Lana Lang is a character I liked alot and TPTB at Smallville really screwed up...I would hope for some redemption for this character...but that is never going to happen and I believe the character is beyond it. The biggest mistakes... Lana & Lex...WTF? And the whole Kryptonite Girl thing, again WTF? I really liked Kristin Kreuk as Lana...but this is a character forever lost.
Unlike others, I never disliked the character. It just seemed like they didn't know what to do with her after high school. They started to give her these odd storylines that felt forced.
I think she was lost long before she hooked up with Lex. Her complete and utter lack of respect for Clark's privacy ruined the character for me. They were a high school romance not a married adult couple. Lana didn't need to know every single little detail about him and his life. If there were things he didn't feel comfortable talking about she should have been patient and waited until he was comfortable enough to open up to her. Instead she manipulated and spied and proved herself Lex's soul mate when it came to how far she would go to find out his deepest secrets. Lana Lang was scum long before Luthor porked her.
My only real problem with Lana is how the writers wrote it out of the series mostly because of my reaction to the line that Saturn Girl says to her in "Legion" that she has a great destiny!!! Geoff Johns wrote that episode. Then the Smallville writers turn around and make her Kryptonite Woman and bash us over the head that she's toxic to Clark. Yeah we get that guys. We've known that for a few seasons now thanks for ruining Lana and Clark with all their on again off again status and Lana's early oh Clark's not trustworthy business. They just mishandled her character from the start I think. I don't really blame Kristen Kruek for anything regarding how she portrayed that character. I was hoping that Lana would be revealed as the Red Queen so that she could have some redemption. Kryptonite Woman has been missing in this entire Kandorian Storyline.
^ Yes Lana could stop Zod & The Kandorians in their tracks and no Kara is another thing missing...this adds to my love/hate relationship with the show.
The Truth is I never understood what was so special about her! I have nothing againist the actress; well, I used to have nothing againist the actress. But I would never for a heartbeat hold a torch like Clark does for someone like Lana or Kristen Kreuk. Plus every freak of the week was head over heels for her, and it NEVER made any sense. Now Allison Mack is another thing. From the first moment she was onscreen I had a thing for her, and lets face if the events of Smallville were real life so would have Clark. We all know that the strongest relationships offen grow out of friendship. The same could be said for Lois Lane. From the first moment Erica Durance was on screen we were all smitten with her, and it wasn't just her beauty. Her personally was top notch too. But the same couldn't be said about Lana - most times she was just annoying as hell. On top of the above, it was pretty clear early on that Clark & Lana (or more to the point Tom & Kristen) had zero chemistry together, and yet TPTB insisted in forcing the relationship down our throats like it was the cure for cancer. And for what..? Because Clark and Lana were a couple in the comics? We all know that Clark ends up with Lois, that Lana is just a teenage romance and nothing else. And yet from the way the show was written, you would have thought they were of the mind Lois Who?... which would have been fine, but then they brought her into the show in Season Four as a main character. On top of that, they kept bringing them together and then splitting 'em up. Six times by my count, and even for a real relatsionship thats enough. Any other show would have moved the character on to someone, perhaps the man she actually married in the comics, but the casting for Pete was so off (no offence to Sam Jones III, I loved him), that there was no way that he and Lana would ever end up together. Any other show would have re-cast the character, but after Seven years there was no hope for her. And in the end, Lana Lang became a character that by her very presence made the show worse than it ever had to be. Lets hope we never see her again.
Lana Lang, ugh. What made me hate the character is how much we were told how great, awesome, beautiful and perfect she was. Everyone was just all Lana, Lana, Lana! And I didn't see why. And KK couldn't act her way out of a paper bag she played Lana as a bland bitch. Everytime she came up the barn steps and some soft, fluffy, pop song would play? UGGGHHHHHHHHHH. But everyone treated her as she was perfect and everyone loved her because the show-creators were so in love with KK for some reason. And, I'm sorry, Lana is supposed to be a hot red-head.
Amy Adams was on Smallville and she still had a ways to go as good actress. But being cast on Smallville I think would've hurt her career.
^ I think it would have helped her more...her appearance in S1 helped her career. KK I don't think is as bad as people make her out to be. IMHO.
I don't think she would've had the opportunity to make Enchanceed or the second Night In A Musuem movie. And I don't think KK is a bad actress either, but the show's writing didn't help her any.
I think the character was fine as she was probably intended. I think that the network forced the producers to prolong the stupid subplot that kept Clark and Lana staring at each other and not saying anything at the end of every episode, so they could play sappy pop songs, in the theory that this kept the fan base happy. For all I know, 90% of the fan base was happy with this. 90% of the fan base probably weren't Superman fans. Lana pairing with Lex was inevitable and intended from the start. Lana, Lex and Clark were supposed to be a triangle, and Lana was part of the rivalry, and it was intended that each character was responsible for "creating" the other characters. Clark was created as a boy scout by watching Lex's fall and by wanting to become the fairy-tail prince that he hoped his fairy-tail Lana would want. Lana was never the fairy-tail taht Clark thought she was. She was human with flaws and her own dark side. Lex was supposed to bring her down to his moral level, and Clark would see this and grow out of his adolescent fantasies, and realize he was in love with a fantasy Lana that he'd created in his dreams, not a real woman. That was when he was supposed to be ready to move on to Metropolis and Lois. Lex was always probably sociopathic, but probably not a dangerous megalomaniac. But his rivaly and suspicions about Clark, and the competition for Lana, made him drive deeper into lies and deception and manipulation. They were each driving the other further to the extremes of their natural personalities. We all have a bit of these qualities in us, but Superman and Lex Luthor represent extreme situations. This was the story of how they got there. So again, I think Lana Lang was fine as originally intended, and in bits and pieces this story came out over the seasons. The major major flaw in the series was dragging out the constant angst between Lana and Clark for too many extra seasons. The network wanted to milk it. Millar and Gough left the show because the direction they wanted to go wasn't where the network wanted. The direction they were going was dark Lana that Clark would have had to finally reject. Clark's endless love for Kryptonite Girl, where he dumped Lois like a sack of stinking crap at Chloe's wedding party to get lost in the Lana dream again, this wasn't Millar and Gough's story, they were long gone. This was what the network was pushing on us. Kreuk had a few episodes left on her contract, they could have used that to show Clark growing up and he and Lana settling in as mature friends, like Clark and Chloe are. But no, it was one more shot at displaying endless unrequitted love and longing for each other.
Smallville I've read is partially inspired by the Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale graphic novel "Superman For All Seasons" it's one of my favorite all time Superman stories and I love the way how Lana is written. She's an important character, part of Clark Kent's paradigm when he's a young man figuring himself out in the universe. I also like the way how John Bryne wrote her in his "Man of Steel" reboot. Smallville created a new type of Lana Lang and I think weakened her character by making her too dependent on her relationships with other characters. She wasn't able to go on her own sort to speak.
Clark had infinitely more relationship with the cute blonde teleporting girl (Alicia?) than he had with Lana. That was a relationship I cared about and was sad how it ended.
Lana was the least of Smallville's numerous problems. And it also seems like a show that is the peak of the actors' careers -- not a career-builder.
Yeah I agree that Clark's relationship with Alica was far more well written and executed than his with Lana. I really felt Clark's pain when Alica was killed. An echo of the roar that Superman screams after Lois is killed by the Earthquake in the first Superman movie
Exactly, it was well written and acted. So much chemistry and you really did feel for Clark when she died, and I felt the same way about his scream. I think it worked so well because the actress did a good job with Alicia.
One of my problems with the Clark/Lana relationship is that I always felt Clark would have to move on voluntarily from Lana in order to grow as a hero. But he never gets over the relationship. He only stopped it because it literally would have killed him to get close. In order to take the next step, he had to put that relationship behind him voluntarily and he never did. That hurt him as far as I'm concerned. Also, Clark really never grew up during this relationship. To him, he always viewed Lana as his perfect, fairy tale princess when the show had shown him and the audience that was anything but.