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Smallville – Fortune Review

Have you ever had a night that was so awesome, so mind-blowing, that you couldn’t remember it the next day? Well, you should definitely watch The Hangover. After that, watch this episode of Smallville. There are only seven episodes of the whole series left after this and it’s their last chance for some goofy fun before Darksied comes to kill everyone. Was it as terrible as the concept sounds? Was it as funny as the trailer made it look? Well…

The episode opens up with Lois’s hen party with Chloe and Tess while Clark goes on his Bucks night with Ollie and Emil. What they didn’t see coming was that Zatanna had roofie-charmed the Champaign and no one, not even Clark, can remember what happened the night before. They wake up to find that they’re all in a ton of trouble. Clark apparently married Chloe under the supervision of a lemur, Lois wakes up with the wrong shoes and her engagement ring gone and Emil has been mistaken for the thief of an armored truck after becoming Metropolis’s number one Elvis impersonator. Even Tess gets in on the action when we see that she and Emil made a sex tape. While this episode could have fallen flat on its ass, it didn’t. Nearly all the jokes work. If you watch the episode twice, you’ll notice jokes you didn’t see before. Clark stealing the "L" in Luthor Corp was great and had me rolling on the floor. The lemur was a nice touch and seeing Tess take a break from being a hard ass bitch was a refreshing change of pace.

Was the episode perfect? HAHHAHH! Not even close. It was very funny and gave us a brief break before we head down the final stretch and it all comes to an end, but this episode was still far from perfect. Let’s get the big one out of the way now: Yes, Oliver Queen dressed up in drag and I could barely keep my eyes open. But the rest of the climax worked well. Lois taking on the eccentric casino owner, Fortune, to get her ring back was reminiscent of old Vegas-based comedies, and Chloe dual wielding guns was just an awesome image. If the only reason you watch Smallville is for Clark, you might want to skip the second and third act. Why? Because Clark disappears. You see him in the beginning putting some of the clues together and we see that he has trouble using powers while hungover. That was also one of the funniest moments. Seeing Clark super-speed into a wall is something we haven’t seen before in the ten years of history with this show and it really caught me off guard.

Bang Bang, she shot me down. Bang Bang, she hit the ground.
I understand that a show on this type of network means you can’t get away with everything you want, but if the writers want to do an episode with drunkenness, I wanted to see the cast members go nuts and do some batshit crazy stuff. I wanted to see Emil snort coke off the backs of those Asian fan girls they had in the limo that loved his Elvis act. I wanted to see Oliver wake up in the middle of the sex party from Eyes Wide Shut. Is that too much to ask? Okay, it probably is, but that would have made me forgive them putting the Emerald Archer in drag.

Unfortunately, this was Alison Mack’s last episode, unless she comes back for the finale. But for the purposes of this review, let’s say she won’t. It was a fitting end to her character. I love that she’s going off to Star City and helping heroes like Batman and Wonder Woman. Wait, what? Yes, she made direct references to Bruce and Diana before leaving. What a freaking tease! I want to see them. But knowing DC’s weird legal thing in not letting them appear on the show, we probably never will. If this episode was going to feature Chloe’s ultimate goodbye, why wasn’t the whole episode about her? It seemed like it came out of left field with no build up or foreshadowing. It doesn’t exactly answer our question about why the Legion didn’t know who she was. All in all, I’ll miss Chloe and the reason for her leaving was great. But the execution could have used some work to make it a perfect character ending.

All in all, this was a nice little escape from the darkness of the show coming to an end and giving us something out of the ordinary and fun to watch. There were a lot of missteps throughout the episode and Chloe’s departure felt a little rushed.  But the episode is far from hate-worthy and is better than it has any right to be. I will say one thing though: I want to hear an audio commentary for this episode with all the cast members drunk.

Rating
8.5

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