Davis Bloom is no Doomsday, and it looks like he’s going to stay that way. On last night’s Smallville, Brainiac placed Davis in his crystal chrysalis and after 12 days, he emerged as the monstrous Doomsday.

From a storytelling perspective, I appreciate the fact that we now have a main villain. On the other hand, if Doomsday is here for good, that means Sam Witwer is gone, which is a tremendous loss for Smallville from both an acting and a hotness perspective.

While last night’s episode had many strong moments, I’m not able to judge it until I see how the rest of the season plays out. I like serialized hero shows that have a main villain, a Big Bad as it was called on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While Doomsday almost meets that criteria, he lacks one important element: an evil plan.

Doomsday is an enforcer, the Ultimate Destroyer, a being whose sole purpose is devastation. The brilliance of Brainiac was that he constructed plans and schemes, and Doomsday was a part of that. Without the mastermind, this villain is just a big killing machine.

Of course, this may not be the case and the Doomsday storyline can still go in any number of interesting directions, but for now, I’m mostly disappointed that Brainiac (and Chloeiac) are gone.

My biggest fear is that Lex Luthor will, even from his remote location, start controlling and organizing a plan to use Doomsday. The problem with that is we’ve seen Lex do this before, and the Doomsday/Brainiac pairing offered a different enemy for Clark Kent.

Yes, Lex Luthor is Superman’s arch-nemesis, but after seven seasons of their cat and mouse game, season 8 of Smallville has succeeded largely because Lex was put on ice. It allowed the show to explore other villains.

However, this season has been so strong that I’m willing to give it a chance to see where it goes. I only hope that it doesn’t go back to the same old stories from before.


-John Kubicek, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image courtesy of the CW)