I'm usually a huge fan of the digital shorts, and sass others who say they're lame or simply not funny, but I was one of the others last night, and it stung. That is, until Brian Austin Green showed up.

According to KryptonsiteDavid Gallagher (7th Heaven) and Allison Scagliotti (Warehouse 13's awesome Claudia) have been cast as Zan and Jayna in the ninth season of Smallville. And you thought Smallville couldn't sink any lower? Bring on the water transforming Zan. I believe this clever clip expresses exactly why the Wonder Twins should be thrown into lake of fire.

In happier news, TV Guide Magazine has the first look at the cyborg-ish Brian Austin Green who stars in two special Smallville episodes in September as Metallo, the Daily Planet reporter who gets a heart of kryptonite after a tragic accident.

BAG will be playing the role of Metallo, the cyborg villain with the heart of Kryptonite — and yes, people have already noted the irony that he's gone from fighting cyborgs to becoming one himself. He'll appear in at least the first two episodes of the season. The show still hasn't cast the long-awaited General Zod, which may mean Metallo has a bigger role than Zod, or just that Metallo shows up first, as a sort of evil appetizer.

(Insert all-purpose rant about the unfairness of this show being on the air, in its 500th season, when T:SCC was cut off in its prime.)

In any case, with Derek Reese on board, Smallville is starting to sound a little intriguing for the first time in ages. Here's hoping BAG gets to bring half the tortured intensity to Metallo that he put into Derek.

In other news, EW is reporting that this next season really may be Smallville's last, and the CW is talking about creating a spin-off for the show, as a way of extending it. (The same reasoning, I guess, which gave us that abortive "Dick Grayson before he was Robin" show.) Who do you think could support a spin-off? The show's version of the Justice League? Green Arrow/Oliver Queen? Or maybe Kara? Or some new character?

[TV Guide and EW]

• It's pure dumb luck that the final two episodes, airing Monday, form a decent season finale for the show. They just happened to be the last two episodes completed before the writers' strike. Episode 10 is awesome, but would have made a much less fitting ending.
• I started to ask Friedman a question, and when he heard I was from io9, he shouted, "Ease up on us! You're killing us!" Apparently he's been reading our recaps of the show, and thinks we're too snarky. (Which made me feel bad, because we love the show, and have been regularly accused of boosting it too much.)
• My actual question had to do with whether Summer Glau's Terminator Cameron is becoming more Cylon-like, with her apparent emotions and her love of ballet in the last episode. Here's what Friedman said:

  With all due respect to Ron Moore, Cylons have wanted to be like terminators for many years. Probably all of them wanted to be like Blade Runner. [Cameron] is a more advanced model, she has more ability to mimic emotion... Whenever you have any form of cyborg or android, [like] Data, there's always temptation by the writers to stat exploring that whole humanity thing. How far it goes and what the limitations are is something that I'm still exploring.

  He added that he wants to explore these themes in a way that makes sense to casual viewers and feels fresh to people who've watched tons of science fiction before. He said there's a lot of debate among the show's makers about whether Cameron is really feeling emotions, or just pretending to. And if she pretends to feel emotions for long enough, will she eventually feel them for real? He also said he can't watch Battlestar, because it does such a good job with these themes that he wants to deal with them on his own.
• The show tries really hard not to violate the rules of time travel, despite the fact that more people and Terminators are coming back through time than you ever saw in the movies. Friedman figures that Skynet would be cautious about sending back too many Terminators or other devices, because Skynet "understands that causality is so complicated that any one thing might change things." Skynet doesn't want to wipe out the human race before its own creation happens.
• Friedman wants to include more comedy in season two.
• We should find out in season two what happens in that spooky basement that FutureBrian Austin Green went into. If we'd gotten our full 13 episodes of season one, there would have been a second episode dealing with future stuff.
• Remember that whole plot about someone painting mean stuff on the doors at the high school? And the girl who committed suicide? And the mean girls? Well, Friedman hasn't forgotten it either. But apparently a lot of the high-school subplot ended up on the cutting-room floor in recent episodes, partly for length reasons and also because it sounds like some people at Fox are skittish about it. "I definitely had this whole huge storyline i was working on," Friedman said. He had planned to resolve that storyline in season one, and hopes to resolve it in the show's second season. I hope those deleted high-school scenes wind up on the DVDs, because the Terminator/Heathers mashup was my favorite part of the show, and I've been missing it.

This definitely felt like another water-treading episode of Sarah Connor, but at least this time around all the characters felt true, and everybody got a nice bit of character development. Sarah and her pet Terminator Cameron are still searching for the dumb chess-playing computer that may possibly become Skynet, and they have to dispose of the last piece of the Terminator that hunted Brian Austin Green a few weeks ago. And Agent Ellison (now with 1000 times more Bible-thumping, which comes from actor Richard T. Jones' real-life Christianity) runs into Sarah's ex-shrink, now a nutcase himself.

I really liked the stuff about Sarah freaking out in the mental institution, and signing away her right to be John's mom. It makes the present-day wound-up-tight Sarah seem more impressive by comparison, and yet you know she's still freaking out somewhere deep down inside. (But maybe with better drugs now.) When John sees the tape of her relinquishing parenthood, Thomas Dekker's acting actually worked for me this time around. And then when he and Sarah re-bond, I could sort of believe they were related and cared for each other, which was a major weakness in earlier episodes.

Meanwhile, Brian Austin Green continues to be a bad houseguest. He messes up Sarah Connor's bedroom. He fucks around with her guns. He's a paranoid maniac who doesn't trust Sarah's ex-boyfriend or her robot pet. He won't eat his pancakes at the breakfast table like a civilized adult. Was he raised in a barn or something?

I was dreading the Terminator-learns-ballet stuff in advance. It was mercifully brief, but pretty much just as awful as I'd feared. We're obviously supposed to think Cameron (Summer Glau) is growing a "soul" because we see her randomly practicing ballet at the end of the episode. And Sarah's voice-over talks about how if the machines learn to appreciate art and beauty the way we do, they can replace us and become us instead of just wiping us out. It all points to a major weakness in this show, which is that it wants to be Battlestar Galactica. It wants Summer Glau to be like a Cylon, with emotions and a conflicted soul, instead of just a machine with a single purpose. Or at least, it wants to toy with the idea that Summer Glau has a soul.

All in all, this episode was way better than I was expecting, and much better than the last couple of episodes. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for next week's final two episodes, airing back to back. Sadly, the show's ratings continue to drop, and Hollywood insiders are saying a second season still isn't a sure thing.