[NAS] The Phoenix

TV Programme: The New Adventures Of Superman
Season: 2
Episode: 13
Date I watched this episode: 25/07/2009
Time since I last watched this programme: 13 days.

Well after a fair few dull episodes, what a LOT happened in this episode!! Not only did we have the return of Lex Luthor - which gave the episode its title - but we had Nigel St John back, Lex's hair loss (finally) and the first date (if only an "almost first date") between Lois and Clark. All these things happened pretty much completely out of the blue, with no real prompting in prior episodes.

The danger was that in packing quite so much into one episode, the episodes following on from it will seem a bit bare. I mean, a lot of the storylines in this episode could have been spread over several episodes, and indeed if they had fed into the previous episodes, those episodes could have been made a bit more exciting. In fact there did seem to be far too much in general in here - that scene with the bomb under Perry's chair served no real purpose and was just a timefiller.

Clark and Lois's reactions to their new situation (after Clark having asked the question) were typically in-character, whilst also being in a sense character-building, because we haven't really seen these two have to cope with that before. Clark keeps it light by making witty comments (like "the guy's only got two tickets" when Lois asks him what about Mayson, or "what did they put in your coffee this morning?" when Lois gets paranoid about the whole situation). Lois on the other hand just seemed to turn into a giggling little girl but this is understandable since she doesn't really go on many dates and she doesn't have much experience of how to react.

The resulting chemistry was seen in droves, both subtly and...not so much (I doubt many adults will have missed the sexual innuendo shown with the champagne bottle). Clark and Lois go so well together because Clark respects her for who she is - doesn't try to demean her by making her feel like she's any less of a person because she's a woman (for example, he doesn't try to make her wait while he goes down into the sewers to investigate, instead he actually waves her on to go first. She would greatly admire this attitude). However, everyone else can't stop talking about the affair, including Jimmy and Perry, and even some random people we haven't seen before, so this makes it all the more difficult for the two of them.

So anyway that's one story, and the other equally important one was Lex's return from the dead - he IS The Phoenix. John Shea was brilliant as ever in this episode, playing a Lex who has now lost everything - including his hair... We had the sequences with Lois which essentially provided closure to a story thread which was left dangling at the end of the season one finale, and the eventual death of Gretchen, who kind of brought it on herself by underestimating Lex's love for Lois.

I wonder if we have seen the last of Nigel St John - now he has the Kryptonite which, in this version of the mythology where it is not so abundant - makes him pretty powerful. So there might be a followup there. However in general terms Lex Luthor and Nigel St John were guest appearances, and so it'd be hard for many of the storylines of this episode to continue beyond.

This episode was fun, exciting and interesting to watch, and has been the best of the season so far by a long way. I enjoyed most of the threads here and the way they were tackled by the writing staff, who have a tough job keeping the story relevant whilst conforming to old traditions. However, unfortunately the wealth of stuff which happened in this ep doesn't bode well for the rest of the season.