My biggest argument against television is the creators never have a plan. Sure, at some point they might work in some plot device, some nugget they consider some grand scheme, but you normally need to have someone with a singular vision to find television where there is a detailed plot line. That's when you get epic television like The Prisoner of Babylon 5. In most cases, especially on long running shows, there are so many executive writers, producers and the like, not to mention consideration of the money people with syndication and some half hearted effort to entice the fans to tune in that the end result of a series run is something less than spectacular.

The hype cannot sustain expectation, that's why, with a good show like The Prisoner, fans are still watching and trying to figure out what it all meant while former fans of ALIAS are, well, former fans.

That brings us to the series finale of Smallville.

Built up as a major event because of it's long run on television, the end of Smallville ended with two bad stories, a messy wrap up of tangling plot lines and awkward corrections of known historical events.

Let's start with the obvious problem with Smallville; it was a TV show trying to do movies. Worse, it was a TV show with a CW budget trying to present a fantasy film. Instead of using this to their advantage, meaning creating stories that lent itself to the restrictions, they tried pushing the envelope. In the end, deciding to do a Drakseid story was wrong. Darkseid is the holy grail of stories, it would be like doing Star Wars. Possible to do but you don't make Darth Vader a cloud! Didn't they learn from the second Fantastic Four movie that you never make an iconic character a cloud! In this case, the writers did have a possible out, which was looking into the works of Grant Morrison for his eccentric take on the characters, but that would have required thought and going out of the comfort zone.

So the creators of Smallville went ahead and messed with the Jack Kirby icons in a way that made them less than. It probably didn't help much that fans could see the real Darkseid and company in the excellent animated direct to video features being made, which only showed how limited the TV series was.

While this event was bad, what happened to Lex Luthor was . . . well really there aren't words that can convey how messed up things got. The creators over the years had gotten so off the Lex Luthor path, even counting it as alternate universe stuff, that getting it back on track to a recognizable Lex meant cloning, consciousness transfer, the wiping out of a father and an until this time an unknown sister and a memory wipe. Oh, and let's have this done at the last hour of the show while weaving in the Darkseid story. Yes, it was as confusing and unconvincing as it sounds.

While this review might come off as sour grapes, the last season of Smallville wasn't something of a surprise. They knew this was the last year well into the planning stages of the last season. It wasn't like HEROES where their fate was in the air. They knew they were at the end and didn't plan on giving the viewer an ending that would be super. The episode, which was two hours long, and very padded at that, was split between a soap opera like wedding event, which obviously wasn't going to happen, and an end of the world confrontation with Darkseid, which would end with Clark embracing Superman.

It was with the Clark embracing Superman that you got the most painful part of the series finale. There is a point where the audience is told the planet that his coming to Earth (I'm not going to go into the impossible physics of how close it was to Earth by this time) will have devastating results in twelve minutes. Clark knows this. In this time he goes to Smallville to meet mom at the barn, goes to Lex to talk to Lex, goes to the Fortress of Solitude to talk to Jor-El. All of this talk when there is a big reg flaming planet coming to Earth! Even before the big red planet is known to be coming to Earth, Clark is talking, and talking and talking.

OK writers, when you have an iconic character don't do stuff reminding people how much better others have done this in the past. Remember in the first Superman movie, way back in 1978, he saved the President's plane? Remember how in Superman Returns he saved a plane? Those were big budget iconic moments introducing us to the character. So, on a CW TV budget, Smallville did the same scene. Worse, they did it with the worse CGI figure ever. Literally, they could have done a better job with wires, a Ken doll and a cape, because the result looked that bad. After he saves the plane, with some struggling it seemed, this Superman (and we're going to go a little into the geek woods for this one) went to crazy 1950s Superman world because this Superman, who kind of struggled with a plane seconds earlier, was able to MOVE A PLANET. It wasn't even struggling Superman from Superman Returns trying to lift an island. This was let me fly real quick to the planet then have it pushed away then have it fly out into deep space fast.

There are so many problems with this episode, which have been a pattern for the series, that it's almost considered typical that it would end so messy, incoherent and disappointing. Fans and casual viewers deserved more from a show ending a ten year run.