User Reviews

This episode and the one before "Lord of the Flies" were a 2 parter featurning the Kryptonians. What a MESS.

First off, the continued insistance that visiting Kryptonians can instntly master all the powers of Superman when it has taken Clark a lifetime of practice just to learn to fly, is just silly. That alone doesn't ruin this episode because they do this in every show and movie so this is just one of those stupid Superman tropes.

The Writers clearly knew nothing about the Kryptonians. They seemed to make up everything about them on the spot, and came up will all this silly beaurocracy stuff. Clark had no reason to believe Zara and Ching, and he was far too gullible and trusting that they were not the lying to him and were the usurpers.

Then Lord Nor shows his hand by capturing Smallville and threatening (after killing people) the world and this is NOT evidence to the Kryptonian council that he should be labeled and outlaw and arrested? It was pretty dumb. But what made it worse was he and his felling Kryptonians were a clear and LETHAL threat, literally vaporizing people, and the show made a joke out of everything they did.

The worst part for me was when the tried Clark and found him guilty and scheduled him for DEATH! Have these people read a Superman comic? The Kryptonians don't execute prisoners they send them to the phantom zone.

(Note: This is actually a review of the two-parter as a whole - both Lord of the Flys and Battleground Earth.)

Normally, Lois & Clark does an impressive job balancing the goofy, cheesy side and the dramatic, emotional side. This two-parter does not necessarily demonstrate that, though. There's too much of going into irrelevant things or not taking things seriously when things that should be a HUGE deal are happening. And while I often find the over-the-top villains in this show to be extremely entertaining and fun, in this case, I wish they could've taken things a little more seriously as far as Lord Nor's portrayal goes. It doesn't help that, while he may have been cartoonish, he wasn't terribly interesting - which is not a good combination at all. I barely even know what his motives are, other than generically wanting power. I don't know why he even bothers conquering the people of earth in such a gradual way, or even why he bothers enslaving them rather than just killing them, considering that he and his men have the power to do virtually anything with an infinitesimally minuscule expenditure time or effort. It definitely had good moments and enjoyable parts, don't get me wrong - the ending in particular was great. The final battle was powerful, and there was really great follow-through on previously introduced elements. But overall it felt like a bit of a drag, and a little padded out, which was disappointing considering how very compelling the setup and preceding episodes were. There were some very interesting ideas in here that weren't necessarily made full use of - I especially liked the Kal-El on trial bit, but I think it could've been even better, especially since, honestly, Clark actually WAS pretty guilty of what they were accusing him of! A fact that they didn't seem to highlight much. All things considered, it's not bad, you should watch it if you're going through the whole series, of course, but if you're just picking out an episode to watch for fun or something, you could do better...especially since this is a two-parter; if you don't like it, you'll have more to sit through.