Justin Hartley Plays a Dangerous Game on Smallville

Just when I think I am watching one of the best seasons of Smallville ever and it is time to go into a slump, they throw "Roulette" at me. It will probably not be one of the favorites of most Smallville fans this season, but it may well be one of my favorite episodes of the entire series. This is Smallville giving me just what I want from one of my favorite shows.

Many will not appreciate the fact that it focuses on Oliver Queen and not Clark Kent, but what we get here is a perfectly realized character piece (with hardly even a real plot, which I don't care about anyway) that redeems a superhero through a comic-book fantasy and at the same time stays perfectly true to the characters I love on Smallville.

For a long time Oliver (Justin Hartley) has been in a downward spiral, going from the leader of the Justice League to a guy who burns his Green Arrow costume, a person who doesn't actively seek suicide but won't avoid it when he sees it. The episode begins with him meeting a fetching woman named Roulette (Steph Song, in a great guest appearance) and he agrees to go "all in" for whatever game she wants to play. He's thinking about a one-night stand, but he ends up taking a strange pill (note to sci-fi characters—never do that!) and ending up in a coffin, for starters.

Before we talk about Ollie's dangerous game let's tackle Clark (Tom Welling) and Lois Lane (Erica Durance) and their movie date night. Lois is on the outside upset about Oliver's abandonment of even their friendship, but she's also clearly ready to commence with some serious flirtations with Clark. To my great relief the flirting between these two is getting more open, and more obvious. Clark opens up with a great line upon finding Lois at the farm— "Shouldn't you be riding a mechanical bull somewhere? It's Friday night." But Lois steals the date, and, heck, she almost steals the show. Erica Durance is having one hell of a season.