Should have Stopped with High School

I am not going to go into too much detail for Smallville because it is on its ninth season and I think I can give a brief synopsis instead.  The original concept was to follow Clark Kent through high school as his powers developed.  Recent years have seen Clark as a reporter at the planet and Justice League type stuff but no Superman, per se.  In fact, these recent years is where the problem lie.

The team behind the show has always promised that Clark will not fly or don the tights in the series.  This concept was great during the early high school episodes.  They could allude to the future and make it clever without over the top invincibility.  Well to be honest, problems actually started to arise in the early seasons.  These problems were more the fact that every character was in someway connected to Clark.  This includes a young Lex Luthor.  Which would make you think that later in life Lex could put two and two together and figure out who Superman is, but maybe not.

Instead we continue into the present day where, Clark has become a reporter and even began developing a Justice League of sorts.  So now instead of being about Superman’s youth it is some kind of off-kilter alternate reality.  If you take it as some alternate version that is fine, but my issue is that it isn’t how it was being marketed originally.

I think a better option would have been to maybe just spread high school over four or eight seasons and then ended the series.  With eight you could have summers as seasons ore kept it manageable and stuck with four.  Now I realize some people are thinking that they would be too old toward the end, but besides Kristin Kreuk, playing Lana Lang, none of them were ever in their teens for the show.  In fact Kristin Kreuk was 19 going into the show.  So really the high school years could have been stretched or kept brief.

This show and many others need to come to terms with something that is difficult.  That is to say, that not every show needs to last forever.  A show with a solid story and a planned end can be as successful, if not more successful, than the never ending ones.