(S06E13) Valentine's Day comes to Smallville about two weeks before the rest of the country. Why can't these episodes come on closer to the actual date of the holiday? Okay, I'm griping too much. We've got the return of Red Kryptonite, and it's about darn time. It comes at the right time, too ... given the fact that Lois has gotten a bit itchy in her relationship with Oliver Queen, and Lana is about to go fully over to the dark side and marry Lex Luthor, not to mention have his baby. That's getting a bit too close to the whole Anakin/Padme relationship, ain't it?

The whole little Zoltar machine slash Gypsy slash matchmaker woman who just gives Lois the magical lipstick was wayyyyy to much of a plot device for me. It's like the writers were in a post-Chinese food coma and decided to just have some character waltz in and hand it over. Was it too convenient? Am I griping about the small stuff too much again? Most likely. Granted, the alternative was probably having a department of LuthorCorp working on cosmetics, and some wacky scientist decides to add meteor rocks and yadda yadda yadda. K-powered shampoo and shaving gel for the world.

(S06E12) Or as I like to call it, "The Martian Manhunter Show!" All Martians, all the time. Either that, or "One Flew Over the Clark Kent's Nest," except we didn't get a Nurse Ratchett, unfortunately. You can tell right from the beginning that this is all taking place in Clark's mind, so it has the ring of "ripoff" to me. Basically, it's like holodeck episode of Star Trek: TNG. Although some good things came out of those (Dixon Hill, Moriarty, Minuet) so I'm not going to declare full shenanigans ... maybe only halfsies.

Someone needs to YouTube together all of the scenes of Clark working on farm equipment and make it a commercial for Clark's Tractor Repair. We must have seen him work on that thing a million times, but I don't remember him ever turning over any soil in the north forty. What gives, Smallville? The writers need to think about dropping the whole Kent Farm charade and just have them live on the land. Martha's a senator, which must pay fairly decent wages, right?

(S06E09) Is this Children of the Corn, or Smallville? Some kids are being forced to work on a farm, and if they try to escape something that looks like Sonic the Hedgehog chases them down and snuffs 'em down in the dirt. Talk about a motivation to keep on digging. They were smuggled across the border to work ... in Smallville? Since when is the Mexican border near Kent and company?

(S05E22) Smallville really takes a lot out of you with the season finales. They take the concept of a cliffhanger and just screw you up the butt with it. Yup, I said it. I feel a little bit sodomized after tonight's episode. It's the same thing every season -- the long, drawn-out climax and then ugh...it sorta hurts there at the end.

And, this season's finale was no different.   

(S05E21) Whew. I don't know how I feel about last night's episode. Basically, it confused the crap out of me, but I think that was the point. It was all just a tease for the finale, which is next Thursday.

Still, there was a lot of stuff that the writers could have tidied up a bit. Namely, the Kryptonian Alphabet.How come Clark can't read Kryptonian letters? Didn't he learn Kryptonian back in like Season 2? Here is Lionel handing him a treasure map of Kryptonian goodness and Clark just shrugs and goes, "What does it say? I don't know." That was just dumb.

(S05E19) If you ignore the blatant Saw rip-off, then this episode was super fantastic. But any episode that centers around Lionel is a winner in my book. This ep was a total incubator for cliffhangers. In this episode, Lionel is kidnapped by a masked tormentor who forces him to endure all kinds of riddles and physical challenges in order to live. Of course, Martha gets thrown into the mix, and several amazing things happen...

(S05E18) About half-way through last night's Smallville, my roommate suddenly proclaimed, "This is the gayest Smallville ever!" I don't know about gayest, but it was pretty lame. It was one of your typical freak-of-the-week episodes that I wish would've disappeared by the 5th season. But nope. In this (not so) special episode, Clark and Martha take in a foster girl who has the ability to control glass, i.e. shatter glass, i.e. accidentally kill her previous foster mom. 

This episode marked Tom Welling's directorial debut. It's sort of hard for me to judge Tom's directing chops when the writing was so lame. There really wasn't a lot going on here in terms of plot, and I don't think that Tom helped things out in terms of direction. The scenes between him and the young girl went on foooooorever. Chemistry, they do not have.   

In last night's episode, Lana becomes addicted to flatlining so she can spend some quality time with her dead parents. Eh, at this point in the series, I find Lana-centric episodes only slightly more exciting than Chloe-driven plots. Plus, I was slightly disappointing with the lack of time that Lana was actually spending in the hereafter. From the previews, I thought she was going to be spending some quality time with her parents, not just 10 second teasers. I guess Lana felt the same way and that's how she became addicted to the kryptonite-serum that was inducing the flatline.

But still, for the sake of television...