It has begun.

I thought about posting long reviews of each episodes, but meh. That's a lot of work. Instead I'll do short reviews, if I remember.

No spoilers in this thread of episodes from Seasons 5 through 10 please, because that's when I stopped watching originally.

Hey everybody, remember when at the begining of Season 5
they told us in the middle of each episode
that those of us watching first-run
would each get $1,000.00 check in the mail?
Since the series is over, I guess it's OK to talk about it now, right?

"Pilot" --
Good start, gets all the pieces in place in clever ways.

Meteor shower sequence set in 1989: Visually pretty darn good, the visuals still hold up, I think. Although I don't think a meteor striking Earth has such contained impacts, even if they meteorites are very small. e.g., a meteor big enough to smash Lana Lang's parents and their car, wouldn't that just raze the entire block? But Lana and her Aunt are watching from across the street, and they avoid injury by turning around and kind of hunching over a bit.

Acting: Lex Luthor, the Kents and Chloe are great. Lionel too, though he isn't in this first episode much. Clark and Pete are charming, but both seem to need some more experience before they're comfortable in the roles. (Tom Welling gets there pretty fast, as I recall. Pete takes some time, but I recall that he eventually won me over.) Lana is perfectly charming here, but it's hard not to be aware of how annoying she will get, so very soon.

The plot of this episode hangs together pretty well, although it hinges quite a bit on coincidence. It's very convenient that so many significant things are all occurring within a few days of each other: Electric Lad coming out of his coma, the big homecoming game, Lex's arrival in Smallville. How fortunate that all of these things occurred within days of each other, else this pilot would not be quite so interesting.

Cringe inducing dialogue: When Lana and Clark happen to run into each other at the graveyard, Lana explains that she comes there often, so she can talk to her parents' grave. A pretty common thing, I think, both in real life and certainly in TV shows, but I guess since Lana is a typical self-conscious teenager, she says, "You must think I'm pretty weird." I could buy that line, but she follows up with, "... you know: conversing with dead people." Thanks for putting so fine a point on it, writers.

But most of the dialogue in this episode is pretty good, I think. There are a few other things that make you go "huh," mostly because they're too on the nose, but they're mostly workable, in large part because of the actors. I like the bookending dialogue about when toddler Clark first showed up in Smallville ("We didn't find him; he found us.") Also, even though it's pretty on the nose, I like that when the villain says, "I have a purpose, and a destiny," Clark retorts with a totally bad-ass, "So do I."

The Krypto-necklace around Clark's neck is a total callback to the first Christopher Reeve film, and they deliberately subvert expectation by having Lex Luthor be -- instead of the one who puts it on Clark -- the guy who helps Clark escape. Nicely done. That said, there's just no reason for Whitney to have put the necklace on Clark. He has no idea that the green rock is making Clark weak, he just thinks Clark is a wimp. It's justified as a symbolic gesture, but it's completely counterintuitive. "Stop making time with my girlfriend, Kent. By the way, here's her necklace, hold on to it for me, will you?"

Mythology stuff established:
*He's only got three powers right now: Super strength, invulnerability, and super-speed.

*Lex lost his hair from getting caught in the Kryptonite meteor shower, when he was nine. (This means he's 21 years old in the present day. Six years older than Clark and his classmates, Pete, Chloe and Lana.)

*The Kents in this version of the story are really young.

*We are told that Lana's necklace is made out of one of the meteors, and we are shown that Clark loses his powers, and becomes sick when he's near the necklace. It's never explicitly spelled out in the dialogue, though, and it will be a long time before the green stuff is named "Kryptonite" in the show.

*Clark has a crush on Lana, and Chloe has a crush on Clark.

*Clark's dad won't let him join the football team; he's worried that in a moment of stress, Clark might injure someone.

*Lana is a cheerleader, and she's dating Whitney, the quarterback.

*Twelve years ago, right before the meteor shower (like literally minutes before), Lionel Luthor, whose main company is based in Metropolis, bought a factory in Smallville. As of the pilot, he's put his 21-year-old son Lex in charge of it. We're not really told why. But it manufactures fertilizer. That's gotta be a real money-maker. Go Luthorcorp!

*Lionel Luthor is a hated figure in the Smallville community, particularly by Jonathan Kent, because he apparently swindled a bunch of folks there out of their land. Then at some point he shipped the Luthor Ancestral Home from Scotland, stone by stone, and had it rebuilt on that land he swindled folks out of. We're told that once he had done that, Lionel never even set foot in the house. So why would he do that? (Lex's answer: "Because he could." That is an unsatisfactory explanation.) Anyway, now Lex lives there.

*Lex takes fencing lessons from a pretty lady. When she beats him at fencing, he gets very angry.

*Clark has known he was adopted for a while, but he doesn't learn that he is an alien until this episode, when his dad explains it to him, and shows him the space ship he arrived in. (The Kents keep it in the storm cellar.)

*Chloe is a plucky reporter, clearly mean to be a proto-Lois Lane. Somebody has to be, since it would violate continuity for Lois Lane to ever show up in Smallville! Chloe has developed a wacky theory that the reason so much crazy stuff goes down in Smallville is because of the meteor deposits. For some reason, she's the only person in the whole town in twelve years to twig to this.

I guess that wasn't so short. But it's the pilot! So much to talk about.

What bitter irony.

Lex loses his hair?

SPOILERS!

How could I be so careless?

I liked Smallville up to a certain point. The first 3 seasons are grea, and still hold up, but but after that I'm not as intothe show. I'm not sure when the show started to lose it but the last couple seasons don't thrill me like the early run does.

I watched the entire series as it aired and liked it enough that I bought all 10 seasons of Smallville at the end of last year. Then I got into rewatching other stuff and Netflix got a ton of shows I was into and never rewatched any of it.

This thread might be the push to get me to start from the beginning.

Episode 2 "Metamorphosis"

After last episode showed that a person caught directly in the wash of the meteor shower got super powers (he could control electricity and such), this episode shows that even someone today can get superpowers, if there are meteor fragments doing something kooky. Kryptonite in this show reminds me of the wild card virus in the GRRM series. As the series progresses, the green rocks get more and more magical, to the point where they seem to grant powers just based on the psychology of the recipient. (Like, salesmen get the power to persuade people to do things, boy-crazy cheerleaders get the power to make their boyfriends into devoted love-slaves, Chloe gets the power to make people tell the truth, etc.) But for right now, they at least try to justify things in a psuedo-scientific way. In this case, bugs that were exposed to the meteors become green and glowy, and when a person is bitten by them multiple times, he becomes bug-like.

This show is a really obvious confluence of influences. While the Superboy parts of the Superman mythology are the stated source material, the show really draws a lot from the "pretty young people with problems" genre that the WB was cornering the market on back then (with shows like Felicity and Dawson's Creek and Gilmore Girls and such). But then mixing in the "plucky teens fight menaces" angle of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The idea that Smallville is a crazy town where crazy sh*t goes down because there are meteor deposits everywhere is very much kin to the Buffy thing, where crazy sh*t went down because it was built on a Hellmouth. (Right?) Since Smallville isn't primarily horror/supernatural, but is meant to be more sci-fi-esque, the actual nature of the threats are psuedo-scientific, but drawn somewhat blatantly from the X-Files. A lot of the superpowers that people exhibit in these early episodes have counterparts in some episode of X-Files. (Or so I'm told.)

So it's Superboy meets Buffy meets Dawson's Creek meets X-Files. With such an innovative and original premise, it's surprising that this show ever found itself veering into cliche or trodding on well-worn thematic ground.

So a loser kid who collects bugs and obsesses over Lana Lang (to the point of videotaping her from afar) becomes a Bug-powered super-villain. (Chloe calls him Bugboy, and also at one point says that he's "gone Kafka." Oh Alison Mack, is it any wonder that 23-year-old Doot was in love with you?) The actor who plays him is pretty great. A lot of the "freaks of the week," as fans came to call them, did some great over-the-top acting.

In many happy coincidences, Greg the bug boy was friends with Clark and Pete when they were little kids. The three of them were a little club who would hang out in a treenhouse and such. Happy coincidence 2 is that now, when they're all teenagers, Greg is crushing on the exact same girl Clark is crushing on. He is only the second freak of the week ever, but his target is a high school kid, just like the previous one, and so just like with Electro-Guy, Clark is well positioned to discover the villain's intent and stop him. It's funny how even though the town is loaded with Kryptonite, the only people affected by it are high school students or high school teachers.

Random things:

*Technically, the first episode never explicitly stated that his only three powers are strength, speed and invulnerability, but it's pretty strongly implied. In this episode, Clark wakes up from a dream floating above his bed, and upon realizing what he's doing, crashes back down. We learn this is the first time such a thing has happened to him. It's the first hint that Clark already has the physical ability to fly, but he's got some kind of psychological block that prevents him from doing it, i.e., he can't fly because he doesn't think he should be able to. I think this is confirmed around Season 4, when he is able to fly when his mind gets taken over by some Kryptonian mind-control stuff. (The details are hazy in m'brain.)

*This show is VERY aware of earlier versions of the Superman story, but it's particularly in the shadow of the Reeve movies (they even cast the Reeve movies' Lana Lang as their Martha Kent). This show continues to evoke the bit in the first movie when Lex hid some Kryptonite in a lead container, but again does it with an eye toward messing with our expectations of Lex. Lex gets the necklace and puts it in the lead box and gives it to Clark, but here he's trying to help Clark, not hurt him. Nice little twist.

*Michael Rosenbaum is so much the star of this show. His characterization, as a guy who has the best of intentions, but rubs people the wrong way because of his father, his own past, and his own cockiness, just works perfectly. I think I heard somewhere that Rosenbaum deliberately tried to play the character as if a lot of what he was saying was lies, or at least not the entire truth. The dramatic irony of the show was that, at least in these early episodes, he often IS being sincere, he just *seems* like he's not, because he's so damn smarmy. It's a novel approach, I think.

*We're explicitly told that Lana's necklace is made from the meteor that killed her parents. (This was virtually said in the pilot, but never outright spelled out.) As the audience all goes, "Wow, what a f*cked up thing to do," Lana explains it's symbolic meaning, which was explained to her by her Aunt Nell, who has raised Lana since her parents died and who originally had the necklace made. (How exactly would she have done that, anyway?) It's about how change can be beautiful, or it can be painful, and often times it can be both. Kristen Kreuk pulls it off, despite the corniness. Oh Kristen, such a shame that you are pretty soon going to become so loathable.

*At one point, Jonathan Kent pshaw's Clark's theory that the meteors are what has made Smallville's citizenry so weird and super-powery. Jonathan suggests that it's actually the Luthorcorp fertilizer plant that's been pumping out horrible chemicals for twelve years now. Interesting; I kind of like the idea that maybe it's a crazy killer combo of the chemicals and the rocks; it would make it at least a little bit less ridiculous how the Kryptonite is so inconsistent in what it does on this show. You could handwave it as saying different combos of Luthor-chem and Krypto-rock create different effects, and it would be a nice idea if Smallville as a town was the bastard child of Kryptonian radiation and Luthorcorp science. But I don't think anything comes of this. Before long it's pretty much established that the rocks are the unequivocal only cause of all the mutations and such.

*Bug Boy's origin sequence at the start reminds me of that bit in Moore's Swamp Thing #26 or 27, where Matt Cable gets in a car accident and then a bunch of bugs go in his mouth. I wonder if that is or isn't coincidence?

*Clark learns for the first time, by experimenting with proximity Lana's necklace, that the meteor rocks mess with him. There's a cool visual effect, where his hand gets all green and veiny. So the writers make it very explicit here, for anyone who didn't get it: The rocks make Clark weak.

*This episode also establishes that lead can block the effects of the rocks. Although over the years, they'll get really inconsistent with this kind of thing. There's at least one episode I remember where a guy just hid some kryptonite under his jacket. He lured Clark close, and Clark was totally fine, then opened his jacket to reveal a giant necklace with like fifty rocks on it, and Clark immediately goes down. Was the jacket lined with lead?

*Despite the fairly weak dialogue and coincidence-filled plots, this show was, to me, pretty novel during these early episodes. The idea seemed pretty fresh at this point, young Clark fighting villains whose powers were due to prolonged Krypto-exposure, which usually mean that to confront the villains, Clark would have to go to the place where that exposure occurred, and then end up getting weakened because, hey, Kryptonite. It so quickly devolved into formula, but it's still pretty fun here.

*Lex is really really keen to be Clark's best friend. It's a bit comical here, but I can buy it. Over the course of the season, we see how Lex views his life as an epic, and when Clark saves that life in the pilot, that clearly means that Clark is an important player in Lex's own story. It's nice in this episode, where Lex makes a point of meeting Lana, so that he can un-subtly suggest that she break up with Whitney and date Clark instead. Pretty darn great.

*At one point, Clark, Pete and Chloe are investigating Bug Boy's house, and they find the corpse of the boy's mom. (Cause he killed her earlier.) You'd think that would be kind of traumatic for all three of them. Fifteen years old and bam, just discovered a dead body. Later, Lana is kidnapped by the Bug Boy and wrapped in some kind of cocoon. Also, probably pretty traumatic. I'm sure in Episode 3, we will see all these characters dealing with the trauma, rather than acting as if they're just normal teenagers living their normal life.

*On the commentary track of this episode, Millar and Gough (series creators and the writers of the first two episodes) make fun of their own plot holes, which I found pretty charming. There's a point when Bug Boy knocks Whitney unconscious, then kidnaps Lana. Clark finds Whitney as he's waking up. Whitney says, "He took her north, towards the woods." On the commentary track, one of them asks, "How does he know what direction they went? He was unconscious." The other replies, "He's just very intuitive."

*After saving Lex from a car crash in the pilot, Clark saves Whitney from a car crash in this episode. It's kind of weird, because you kind of get the impression that before the pilot, nothing all that extraordinary has happened in the lives of these characters since the meteor shower. Jonathan and Martha raised a superpowered kid, but apart from that, things seem to have been kind of quiet. But man, starting in the fall of 2001, Clark is just always on the move: Saving lives, fighting supervillains, discovering dead bodies. I mean it is literally every week.

*After Whitney coming off as a total villain in the pilot, the creators try to finesse him back into being more sympathetic in Episode 2. He explains last episode's shenanigans as him just going crazy with jealousy when he saw Clark trying to mac on Lana. He even apologizes to Clark in this episode, or starts to, but then he looks away for a second and Clark speeds off. That's a bit they'll do a lot, but it's charming when it happens this first time. I like the idea that Clark was too busy having to go be super to listen to the football jock humble himself.

*Also a nice bit: While Clark is the one who beats Bugboy's ass (Bugboy ends up accidentally killing himself at the end of the fight), Whitney is the one who finds and rescues Lana. So Clark gets none of the glory. I like that better. I feel like the writers eventually got lazy about finding ways for Clark to not get the credit for his good works. I think it's more effective dramatically that way, and also more realistic. How many lives can Clark save in one small town while still effectively being just some high school kid that nobody really notices?

I haven't bought Season Ten yet; I'm hoping it will go down to $15 like the other seasons have.

I waited and bought them all on Amazon at $14.99.

Do you buy on DVD? Amazon has season 10 listed at 14.96 right now.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003L77GG0/?tag=imwan-20

This thread is awesome.

Also, talk more about how awesome the Kents are. Thanks.

Episode 3 "Hothead"

(Every single episode title of this series is a single word. All 200-some episodes. Who knew there were so many single words?)

Lana was established as a cheerleader in the pilot. I seem to recall that she's in a cheerleader outfit in her official "Smallville" action figure. But only three episodes in, she quits the squad, never to return. A nice twist, and a good way to take the character out of of cliche territory.

Clark joins the football team despite his dad still not wanting him to (giving a lot of the same arguments he already gave in the pilot). But at the end of the episode, he quits -- partly because Lana is no longer a cheerleader so what's the point? And partly I think because he realizes that his dad had a point. Also, he is maybe turned off of football by the supervillain coach.

The evil coach has the power to manifest and manipulate fire. He got it because the coal that he uses to heat up his sauna is made up of green rocks. (I think this is the first episode where Clark calls them "meteor rocks," which is their official name until Christopher Reeve shows up in Season 2 (I think) to say, "It's called Kryptonite, you idiots." So, because he was breathing in hot fumes, his power involves fire, which is also hot, just like fumes are. That is damn scientific.

John Schneider's Jonathan Kent is really good in this episode. Actually I think he's just a good actor in general. He's so good in this role, you can really buy him in every moment, whether he's being the stern tough guy or the kind, sensitive dad.

Some of the writing on this show is so facile. It all reads like first drafts, which I guess a lot of TV scripts probably *are*, but still. Some of it really seems like placeholder dialogue. In this episode, Lionel Luthor (in his first scene of the series that is set in the present day) tells Lex that since the Smallville fertilizer plant is 20% behind projections, he must cut 20% of his workforce. Lex says that he is going to, instead, increase his workforce by 20%, and when his dad nixes that, he comes up with a new plan that will increase their profit margin by 20%. I mean ... honestly, couldn't they vary that figure a bit? The fact that it's the same very time is so distracting, as is the fact that it's so damn big. TWENTY? I know later episodes establish that this plant is huge and employs a really large number of workers. Twenty percent would be ridiculous, to just cut or add on a whim. Also, it bugs me that every time they talk about it, they say "workforce." Never employees or anything. The writers on "Smallville" don't believe in synonyms.

After establishing in the pilot that Lex likes to fence, this episode eschews any subtlety regarding the Lex/Lionel relationship, as they literally swordfight to see who will decide what's best for the company. I kind of like it, though. Especially that Lionel lectures Lex even as they're breathlessly whacking away at each other with epees. "Your moves are rash, son, with no regard to the consequences of your actions." It reminds me of something Claremont would write. Hence it is good.

This episode also states explicitly why Lionel exiled Lex to Smallville. He says something about how Alexander the Great sent his sons to the farthest reaches of the empire so that they could learn how to do things on their own, in the real world. Lionel doesn't really see Luthorcorp as a company or himself as just a business man. He tells Lex at the end, in response to the miracle 20% plan, "Empires are not built on clever bookkeeping." He seems himself as a conqueror, and his company as an empire. It's over the top, but I think it's appropriately melodramatic for the father of a future super-villain, and John Glover always acts these moments really well. (Lionel's "thing" for a while will be comparing himself and/or Lex to characters out of legends or myths.) And the writers are actually somewhat subtle here. They don't out-and-out say that Lex is actually named after Alexander the Great, but it's sort of implicit. (In later episodes, the writers will spell that out, for dummies like me.)

This series is obviously one giant prequel, and it's often prone to making little nods to the future. In this episode, Lex tells his father, "You have no idea what I'm capable of," which rings with the appropriate sense of foreboding. Rosenbaum always does great with this stuff too. He and Glover were a great match. (I also love that Lionel has unruly long hair and a thick beard to match, to totally contrast him with Lex.)

Lana gets a job as a waitress in this episode, and then gets fired after a couple days because she sucks at it. These characters were still likably human at this stage. And the way Lex and Clark share a laugh over Lana's waitress-suckitude is pretty great.

This episode has an exchange that totally sold me on this show. When the overbearing jerky coach tries to browbeat Clark into joining the football team, he says, "I remember your father. One of the best players I ever coached; he had a god-given gift. It's in your genes, Kent." And Welling very sanguinely replies, "Actually I'm adopted." (Not only is that a great bit, but they even pay it off at the end. When Clark beats the coach's ass at the end and the coach wonders how Clark is doing these super feats, he says, bad-assedly, "It's in the genes." Pretty, pretty great.)

There's a weird bit in this episode where the coach makes the TV in his office burst into flames, right in the middle of an argument with Principal Kwann. Instead of the principal panicking, or grabbing a fire extinguisher, or running into the hall to trigger a fire alarm, he just looks at the TV with confusion, and says, "What's going on here, coach?" Then he just walks away, and a few minutes later we see him calmly walking to his car. A-wha? There's no outward evidence that the coach caused it, but even if Kwann somehow sensed that the coach was responsible ... wouldn't he still try to put the fire out, or run away and find a phone and call the fire department?

I'm not quite sure what happens to the coach at the end of this episode. It seems like maybe he is consumed in his own flames? Bugboy unequivocally died at the end of the previous episode, but this one is kind of vague. At the end, Lana says to Clark (while they're both standing in the football field), "I heard about the coach. Pretty weird." And Clark replies, "He won his 200th game and wasn't even here to see it." Meaning he wasn't on the field? Or not here, among the living?

This episode gives more evidence of Chloe's crush on Clark. At one point he apologizes to her for being rude, and she smiles a huge smile and says, "It's amazing how far that Kent charm will get you." She is just so irresistibly cute when she does that. Then later when the coach tries to torch her office (oh yeah, Chloe is in charge of the school newspaper, that was established at some point ... I think in the previous episode, actually) ...

... anyway, the office is all on fire and Clark heads to her rescue, but before he gets there she actually almost saves herself by being totally bad-ass and just jumping through the flames after covering herself with a long jacket. If the flames weren't telepathically controlled, she'd totally have saved herself. She's so awesome. When this show was in first run and I would talk about it with friends who also watched it, I would make a big thing of how Clark sucks for liking Lana better than Chloe. Chloe just rules.

Another awesome Chloe thing. After some football players are caught cheating, they get kicked off the team. When they are later seen acting weird in public, Chloe asks Pete (who's still on the team), "What's up with your fallen brethren?" They gave her such a great vocabulary, and Alison Mack always made it charming and funny and great. (In the pilot, she refers to Smallville as a "leafy little hamlet," which is also awesome.)

Shoot, I forgot if it was this episode or the Bug Boy episode, but in one of them Lana shows up in Clark's barnyard loft/hangout for the first time, and Clark says, "My dad calls this place my 'Fortress of Solitude.'" These kind of references were always fun, although they did make you wonder things like ... what will he call his ACTUAL Fortress of Solitude, when he gets one?

We learn from Martha Kent that she and Jonathan actually isolated Clark a lot growing up -- didn't ever let him join teams or playgroups or whatever. An interesting touch, and goes some way towards explaining why a fifteen-year-old kid who looks like a dreamy-eyed, perfectly muscled adult male model is such an outcast.

At one point early on, the coach says to Whitney, "Hey, how do you think Clark would do on the team?" Whitney rakes Clark with a pretty harsh glare and then says, grudgingly, "He might do all right." Wow, Whitney. I know Clark is crushing on your girlfriend, but a week ago, he pulled you out of a fiery car wreck. Why the hate?

Oh, sweet. I swear the last time I looked it was like 30-something.

I shall. In fact, I even did, before reading this post!

Three reviews! You type fast!

I really get into this kind of thing, for some reason. It's easier than writing original material ...

The coach tries to torch the Torch.

DRAMATIC IRONY.

(I'm really sensitive about spoilers, so ill stay out of this thread, as I have not seen these episodes)

Episode 4, "X-Ray"

Watch as the show slowly and insidiously descends into formula. There was literally only one episode between this one and the bug-boy one, and we've got another evil teenager with powers, raised by a single mom (whom the teenager then kills), obsessed with Lana Lang, and eventually defeated by Clark. (I guess that last part is fine ... that should always happen, probably.)

I don't think I'd ever seen Lizzy Caplan before watching this episode for the first time, but I really dig her here. Like Bug Boy, she's really over-the-top evil, but the acting is so good that it seems just sort of fun and comic-book cool, rather than corny and lame. Caplan would go on to play an unpopular girl obsessed with a more popular girl in "Mean Girls" years later, and she also is in "Cloverfield" which is a movie that rules. She also was a supporting actress in the last few episodes of "Tru Calling," and she was good in that too. ("Tru Calling" and "Smallville" both filmed in Canada, so there are quite a few character actors who turned up on both shows. Erica Durance was in an episode of "Tru" where she played a ditzy beauty pageant contestant, a couple years before becoming the Best Lois Lane Ever.)

Tina Greer's power is that she can make herself look like whoever ... well, she's Mystique, basically. They explain this as being due to her having been caught in the meteor shower when she was three, and somehow absorbing Krypto stuff into her bones. I'm not sure that makes sense. I guess altering your bone structure could make your face change shape, but how would that let her alter her skin tone, or hair color/length/texture? (Or make her hair go away entirely, since the first thing she does in this episode is impersonate Lex Luthor?) And how does she make her voice sound exactly like the people she's being?

But they wanted to make it be that her bones were the weird thing about her, because this is the episode when Clark gets X-Ray vision, and they wanted to have it be a thing where only by using his X-Ray vision is he able to tell when someone is really who they claim to be, or is actually the evil Tina Greer. He also uses his X-Ray vision to find money in her locker (proving she is the Lex Luthor impersonator who tried to rob a bank) and to discover the corpse of Tina's mom. I love how in the space of two weeks, Clark and Pete have found two dead bodies, both of them parents murdered by their teenage offspring. And once again, the bad guy kidnaps Lana and almost kills her. It's funny how at the start of every episode, Pete and Lana and everybody else are just normal kids talking about normal sh*t, and never seem to have any kind of insight or maturity despite going through these intense experiences. I mean, they see more violence and death in a single month than most typical policemen or soldiers. How are these fifteen-year-old kids just blowing these experiences off?

I think this episode is the start of annoying Drama Queen Lana. She finds her mom's diary and spends much of this episode being all weird about how her mom was an unhappy teenager. I'll give the writers the benefit of the doubt here, though -- there's one scene where Lana goes really over the top and drama-queeny and tells Clark, "You're the only who sees me as I truly am," which is horrible and lame, but then she kisses Clark on the lips and you realize, oh, it's Tina Greer. Nice fakeout. Then Tina throws him out of a window with her super-strength that she has because of krypto-bones.

The writers get yet more mileage out of that Kryptonite necklace that Lana wears. Tina steals it so that she can complete her usurpation of Lana's identity, so for the big fight with Clark, she's wearing a magic Clark-weakener without realizing it. Pretty cute. (And, I think, the last clever use of it. I'm pretty sure that necklace is going to get written out pretty soon, and in the meantime, the writers pretty much forget that it should be making Clark weak whenever he gets near Lana.)

This is the first episode where the Kents are just talkin' in the kitchen, shooting the breeze and someone's rhetorical question is replied to by someone who is just outside, with their face pressed up to the screen door. (It's Lex, in this first instance.) For some reason, these guys never close their door, but they still will blithely talk about Clark's powers and other secrets. Even more goofy, they never really seem concerned about it. Like they'll talk about Clark's powers, and then five seconds after changing the subject to pie and ice cream, somebody will speak up from outside the screen door, "Did someone say pie and ice cream? That's my favorite!" And the Kents never think, "Shit, how long was that guy out there? We were just talking about how Clark is an alien with super-powers, literally five seconds ago."

Tom Welling's acting is already so much better. I remember talking with people online back when this show was still in the early seasons, and people really liked to slam Welling for seeming like just a dumb model who got a lucky acting break because he looks like Superman, but I don't think that's fair. He's awkward in the pilot, but I think a lot of his "dumb" moments are deliberate acting choices. He's still figuring stuff out. There's a moment in this episode where he gets a flash of x-ray vision (he can't control it at first), and his mom asks him, did it happen again. Welling just kind of blinks and nods stupidly. To me, that just strikes me as a realistic reaction from an overwhelmed teenager. A similar moment later, when he's trying to use his x-ray vision to confirm his theory about Tina's bones, and Tina gets real pissy at him and says, "Why are you always staring at me?" He just kind of stares vacantly, says, "I don't know," and then rushes away. Again, it makes Clark look a bit ineffectual, but he should be sometimes. He's not Superman yet, dammit! (Welling also is good at comedy, I think. His expression when he accidentally uses his x-ray vision to peep into the girls locker room is so perfect. Any kind of leer would be totally off-putting, but his expression is one of pure, adolescent joy. Pretty brilliant.)

Short notes:
*This is the first episode wherein Chloe does not assist in the figuring out of the freak of the week. Instead she helps Lana deal with her dumbass problem. (Although, hey, why does she say that she transcribed the valedictorian graduation speech "last year"? Aren't Pete, Lana, Clark and Chloe all freshmen? For that matter, why is she in charge of the school paper? Wouldn't an upperclassman be doing that?)

*Longer running subplots are initiated in this episode, all involving Lex and a sleazy newspaper guy. 1.) We learn that Lex has saved the car he crashed into the water in the pilot, and desires to figure out "what really happened." 2.) A mysterious incident is referenced from Lex's past, involving "Club Zero." (There will be other references to this, before we finally learn the full details in Episode 14, "Zero," an episode I remember being super-awesome at the time.) 3.) The sleazy reporter guy will be a presence, trying to learn Clark's "secret," right up to the Season One finale, wherein I think he probably dies. Luckily he is only one of dozens of people whose entire raison d'etre is to discover Clark's "secret."

I am following the "Cringe Inducing Dialogue" mini-feature.

Episode 5, "Cool"

This is the first episode where they start to go, perhaps, overboard with the cutesy references. I feel like starting here, every episode will have some double-meaning type reference to Superman's mythology. This one has three:

1.) Chloe comments that it's really cold out and Clark says he feels fine. She cleverly zings him with, "What are you, from an ice planet?" That's a bit forced.

2.) Clark is prepping for his friend-date with Lana and Chloe helps him pick out outfits. She grabs a blue shirt out of a laundry basket, holds it up to him and says, "Blue's a good color on you." That's a little better, more understated. Especially followed up with Clark's naive, "Really?" (I wonder if this is the point where they start always dressing Clark up in combos of red, blue and yellow.

3.) Chloe mocks Clark by saying that a woman can be attractive even if she doesn't have "raven hair and the initials L.L," which obviously in the show is a reference to Lana, but can't help but evoke Lois Lane. (Although when Lois does show up on this show, she doesn't have black hair, go fig. Also, she turns out to be Chloe's cousin. What a coincidence!)

The villain in this episode is a womanizing jerk, but he's the first one to not be full-on crazy evil. After plunging into an icy lake with meteor rocks at the bottom, he becomes unable to retain heat, and also has the ability to absorb heat from other human bodies, which "recharges" him temporarily. So he's the first freak of the week who isn't maliciously using his power, but is physically forced to use them in order to survive (or not be really, really cold all the time, I guess). Although that said, by the time he tries to absorb Chloe's sexy heat, he seems to have reached crazy-evil-killer mode. Funny when he says to Clark "Your mom is hot!" though.

This episode's dialogue is fairly snappy, and I even like the not-overdone use of temperature related puns. Whitney tells Shawn that his treatment of women is "cold." When Clark notes that Shawn is a womanizer, Pete says "He's always been cool to me." And Chloe says that Sean is "really hot." (I remember watching this episode in first run with my mom, and she said, "No he isn't!" That kind of misses the point of the line, surely? Tsk, moms.) Also, Shawn's last name is "Kelvin." Ho-ho!

Another favorite line of this episode is when Chloe refers to Lex Luthor as "follicly challenged."

Lex is once more hilariously tactless and rude when he tries to break Lana and Whitney up.

Speaking of, Lana gets mad at Whitney in this episode, because he is going to watch a fight on Pay Per View instead of driving her to Metropolis so they can visit the art museum. This is the kind of thing I mean: Last week, she almost got killed by a psychotic shape-shifter. Wouldn't an argument like this seem incredibly trite after that? This show is so weird about continuity -- there are ongoing subplots and character arcs, but the freaks of the week seem to exist in these little bubbles, and are totally forgotten about. Like, shouldn't the Lana/Whitney argument be along the lines of, Whitney wants to hang with his friends, but Lana is still a little shook up by Tina trying to kill her ONE WEEK AGO, and she just wants to Whitney to hang with her and ... I don't know, comfort her and such? Maybe there's an episode later on that will show how all the Kyptonite in Smallville creates localized amnesia-causing energy fields.

This episode establishes that Clark can do difficult math in his head. Which seems perfectly appropriate and super, although it's sort of apropos of nothing. Later episodes don't really do much with his super-smartness, although I suppose it could be argued that he's using it every time he figures something out with very little information. (The kyptonite diet shakes a few episodes from now are a prime example.)

This is the first episode to establish that the Kents' farm isn't actually doing very well financially. This will be a source of drama for many episodes to come.

Clark uses his x-ray vision to do a card trick to impress Lana. Awww ...

Chloe's reactions to Shawn's flirtations are so adorable. It's really coming back to me how much I adored Alison Mack back then. A friend of mine actually bought me an autographed photo of her for my birthday one year.

This is the first episode to imply that, in this version of the DC universe, Smallville and Metropolis are *really* close to each other. Like at most only a few hours apart. (Clark and Lana take Lex's limo to see a Radiohead concert in Metrpolis, and it is already dark when they first leave Smallville.)

Clark cancels his friend-date with Lana to go and save Chloe. Good call, Kent.

In the pilot episode, Whitney's truck got stacked atop two other trucks. Presumably he found a way to get it down and fixed, because he was driving it again in Episode 2 (which was set pretty much the day after Episode 1). Then Bug-Boy attacked, and the truck exploded. In this episode, Whitney has a new truck, and he crashes it.

I should be paying attention to the writing credits on these episodes. This one is one of the better-written episodes; most of the dialogue is pretty snappy, and the plot is neatly structured, with the Lex/Jonathan/Martha subplot intersecting with the Freak-of-the-Week story.

At the end of the episode, we see Chloe mourning Jenna, the fellow teen that Shawn murdered. Nice to see that kind of reflection and humanity on the part of one of the characters. Chloe seems genuinely affected by the events of the episode, which is nice.