How Comcast Cheated Me

I spent the better part of yesterday dealing with customer service issues that nearly caused my eyes and ears to rupture and over the past few days I've received a handful of completely different stories and run-arounds from my bank of ten years, not to mention having to deal with a bunch of work-related headaches.

So I was really looking forward to last night. Not only were the Flyers playing a pivotal game in their first-round series with the Caps, but my years of watching, defending and waiting – all in the name of SMALLVILLE – were about to be rewarded.

I'm no Superman fan. Let me get that out there right off the bat. I prefer my superheroes a bit darker, frequently with some sort of raging psychopathic revenge streak boiling in their blood. But I decided to give SMALLVILLE shot when it came on eight (!) years ago and liked this new take on the Boy Scout's backstory.

Frankly, the highlight of the show was regularly the Luthors: Michael Rosenbaum as Lex and John Glover as his father, Lionel. While Lionel was clearly a villainous, manipulative presence at first and Lex more a shade of grey than truly evil, the characters have progressed and flip-flopped over the course of eight seasons.

Most notably, in recent seasons Lionel has become a protector of Tom Welling's Clark Kent/Kal-El, an emissary of sorts for his Kryptonian father while Lex has been delving deeper and deeper into the dark side, deluded by his beliefs that he's interested in nothing more than protecting the people of Earth.

So, when promos began teasing last night's episode in which Lex killed Lionel – finally delivering on the statement that he is "the villain of this story" – I was quite pleased. Rosenbaum has always been the main reason to watch the show, delivering a layered, nuanced performance as the future super-villain that has been fun to watch. But, to be honest, the flashes of him in full-blown super bad-ass mode have been too few and far between of late and I was really looking forward to some homicidal villainy.

Which meant that it was only fitting that there was some sort of mysterious outage last night that affected DVR cable boxes only, meaning that I neither got to see the first 20 minutes of the show nor did my cable box record it! Argh!