Episode Review: Abandoned

Now that she'd sealed young Lex's fate and convinced the JLA that she was harmless, Tess was finally free to pursue her dream of becoming the world's first serial-killing ballerina.

As of this writing, I’ve seen “Abandoned” twice.  I’m also watching it again as I go through this review, so by the time all of you see this,  I’ll have checked it out three times.  So did I love this show enough to watch it three times since last Friday?  Well, no, not exactly.  Honestly, I’d have to say that this episode puzzles me more than it entertains.  That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the show, because I did.  I just can’t quite figure out why it feels so contrived and disjointed and still somehow manages to more or less work as an overall experience.  Most episodes that feel like “Abandoned” felt to me both times I’ve seen it don’t really do it for me in the end.  And yet, I didn’t feel a disconnect with this one like I ordinarily might have.  On the other hand, it did leave me with a bevy of questions that I feel weren’t really necessary to leave hanging.  The first thing I don’t get is the very first scene with Tess.  She gets this flashback to a childhood she doesn’t remember, but what is it that suddenly prompts this memory to the surface?  There’s an insinuation later on that it’s the music box that makes her remember these things, but that just felt a bit too easy to me.  It’s as if the person who left the box was so sure that Tess would have a dream about being at the orphanage on that particular night that they based all of their plans for her around that assumption.  In any case, Tess’s memories are pretty disturbing, and we need an excuse for a revelatory episode about Tess’s shrouded history, so I guess this gives our show the motivation to delve into it.

"A Clockwork Orange", "I Spit On Your Grave", and "The English Patient"?! Lois suddenly wished she'd taken the time to look over Clark's collection of videos BEFORE she'd agreed to move in.

I also had the same impression of the following scene at the Kent Farm.  When we catch up with Lois after the events of “Ambush”, she’s standing over a large box that The General has sent her from her mother.  On one level, I really like the implication of what The General sending this to Lois meant toward his acceptance of Clark and their relationship.  It felt to me like he’s finally deemed her grown up and independent enough to have this back, which was a really nice off-screen touch.  The thing that is strange here, though, is that we’ve never heard anything about this box before, and yet it’s evidently this huge motivating factor in Lois’s life.  We learn that Lois’s mom was sick for five weeks at the hospital and has left her some VHS tapes to watch.  As Lois remembers it, she refused to go visit her and has been harboring guilt about it ever since.  I know the writers have done a pretty thorough job of establishing Lois as someone who doesn’t let a lot of people in to the most personal places, and maybe it’s just in her nature to repress something like this, but I guess it just all seemed to come out of nowhere for my taste.  You’d think we’d have gotten at least some allusion to this in the last six years, even as an aside.  I think the impact of this scene is also hurt by following the intro with Tess the way it does.  It feels like we’re being hit over the head with the episode’s theme in the first five minutes.  Lois asks Clark if he feels an emptiness because of what’s happened with him and Jor-El, and the mention of this obviously disturbs Clark, even though he doesn’t want to let on.  His whole “if I’m up, I really should be on patrol” excuse to leave the house gracefully was pretty transparent, though I did find it sweet that he stopped and told Lois that he could stay if she needed him to.

"Hey, Clark, do you know a four-letter word for diabolical"? "Tess, honestly, we've been over this. You need to stay on task or we're going to have to stop casual Fridays at Watchtower".

Next up is a scene I really loved.  Clark meets up with Tess at Watchtower, and the two have a great little scene together that feels more fluid and natural than I think we’ve seen yet.  Typically, Clark and Tess’s relationship has felt more like a strained business arrangement than a real, trusting friendship.  It might have just been the whole “after hours” nature of this particular meeting, but I hope going forward that we’ll see more of Tess out of the constrictive business outfits and wearing things that feel more like she’s at home when she’s working with Clark.  This may seem like a minor detail, but for me, it made a world of difference, and things between them felt emotionally relaxed for perhaps the first time.  Tess tells Clark about her dream and about waking up to find the music box lying in the floor at the mansion.  Clark pulls off the “Happy Birthday, Tess” note on the bottom to reveal a second sticker.  A quick scan on Watchtower’s table (and seriously, who doesn’t want one of those things?) reveals the words “St. Louise’s Orphanage”.  Now, sure, this all seems a little bit too easy and convenient, but then I’m sure that was the intent of Granny Goodness, whom Clark and Tess learn here runs the orphanage.  I must say, for someone who’s supposed to be, in Clark’s words, the Mother Teresa for needy children, the newspaper certainly snapped a particularly eerie shot of her for their article.  This leads us to our first brief scene with Granny Goodness and with another character who will eventually become one of my biggest issues with “Abandoned”, a little girl who’s evidently being forced to surrender her memories.  This scene was definitely sufficiently disturbing to really set up the character of Granny Goodness well as someone formidable and evil (Deadshot could take a pointer or two).

Okay, Lois had to admit she was bored. But "Cheaters", "Judge Judy", and "Maury"? Was this all people did for entertainment during the day?

I’m not sure when it happened, but as odd as it is for me to admit, somewhere back in Season 9 (I’m pretty sure that’s when it was anyway), Lois nudged past Clark as my favorite character on this series.  Don’t misunderstand, I’m still watching “Smallville” because I love Superman, but I just find so much to love in Erica’s performance as Lois Lane every week that it’s become just as significant a factor in my tuning in than seeing Clark put on those famous tights and finally get the underwear outside of the pants.  At this point, I suppose I should break down and confess to the masses that I have never watched “Lois and Clark”, and so Teri Hatcher’s appearance on Smallville, while I appreciated its historical importance (just as I did Dean Cain’s in Season 7), probably didn’t hold the same excitement for me as it did with a lot of fans out there.  Having now seen this scene, though, I think I get what all the fuss was about.  Lois plays the first tape left for her by her mother and learns that it was her wish that Lois and Lucy weren’t allowed to come see her when she was ill.  It’s truly amazing how much Hatcher and Durance get out of this sequence within a couple of minutes.  We’ve just been introduced to Lois’s mother, and yet the emotional resonance here is extremely heartfelt and real.  I’ve re-watched this scene several times now, and it never ceases to amaze me how much Erica manages to say with Lois here without any dialogue at all.  There are only a few moments in television (or even film) than I can remember standing out for me for this same reason (one that immediately comes to mind is Kate Hudson’s single tear in “Almost Famous”), and I think it’s things like this that set great actors apart from good ones.  This scene was touching and affecting in all the right ways, and it definitely elevated everything else around it a notch or two.

Last known photo.

Meanwhile, Clark and Tess arrive at St. Louise’s Orphanage, and are greeted warmly by Granny Goodness.  When Clark hears a girl’s cries, however, he makes an excuse to slip away and speed off to her rescue.  He eventually finds the little girl we were introduced to earlier.  Apparently, her parents were recently killed in a car accident, and Granny Goodness is trying to purge all of her memories of them.  Clark tells her he’s getting her out of the orphanage and helps her out of her restraints.  He then hears the sound of metal clanking, and the frightened girl tells Clark that that’s what Granny turns the girls there into.  And so Clark stuffs the girl behind the nearest door, tells her to wait there while he investigates, and winds up getting himself in a whole heap of trouble, never getting around to actually going back for her.  But moving on, Clark follows the sounds down a hallway…wait, what?  Yeah, you heard me right.  The world’s greatest superhero, upon finding a terrified and obviously brutalized little girl in a hostile environment, immediately leaves her in a random room to go investigate a strange noise.  Whatever happened to getting people to safety first – or to common sense in general?  I’m sorry, show, but this was just really sloppy writing.  The only possible reason to even establish this little girl at all (aside from giving Clark an excuse to go snooping around, which could have been explained in about a hundred other ways) would be to have Clark get her out of this place.  It would have even held resonance with Tess’s memories and given her a human face to fight for other than herself.  I suspect that something was done with this girl in the script but was later dropped.  In any case, as this episode now stands, Clark leaves a scared little girl alone in a bad place by show’s end.  I have little choice but to attribute the episode title “Abandoned” to this girl, even though I know that was not the intent.  But it’s just such a glaring, gaping plot hole that even an apologist like me can’t let it go.

Wes Craven is currently suing Warner Bros. in light of this blatant copyright infraction. Settlement pending.

But moving on, Clark follows the sounds down a hallway and finds what appears to be a combat training room for women with severe emotional problems.  Naturally, there’s Kryptonite in the area (later explained as a means of tempering their weapons), and so Clark is quickly overwhelmed and held captive.  Again, I had a few questions about all of this.  First, Granny Goodness has been heading up this school for at least the last 20 years, and yet no one has ever managed to notice the least inconspicuous devious plan in history?  These girls aren’t exactly keeping things down or being subtle here.  It’s sort of the kind of thing that even a casual passer-by might take note of, even without super-hearing.  Second, how exactly are these girls really going to be a major threat to anyone out in the real world if they’re truly being groomed (as we’re led to assume they are) for part of Darkseid’s army?  Knives, swords, whips and razor blade claws might look pretty cool, but as weapons go, they’re not going to hold up all that well even against a common hand pistol.  I guess I’m just missing something here, because I don’t see this “army” as anything but a minor annoyance.  They’re glorified Wolverine / Freddy clones at best, and I guess that just doesn’t strike me as a particularly smart or effective way of taking over the world.  But maybe it’s just me.

Try as she might, Tess couldn't shake the feeling that she'd been here before. And she could have sworn there was an ice witch and a talking lion involved somehow, too.

Tess begins to suspect that her dream was actually a real memory as she starts looking around, and Granny Goodness eventually reveals that Tess was raised by her at the orphanage.  While a great job was done here to make this revelation creepy (and it was, with probably the most unsettling piece of score I’ve heard yet from Louis Febre as Granny Goodness moves aside to reveal Tess’s portrait), I simply had to wonder what it was that made all the other girls remain loyal to this woman when she was so obviously crazy to anyone else looking in.  Why would Tess’s birth parents (we’ll get to that in a moment) leave her here when I think all of us know they must have been aware of what was going on in this place…especially if they were just going to turn around and find her another home shortly thereafter?  What was the endgame of even luring Tess back here in the first place and then straight away threatening her and Clark?  The whole thing just felt more like a cheap plot twist and a means to explain away Tess’s history than a truly logical story progression.  But I do get the sense that a lot of groundwork is being laid in Season 10 (more so than in previous seasons) for things that will ultimately gel and come together later on in the season, so I’m going to try and let this slide – for now.  On the other hand, the pile of questions brought up by this sequence was instantly worth it when Tess runs into her old room and finds the ultimate wink wink to the long-time fans of the series.  Seriously, having that phrase carved into the wall was absolute genius!

After getting Shelby to divulge the secret of her family's time-honored baked beans recipe, Lois knew it was only a matter of time until she got Clark's whereabouts out of her, too.

I’ve said it a few times already in my reviews, I know, but I really love how much fun Lois is having with knowing Clark’s secret.  More than anyone else, knowing has redefined her as a character (well, I suppose it pretty well redefined Chloe, too, but not necessarily for the better).  I like how her investigative instincts are being brought to the fore in her quest to see that Clark and Jor-El resolve their estranged relationship.  I did have to chuckle, though, at how easily all the pieces to the fortress just fell nicely into place, especially considering how Clark had forgotten to put the book away in anticipation of The General’s questions last week in “Ambush”.  Lois takes a look at the book, finds a map of the caves, and quickly discerns the location of the Kryptonian key all within a minute or two.  As many people have been trying to figure out your identity over the years, this probably isn’t a book you want to just leave lying around your barn, Clark.  Just sayin’.  But again, this is all played so disarmingly that I still couldn’t help but enjoy it and be excited at the thought of Lois making her way to The Fortress of Solitude.  And hey, we get our first look at Shelby this year, too!  That alone makes a scene worth shooting, am I right?  In any case, we definitely get a sense that Lois is determined to do this and that something has changed fundamentally about her after getting the closure she so desperately needed with her mother.

For one fleeting moment, Tess couldn't figure out if she was at Excelsior Academy, St. Louise's Orphanage or Black Creek, but the drapes were a dead giveaway.

After the obligatory scene in which Clark is tied up and threatened (and I’m sure there were a great many fans pleased to finally see the plot require Tom shirtless for a change instead of Justin, just to mix things up), Tess escapes from the room in which Granny Goodness had her trapped.  She’s stopped by Harriet (who evidently isn’t nearly as dangerous as her claw would have us believe).  I love how, even though Tess hasn’t been at the orphanage getting “trained” all of this time, she still makes rather short work of Harriet.  It’s an awesome detail to see that Tess has managed to somehow get even stronger through just dealing with the holes in her life and overcoming her own demons than any of these girls have through a lifetime of systematic indoctrination.  I really liked the thought of that, and it greatly informs the earlier moments we had with Tess when she first came to Smallville back in Season 8.  It makes you re-evaluate all those scenes with her constantly working out at the mansion and wonder if maybe, subconsciously, Tess always knew she had to be stronger than anyone else because of this kill or be killed sentiment that was drilled into her, nearly from day one.  To me, that slight revision (or reinvention, if you will) of just who Tess is makes her at once more relatable and even endearing as a character.  But just when we think Tess is in the clear, another girl in Granny Goodness’s army gets the upper hand and we take a break to catch up with Lois.

When Lois suggested to Jor-El that the two of them chill for while, she found out the hard way that Kryptonians and human slang don't mix.

This scene with Lois talking to Jor-El in the Fortress of Solitude might just be my favorite scene so far in Season 10 (or, if it isn’t, it’s very close to the top).  I think the reason I love it so much is that it really sells – more than anything up to this point has – that Clark really can’t fully become Superman without his Lois Lane.  It’s almost a throwback to – and a rebuttal of – “Savior”, when Jor-El insinuated that it was Lois who was holding Clark back from achieving his true potential.  I absolutely love that Lois has come back to stand up for herself and set Jor-El straight on that point.  No, she asserts, it is he who has held Clark back by not believing in him as a true father would.  I wanted to stand up and cheer as Lois told Jor-El that he was holding Clark back from being the man he had it in him to be.  It’s such a wonderful and refreshing change to see someone standing up for the man they know Clark is the way that Jonathan used to do rather than tear him down for having the best of intentions, even if he falters at times along the way.  Even the best of us make mistakes and have hurdles to overcome, but what sets Lois apart from everyone else who’s claimed to love Clark in the past is that she truly fights for him in her own way just as valiantly as he does for her as The Blur.  Lois becomes the reason in this episode why Clark is able to bury the hurt in his heart and know that his biological parents always believed in his ability to rise above everything and become the world’s greatest hero.  But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.  Before that can happen, Jor-El has a (quite predictable) tantrum and captures Lois in a force field when he doesn’t like what she has to say.  Oh, Jor-El.  Perhaps the lesson you’d like Clark to take away from all of this is that, if you don’t like something, you immobilize it?  Dubious parenting style at best, sir.

Fortunately, being secretly into S&M as he was allowed Clark to reach the state of arousal necessary to free Tess with his heat vision before she choked to death.

Much like “Ambush” last week, things resolve at a rather rapid pace in “Abandoned”.  Clark’s just about to be mind-wiped by Granny Goodness when he uses his arctic breath to freeze the chain holding up a lead plate, allowing it to fall on the Kryptonite that’s inhibiting his powers.  I was so happy to see Clark actually use that power again!  It’s been woefully under-used compared to super-speed and heat vision in my opinion.  Freezing and shattering effects are probably a little more cost-prohibitive than burning or blurring, though, so I suppose it’s understandable.  When Clark escapes, Granny Goodness makes a rapid exit, and Clark goes instead to help Tess, who’s hanging from a staircase by a whip around her neck.  He burns the whip with his heat vision and super-speeds to catch Tess as she falls.  And then we get probably the funniest and most unexpected moment on Smallville in years.  When one of the villainous girls shows up at the top of the stairs and snaps two whips menacingly, Clark disarms her in the blink of an eye without breaking a sweat.  I could be wrong, but I instantly assumed this was a nod to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when Indy fought the swordsman.  In any case, it came off that way, and it was hysterical in exactly the right way without taking away from the drama of the scene.  There’s a very nice moment where Tess tells Clark that she’s surprised he came back for her, and it really sold once again how Tess just doesn’t have it in her to just blindly trust anyone, even people she knows in her heart are as honorable as Clark.  She always assumes the worst will happen and that people will ultimately let her down.  “You’re part of my team now, I wasn’t going to abandon you”, Clark tells her.  The terrified little girl in the electrical closet, however, is evidently not a part of Clark’s team.  Oh, well, all’s well that ends well, aye?  Okay, I’ll let it go.

It fell upon Jor-El and Lara to tell Clark of Krypton's darkest corner of history, when the counsel was forced to banish Zod for his utter refusal to dress monochromatically like everyone else.

When Clark discovers that Lois has found her way to the Fortress, he goes after her and, after rescuing her from Jor-El’s force field, he’s ready to give up on his relationship with his father once and for all.  But just as he and Lois are about to leave, Clark is shown the final moments of his parents’ lives on Krypton as they sent him away to his journey to Earth.  I really liked this scene, although I felt that it was left a bit too ambiguous as to why it was shown to Clark at this particular moment in his life.  I’d like to think that Jor-El wasn’t just chastising Lois by holding her captive.  I’d like to think that he actually read her mind and learned the kind of man that his son had become through her eyes, and finally gained an understanding of the hole that Clark had been harboring in his heart over the broken relationship with his Kryptonian heritage.  It would give things a much greater meaning if the Fortress version of Jor-El somehow vaguely understood emotion enough to know what seeing those final moments would mean to his son and showed it to him to let him know that he still loved him.  And I suppose we can take those things away from this scene if we so choose, but I do wish it had been made clearer.  As it stands, it seems a little strange that this would suddenly happen just when it needed to.  It undermines the power of a scene that was really necessary for Clark to advance on to his final destiny as Superman to have it come out of nowhere.  But again, it’s pretty awesome that Lois was the catalyst in one way or another.  She was the one who confronted Jor-El and got Clark to the Fortress again, and she’s the reason why he got this final push to become The Man of Steel.

Granny Goodness couldn't understand it. She had yet to see a single trick-or-treater this year. Was she somehow coming off inhospitable?

And lest anyone wonder why exactly Granny Goodness wears her hair up, we get a scene here that makes it pretty clear as she meets up with Godfrey and Desaad.  We learn that the three are minions of Darkseid and that each has a specific function in clearing the way for his rise to power.  I really thought this was a clever twist on the single villain structure that we’ve come to know.  It’s actually pretty terrifying to think of a character who is so evil that he thrives not on money or blood lust, but on breaking the human spirit from the inside out.  When you think of what Superman stands for, this definitely works incredibly well on a thematic level as Clark’s ultimate challenge.  In order to become the world’s symbol of the best in humanity, in a way it does naturally follow that he should have to overcome that which thrives on bringing out the worst in all of us.  About the only thing that’s really troubling me about Season 10 so far is that it seems so intent on building up things that will pay off later that the individual episodes are suffering (not by a lot, mind you, but slightly) in comparison to Season 9.  Zod wasn’t someone most anyone needed explained, so last year became all about the ride.  This time around plays more like chess than checkers.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that it will mean that Season 10 will likely play far better the second time around when it’s clear why all of these pieces of the puzzle are being tossed out onto the table.

"Look, Clark, please don't get offended. It's just...I don't know how else to tell you that it's an issue. But if you want to christen that porch swing, this simply has to be done".

Lois and Clark have one last talk about their parents and how they shouldn’t let the past get in the way of their future together, and Lois finally agrees to officially move in.  I really did like the theme of “Abandoned” very much.  I know much of this review has probably read like I’ve been nitpicking a bit too much, but I really didn’t dislike this show as a whole.  I think the reason for this is because, even though I felt like things were just sort of thrown together from a narrative standpoint (asking us to swallow perhaps a tad too many plot contrivances in the span of a 42-minute episode), the emotional undercurrents of the show rang true each and every time.  It might, in fact, be more vital to me that an episode feels right than whether or not it plays right.  I do feel like things were thrown in a little too haphazardly in “Abandoned”, and the two stories – though thematically relevant to one another – felt too dissimilar to meld as well together as would have been ideal.  But emotionally, I connected with the story and with the characters in a way that isn’t there in the episodes that I end up shrugging my shoulders over.  At the end of this scene, we get a glimpse of a card that Lois’s mother has left for her to open on her wedding day, and of the ring that Clark’s preparing to give to Lois “sooner than she thinks”.  If I were a fangirl shipper, I’m sure I’d find this whole thing positively squee-worthy and gush over it for a page or two at the end of this already sprawling epic of a review, but as a professional (and a male), I’ll simply say this was a very satisfying moment indeed and end this paragraph with some small shred of my dignity intact.

The Luthor family evil truly knew no bounds. "Names That Will Ruin Your Child's Life" was, in fact, one of Lionel's most treasured volumes.

At the end of the episode, it’s finally made clear that Tess is actually a Luthor, born to Lionel and Pamela Jenkins.  I have to say, making Pamela Tess’s mom really, really works for me.  I’m sure Tess wasn’t even on the creative team’s radar back in Season 1, but what a masterstroke it is to have Tess’s biological mother be someone with such a compassionate, conciliatory heart.  Again, this really informs on Tess as a person, and it makes her character make so much more sense in the way that she’s constantly battling with her Jenkins and Luthor sides.  I get the sense that Tess just really got a raw deal from birth, born to a man who desperately wanted a male heir to his empire and chucked the unwanted child out like a piece of garbage.  Tess has had a huge, gaping hole of unknown origin in her heart for years, and it’s just now becoming fully focused.  I hope that as this happens, we’ll see a truer, more self-assured Tess Mercer emerge from the ashes of someone who’s tried desperately to do the right things but never truly understood who she was or why she felt as she did about herself or the world.  Equipped with this new understanding of herself, I think she now has it in her to finally become someone who can rise above the terrible circumstances of her past and grab onto a life that would make even a person like Clark proud.  Then again, she does have evil incarnate hanging out somewhere in Luthor Mansion, armed with a buzz trimmer and a bad attitude.  Perhaps she should take these things one at a time.