The mid-season jump is already upon us.

Yes, tonight’s episode of Smallville is the last until January 22nd, and while that’s a bit frustrating, the frustration at least stands as a testament to a fairly stellar first half of the season. Pandora was no exception.

Tonight, we finally got to see what Lois saw when she travelled to the future. Of course, the prior visions had been misleading. Where we could easily have jumped to the conclusion that Lois had travelled to a future overrun by a despotic, twisted Clark; what we found was a different story indeed. Spoilers follow - read on at your own expense.

In this “far flung” future world, Clark is powerless beneath a sun made red by Zod’s solar tower. It seems that the Kandorian clones have an inverse relationship with solar rays to true Kryptonians, and this newly reddened sun has restored their powers, making them the ruling class on Earth. The resistance - led by Chloe and Oliver, because of course there’d be no one more suited to the task in all the world - fights a seemingly hopeless battle to stop Tess and Zod’s army. But now, with Lois back, Clark finds his courage again and rejoins them, and together, they turn the tide. Not without losses, though.

Without giving away too much, pretty much everyone dies in the future, but it’s fine, because Lois is sent back to the “present” to make certain none of this ever comes to pass. While Lois’s memories of the future are erased by episode’s end, we’ve seen the future through the eyes of the other characters as they tapped into Lois’s psyche, and now they possess the information she brought back - the information that will save the world. Most specifically, Clark realizes that it was fighting Zod that led Earth down the disastrous path they saw the end results of; a realization that prompts him to instead heed Jor-El’s advice from episode 7 (Kandor) and reach out to Zod as a friend.  What happens next, I don’t think anyone expected.

While this episode felt a bit more “Smallville-ish” than the rest of the season so far, it still held up rather well. The future scenes were appropriately grim, the characters were all on point, and action was really ramped up as the Earth resistance fought against the Kandorians.  My biggest gripe in this episode was that, again, the entire fate of the world hinges around the events of Metropolis and its cast of characters. I don’t recall so much as a mention of other heroes fighting against the Kandorian forces. Maybe I just missed it, but it seems to me people like the Wonder Twins, Cyborg, Aquaman, et. al ought to have been able to hold their own for awhile at least. This is only one year in the future.

Then again, the fact that events have moved at the speed of plot is really the only thing holding this episode back.  As such -

Pandora gets 4 out of 5 characters experiencing their own future deaths