![]() The episode built-up some storylines, like Chloe’s and Oliver’s growing affection for one another, and redirected others. It seems like Chloe took that in stride as part of the price of doing business as Watchtower, so I’m not sure I like them giving Clark yet another thing to be guilty about. Yeah, Chloe’s important, but is she really THAT important to the team? Even if she is that important, why did they place the blame on Clark for Chloe’s vulnerability? Any human, compared to Clark, is vulnerable just walking around town, never mind trying to investigate a shady organization like Checkmate. ![]() One problem I had was with the continued near-deification of Chloe. It’ll make some things like erasing inconvenient memories of Clark’s identity a lot easier. ![]() It’s a better solution than some one-off thing Jor-El could have done for Clark up in the Fortress, so I bet the writers are glad John’s powers are back. I guess John Jones erasing Amanda’s memories of the events that revealed to her Clark’s, Oliver’s and Chloe’s faces was a bit on the Deus Ex Machina side, but I’ll take it. It would probably turn your ex-lover a bit on the frosty side. She kidnapped him and tortured him, now she didn’t realize Green Arrow was actually Oliver, but still. I thought he was a bit cold to her, but who could blame him for that. That’s a bit severe, but it does certainly give her strong motivation to ask her Oliver for help even after she’d gotten so angry at him. I liked that Tess’ story in this episode filled in some blanks: it revealed how she had gotten involved with Checkmate in the first place and we found out that if she ever leaves it would cost her life. It was a high price to pay and gave him a horrible dilemma, so I’m glad that with Oliver’s and Tess’s help, he was able to find and rescue Chloe without comprising anyone else’s identities. By the fourth act, he was forced to try and make a deal with Amanda Waller for Chloe’s life, but at the expense for everyone that had worked with Watchtower. I also liked how the stakes rose constantly throughout the episode for everyone, but especially for Clark. One thing led to another, it didn’t have the episodic feeling a lot of these stories like that can often have on “Smallville.” (You know, this happens and that happens and this other thing happens, all seemingly without any direct connection to each other.) So, overall it was very was well done because they all didn’t feel like totally unrelated events. I liked the way the different stories, there were so many of them, seemed to hinge off of each other. And then Clark going his own way as he continued trying to figure out what’s going on, Tess figuring out that Ollie’s Green Arrow because he just can’t keep his mouth shut, and Clark finally figuring out Tess is part of Checkmate. The episode just got better after that: by kidnapping the Green Arrow, Amanda Waller ups the stakes in huge ways and we also find out that John Jones is apparently up to something on his own, hiding things from Clark. Yet, then at the end of the tease she hits Oliver who was trying to save her and then injected him with sedative right before she said ‘checkmate.’ Now that’s a tease that was truly teasing. The way she seemed scared by the white knight chess piece and then left via an emergency escape chute and the next time we saw her she was in disguise, they had made it appear that she was running from Checkmate. ![]() The way it played out, it completely fooled me on what Tess was up to. The tease was exciting and was truly teasing. (I’ll talk about what I didn’t like about it later, since I’m not sure the problems I had with it were because of a writer’s choice.) It looks like this episode is the first professional credit for writer John Chisholm and he got things going right from the start, so I think this is an excellent first effort. It’s much better than the last one, so hopefully you will like it too, but read no further if you wish to remain spoiler free. NOTE: Read no further if you want avoid learning important plot details before seeing the episode. ![]()
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