The End of the Beginning

Tonight is the night. One of my favorite shows is coming to an end
Oh and did I mention for the first time since Season 7 look who is back

I remember when Smallville was first airing I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in watching it. Not because I thought it was going to be a bad show, but at the time I did not watch nearly as much TV as I do today. I was too busy going out with friends and meeting the future Mrs. Williams. A guy I was working with named, Chris (the same guy who talked me into watching LOST), told me I should really give the show a chance. Lisa was out one evening and I ended up catching my very first episode of Smallville. Krypto, the 14th episode of the 4th season, was my introduction into the world of Superman. I really enjoyed the episode. The next day I told Chris how much I liked it and that I was going to watch next week’s episode. He told me that the Krypto episode may have been the worst episode that he has seen. I ended up buying the first two seasons, and borrowed the third and we got caught up pretty quickly. Smallville soon became a main stay in my viewing habits (and the only reason I would watch the CW/WB Network).

Superman was created in 1935 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Originally as a bald headed villain who had telekinetic abilities.
At some point Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster decided to take a very different approach and “re-envisioned the character, who became more of a hero in the mythic tradition, inspired by such characters as Samson and Hercules, who would right the wrongs of Siegel and Shuster's times, fighting for social justice and against tyranny”. This led to the iconic version of Superman being in the image we all know and love today.

Superman has been in comic books, has had his own radio show, lunchboxes, t-shirts, several television shows, and of course the movies. One of my favorite Superman stories is his battle with the Ku Klux Kan. This is part of an article that was on Wikipedia that shows how everyone behind Superman wanted to help fight against social intolerance.

“Clan of a Fiery Cross” - The series delivered a powerful blow against the Ku Klux Klan's prospects in the northern USA. The human rights activist Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the KKK and other racist/terrorist groups. Concerned that the organization had links to the government and police forces, Kennedy decided to use his findings to strike at the Klan in a different way. He contacted the Superman producers and proposed a story where the superhero battles the Klan. Looking for new villains, the producers eagerly agreed. To that end, he provided information — including secret code words and details of Klan rituals — to the writers. The result was a series of episodes, “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” in which Superman took on the Klan. Kennedy intended to strip away the Klan's mystique. The trivialization of the Klan's rituals and code words was perceived to have had a negative impact on Klan recruiting and membership.

Reportedly, Klan leaders denounced the show and called for a boycott of Kellogg's products. However, the story arc earned spectacular ratings, and the food company stood by its support of the show.
However, this is about the end of Smallville, and the journey to become Superman, and not the story of Superman. This moment is very bitter sweet. Tom Welling has done such an amazing job creating Clark Kent that the only person I want to see in the Superman suit is Tom Welling. Tonight I have a very different feeling than when Lost went off the air. LOST I knew I was going to get answers to my questions and a conclusion to an amazing journey. I was excited but also sad to see LOST go off the air. With Smallville I have more excitement than sadness. We have been waiting 10 years and 217 episodes later for this moment, the moment that Clark Kent finally accepts his destiny and steps into the light to become the symbol of hope that is Superman.

I would love to see the journey continue and see how Tom Welling takes the Superman character but all good things must come to an end.
Entertainment Weekly recently put out this article by Jeff Jensen, talking about the Super 9 Episodes of Smallville, and they pretty much hit the nail on the head with this list.

1) “Pilot” (Season 1) - Smallville's premiere episode on The WB — watched by 8.4 million people — made an immediate impression with its cinematic panache and inspired reformulation of Superman's small-town coming-of-age beginnings. Tom Welling was instantly winning as a humble, hunky Clark, and he had crackling chemistry with the show's key supporting players — John Schneider's Jonathan Kent; Kristen Kreuk's Lana Lang; and especially Michael Rosenbaum's Lex Luthor. The premise of a heartland town forever changed by a catastrophe from the sky (the radioactive meteor shower that attended Kal-El's arrival) had provocative resonance one month after 9/11, as did a high school hazing subplot that evoked the Matthew Shepard hate-crime tragedy. Credit series developers Al Gough and Miles Millar for delivering the geeky goods while working the Man of Steel mythos for meaningful, accessible metaphors for alienation and adolescent angst.


2) “Heat” (Season 2) - Some boys find themselves daydreaming about the cute farm girl that lives down the Lang... I mean Lois Lane.. err... just... ROAD, and feel a strange stirring in their skivvies. But when Superboy gets his tighties in a twist over a cute lass (or gets hot for a femme-fatale biology teacher imbued with radioactive pheromones), he shoots fire out of his eyes. Smallville was often ingenious in the way it used teenage Clark's developing powers to access those previously mentioned ''metaphors for adolescent angst,'' and ''Heat'' was one of the funniest and best.


3) “Red” (Season 2) - One of the sillier parts of the Superman mythology is the idea that different kinds and colors of kryptonite — remnants of Kal-El's exploded home planet; the ''meteor rocks'' that showered Smallville on the day of Clark's arrival — could affect him in different ways. For example, while green kryptonite can kill Superman, gold kryptonite takes his powers away, and red kryptonite makes him bad — the anti-Superman. But kudos to Smallville for embracing almost everything about Superman, and even making the silly parts work for effective drama. ''Red,'' which exposed Clark to crimson meteor rocks and turned the humble superpowered square into a selfish superpowered jerk, was a nifty allegory for teenage rebellion that allowed Tom Welling the chance to stretch and play with his performance. Even Lana Lang was dazzled by his bad-boy act.

4) “Rosetta” (Season 2) - Smallville was slow to deal with Superman's Kryptonian backstory — a calculated decision that may have irked impatient fanboys, but gave the series somewhere to go once it exhausted its early freak-of-the-week storytelling conceit. In ''Rosetta,'' Clark finally began decoding the mysteries of his extraterrestrial origins with the help of a big-screen Super-friend: Christopher Reeve, stirring and inspiring as a twinkle-eyed, Stephen Hawking-esque astrophysicist.


5) “Crusade” (Season 4) - The producers of Smallville promised a version of Superboy/Superman that stayed away from the more overt comic-booky elements that could limit the show's broad-skewing potential or strain the show's budget. (Though let's pause to note that Smallville's special effects have always been top-notch for series television.) However, at the start of the fourth season, one tenet of the show's well-known ''no flights, no tights'' philosophy fell by the wayside when the producers allowed Clark Kent one awesome, well-produced flight, in a rousing episode that saw Kal-El temporarily renouncing everything Earthy about him and go Kryptonian warlord on everyone. (As for the ''no tights'' part of the mantra, all signs point to the May 13 series finale finally breaking that rule in equally triumphant fashion.)


6) “Reckoning” (Season 5) - Pa Kent's death loomed from the start of Smallville. Yet his demise was a wrenching shock, nonetheless, well disguised in a poignant time-travel episode that also dealt smartly with the inevitability of Clark and Lana's doomed romance. The show's terrific ticktock chronicle of a maturing Man of Steel owes a huge debt to Schneider's portrayal of the man who taught Clark to be super.


7) “Justice” (Season 6) - Over the years, Smallville found ways to import more characters and story lines from the DC Comics universe, much to the delight of fanboy viewers. ''Justice'' marked an ambitious attempt to bring many of them together — most notably Green Arrow (Justin Hartley), who became a series regular. (''Absolute Justice'' from season 9 — featuring old-time heroes from the Justice Society of America — was also a geek blast.)


8) “Artic” (Season 7) - This was a tumultuous time in the long life of Smallville. The seventh season — interrupted and shortened by the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike — marked the swan-song years for producers Al Gough and Miles Millar and stars Kristen Kreuk and Michael Rosenbaum, whose always-riveting and nuanced Lex Luthor was as much a reason to watch as Welling's Clark or the show's strong, confident storytelling. Complex Lex was ostensibly killed in ''Arctic,'' Smallville's momentous season 7 finale, although he's slated to make a return appearance in the series capper on May 13. And yet, while many fans and critics thought Smallville was doomed by these departures, the show would hold its own for three more years under the stewardship of longtime writers Kelly Souders, Brian Peterson, Todd Slavkin, and Darren Swimmer.
I can’t embed the You Tube Video but this scene is awesome

9) “Homecoming” (Season 10) - Smallville found new creative traction in the middle of its decade-long run by adding Lois Lane (Erica Durance) and moving Clark to Metropolis. In ''Homecoming,'' a riff on It's a Wonderful Life, Clark got a peek at his Super-future (complete with knowing nods to the Superman movies) and revealed his identity (and heart) to the love of his life. Will they seal the deal at the altar? The May 13 finale will tell the tale. Bring tissues.


With the exception of the 4th Season Finale “Commencement” where the fortress of solitude is built and another meteor shower hits Smallville “Commencement” is awesome
the above list has the best episodes.

My personal favorite is Homecoming. 200 episodes into the series and I was nothing but smiles during the entire episode.

This is a fan made trailer for the final episode of Smallville but it is pretty cool.


To everyone who was behind Smallville for the past 10 years. Thank you for making a show that I cared about and enjoyed watching every single episode. I will always hold out hope that we will get a once a year movie dedicated to Tom Welling Superman and the world he created. Superman will live on and after tonight we will look to Harry Cavill who will carry the torch that is the Last Son of Krypton.