Julian The Shark

I give you fair warning that this post is coming from the mind of a recently embittered Smallville fan. It's too big an angry rant for my livejournal. Warner Brothers may have jumped the shark on their hit series. For real. So, if you have no interest in the show or have not kept up on the current season, you might not care to read further. Spoiler alert.

First off, who wrote tonight's episode? The dialog was less than fresh. There were two people who took that crappy dialog and worked it. They would be John Glover and Michael Rosenbaum. John Glover plays Lionel Luthor, father of Lex Luthor and by far the best character in the series. Michael Rosenbaum plays Lex Luthor a man on a journey to become the biggest baddie of them all. I suppose that Tom Welling (Clark Kent) did a good job as well. I add that his lines were not as crappy as everyone else's.

Second off, why has Lionel turned into a bit part? It's as if the screenwriters have forgotten the masterful character he was in seasons 2,3 4 and 5. It's as if they've lost their minds. The problems between him and Lex have ceased to exist, yet they still hate each other. Am I the only one who thinks this bears some more thought and fleshing out? Come on people, give Lionel back his character. I liked it better when he was evil. At least he had an important part to play then.

Third off, bringing in Lex's "dead" brother Julian jumped a shark. Maybe two sharks. It hurt. Giving him the role of the stupid, annoying, horny editor at the Planet may have jumped an additional shark. This destroys one of the most important parts of the whole series. Again, the Lex-Lionel conflict. Possibly my favorite episode of the entire series was 3.19. In it we learn the truth about Julian's death, which, until then we were under the impression that Lex had caused. Lex gets back some repressed memories from his childhood to discover that his mother killed Julian. Yes, this is horrible, yes, she was crazy. But more than that, it is in that episode that Lionel realizes that he has hated his son for 20 years because he thought Lex killed Julian. They cannot go back and change that by making Julian alive. It doesn't make sense. It's wrong. It's jumping the shark. I won't stand for it. I'm an angry fan. I wish I could pretend this had never happened. It's completely inconsistent with the rest of the show. I can only hope that they will do a decent enough job with this tangential problem that I can gloss over it and pay more attention to the other characters story-lines. I can only hope. Desperately . . .