This is the thread for discussing where the story takes place, whether it be the farm, the LuthorCorp building, that one room of Lex's mansion that he spends 90% of his time in, the ubiquitous Smallville Medical Center, the Daily Planet, etc.

I couldn't find a proper thread for this question and its been bugging me. Where is Isis located? Smallville, Metropolis or somewhere in between?

It's in Metropolis, I think. They say the street address (or the cross street or something) in one episode... Maybe when Chloe looks at the brochure?

In "Descent," Jimmy tells Gina that the server, where the photo was sent, is at the Isis Foundation, 3rd and Broadway, a 10 min drive (from the DP freezer).

I've been ranting about Metropolis supposedly being three hours away from Smallville, and the improbable commuting.

But have we ever been told how far it is on the show? I know Al & Miles said after... Nicodemus was it?... That it was three hours away, but has a time ever actually been mentioned on the show?

Because in Nicodemus, when they can see it from the water tower, and then in Exodus when Clark has just left Smallville and is on the road to Metropolis, it looks a hell of a lot closer.

Like maybe an hour, or less.

I live in a big city, and my hometown is three hours away. There's no way in hell you can see Melbourne (the city) from anywhere near my hometown.

In Whisper, Chloe says it's a "three-hour drive" in conversation with Lionel and in Truth, Chloe incredulously asks Pete if Clark "is driving six hours to pick up a couple of hot dogs?" when he slips up about Clark's superspeed and him running to Metropolis to get them food from the Shark's stadium.


IIRC, the closeness of Metropolis in Nicodemus is a "mistake" insofar as I believe Al or possibly one of the writers/producers has gone on record stating that it ended up looking a lot closer than they had intended, although I admit I can't find the exact quote.

Ah, in my great DVD rewatch I've only just finished season 2.

So Exodus is another mistake then?

Is it possible, for the sake of fanwanking, that Chloe was exaggerating a bit?

I always wondered, 3 hour drive at what speed limit? I always thought maybe it's 40 MPH road (which is common for those kind of one lane back and forth road like in Exil) that lead to the city, but in the years later do to Luthorcorp's growing presences in Smallville, maybe there is a new highway?

If it's 3 hours at a 40 MPH speed limit, then it would be only only 1hr and a half if traveling at 80 MPH Thus making it a 3 hour commute back and forth.

That's how I fanwak that.

No idea on that one, sorry.


Probably, but even if she's only half an hour off, it's still way off from how easily we see people who do not have superspeed moving back and forth between Smallville and Metropolis.

I admit I didn't really notice it until Hypnotic when Lana arrives at her dorm at Met U only to immediately receive a call from Clark and then turn right around and go back to Smallville. Looking back, Splinter was probably a better indicator, when Chloe arrives at Met U only moments after Clark from Smallville, although that can possibly be fanwanked that Clark was so spaced out it actually took him three hours to get there. :)

Before S5, though, I don't recall it being that much of an issue, for me, anyway. It's just laziness on the part of the writers and not wanting to move everyone but Clark (and possibly Lex) out of Smallville, although I don't know why. The only people I think it's a real problem for are Chloe, Lois and Lana, when she's around. The show can still be "Smallville" so long as Clark's there, imo, and distance isn't an issue for his character.

I don't think Exodus shows him leaving Smallville and immediately seeing Metropolis. We don't see him pulling out of the farm, or passing a "Now Leaving Smallville" sign, and instantly seeing the buildings in the distance or anything. At least I don't believe we do. I always got the impression he'd driven quite a long ways, and they were just showing us his final destination. But I really don't think the show makes that clear one way or the other.

In Nicodemus, OTOH, the city is clearly visible from Smallville, and the producers said at some point that it was in fact an error on their part.



That's the only way I've been able to fanwank it. Either that, or Metropolis is on wheels.

It's like the Lost island - there's some kind of time dilation between the two cities. Or maybe a wormhole opened up at the end of Season 4.

They were doing repaving on the highway in S2 (Magnetic), so that supports that theory.

Another thing: I know as I got older, it always seemed like distances shrunk. I live about forty-five minutes away from San Francisco, but when I was a kid/early teen it seemed like suuuuch a huge trip, because I never went there. I remember telling someone it took two hours. Which is utterly ridiculous. And Chloe also was relocated to this hick town, so I can see her blowing up the distance in her head. So Chloe exaggurating plus a new highway could make up most of the difference (not "Hypnotic" or "Splinter" difference, but the usual "drive to Smallville for very little reason" kind).

That's what I was thinking of! :)

Here's a random question: just when did Lionel have the castle installed in Smallville? Onyx!Alexander claimed to play there as a kid and Lex claimed Lionel never went there, so that means it was before Lillian died, leaving a three year window (89-92). Also, Clark remembers the trucks coming through, so it couldn't have been too soon after the meteor shower. Thoughts?

But whether it was a mistake or not, there it is. Do they want us to ignore it? They can't pick and choose. It's established, so they have to live with it.

I'm going to go with the 'Chloe was wildly exaggerating' theory. Because people, and what they say, can be fallible. What we, and the characters, have seen with our own eyes isn't.

It was state on more then 1 occasion that it's 3 hours though. Wasn't it also mentioned by Chloe it was 3 hours away in Truth and Whisper?

If it was less than three hours, it would sort of take away the "small town" nature Smallville is supposed to have and make it more something like a rural suburb.

Make of it what you will, but in this scene from "Veritas," Lionel tells Lil Lex that Smallville is "just outside the city."

They are going by helicopter, though. I've never ridden in one, but I assume that's a faster way to travel than by car. I also think that can be chalked up to father trying to convince his nine-year old son that this trip isn't going to be boring.

Yes, I think that scene in "Veritas" was the official statement of retcon. Smallville is no longer a remote little hamlet; it's just a suburb of Metropolis.

That wouldn't jive with Jimmy's "had to stop and ask for directions twice and spend half a tank of gas" to get to the Kent farm in Sleeper, though, would it? Honest question, as I also don't drive, so I know nothing of gas mileage. :)

Personally, I just find it difficult to believe it's just a suburb. Farm country, which Smallville defintiely is, imo, doesn't mesh with suburb.

Heh, well, I'm not sure that this will really clear anything up, but my analogy is:

The university I went to is in a fairly rural area about 3 hours from Chicago. I can't imagine anyone describing it as being "just outside of" to anyone, even by helicopter (though the nine-year-old thing maybe makes more sense).

Having said that, it does in fact take me about a half of a tank of gas to get from one to the other. So....

I never saw "Veritas" as a retcon statement. He was trying to talk to Lex as though they were about to go an adventure. I didn't really see it as Lionel actually meaning it was "right outside the city."

If he was just driving around Smallville, I think it would be a lot. It was meant to sound like a lot.

It's the isolated rural suburb 20 minutes or 3 hours away.

My fanwank:
When Clark altered time in Reckoning, he "folded" the space-time continuum and Smallville inadvertently got closer to Metropolis. 43 farms, a dozen people, and 800 head of cattle were sucked into an endless vortex, but JorEl didn't mention it cause Clark was having a bad day anyway.

OR
A wizard did it.

As someone that used to spend 3 hours a day commuting, a from one 'star' city to a big city (in the Midwest too) I can tell you one thing. No one is driving 40 miles per hours. Try 90 at a good day, 60 on a snow day. 50 in a blizzard.

The 3 hour comment I take to mean round trip on an average day. My experience is that Kansas has a decent department of transportation. I can definately tell a difference when I drive out of Nebraska into Kansas when I go to Dallas on occasion.

Where I live (Southwestern Ontario) is mostly farming country, but lots of little towns are very close to major centres. Nobody would call Birr a suburb of London, or Tavistock a suburb of Kitchener, but both of them are definitely farming towns and both are within 15-20 minutes of the (respective) city.

Of course, K-W and London are cities by Canadian standards only. They are not multi-million person megalopoles, as I believe Metropolis is supposed to be. There are no farming towns that close to Toronto, unless (like me) you call the entire GTA "Toronto", and even then, the primary industry of the town would be building houses for commuters, not farming cattle.

It may depend on the boundaries of Lowell County, too. It seems to me that both in North Carolina and Virginia (the two places I've lived) if a county touches the boundary of a city, it's generally considered part of the city's "metro area." So if Lowell County borders Metropolis, it, and the towns inside it, would be part of Metropolis's metro area. If not, then it probably wouldn't.

Yeah, I'm a Torontonian who grew up in the outer suburbs (ie, it wasn't before GTA, but it technically is now) and farm country was still a good 20-30minute drive further out, and definitely no cattle farms. The farm I frequent near Ottawa, on the other hand, is only about a hour's drive from downtown Ottawa itself and they are a working dairy farm, but they're nowhere near considered a suburb.

To me, Metropolis is more comparable to Toronto, though, so I'd expect farms of that size to be not very near the downtown core itself, as a suburb would be. But now we're just getting into personal opinion than show canon.


I've always had the impression it did, though I can't pinpoint anything in canon off the top of my head that indicates this. Granville is also a part of Lowell county, if I'm not mistaken.

Is it still mainly farm country though? I know at the beginning, they definitely made it seem that way, but as time has gone on, a lot of people sold land to the Luthors (right?), there was a big housing development, and the harvest fair thingie seemed a loooot less farm-y this year than it did in "Metamorphosis" back in S1. As cities grow, often suburbs become more city-ish and small towns become more suburb-ish. I live in a "farm town"- it's not a farm town AT ALL (basically, we've turned into a suburb of San Francisco, just kinda far away), but people still talk and act like it is (we have an egg festival every year, heh), much like how they might in Smallville. We know Clark and a few others are still farmers, but does that mean most people are now, like they were when Smallville was the creamed corn capital?

IIRC, they say that- in the second season, maybe? I have the same impression.

With the quibble on the "is it or is it not farm country", which I perfectly understand, I still don't get the 3 hour thing. As kenm would probably agree, 3 hours is enough to drive across most of southern Ontario even using the 2 lane highways. And I would certainly class several rural towns within a 2 hour limit of London as "farm towns" (the pop. being 2000 to 5000 people). Clinton, Exeter, Listowel, Blyth, Wingham, are all much closer than 3 hours to London or to each other and serve large abutting rural areas. If you're not fighting the bumper to bumper traffic, or winding around the sides of mountains, 3 hours driving is 180 miles. OTOH, Lucan or Ilderton, which I also consider rural towns with large farms around them, are 20 minutes from London and both have growing populations of people from the city moving into new subdivisions in those towns and commuting to work.

My issue is not whether it's farm country or how close to a city can farm country be. It's what Smallville represents versus what Metropolis represents. It should be the place that Smallvillers aspire to get to; a land of culture and progress v. the dullness of Smallville. There should be some sort of "challenge" to get there. I know challenge is the wrong word since it's just driving- not like trying to go to Mount Doom- but it should take some time. If you can go back and forth in 20 minutes, I think it takes away from the importance of the dichotomy of the two places.

I thought Granville was its own county.

Since this thread exists and it's going to be a part of S8 I'd like to register my dislike of the Ace of Clubs set. Something about it just irks me. For a club, a recently opened club that's supposed to be so ubercool, there's hardly any people in it (part of the problem is that it seems overly big too). It's too well lit. In fact it's so well lit and so quiet that Lois can sit there and do work while enjoying their awesome happy hour in the middle of the day.

Maybe my problem is that I'm thinking of it too much as a night club and not enough as a lounge. But I was under the impression that it was a night clubby type place.

It's very cheap looking, and stagey. It doesn't seem bar like at all. I was shocked it was to be a regular set. I would have hoped more care would go into a reoccuring location.

I'm expecting a major set overhaul next season.

They've been building and tearing down nonstop since filming for Arctic ended. We haven't seen the Planet since Apocalypse. They've deliberately tried to dodge it (having Lois working on Lex-stuff at the Ace of Clubs). I think they've torn the basement set down. Or, at least changing it so that it looks like an upper floor set (where Lois will work next season, and possibly Chloe again, and possibly Clark). They've also built a section of the city (movie theaters, shops, apartments) on the lot so they don't have to do location shooting anymore (less expensive!). They spent a particularly long amount of time on one exterior that looks like an apartment. The pictures are in some thread in the spoilers section of K-Site forums.

I think the Ace of Clubs is what they wanted to make in season 5 (the commentary of Thirst tells us they wanted a new Talon for the kids to hang out at, something hip and in the city). Unfortunately it seems like they're strapped for cash now, and had to convert Ollie's apartment into a cheap looking club/bar. :\

This might also mean we'll lose the Talon sets altogether (apartment and coffeeshop), now that they have a place to chill.

I say good riddance to The Talon. Though, maybe it will make a re-appearance when Lana returns?

Do you have a link to those K-Site photos?

Could they be doing a season 8 of Charmed? Eliminating location shooting, or at least minimising it, so that they can save money?

I wonder why they didn't go for some kind of pub setting? It would make a good hang out for journalists and they wouldn't have to hire as many extras to fill it up. Plus, every time Clark walks in, people could shout "Clark!" in greeting.

Maybe because they don't think pubs are something cool that would appeal to hip, young kids who want to see gorgeous men. But the pub idea makes so much more sense than the night club idea. What was the name of that place on Murphy Brown's? Pat's?

And that might be the first time I thought about that show in over a decade.

I think too that the Ace of Clubs actually is a bar in Superman. With Bibbo (I'm told not to confuse the owner with Beppo the Kryptonian Monkey, sorry if I err) who is a huge supes fan. If I'm correct, it's supposed to be more pub or sportsbar like. So it's yet another deviation from cannon. So it may be quite deliberate, and associating Lois with the fake pub may be deliberate as well. We shall see.

Someone commented on how brightly lit the Ace of Clubs is. Then it hit me. That's part of why it looks so non-bar like, so sound stagey. Who does bars in white and blue? They are usually dimly lit, in dark colors. Smallville has been doing a lot of these blue lit metalic cold sets recently. Frequently they have been associated with cold evil manipulative stuff. Compare the warmly lit comfortable : Kent Farm, Daily Planet to metal blue lit Lionel's office in the Luthor Corp building or Isis. Then the throwback sets like the Luthor Library or Talon are more warm. So to me this blue lit modern stuff has been "wrong" for a while (but it may just be cheap). I don't see Lois fitting that cold and calculating mold, but maybe she's supposed to fit into shallow poser? Or it's a Doomtender hint?

Anyhow, I hate that set.

This is particularly true in that they changed the lighting for Isis in at least 50% of the shots. Now there is a warmly lit backwash of light against the brickwall. This is particuarly evident when Chloe is in a scene there. The ROLL (now possibly the Chloe Alcove of Competent Hacking Everywhere) is still dark, presumably so the screens show up better, but the outer office has much more light than it did in the past.

Teen Titan IA. The coffee house must go.

I hate the Ace of Clubs set too. For me, it's just too closely associated with tango!Chimmy. Gah, someone get me some brain bleach.

Can I just chime in with how much I hate the Isis set too? It was cool in the beginning, when I deluded myself into thinking Lana would actually pay for spying on Lex and robbing him of 10 million dollars, but now that all of that has gone with absolutely no consequence and especially now that it seems to be Chloe's new hangout spot, I pretty much loathe it.

(I've taken the discussion regarding the 10 million to the all seasons thread).

I don't mind the Isis set but I HATE, hate, hate the Isis logo. It looks like crap. Can Chloe change that?



The thing is, I loved Ollie's apartment set. So the basic set is sound. It's just the redress that is crap. I don't think it's the colours. At least, that wasn't something that jumped out at me.

It just feels really inauthentic. Maybe, for me, it's that the second I saw it I recognised it as the clocktower set. So immediately it felt cheap and fake.

If we have to see much of the Planet this season, what would be nice would be if we could take down all the globes for refurbishment. It would be a nice symbolic touch. They could be sitting around under wraps, or big blank spaces on the walls or what not.

I can dream.

Question about the barn- wasn't the barn loft/FoS built for Clark? Then, why in Kara remember Lara in the loft in the episode "Lara"? Did I get something wrong?

Clark's part of the loft was modified for him, but before that, it would have been just like the other side of the loft, and would have housed hay. So the loft itself would have been there, it just wouldn't have the couches and desks that Clark has.

Phil's :)



And, the Ace of Clubs is actually in Suicide Slum, is it not? Seems like a deviation to me because those folks in the Smallville version don't look like people I'd associate with the Slum that we saw in "Vengeance".



You're not the only one who felt that way.