Friday's episode of Smallville, "Isis," was a villain-of-the-week tale punctuated by moments of intense cuteness. Smallville is at its best with a little levity, but man, they are layering on the love. Also, Green Arrow got his own breakfast cereal!
Indeed, love was the message of last night's Smallville. There was a lot of exposition on how characters lack love (see: Tess, Ollie). Other characters loved too much — Lois turned into the Egyptian god Isis after a magic necklace stowed away with her from Africa. Under the control of Isis, Lois tries to resurrect Osiris and bring the Underworld to Earth. Characters played semantic volleyball over the definition of the word "love" (Clark and Isis exchanged recriminations that neither knew what love was). And Tess discovers love when she decides to take care of her wee creepy Lex clone, who has Jack syndrome.
And nobody loves that snoopy Cat Grant, least of all the audience. Seriously, what's up with her characterization? In "Deadshot" they established that she was annoying albeit hard-working single mom. Here's she's just an irredeemable pain-in-the-ass. We can't empathize with a character when she's stabbing Lois with pens and acting like a yokel.
Let's go back to Isis — her appearance fulfilled the usual "Lois gets possessed by an evil spirit" and the "Lois wears a sexy themed outfit" quotas for at least a half-dozen episodes. And despite Erica Durances's retro get-up, this portrayal of Isis wasn't the funky Filmation do-gooder from the 1970s...
...no, this portrayal was more like the modern DC Universe incarnation of Isis, who's Black Adam's moll. And look! They gave him a shout-out with his very museum placard.
How do Ollie and Clark defeat Isis? By giving her the ol' arrow and heat vision combo. It's pretty neat to think that Superman and Green Arrow become the World's Finest on this Earth.
Speaking of Ollie, the show's going whole hog with his transformation into Tony Stark. The Green Arrow dancers have been done before, but Fortifix cereal was admittedly clutch.
But yeah, despite the intense campiness of this episode, Smallville wins you back with awww-shucks moments like this. Last episode Clark admitted he loved Lois, now he owns up to being the Blur. The show knows what it needs to do, and when it doesn't digress into mind control and Cat Grant acting like a Jed Clampett, it does it well.