Smallville Season 11 - Guardian Thoughts, Ten Years Since Buffy Signed Off

If you are missing Smallville, you have a great option to continue on with the story.  A few months ago, Smallville season eleven started in comic form.  If you have been unable to keep up with it with each digital chapter or by the issues, the first volume named Guardian has been released capturing the first four issues of season eleven.  I just read the this and I give this thing a huge thumbs up.  I am enjoying this so much.  The comic has a great feel of the show with the dialogue and artwork.  It captures the characters and stories so well.  Season eleven picks up six months later from the TV season ten series finale.  Going to move into spoilers here so if you don’t want spoilers, you’ll want to quit reading.  Clark has emerged into Superman.  Lex has returned.  Clark and Lois continue their relationship.  Chloe and Oliver are still progressing with their relationship after getting married.  So, what do we have in season eleven?  A lot happening.  Some visitors from another planet during a storm that had a great reveal at the end of issue four making me wonder where this could possibly go.  Lex launching a space shuttle program with a new hero in charge which is Captain Henshaw.  Superman keeping an eye on Lex to see what his agenda is.  Lex getting a constant visit from an unwanted visitor.  And much more.  Now, let’s really go into spoilers.  Do not read if you don’t want to know the happenings of season eleven.  I really love how the story on the space shuttle program has evolved.  It keeps changing.  Something to protect the human race to it all going wrong.  Superman saves Henshaw who suffers severe burns from the radiation of the shuttle explosion.  Henshaw ends up trapped in his own body unable to communicate but completely conscious in his own mind.  Lex uses this as an opportunity to do something to get rid of his visitor.  Tess has been in his head through all of this so far which has to do with the memory erasing toxin that she gave to Lex.  Lex uses this situation with Henshaw to test something that occurred in the past at Summerholt.  A doctor had been murdered by a patient who was giving him the toxin.  Then, the patient kept saying that he could see the doctor in the room.  They were mentally bonded.  This is happening to Lex and Tess now.  So, Lex uses the Henshaw situation to test moving his mind to a drone.  If all goes well, he could get rid of Tess after a successful experiment.  That goes wrong of course when Henshaw is so enraged with the situation when he is brought to life of sorts in that drone.  Henshaw was already furious with Lex saying that the explosion of the shuttle wasn’t an accident and that Lex had done this on purpose.  That turned out true when Lex revealed to Superman that he had done this as a way to put a radiation trail on Superman.  Anyone with satellites with the capabilities of Lex’s could track him anywhere.  This means that Clark and Lois can not spend any time together.  They can’t be in their apartment together.  Nothing because he could be tracked and his secret would be out.  I am loving this story and the interplay with Lex and Clark.  Just like always that every time Clark gets his guard down with Lex, it comes back and bites him.  So, what is up with Chloe and Oliver?  We keep getting signs that things maybe just aren’t right with them.  Maybe their relationship isn’t as strong as it once was.  Kind of that heat is off the relationship kind of thing.  Chloe has been looking to move once the new watchtower was set up and give them a fresh start but she is having trouble moving on.  Now, they are on the trail of a visitor that came down during a solar storm.  They found that the spaceship was a ship with a Queen Industries logo on it.  Oliver knew nothing of why his company should have a logo on the ship.  One big reveal was that there were two people involved in this storm and ship arrival.  One being hunted and the other being the hunter.  They found a masked person which turned out to be Earth 2 Chloe who was shot and killed in front of them.  She had a warning for Superman of a crisis coming.  That is some of the happenings of season eleven and I’m excited to see where we go from here.  One funny thing that made me laugh immediately was the arrival of Otis right away.  That didn’t take long to get him into the story.  Otis is Otis.  LOL.  I love the scenes especially early on including the talk with Lois and Chloe.  It just felt so much like a scene that you would see between the two on a normal episode.  Bryan Q. Miller is doing a great job of picking up where the story left and writing Smallville again.  Loving his work and loving the artwork by Pere Perez.  If you have been on the fence about getting into the season eleven comic, what are you waiting for?  Get involved and start reading.  I’m loving it and you will too. 

May 20, 2003 was the date of the series finale of Buffy The Vampire Slayer airing on UPN.  It has been ten years since the Buffy finale.  Isn’t that amazing? It was that night that I sat in front of the TV stressing wondering how the show was going to end.  Would my favorites survive?  Would we get a cliffhanger ending?  How would it all resolve?  I’m still happy looking back with how Buffy ended.  I thought the show wrapped up really nicely.  We got a good closure.  With Joss Whedon, it is a definite fear among all of us fans that we just want our favorites to survive.  It is a question that he often gets asked at conventions on why he has this thing for killing off liked characters.  It has almost turned into a joke of sorts cause he knows the question is coming.  Taking heat from fans of different characters from throughout the Whedonverse.  The finish of Buffy saw her taking on what seemed to be impossible odds with the big bad. There was the big hero moment in the finale with Spike where he helped save the world.  This would also play into his return to Angel in the final season of that show later that year.  I still love the image of the Scooby gang up there standing together at the end after the slayer power had been released all over the world.  The look of peace on Buffy’s face of that everything was going to be ok.  The weight of the world was off. I was very happy with the ending of the show.  It just felt like Joss wrapped that finale and the finished story in a nice little wrapped up box and gave it to us fans.  A year later, Angel would give us a different style of finale leaving many things open ended.