Smallville Season 4 Retrospective

The fourth season of Smallville is evidence of a show struggling to find new ideas a few years in, and thus creating long-winded narratives that were never part of the Superman lore in order to keep the 22-episode structure of each series intact. The sub-plot featuring Jason and Genevieve Teague stretches the entire run, and while it starts out neatly as is so often the case with Smallville the end result feels unrealistic and somewhat jarring with the earlier stories. A way of describing this is to say that all the tantialising teasers don't really come to fruition by series' end, and it's only with dramatic twists such as Chloe's discovery of the powers held by Clark Kent and the second meteor shower (I'm guessing very few people saw that coming back in 2004) that Season Four doesn't feel like a clear indication of a programme that's starting to lose steam- fast. In which case, the inclusion of Lois Lane as more of a friendly adversary for Clark is a strange one by the show's writers, yet one that would eventually develop her into a thoroughly lovable heroine in Seasons Eight and Nine. The back-and-forth nature of Clark and Lana's romance is cast aside thanks to the arrival of Jason on the scene, which can only be a good thing too. All in all, Season Four is a major improvement on its predecessor (which didn't seem to move forward at all), impressing despite the length of time Smallville had been running by that point.