The Show
The Complete Tenth Season of Smallville is also The Final Season, and it has all been leading to this. Clark Kent, rocketed to Earth as an infant from the doomed planet Krypton, has been raised by The Kents to be a righteous man, even a hero, but he still lacks the necessary confidence and inner peace to realize his full potential and become a superman.
With help of friends and family, he sets about making that final leap and fulfill his destiny, and not a moment too soon as Darkseid, probably the most powerful villain in the entire DC Universe, arrives in our midst, determined to bring about the end of all mankind. And of course, there's only one person who can even hope to halt his apocalyptic plan.
This last year saw the return of characters thought gone forever, either as ghosts or with the help of extreme science, and the sight of some familiar actors imparts an even greater sentimentality to the proceedings. Seventy-plus years of comic book history aside, there are also a great many references to Hollywood's live-action Superman canon, and ultimately that homage is not such a bad thing, since it elevates Smallville to a much grander context than is typical for a weekly television show.
The Picture
Detail is consistently solid, sometimes but not always spectacular within the 16:9 image, owing at least in part to the necessary compression to fit all 22 episodes onto four platters. The resulting AVC bitrate is in the teens (megabits per second) on average, and darks too are strong if not comparable to the best I've seen this year. Brights meanwhile can look a little harsh. I noted mildly unpleasant strobing in fast action, while the digital special effects can look a little cheesy, as well as a little noisy. In fact, video noise has a tendency to pop up quite a bit across the season. Colors however are remarkably strong for TV material.
The Sound
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack features extremely generous rear-channel fill, backed by ample if not earth-shaking bass. It more than does the job of conveying rainfall, or the isolated confines of a kryptonite-induced death-dream. Quick glimmers of what the business of super-hearing must sound like are cleverly executed, and the music is aggressively spread out across the entire soundfield, but occasionally certain effects--such as Clark crashing through the roof of the Kent family barn--can fall a bit flat if we're expecting big, movie-quality moments. Raised voices too can sound a bit thin.
The Extras
Audio commentary is provided on two episodes: season premiere "Lazarus" with writer/producers Don Whitehead and Holly Henderson and actors Allison Mack and Cassidy Freeman, and "Dominion" with executive producers Brian Peterson and Kelly Souders, director/actor Justin Hartley and actor Callum Blue. The collection of high-definition deleted scenes is grouped by episode and distributed across the first three discs of the set.
The final platter carries two featurettes. The first, "Back in the Jacket: A Smallville Homecoming" (about 20 minutes), explores the 200th episode, which highlights shortly before the conclusion of it all just how far the characters have come. In "The Son Becomes the Father" (17 minutes), we explore the complicated father/son relationships in the series, both good and bad. There's also an extended performance of "How Do We Do" sung by Cassidy Freeman and Alessandro Juliani in the episode "Fortune." All of these are in HD, but the music video doesn't really look it. All four discs support BD-Live.
Final Thoughts
I've adored Superman as along as I can remember, and so I must admit to a certain frustration that The Tenth Season finally--after a decade-long wait--showed him in action, in uniform, in flight, but these precious glimpses are relegated to the last scenes of the last episode. Ah, well, for better or worse, it's like they say: always leave 'em wanting more.
Product Details
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