"Aqua" - Smallville

 

Hey, all!  I’m taking a hiatus from the hiatus to fulfill a request from a friend, who wanted to see a review about her favorite hero, Aquaman.  So today we’re returning to Smallville to take a look at the fifth-season episode “Aqua.”

By Season Five, Smallville had begun adding other heroes to the mix, including today’s guest star, Aquaman.  Well, pseudo-Aquaman.   Instead of being king of the seas, he’s a Florida college student with a crazy environmentalist streak.  It’s not quite as bad as it sounds.

We begin with a little summer fun at Crater Lake, where Clark and Lana’s nauseating romance is interrupted by the appearance of Chloe Sullivan and her cousin, Lois Lane.  For those who didn’t see Lois’s introduction during Season Four, you should know that Lois and Clark start out hating each other’s guts, and while the insults flying between them are pretty fun, the clichéd scenario is not.  Come ON, we KNOW they end up together.  I’m not expecting them to immediately fall into each other’s arms, but there’s no need to have them outright antagonistic towards each other, either.

Clark whines to Chloe about how terrible it is to have to keep his superpowers a secret from Lana (why he has to keep this secret is never discussed), and Chloe tells him to suck it up.  Go Chloe.  Lois, meanwhile, has gone for a swim and ends up smacking her head on a board, knocking herself unconscious.  Clark goes to rescue her, proving that those superpowers he constantly complains about can actually be useful on occasion, but he is beaten to the punch by a guy even more ripped than he is.  Nerds and nerdlings, meet your new Aquaman!

 

Oh wait, I’m sorry, I seem to have taken a screenshot of the gratuitous unconscious-Lois-Lane butt shot they decided to throw in there for no reason.  Silly me. 

This is your new Aquaman.

 

Don’t worry, the tacky orange shirt pops up later.

Anyway, the mystery hero’s pecs is the first thing Lois sees after regaining consciousness, and of course she instantly develops a massive crush on him, not that she’ll admit it in so many words.  As it turns out, Lois’s rescuer goes by the nickname A.C., which is short for Air Conditioning, I assume.  Well, Lois does comment later about how cold his skin is.

(But seriously, A.C. is actually a “hip” and “modern” update of his real name, Arthur Curry, but it’s so much more fun to plug “AC” into Wikipedia and see what else it stands for.)

Clark’s first reaction, rather than to be happy about Lois’s rescue, is to be suspicious of her savior.  Which I guess is fair, considering the number of super-powered nutjobs he’s had to deal with by this point.

The next day, Clark is just starting college and he is, like every good little angsty superhero, late for his first class.  Which is lucky for him, because he misses out on one of his professors, Milton Fine, spouting that “we only use ten percent of our brains” baloney.  Never mind that that’s been disproven six ways to Sunday—we need subtle foreshadowing that Milton Fine is really Brainiac, darnit!  Fine also compares successful local businessman Lex Luthor to Hitler, Stalin and Napoleon because he apparently has the mentality and self-restraint of a YouTube commenter.

We leave Clark to presumably regret his choice of university and rejoin Lois, who works at the Talon, a Smallville coffee shop.  Air Canada stops by to grin stupidly at her for a while.  Lois grins stupidly back, but at least she calls him out on his outfit while doing so.



“You know that whole orange and green thing you got going?  Looks like Flipper threw up.”

That is the best face I have ever seen on anyone on this show, even if the insult makes no sense.  What does she think Flipper eats?  Skittles?  Radioactive seaweed?

The whole conversation devolves into Lois being surprisingly rude to the guy who saved her life, even insisting that she was still conscious and didn’t need rescuing at all.  On the other hand, Anticipated Convection is being a little obnoxious too, continually refusing to believe she can actually swim at all.  Lois insists she can “swim like a fish,” so of course they decide to have a swimming contest like they’re twelve.  No prizes for guessing what happens.  And I don’t mean the no-prizes that Marvel used to give to readers for spotting mistakes in their comics.

 

Ante Christum: “I’m part fish.”

No he’s not, he’s part Atlantean.  Read a comic book!

They smile stupidly some more but are interrupted when a strange pulsing sound from under the water incapacitates Alternating Current and kills all the fish in the lake.  And I’ll bet you can guess who’s responsible for this, can’t you?

 

Yup!  Our perennial frenemy Lex Luthor.  The pulsing came from a sonar weapon called Leviathan, which Lex plans to sell to the military as an anti-submarine weapon.  And, as we’ve seen, Leviathan also kills all marine life in the immediate area.  Tuna casserole for everybody!

Meanwhile, Clark has Chloe do a little research on their fishy friend (oh hush, the show makes way worse puns than that).  When the investigation finds nothing that matches up with Clark’s preconceived suspicions, Clark goes to the Talon to confront Altocumulus, who explains that he’s come to Crater Lake to investigate a bunch of unexplained fish die-offs because we’re all connected, save the whales, etc.

“Do you really believe that, or is that a pick-up line for the girls?”

Ooh, subtle.  Batman’s going to have stiff competition for the title of World’s Greatest Detective, I see.

Lois of all people calls Clark out on his attitude.  Yeah, the irony is crushing me, too.

Actinium (okay, no more AC jokes, I’m just calling him Arthur) leaves the Talon not long after.  Clark follows him to the Lake, where Arthur breaks into a secret LexCorp facility and tries to blow up Leviathan, only for Clark to bust in on him and wrap himself around the bomb, preventing it from doing any damage.  But, of course, when Clark tries to warn Lois that her crush is a terrorist, she doesn’t believe him.  And really, considering Clark has been a dipstick to the guy since Day One, I’d ignore him too.

Arthur tells Clark the truth about Leviathan and how bad it will be if the Pentagon uses it.  And Clark just magically believes he’s telling the truth despite the earlier animosity.  (Maybe they were running out of time before the next commercial break or something.)  Arthur even suggests they work together, but his idea is to blow stuff up, which Clark heartily disapproves of.  Instead, our hero suggests directly confronting Lex, which Arthur agrees to, if only so he can rub Clark’s naiveté in his face afterward. 

 

Much to everyone’s shock, Lex denies everything, Clark and Lex fight like bitter exes (still a better love story than Clark and Lana), and Arthur storms out.  He returns to the lake, only to get shot in the neck with a tranq dart for his trouble.  By the time he wakes up, Luthor is keeping him dehydrated in the most deliciously obnoxious way possible.

 

This is what a jerkwad looks like.  Just in case you were wondering.

Lex leaves when Arthur refuses to reveal the secret behind his super-swimming abilities (Lex caught him on camera), but fortunately, Clark shows up not long after to turn on the sprinkler for him.  And then he just stands there.  Um, would it have killed you to untie the poor man too, Clark, or do you still not like him enough for that?  Arthur does manage to free himself after a moment or two, and together, they destroy Leviathan just as Luthor is about to demonstrate it for the Pentagon.  How embarrassing.

Mission accomplished, they head back to the Kent barn, with Arthur crowing about what a good team they make and how they should start a “junior lifeguard association or something.”  Clark’s response?

“I’m not sure I’m ready for the JLA just yet.”

AHAHAHA DID YOU GET IT?  IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT SOUNDS LIKE HE’S TALKING ABOUT THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA!  GET IT?  GET IT?!!

Clark’s grown up a little this episode, finally admitting that Lex isn’t the good friend he used to be, and he accepts an assistant research position with Professor Fine, who is determined to uncover the unsavory truth about LexCorp.  Arthur says good-bye to Lois, and Lois gives us one last bit of clumsy foreshadowing to end the episode.

 

(discussing Arthur) “I’ve known a lot of guys who want to own the world.  I haven’t met very many who actually want to save it.  Where am I ever gonna meet someone like that again?”

 DO YOU GET IT?  SHE SAID THAT BECAUSE SHE ENDS UP WITH CLARK AND HE’S SITTING RIGHT BEHIND HER!  LAUGH!  IT’S FUNNY, DARNIT!!

This was… well, it sure was Smallville.  Translation: It was decent and enjoyable in spots, but it’s nothing really special and the characters tend to grate on your nerves after a while.  And, as you’d expect, there are water-related puns and comic book references in every dang scene.  Heck, there’s a deleted scene where Arthur confesses his more terrorist-y activities to Lois.  When he says he did it to protect the oceans, she says, “Who died and made you King Neptune?”  Arthur’s face is just like “I can’t believe you said that,” which is pretty much how I feel every time someone does a wink-wink nudge-nudge at the original comics.

 

I feel ya, bro.

And of course, they danced around Arthur’s backstory a lot, presumably because a sea king who can talk to marine life is just too silly and unbelievable for a show about a superpowered alien who landed on Earth in the midst of a meteor shower and now regularly fights crazy people who got powers of their own from said meteor shower.  But how far did Smallville really stray from the comics here?

**HISTORY TIME**

Okay, so first off, you should know that comics are really overcomplicated and feel the need to reboot and retell every single origin about five thousand times until everyone but the most hardcore of fans is left scratching their heads.  However, back in the Silver Age when things were infinitely simpler, Aquaman’s backstory is pretty much identical to the one we hear him tell Clark, Lana and Lois at the Talon—his father is a lighthouse keeper and his mother died a while ago. 

Now, in the comics, Arthur’s mother confessed on her deathbed that she was an exiled member of the Atlantean royal family, and after she died, his dad taught him to use and control his powers.  Obviously there’s no mention of that in this show (we can only suspend our disbelief so far, people), and Arthur only mentions that he spent all of his free time in the water.  On the other hand, they never really say or do anything that would contradict this version of events, and the only way to explain Leviathan’s negative effect on Arthur would be to make him part marine animal.  So while the details were omitted, it doesn’t look like they actually changed anything, which is kind of surprising given how much this show likes to screw around with continuity. (See: Doomsday.  Or better yet, don’t.)

**END OF HISTORY TIME**

This version of Aquaman even got popular enough to warrant his own TV pilot, but instead of Alan Ritchson in the title role we got Justin Hartley.  Obviously, Aquaman never took off—it was dead in the water, you might say—and Hartley went on to become Smallville’s Green Arrow instead.  Aquaman didn’t just quietly disappear into the sunset, though; Ritchson reprised the role in three more episodes before Smallville finally kicked the bucket in 2011. 

As far as portrayals of Aquaman go, this one is solid but hardly revolutionary.  He’s nowhere near as awesome here as he is in, say, Batman: Brave and the Bold, but to be fair, few characters are.  And to their credit, Smallville did strike a nice tone in terms of Arthur’s personality: he doesn’t really want to hurt anyone (at least not anyone innocent), but if that’s the only way to protect the ocean, he will do whatever it takes without even a smidgen of guilt.  On the other hand, Arthur isn’t so rigid that he’s unable to consider other people’s perspectives and ideas, and he even allows Clark to steer him away from a path of wanton destruction without sacrificing his own goals, which makes him a genuinely interesting character.  So basically, yeah, not bad, Smallville. 

Images from Smallville