Smallville's Series Finale - The CW's Finger to the Fans

I just finished watching the Smallville series finale. If you haven't seen it and don't want spoilers, stop reading right now.

For the rest of you...

Ten years. We watched this show for 10 years for one reason: to see the suit. How many times did it suffer horrible words flung at it from critics everywhere, while we fans fought and defended it because we hoped for a happy ending? Through every stupid Lana episode, we held on even though she would never die. With every moronic "I didn't ask for this destiny!" speech we heard from Clark, we kept on tuning in. Even when Lex himself left, we still stuck around through horrible storylines and cheap villains just because we wanted to see the suit.

Yep, I got a million bucks for those ten minutes.

And here we ended up, 10 years later, and we only wanted two things: Michael Rosenbaum to return to the role he made his own: Lex Luthor (check, we got that one), and we wanted to see Welling in the suit. After teasing for weeks on end about it, showing clips of it and even an outline of the cape for a few promos, the night came to deliver.

What did we get? A half dozen long-range shots of a tiny figure in the suit that actually looked less convincing than 98% of the Photoshop fan pictures I've seen on the internet! And when it finally swung around to give us a glimpse, it cuts to a comic book? Are you kidding me??? Do they honestly think we don't know what Superman looks like in the comic books???

Suck it, viewers! You'll never see this! Hahahaa!

Rosenbaum did great, and the "memory loss powder" was a very nice touch that allowed the mythos to step in there for no memory of Smallville. But 10 minutes? And all we got was a speech to Clark and a speech to Tess (right before he killed her...nice touch and points for you there, writers). They should have skipped the whole Darkseid angle and just given us two hours of Clark versus Lex.

Or--and I know this is a crazy thought but hear me out here--they could have given us Welling in the suit! One shot! Just one! If that's all we were worth to you producers and writers, you should have given us one lousy shot.

Now we get to add Smallville's finale to the list of great series bombouts like Battlestar Galactica and Lost.

Hey guys, please let me know when you're starting another series so I can be sure to save my time and money.

Yeah, how you like me now, eh?

On the other hand, I'm sure Brandon Routh is sleeping happily tonight knowing that someone did manage to put together a Superman piece of junk worse that Superman Returns. For that, I'm sure he thanks the writers and producers profusely.

Smallville's season finale...if this is what WB can do with heroes, it's time to stop reading comic books.

The only way they will ever redeem this mess is if they let Welling come into the JLA movie as Superman. Chances of that happening are just slightly less than Spider-Man 3 winning an award as the best comic book film ever made.

Am I wrong? Did you like it? Did you feel those CGI pinpoint versions of Welling in costume were enough? Let your voice be heard in the comments!