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Smallville: Season 6 (HD DVD)
Warner Bros. // Unrated // September 18, 2007 // Region 0
List Price: $79.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Okay, I know I started off my review of Smallville's fifth season with a double helping of sarcasm. I'm not exactly the first person to have poked fun of some of Smallville's more repetitive bad habits, but as season six kicks off, it seems as if the show's writers have finally started to counter some of those jabs.
Clark had spent most of the past few seasons barging into Lex's palatial mansion and accusing him of masterminding whatever that week's nefarious scheme happened to be, and half the time, he was completely off-base. In one of season six's earliest episodes, Lex snarls at Clark that his days of accusations and righteous indignation
are over, and he's no longer welcome in the Luthor mansion. It'd been a long while since Lana served any purpose other than doe-eyed, grating love interest. Not only is Lana given more to do at the start of season six than passively be doted over while whining about everyone and everything around her, but she quickly becomes seduced by Lex's darker side and indulges her thirst for power. Before the season's out, Lex has at long last graduated to a full-blown supervillain. Lois makes her first steps towards becoming a journalist, and Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore) turns up for something more than an off-screen one night stand. Meteor freaks are still an integral part of the season, but they aren't the week-in-week-out bad guys this time around, instead concentrating on the responsibility Clark feels in reimprisoning the savage killers he inadvertently released from the Phantom Zone.
The premiere picks up immediately where the previous season's finale left off. Metropolis is engulfed in riots, and the chaos in last season's "Vessel" has left some of Clark's closest friends and family near death. The outcast Kryptonian general Zod has assumed Lex's body as his earthly vessel, and with Clark trapped in the Phantom Zone, there's little to stand in his way as he purges mankind from Earth and terraforms the planet into a replica of his dead homeworld. Much like Smallville's premiere a year earlier, theis first episode of season six is a love letter to Christopher Reeve's Superman movies, complete with a return trip to the crystalline Fortress of Solitude, a spinning Phantom Zone disk, and an ominously bellowed "kneel before Zod". While it goes without saying that humanity isn't exterminated and that Clark doesn't spend the entirety of the season in a barren, otherdimensional limbo, the events of the premiere do leave a long-lasting impact. Zod's brief reign on Earth is near-catastrophic, further fueling Lana and Lex's determination to protect the planet from alien invasions. This brings the two of them even closer as Lex schemes to unravel the secrets of an immeasurably powerful extraterrestrial artifact and begins to experiment on the meteor-infected.
Smallville has been tossing in other characters from the DC universe for years now, but season six really revels in it. The most notable addition this time around is Oliver Queen, a twentysomething billionaire rival of Lex's who skulks around Metropolis at night as the vigilante Green Arrow. Instead of just popping up one episode and disappearing from the series before the end credits roll, Green Arrow is an integral part of the first half of the season, and his much more aggressive, proactive approach to crime fighting...to putting his life and livelihood at risk to better the world...comes in stark contrast to the heroic but much more passive Clark. Oliver has even gone one step further, assembling a team of the heroes Clark has seen come and go from Smallville, using them as his own personal army to wipe out Luthercorp's string of underground testing facilities where meteor freaks are being poked and prodded to engineer an army of super-soldiers. The season peaks with "Justice", a reunion that's riddled with nods to the comics, from the use of the heroes' codenames -- Impulse, Green Arrow, Aquaman, and Cyborg -- to Chloe taking the reigns as "Watchtower" as she oversees the team's assault on the Luthercorp facility. Though he's not a part of that surgical strike, another familiar face from the four-color incarnation of the Justice League -- the Martian Manhunter -- also appears in a few episodes throughout the season.
"Justice" might be the highest point of the season, but there are several other standouts that deserve a quick mention. One of season six's best is "Nemesis", which sees Lex and Clark bruised, bloodied, and trapped in a sprawling set of crumbling labyrinthine tunnels underneath the city. A series of explosions have already ravaged the tunnels, and with Clark's powers throttled by the the shattered fragments of meteor rocks that surround them, they struggle to find a way out as the timer on the final bomb ticks down. So many of these episodes spent with Clark and Lex at odds and miles apart, but "Nemesis" offers at least a glimpse of the bond they used to share, delving into how much their lives have changed over the course of the past six seasons. Another of this boxed set's most memorable moments is "Noir", which gives Jimmy Olsen a chance to step into the spotlight after he's conked on the head with The Big Sleep still
unspooling in the other room. Jimmy wakes up in a monochromatic world, immersed in a '40s-style film noir as he investigates the imminent murder of Lana Lang (doing her best husky Lauren Bacall, natch). Smallville has always been a visually stylish show, but the black and white photography and retro-minded production design makes "Noir" a particularly stunning episode.
This is a rather grim season of Smallville, and it isn't timid about being cringingly brutal. Virtually everyone is mauled or mutilated at some point: there are multiple stabbings, the usual parade of gunshot wounds, alien organs ripped out with a bare hand, and spinal columns torn out so a Zoner can munch on some marrow. So...yeah. The producers definitely get their money's worth out of that Smallville Hospital set this season. The best of these darker episodes is "Labyrinth", with Clark jarringly awakening in a mental institution where he's told that his memories of saving the world time and again as well as his Kryptonian heritage are all mental delusions. Even though Clark had supposedly spent the past five and a half years in a sanitarium, he escapes to a world that is in many ways ideal: he isn't saddled with any superheroic responsibilities, and the love of his life has been waiting patiently for his release so they can be together again. In much the same way as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "Normal Again", "Labyrinth" is an intense episode and one of the more emotionally resonant installments this season.
As bleak as some of these episodes can be, season six still has its more cheerful moments. "Sneeze" introduces another power of Clark's when he's infected with a super-cold, and...c'mon, who can hate "Hydro", which has Tori Spelling as a bitchy gossip columnist who can turn into a bucket of water? The annual Red Kryptonite episode this time around is set during Valentine's Day, as a jilted Lois tries to patch up a broken heart with a tube of Red-K-tainted lipstick that compels her to fall in love with the first man she sees. ...and yup, it's Clark. "Crimson" starts off feeling light and goofy as Lois dotes over a corn-fed farmboy she's poked fun at for a couple of years straight, but the episode soon switches gears, pushing one of the season's driving stories forward when Clark crashes Lana and Lex's engagement party and viciously snipes at everyone there.
The guest stars throughout season six include Bow Wow as a nuclear-irradiated baller, Tori Spelling as that waterlogged gossip columnist namechecked a paragraph or two up, and Lynda Carter -- Wonder Woman herself! -- as Chloe's inadvertently manipulative, meteor rock-infected mother. Smallville's been keen on throwing in movie homages for a while now, and there are still a few this season. "Reunion" has a sort of Final Destination bent as it flashes back and forth between a bullying Oliver and a much meeker Lex during their days together in boarding school. "Trespass" takes more than a couple of cues from The Shining as Lana is stalked throughout its climax, and as the season draws to a close, there are also homages to Silence of the Lambs and The Exorcist.
Okay, it's not all gold, though. Some of the dialogue is abysmal, with lines like "I work for a guy called...Mr. Kiss My Butt. Would you like me to introduce you?" Yikes. It kinda goes without saying that everyone's still hopelessly smitten with Lana. Although she starts the season at a much more interesting place -- conniving, manipulative, and loving it -- Lana pushes things absurdly far into soap opera territory, and the same stupid sort of love triangle from...oh, every other season of Smallville dominates and drags down the second half of the season. Lana's motivations can change jarringly and without warning, but that's kind of in keeping with a lot of the characters this season, whose personalities bend to whatever that week's script requires. Some of the turns with Lana are particularly a drag since after "Hydro", it seemed as if Clark had finally accepted than she was part of his past and was ready to move on.
Other clunkers...? "Rage" is another drugs-are-bad-mmmkay, double-underscored moral. "Subterranean" is clumsily anchored around the "ripped from the headlines!" issue of illegal immigration, and since every genre show has to have at least one underground gladiatorial fight-to-the-death episode, Smallville whips out "Combat", a near-total disaster that's only redeemed by a deliriously over-the-top fight promoter. "Phantom" is a fairly weak finale, and although it has some great moments -- one of the best explosions I've seen on network TV, for starters -- and ends on a strong note, it's really rushed, feeling as if the writers crammed in three full episodes into 40 minutes and change. I can't say I'm all that keen on one of the revelations made about Chloe late in the season either.
There are still several episodes that flop and flounder, and I don't think the show's writers have all that consistent a grasp on who these characters are supposed to be, but I still really dug this sixth season of Smallville. It's a guilty pleasure, sure, but there's something I find inescapably addictive about Smallville anyway. The already embittered should probably steer clear, and neophytes would be better off either renting some of the earlier DVD sets first or checking out reruns of older episodes on cable. Like I said last time, though, if you've willingly subjected yourself to a review this long and rambling, you're clearly enough of a devoted Smallville fan to find this boxed set of the series' sixth season well worth a purchase. Recommended.
Video: Encoded with Microsoft's VC-1 codec and presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, this HD DVD set of Smallville frequently impressed, standing out as crisper and more detailed than what I'm used to seeing on cable and over-the-air. Tight close-ups render each and every pore on the clean-scrubbed cast's faces, and the image is so sharp that I could pick out individual flecks of dust in the ring box during Lex's proposal. This HD DVD set can actually be too revealing, making the low-rent CGI throughout "Prototype" stand out that much more, and there were times when I could even make out the faint texture of the actors' stage makeup. Sharpness is generally strong throughout, although a few of the earliest episodes in the season did seem to suffer from a slight tinge of
softness, and some of the establishing shots that are continually recycled aren't as immaculately detailed as the rest of the footage. Colors are frequently bold and vivid, particularly leaping off the screen during "Freak"'s opening teaser in the bowling alley.
I first caught Smallville through the high-def airings on HDNet, and at least through my admittedly lousy cable provider, I'm used to seeing explosions and flickering flames devolve into a blocky, overcompressed mess. By comparison, these HD DVD sets teeter on perfection, and even the sorts of odd compression hiccups I spotted in the season 5 set don't creep in this time around. For one, the image remains rock solid during the challenging strobe effects in "Combat". There was one brief moment in "Freak" when the image leaned more towards being blocky and noisy rather than boasting the usual texture of film grain, but this isn't a constant concern, and the grain present throughout the season is rendered well and is rarely distracting. The varying weight of film grain and some sporadic softness are somewhat expected, although I did spot a handful of white specks in episodes like "Promise" and "Progeny", and even though they're easily ignored, this isn't something I'm all that used to seeing on such a recent TV-on-DVD set.
Smallville still stands out as the best looking TV series I've seen in high definition, and I'm impressed enough that I hope Warner ramps up their season sets on these high-def formats over the coming months.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio in this boxed set is in the same league as what we got the last time around. The sound design may be weighted towards the front channels, but the mix still does a decent job filling the room with sound. The rear channels ably support the score, and the surrounds are kept roaring throughout the season's many action-heavy sequences. Some of the standout moments making full use of all of the channels on-hand are the swirling phantoms in "Zod", the crumbling tunnels throughout "Nemesis", and the collapsing earth in "Subterranean". The LFE channel doesn't have that deep, foundation-rattling resonance of a feature film but is still reasonably robust. Gunplay and the meaty thuds of punches are accompanied by a solid low-frequency kick, and the subwoofer really starts to rattle during the opening of the gateway and the pervasive destruction throughout "Zod", the kinetic blasts of radiation in "Fallout", Clark ripping open the doors to a secret room in "Rage", and the explosive opening to "Nemesis". The sound design overall is stronger than expected for a television series, and my only real gripe is that there's a slightly clipped quality to some of the dialogue.
Along with the English Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio, Smallville also offers subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Extras: The extras on this sixth season of Smallville don't really pull back the curtain to reveal what goes into putting the show together the way previous sets have: no audio commentaries, no In Program Experiences, and no making-of featurettes. There is some good stuff on here, though, and Warner has gone to the extra effort of offering at least some of these features in high definition.
The first of the high-def bells and whistles are deleted scenes from 12 of the season's episodes, running just over 20 minutes in total. For the most part, they're just short snippets of additional dialogue and really wouldn't have added all that much to the season. However, the lengthiest of these scenes is anchored around a frank discussion with John Jones reminding Clark that despite his attachments to the people around him, he is an alien, and this would've brought a much stronger close to "Labyrinth" than the repetitive Clark and Lana moping that took its place. Some of the other scenes are flat-out awful, including a really odd bit with a presumably post-coital Jimmy bickering with Lois in Chloe's apartment over who gets to hit the bathroom first, and another has Clark clocking one of the season's worst bit actors before a fight to the death in "Combat". Although the quality of the footage is fully polished and looks every bit as good as the episodes proper, these were trimmed out early enough in the process that the audio is still raw, and a couple of them still have placeholders where visual effects would've gone.
Also presented in high definition is "Smallville Legends: Justice and Doom" (10 min.), which follows the Clark-less Justice League as they demolish the string of 33.1 labs throughout the globe and square off against a prototype super-soldier in the desert. The five part series is presented as a set of comic book pages, with light animation, no voiceovers, and all of its dialogue tossed into word bubbles. Although this material is directly referenced late in the season -- Chloe gives a nod to the battle with this initial prototype in a throwaway line of dialogue -- the writing is pretty corny, the Toyota product placement is hysterically heavy-handed, and there's just something about reading comic book panels on my TV for ten minutes straight that kinda bugs.
The rest of the set's extras are in standard definition, and all but a couple of 'em are presented in anamorphic widescreen.
"Smallville Legends: The Oliver Queen Chronicles" (22 min.) follows how the young son of multimillionaire industrialists steeled himself into becoming Green Arrow in this
6 part series of CG-animated "mobisodes". Geared towards mobile phones and tiny computer windows, the 3D animation is really rough and doesn't hold up at all when plastered across a large high-def screen. I almost feel guilty for saying that nothing about the mini-miniseries -- the animation, the voice acting, or the writing -- really works after watching the three accompanying making-of featurettes. The staff's enthusiasm is infectious as they spend nine minutes running through recording the voice actors, rendering the individual elements of each installment, designing and animating the characters, and follow one shot through every stage of the process. These making-of featurettes are one of the disc's few extras to be presented at 4x3, although the fully animated mobisodes are in anamorphic widescreen.
Also included are a pair of half-hour featurettes. The first of them is "Green Arrow: The Legend of the Emerald Archer" which takes a look at a character that started life as a shameless Batman knockoff and follows how he established himself as one of DC's most deservedly iconic characters. A small army of comic book talent is interviewed -- Neal Adams, Denny O'Neill, Brad Meltzer, Judd Winick, Bob Schreck, Phil Hester, Mike Carlin, Mark Waid, Kevin Smith, and Dan Didio -- as they run through Green Arrow coming into his own under Jack Kirby's pencils, his induction as the first non-charter member of the Justice League, his more socially conscious revival in the late '60s and early '70s, the gritty re-envisionings that followed throughout the '80s and '90s, and Oliver Queen's continued political awareness today. The featurette also touches on Green Arrow's animated incarnations, and a gaggle of Smallville writers and producers -- along with Justin Hartley himself -- talk about the character's integration into the series. It's a really solid featurette, and to amp up the geek quotient even more, it's narrated by Star Wars' Mark Hamill.
Okay, even if I'm not exactly the type of guy who'd be featured in something like this, my favorite of the disc's extras is "Smallville: Big Fans". This love letter to the series' most unwaveringly loyal supporters is littered with comments from fans along with reels of footage shot at Comic Con, and quite a bit of the show's cast and crew gush about their fanbase and show off some of the fan mail and assorted goodies they've received over the years. Smallville's producers note how they interact with the online community and how fans' voices are heard, and they run through fan campaigns, different romantic 'ships, and even the impact fans have left on their support of various charities. A few fans in particular are highlighted throughout the half hour piece, showing off a homebrew Wall of Weird, decked-out viewing parties, a Smallville-centric vacation in British Columbia, the recording of the House of El podcast, and the web comic Lanarama.
Rounding out the extras is a minute long, 4x3, standard definition trailer for Superman Doomsday.
Season six comes packaged in the same sort of case as the previous HD DVD set, again sporting a booklet tucked inside that lists all of the season's episodes and the individual chapter stops. There's also an insert notifying me that I may need to upgrade the firmware on my Blu-ray player, which is kinda funny considering that this is an HD DVD set I'm reviewing. For what it's worth, the HD DVD and Blu-ray releases are reportedly identical in every way aside from disc count; the HD DVD is a 5 disc set, while Blu-ray's beefier capacity trims that number down to 4.
Conclusion: Although season 6 of Smallville does fall apart somewhat in its second half, I found myself enjoying a lot of these episodes much more than I expected, and it's clear that the show's writers tried to address some of the fans' most common gripes when breaking the early stretch of the season. Smallville looks and sounds great on HD DVD, and even though its set of extras are slimmer than usual this time around, it's appreciated that at least some of them are offered in high definition. Smallville is a guilty pleasure, sure, but this HD DVD set of the show's sixth season still comes Recommended.
Clark had spent most of the past few seasons barging into Lex's palatial mansion and accusing him of masterminding whatever that week's nefarious scheme happened to be, and half the time, he was completely off-base. In one of season six's earliest episodes, Lex snarls at Clark that his days of accusations and righteous indignation
are over, and he's no longer welcome in the Luthor mansion. It'd been a long while since Lana served any purpose other than doe-eyed, grating love interest. Not only is Lana given more to do at the start of season six than passively be doted over while whining about everyone and everything around her, but she quickly becomes seduced by Lex's darker side and indulges her thirst for power. Before the season's out, Lex has at long last graduated to a full-blown supervillain. Lois makes her first steps towards becoming a journalist, and Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore) turns up for something more than an off-screen one night stand. Meteor freaks are still an integral part of the season, but they aren't the week-in-week-out bad guys this time around, instead concentrating on the responsibility Clark feels in reimprisoning the savage killers he inadvertently released from the Phantom Zone. The premiere picks up immediately where the previous season's finale left off. Metropolis is engulfed in riots, and the chaos in last season's "Vessel" has left some of Clark's closest friends and family near death. The outcast Kryptonian general Zod has assumed Lex's body as his earthly vessel, and with Clark trapped in the Phantom Zone, there's little to stand in his way as he purges mankind from Earth and terraforms the planet into a replica of his dead homeworld. Much like Smallville's premiere a year earlier, theis first episode of season six is a love letter to Christopher Reeve's Superman movies, complete with a return trip to the crystalline Fortress of Solitude, a spinning Phantom Zone disk, and an ominously bellowed "kneel before Zod". While it goes without saying that humanity isn't exterminated and that Clark doesn't spend the entirety of the season in a barren, otherdimensional limbo, the events of the premiere do leave a long-lasting impact. Zod's brief reign on Earth is near-catastrophic, further fueling Lana and Lex's determination to protect the planet from alien invasions. This brings the two of them even closer as Lex schemes to unravel the secrets of an immeasurably powerful extraterrestrial artifact and begins to experiment on the meteor-infected.
Smallville has been tossing in other characters from the DC universe for years now, but season six really revels in it. The most notable addition this time around is Oliver Queen, a twentysomething billionaire rival of Lex's who skulks around Metropolis at night as the vigilante Green Arrow. Instead of just popping up one episode and disappearing from the series before the end credits roll, Green Arrow is an integral part of the first half of the season, and his much more aggressive, proactive approach to crime fighting...to putting his life and livelihood at risk to better the world...comes in stark contrast to the heroic but much more passive Clark. Oliver has even gone one step further, assembling a team of the heroes Clark has seen come and go from Smallville, using them as his own personal army to wipe out Luthercorp's string of underground testing facilities where meteor freaks are being poked and prodded to engineer an army of super-soldiers. The season peaks with "Justice", a reunion that's riddled with nods to the comics, from the use of the heroes' codenames -- Impulse, Green Arrow, Aquaman, and Cyborg -- to Chloe taking the reigns as "Watchtower" as she oversees the team's assault on the Luthercorp facility. Though he's not a part of that surgical strike, another familiar face from the four-color incarnation of the Justice League -- the Martian Manhunter -- also appears in a few episodes throughout the season.
"Justice" might be the highest point of the season, but there are several other standouts that deserve a quick mention. One of season six's best is "Nemesis", which sees Lex and Clark bruised, bloodied, and trapped in a sprawling set of crumbling labyrinthine tunnels underneath the city. A series of explosions have already ravaged the tunnels, and with Clark's powers throttled by the the shattered fragments of meteor rocks that surround them, they struggle to find a way out as the timer on the final bomb ticks down. So many of these episodes spent with Clark and Lex at odds and miles apart, but "Nemesis" offers at least a glimpse of the bond they used to share, delving into how much their lives have changed over the course of the past six seasons. Another of this boxed set's most memorable moments is "Noir", which gives Jimmy Olsen a chance to step into the spotlight after he's conked on the head with The Big Sleep still
unspooling in the other room. Jimmy wakes up in a monochromatic world, immersed in a '40s-style film noir as he investigates the imminent murder of Lana Lang (doing her best husky Lauren Bacall, natch). Smallville has always been a visually stylish show, but the black and white photography and retro-minded production design makes "Noir" a particularly stunning episode. This is a rather grim season of Smallville, and it isn't timid about being cringingly brutal. Virtually everyone is mauled or mutilated at some point: there are multiple stabbings, the usual parade of gunshot wounds, alien organs ripped out with a bare hand, and spinal columns torn out so a Zoner can munch on some marrow. So...yeah. The producers definitely get their money's worth out of that Smallville Hospital set this season. The best of these darker episodes is "Labyrinth", with Clark jarringly awakening in a mental institution where he's told that his memories of saving the world time and again as well as his Kryptonian heritage are all mental delusions. Even though Clark had supposedly spent the past five and a half years in a sanitarium, he escapes to a world that is in many ways ideal: he isn't saddled with any superheroic responsibilities, and the love of his life has been waiting patiently for his release so they can be together again. In much the same way as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "Normal Again", "Labyrinth" is an intense episode and one of the more emotionally resonant installments this season.
As bleak as some of these episodes can be, season six still has its more cheerful moments. "Sneeze" introduces another power of Clark's when he's infected with a super-cold, and...c'mon, who can hate "Hydro", which has Tori Spelling as a bitchy gossip columnist who can turn into a bucket of water? The annual Red Kryptonite episode this time around is set during Valentine's Day, as a jilted Lois tries to patch up a broken heart with a tube of Red-K-tainted lipstick that compels her to fall in love with the first man she sees. ...and yup, it's Clark. "Crimson" starts off feeling light and goofy as Lois dotes over a corn-fed farmboy she's poked fun at for a couple of years straight, but the episode soon switches gears, pushing one of the season's driving stories forward when Clark crashes Lana and Lex's engagement party and viciously snipes at everyone there.
The guest stars throughout season six include Bow Wow as a nuclear-irradiated baller, Tori Spelling as that waterlogged gossip columnist namechecked a paragraph or two up, and Lynda Carter -- Wonder Woman herself! -- as Chloe's inadvertently manipulative, meteor rock-infected mother. Smallville's been keen on throwing in movie homages for a while now, and there are still a few this season. "Reunion" has a sort of Final Destination bent as it flashes back and forth between a bullying Oliver and a much meeker Lex during their days together in boarding school. "Trespass" takes more than a couple of cues from The Shining as Lana is stalked throughout its climax, and as the season draws to a close, there are also homages to Silence of the Lambs and The Exorcist.
Okay, it's not all gold, though. Some of the dialogue is abysmal, with lines like "I work for a guy called...Mr. Kiss My Butt. Would you like me to introduce you?" Yikes. It kinda goes without saying that everyone's still hopelessly smitten with Lana. Although she starts the season at a much more interesting place -- conniving, manipulative, and loving it -- Lana pushes things absurdly far into soap opera territory, and the same stupid sort of love triangle from...oh, every other season of Smallville dominates and drags down the second half of the season. Lana's motivations can change jarringly and without warning, but that's kind of in keeping with a lot of the characters this season, whose personalities bend to whatever that week's script requires. Some of the turns with Lana are particularly a drag since after "Hydro", it seemed as if Clark had finally accepted than she was part of his past and was ready to move on.
Other clunkers...? "Rage" is another drugs-are-bad-mmmkay, double-underscored moral. "Subterranean" is clumsily anchored around the "ripped from the headlines!" issue of illegal immigration, and since every genre show has to have at least one underground gladiatorial fight-to-the-death episode, Smallville whips out "Combat", a near-total disaster that's only redeemed by a deliriously over-the-top fight promoter. "Phantom" is a fairly weak finale, and although it has some great moments -- one of the best explosions I've seen on network TV, for starters -- and ends on a strong note, it's really rushed, feeling as if the writers crammed in three full episodes into 40 minutes and change. I can't say I'm all that keen on one of the revelations made about Chloe late in the season either.
There are still several episodes that flop and flounder, and I don't think the show's writers have all that consistent a grasp on who these characters are supposed to be, but I still really dug this sixth season of Smallville. It's a guilty pleasure, sure, but there's something I find inescapably addictive about Smallville anyway. The already embittered should probably steer clear, and neophytes would be better off either renting some of the earlier DVD sets first or checking out reruns of older episodes on cable. Like I said last time, though, if you've willingly subjected yourself to a review this long and rambling, you're clearly enough of a devoted Smallville fan to find this boxed set of the series' sixth season well worth a purchase. Recommended.
Video: Encoded with Microsoft's VC-1 codec and presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, this HD DVD set of Smallville frequently impressed, standing out as crisper and more detailed than what I'm used to seeing on cable and over-the-air. Tight close-ups render each and every pore on the clean-scrubbed cast's faces, and the image is so sharp that I could pick out individual flecks of dust in the ring box during Lex's proposal. This HD DVD set can actually be too revealing, making the low-rent CGI throughout "Prototype" stand out that much more, and there were times when I could even make out the faint texture of the actors' stage makeup. Sharpness is generally strong throughout, although a few of the earliest episodes in the season did seem to suffer from a slight tinge of
softness, and some of the establishing shots that are continually recycled aren't as immaculately detailed as the rest of the footage. Colors are frequently bold and vivid, particularly leaping off the screen during "Freak"'s opening teaser in the bowling alley. I first caught Smallville through the high-def airings on HDNet, and at least through my admittedly lousy cable provider, I'm used to seeing explosions and flickering flames devolve into a blocky, overcompressed mess. By comparison, these HD DVD sets teeter on perfection, and even the sorts of odd compression hiccups I spotted in the season 5 set don't creep in this time around. For one, the image remains rock solid during the challenging strobe effects in "Combat". There was one brief moment in "Freak" when the image leaned more towards being blocky and noisy rather than boasting the usual texture of film grain, but this isn't a constant concern, and the grain present throughout the season is rendered well and is rarely distracting. The varying weight of film grain and some sporadic softness are somewhat expected, although I did spot a handful of white specks in episodes like "Promise" and "Progeny", and even though they're easily ignored, this isn't something I'm all that used to seeing on such a recent TV-on-DVD set.
Smallville still stands out as the best looking TV series I've seen in high definition, and I'm impressed enough that I hope Warner ramps up their season sets on these high-def formats over the coming months.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio in this boxed set is in the same league as what we got the last time around. The sound design may be weighted towards the front channels, but the mix still does a decent job filling the room with sound. The rear channels ably support the score, and the surrounds are kept roaring throughout the season's many action-heavy sequences. Some of the standout moments making full use of all of the channels on-hand are the swirling phantoms in "Zod", the crumbling tunnels throughout "Nemesis", and the collapsing earth in "Subterranean". The LFE channel doesn't have that deep, foundation-rattling resonance of a feature film but is still reasonably robust. Gunplay and the meaty thuds of punches are accompanied by a solid low-frequency kick, and the subwoofer really starts to rattle during the opening of the gateway and the pervasive destruction throughout "Zod", the kinetic blasts of radiation in "Fallout", Clark ripping open the doors to a secret room in "Rage", and the explosive opening to "Nemesis". The sound design overall is stronger than expected for a television series, and my only real gripe is that there's a slightly clipped quality to some of the dialogue.
Along with the English Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio, Smallville also offers subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Extras: The extras on this sixth season of Smallville don't really pull back the curtain to reveal what goes into putting the show together the way previous sets have: no audio commentaries, no In Program Experiences, and no making-of featurettes. There is some good stuff on here, though, and Warner has gone to the extra effort of offering at least some of these features in high definition.
The first of the high-def bells and whistles are deleted scenes from 12 of the season's episodes, running just over 20 minutes in total. For the most part, they're just short snippets of additional dialogue and really wouldn't have added all that much to the season. However, the lengthiest of these scenes is anchored around a frank discussion with John Jones reminding Clark that despite his attachments to the people around him, he is an alien, and this would've brought a much stronger close to "Labyrinth" than the repetitive Clark and Lana moping that took its place. Some of the other scenes are flat-out awful, including a really odd bit with a presumably post-coital Jimmy bickering with Lois in Chloe's apartment over who gets to hit the bathroom first, and another has Clark clocking one of the season's worst bit actors before a fight to the death in "Combat". Although the quality of the footage is fully polished and looks every bit as good as the episodes proper, these were trimmed out early enough in the process that the audio is still raw, and a couple of them still have placeholders where visual effects would've gone.
Also presented in high definition is "Smallville Legends: Justice and Doom" (10 min.), which follows the Clark-less Justice League as they demolish the string of 33.1 labs throughout the globe and square off against a prototype super-soldier in the desert. The five part series is presented as a set of comic book pages, with light animation, no voiceovers, and all of its dialogue tossed into word bubbles. Although this material is directly referenced late in the season -- Chloe gives a nod to the battle with this initial prototype in a throwaway line of dialogue -- the writing is pretty corny, the Toyota product placement is hysterically heavy-handed, and there's just something about reading comic book panels on my TV for ten minutes straight that kinda bugs.
The rest of the set's extras are in standard definition, and all but a couple of 'em are presented in anamorphic widescreen.
"Smallville Legends: The Oliver Queen Chronicles" (22 min.) follows how the young son of multimillionaire industrialists steeled himself into becoming Green Arrow in this
6 part series of CG-animated "mobisodes". Geared towards mobile phones and tiny computer windows, the 3D animation is really rough and doesn't hold up at all when plastered across a large high-def screen. I almost feel guilty for saying that nothing about the mini-miniseries -- the animation, the voice acting, or the writing -- really works after watching the three accompanying making-of featurettes. The staff's enthusiasm is infectious as they spend nine minutes running through recording the voice actors, rendering the individual elements of each installment, designing and animating the characters, and follow one shot through every stage of the process. These making-of featurettes are one of the disc's few extras to be presented at 4x3, although the fully animated mobisodes are in anamorphic widescreen. Also included are a pair of half-hour featurettes. The first of them is "Green Arrow: The Legend of the Emerald Archer" which takes a look at a character that started life as a shameless Batman knockoff and follows how he established himself as one of DC's most deservedly iconic characters. A small army of comic book talent is interviewed -- Neal Adams, Denny O'Neill, Brad Meltzer, Judd Winick, Bob Schreck, Phil Hester, Mike Carlin, Mark Waid, Kevin Smith, and Dan Didio -- as they run through Green Arrow coming into his own under Jack Kirby's pencils, his induction as the first non-charter member of the Justice League, his more socially conscious revival in the late '60s and early '70s, the gritty re-envisionings that followed throughout the '80s and '90s, and Oliver Queen's continued political awareness today. The featurette also touches on Green Arrow's animated incarnations, and a gaggle of Smallville writers and producers -- along with Justin Hartley himself -- talk about the character's integration into the series. It's a really solid featurette, and to amp up the geek quotient even more, it's narrated by Star Wars' Mark Hamill.
Okay, even if I'm not exactly the type of guy who'd be featured in something like this, my favorite of the disc's extras is "Smallville: Big Fans". This love letter to the series' most unwaveringly loyal supporters is littered with comments from fans along with reels of footage shot at Comic Con, and quite a bit of the show's cast and crew gush about their fanbase and show off some of the fan mail and assorted goodies they've received over the years. Smallville's producers note how they interact with the online community and how fans' voices are heard, and they run through fan campaigns, different romantic 'ships, and even the impact fans have left on their support of various charities. A few fans in particular are highlighted throughout the half hour piece, showing off a homebrew Wall of Weird, decked-out viewing parties, a Smallville-centric vacation in British Columbia, the recording of the House of El podcast, and the web comic Lanarama.
Rounding out the extras is a minute long, 4x3, standard definition trailer for Superman Doomsday.
Season six comes packaged in the same sort of case as the previous HD DVD set, again sporting a booklet tucked inside that lists all of the season's episodes and the individual chapter stops. There's also an insert notifying me that I may need to upgrade the firmware on my Blu-ray player, which is kinda funny considering that this is an HD DVD set I'm reviewing. For what it's worth, the HD DVD and Blu-ray releases are reportedly identical in every way aside from disc count; the HD DVD is a 5 disc set, while Blu-ray's beefier capacity trims that number down to 4.
Conclusion: Although season 6 of Smallville does fall apart somewhat in its second half, I found myself enjoying a lot of these episodes much more than I expected, and it's clear that the show's writers tried to address some of the fans' most common gripes when breaking the early stretch of the season. Smallville looks and sounds great on HD DVD, and even though its set of extras are slimmer than usual this time around, it's appreciated that at least some of them are offered in high definition. Smallville is a guilty pleasure, sure, but this HD DVD set of the show's sixth season still comes Recommended.
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