel Before Zod – The Evolution of a Classic Evil Character”, is surprisingly engaging given its brief (around 15-minute) running time, with Terence Stamp, director Richard Donner, and Callum Blue all giving their takes on the various incarnations of Superman’s infamous foe. The next featurette, “Absolute Justice: From Script To Screen – Introducing Venerable Justice Society of America Heroes into Smallville’s Universe”, runs about twice as long as the Zod featurette, and is pretty much what one would garner from the title. Pretty much everything about the 85-minute super-episode is covered here, though, and I can’t imagine fans coming away feeling let down by the piece. With nary a negative comment to be found here, one might wonder why my “Extras” score is so low this time around. The score doesn’t reflect on the quality, but rather the quantity of what’s to be found here. Excluding the commentary tracks, one can breeze through the extras on this set in less and an hour and a half, and they’re not ones you’re likely to watch again and again. It just feels like a series that is about to become the longest-running science fiction program in North America deserves a bit more loving care than a couple of relatively brief featurettes and some minor cut scenes that really don’t add up to much in the end. I know there’s very little chance in our getting some mega-deluxe set of Smallville extras, but I’d personally love to see Warner Bros. go all out for Season 10. Give us lossless audio, spread the show out to as many discs as necessary to maintain the technical quality we’ve got here, and at least a full disc full of some really worthwhile extras. A series-spanning documentary would be most welcome, as would a new gag reel and episode promos. A bit more effort would go a long way toward tipping the scales and making a decent set into something really worthwhile for the fans who’ve stuck around and supported this great series for nearly decade.
Video: 4.5
Audio: 4.0
Extras: 2.5
Overall: 4.5
Also available at DVD Authority.
