COWBOY PETE’S TOTALLY CURRENT TV ROUND-UP: SMALLVILLE, ANGEL, WEST WING

No fun puppets to be seen this week, and not a lot of smiles to go around.

Smallville: Being a brand new friend of Clark Kent’s is becoming almost as hazardous a pastime as being an old friend of Jessica Fletcher’s. This time around, a friend of Clark’s has to deal with his brother, who dies, only to be brought back to life through an injection of Clark’s blood, which it’s now being implied might have some sort of amazing restorative properties. But with the older brother dying again, the younger brother straps a bomb on his chest and demands an immediate liver transplant for his dying sibling or he’ll blow the whole place to kingdom come, all while Pa Kent’s having open heart surgery…

Okay. I think I know what’s starting to bother me. What made “Smallville” work was that it was essentially “Dawson’s Creek” with one outlandish gimme: The meteor shower which brought us Clark and Kryptonite…earth’s greatest hero and the hero’s greatest weakness, all in one shot. That’s fine. But as the mythos builds and builds, I’m starting to be hit with stuff I’m having a tough time believing. Clark’s an alien. Human blood is complicated stuff. One human can’t even transfer to another without killing him unless the blood’s been typed and matched. So the notion that this alien blood could interact at all with human blood and do anything else other than kill the recipient…or, if the recipient’s dead, make him even deader…is starting to push at the outer reaches of my suspension of disbelief.

Suspension of disbelief is a delicate thing. For instance, I’m willing to believe that Clark is faster than a speeding bullet. On that basis, the end fell apart for me as Clark stood there completely flat footed as a bullet cracks through the window and takes out his friend, but triggering the bomb. Clark is then fast enough to grab lead sheeting, throw it over the bomb, and get it to a safe detonation point miles away, all within seconds…but he couldn’t stop the bullet in the first place?! His superhearing didn’t pick up the gun firing? His super speed didn’t allow him to see the bullet coming? His heat vision couldn’t melt the bullet? What the hëll–?!

The show’s been so solid most of the season, but in recent episodes the endings have been dodgy at best. Fingers crossed on next week’s Adam episode.

Angel: The surface reaction is that, aw cripes, not ANOTHER possessed female becoming the antagonist?!? My supposition is that Mutant Enemy knew way before us that the WB wasn’t continuing the series, and we’re seeing some fast dancing to try and wrap things up, because between the abrupt vanishing of Lindsay and the sudden turn of events, it feels like the season’s been yanked in one direction and then another.

But surface reaction aside, this is not a mere rehashing of Evil Cordy (or even Dark Willow.) Instead, in this Whedon-scripted episode, the real story is seeing how their year-long association with W&H has eviled-up the Fang Gang. I mean, my God: Wes casually shoots an annoying associate in the leg, Lorne threatens to kill Eve on the spot and clearly means it, Gunn (as near as we can tell) crushes the skull of a helpless opponent. And the most terrifying of all: When Angel learns that saving Fred would literally cost the lives of thousands of people, his response is, “To hëll with the world.” His rationale is clear: He’s spent a century saving millions of lives; the world owes him a few thousand. He’s ready to sacrifice unknown thousands for the sake of one person.

The place where Whedon falls down, unfortunately, is that he gives Angel an easy out. The decision point never reaches fruition because events with Fred outstrip his ability to forestall them. What the episode was building toward, and failed to deliver, was an Angel/Spike confrontation in which Angel is ready to make good on his intent to save Fred no matter what the cost, and Spike endeavors to stop him. What a climax that would have been, particularly if it had come down to a final battle atop that hole through the world.

Instead it was almost as if they ran out of either time or budget. The major dramatic point they were building toward never paid off. Granted, Whedon likes to defy expectations, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But the expectation here was a grand, almost epic finale with the underlying theme of a corrupted good in direct conflict with evil seeking salvation. Instead we got Fred with a punk hairdo. The trick is to defy expectations without letting them down, and I feel as if that’s what happened here.

Although you did have to love the beginning of Fred assuring her parents she’d lead a normal, quiet life, and then we smash cut to Fred going Ellen Ripley on some critters. And Angel with the sword through him with the insect on the other end was priceless.

West Wing: Due to a recording glitch, I missed the first eighteen minutes, but between the coming attractions and the subsequent story, I’m pretty sure I’ve got the whole episode.

Although the writing and execution were solid, I’m disturbed by the direction they’ve gone with Hoynes. Previously Hoynes was a decent man whom Bartlet trusted implicitly (remember the “Because I might die” note he wrote to explain why they should keep Hoynes on the ticket?) I mean, jeez, he told Hoynes about the MS years before he told Leo. So now it turns out Hoynes is an untrustworthy creep who was womanizing for years (including, apparently, bagging CJ!) and is ready to trash his former colleagues for political gain to cover his own lapses. I mean, yes, there are people whom you trust who turn out to be dirtbags. That happens in life. The problem is that it diminishes everyone else in the series who ever trusted him, up to and including Bartlet, because they were so completely wrong about the type of person he was. It’s like we’re backsliding to the beginning of the season, when the characters were being turned so completely around that they were barely recognizable as themselves.

And I’m afraid the trend is only continuing. Next week, we’re told, someone has “set up” the Bartlet daughters to look bad. Unless I completely miss my guess, that someone is Will Bailey (Toby’s talking to someone wearing glasses in the trailer: That means either Will or Leo, and I’m thinking it ain’t Leo.) I’ve been complaining about the marginalizing of Sorkin favorite Josh Molina, and now I’m worried they’re going to be forcing him out of the series altogether. It’s like the entire Bartlet administration is self-destructing before our eyes…which, again, admittedly happens in real life. But I don’t need to watch “West Wing” for that. I can tune in CNN or read history books. This was once a series about decent people trying to pull together; not indecent people pulling each other apart.