.

After a decade of heartache and heat-vision, Smallville ended its astounding 10-year primetime run with a two-hour series finale airing this past weekend. The time has come to board up the Talon, put the Kent farm up for sale and burn Luthor Mansion to the ground because it’s all finally come to an end – and not a season too soon. Over the years, the superhero soap opera has indulged in the outrageously heartfelt excesses of television melodrama, but the series has also achieved some interesting deviations from the Superman cannon.

In the forward to a graphic novel Superman: Birthright, which similarly supposes an adolescent friendship between Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, Smallville co-creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar explain, “To help us round out the world of Smallville, we added Lex Luthor’s father, Lionel, and Clark’s high school reporter pal Chloe Sullivan. More controversial was the idea that Kal-El arrives in a meteor shower of Kryptonite.” Gough and Miller streamlined the Superman mythology with a consolidation of events making Superman’s crash landing on Earth also responsible for a meteor shower which devastates Smallville, kills Lana Lang’s parents and also causes young Lex Luthor’s permanent baldness.

Director Richard Donner has stated that the concept of verisimilitude was of great importance to him while making the original Superman (1978) starring Christopher Reeve. Actor Marc McClure, who played Jimmy Olson, said “It’s a word that symbolizes truth. It was Donner’s mantra throughout filming of Superman.” Defined simply as “the appearance of being true or real”, verisimilitude is important in all superhero storytelling as it is the term expressing the emotional realness beneath the unreality of the fantasy. It is Donner’s understanding and application of comicbook verisimilitude which gives the first Superman film its heart and distinguishes the director apart from numerous other filmmakers who ignore the symbolic possibilities of superhero fiction in favour of the cheap shtick on display in Richard Lester’s Superman III (1983) or Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin (1997).

The most potent verisimilitude in Smallville often related through Clark Kent’s struggles with his destiny as Superman and how this is comparable to the pressures felt by teenagers beginning their adult lives. Smallville’s verisimilitude takes on a metaphorical quality when Clark cracks under the pressure of his super-heroic fate at the end of season two and begins using red kryptonite like a junkie uses heroin. In the episode ‘Red’ from season two, the crimson kryptonite makes Clark angry, selfish and uninhibited, as if he were using amphetamines. In the season finale, ‘Exodus’, Clark relapses after a family crisis and breaks open a desk drawer to score some red-K before running away to join inter-gang in Metropolis. For his friends who are unaware of his secret, Clark appears to struggling with an unseen drug addiction. The disturbing sight of a runaway, substance-abusing, bank-robbing Clark Kent is used to address the intense pressures felt by young adults toward the end of high school regarding the direction of their lives. In Smallville, these commonplace domestic pressures have been amplified into the realm of the mythological as Clark understandably seeks to avoid the near-paralyzing responsibilities of his secret abilities and alien heritage.

There is another slight reversal of expectations in Smallville’s surprisingly sympathetic interpretation of Lex Luthor (pportrayed by Michael Rosenbaum). The strongest storylines in Smallville stress the power of parenting to shape the future, especially when contrasting the unconditional love of the Kent household against the abusive and manipulative conditioning Lex receives from his father Lionel. Different from all other interpretations, Smallville has young Superman help create his worst enemy by constantly having to lie and deceive Lex about his secret powers. Clark chooses not to trust Lex with the truth about his alien identity and inadvertently adds to the young millionaire’s growing paranoia, isolation and emotional detachment. The episode which casts Lex in the most sympathetic light is ‘Shattered’ from season three, where Lex hides out on the Kent Farm claiming that his father is trying to kill him. After it has been revealed that Lionel has been drugging his son’s supply of scotch, a delusional Lex confronts Lionel’s crime-boss associate and Clark must reveal his invulnerability to save his friend from a speeding car. The end of the episode shows Lionel institutionalizing his son as Lex as he raves about Clark’s super-powers and Clark is unable to backup Lex’s story without exposing his secret to the world. Safe to say, that would put a strain on just about any friendship.

In the often black-and-white world of superhero morality, Smallville emphasises the grey areas acknowledging that we all have the potential for good and evil within each of us. An admirable thematic message in the Smallville narrative is that (at least to begin with) Lex Luthor is capable of great kindnesses and Clark Kent is capable of profound cruelties.

Smallville uses some clever casting choices pay homage to Richard Donner and Richard Lester’s popular Superman movies from the late 70s and early 80s, such as the rather Freudian selection of having Annette O’Toole, who played Lana Lang in Superman III (1983), now play Clark Kent’s mom. The most effective trick casting throughout the series has been the use of Terence Stamp to create Clark’s antagonistic Kryptonian birth-father, Jor-El, which is very different than the one portrayed by Marlon Brandon in Donner’s Superman. Stamp famously played the tyrannical General Zod in Superman and Superman II (1980), and Stamp’s version of Jor-El in Smallville is far less benevolent and more Zod-like in his ruthlessness. Poignantly, Christopher Reeve appeared in season two and three as the reclusive astrologist Virgil Swan who assists Clark in translating the Kryptonian language. Throughout the series, the creative team has reverentially referenced popular ideas, images and scenarios depicted in Superman and Superman II including the design of the Fortress of Solitude, the appearance of General Zod and our hero reversing time to resurrect the woman he loves. The line “Kneel before Zod” has been thrown around more than once.

Unfortunately, with all possible romantic entanglements already done to death, the final season of Smallville has been a bit of a wash. The series’ final run has had a handful of solid episodes with the return of characters from seasons past, including Brainiac, Zod, Lionel Luthor and Jonathan Kent, weighted against some truly embarrassing episodes curiously modeled after The Matrix and The Hangover. Season ten has primarily been a victory lap for Smallville, peppered with confusing cameos from lesser DC comicbook characters like Deathstroke, Deadshot, Booster Gold and The Blue Beetle.

Almost anyone watching, even those outside the comicbook hardcore, has been aware of the eventual endgame for Smallville and that has been half the fun of the series; how are we going to get there from here? This week, we finally get there – Clark Kent marries Lois Lane, Lex Luthor is back from the dead and Superman flies through the skies of Metropolis. Because the predestined ending point for Smallville has been foreshadowed and held-back for so many years, it inevitably feels somewhat unsatisfying when it finally arrives.