I've put off writing this because it's hard to explain exactly how I feel about this latest episode and the turns it took. It's certainly no secret that I'm dead tired of this show, and I don't think that's entirely the fault of the new continuity. I think it's inevitable in a weekly series that's trying to push forward with both weekly plots and serious character arcs. (Overly serious, if you ask me, but that's a rant best fit for our new forum.)

The best episodes have found a way to combine both elements, or focused on only one, with the other in the background, and the worst have essentially run us in a very wide, tiresome circle. My issues with the new continuity notwithstanding, the neverending dance of character stagnation is enough to make me want to gouge my pretty little eyes out. It's a wonder I was ever a teenager, given my complete impatience for love triangles and passive aggressive relationship nonsense. (For all of our sanity, I'm not even going to bother recapping the ridiculous fight between Chloe and Lana. Why? Because, as usual, it went nowhere.)

Still, I have to admit to a certain frisson of sentimental excitement upon hearing those fateful words "Kal-El from Krypton" for the first time in this incarnation. There was a wonderful scene between Clark and Jonathan that touched on what I feel is the real core of the Superman story, and then there was the rest of the episode.

Much has been made about Christopher Reeve's guest spot, as reclusive scientist billionaire and "man of tomorrow" Virgil Swann, but for mostly the wrong reasons. The correct reason to be excited about this guest spot was the actual, undeniable plot advancement that his character provided. So hell, in for a penny, in for a pound, as my father used to say. This is our next Superman, and we might as well get used to him.

Clark, in a fit of sleepwalking (or sleep flying, possibly), keeps returning to the caves in his dreams, convinced that it holds the answers he needs. Then the octagon, not unlike a dog whistle, starts emitting a clarion call for Clark, clearly unhappy with its neglect in the barn. So Clark does what we've all been waiting for, takes the disk to the cave and puts it in the right hole. After glowing and opening into a very teasingly familiar shape, the wall blasts Clark with a beam of bright light, and knocks him unconscious.

Lex and his pet linguist/archaeologist find him, sprawled there, unable to explain what happened or how. They're both suspicious, of course, Dr. Walden more gratingly so, because he's the annoying clone-spawn of Jay Thomas and Quentin Tarantino. But they're even more suspicious when "someone" burns one of the cryptic cave symbols on the Kents' barn.

That someone is Clark, with his heat vision going momentarily rogue, and Chloe happens to be close enough to photograph it for the paper. It's a symbol for "hope," which Clark knows because the cave somehow taught him the language. He takes advantage of a lame plot parallel about a family tree assignment to demonstrate this fact further, on a piece of scratch paper that Lex conveniently finds.

Curiosity kills the cat, though, or at least renders it comatose; when Dr. Walden tries the trick with the disk, which he finds embedded in a wall in the cave, that same beam of bright light overloads his cerebral cortex. Bets are now being taken on whether the catatonic scientist will figure prominently as a villain in the future, or if this was simply a prelude to a self-protecting Fortress of Solitude.

The mysterious Swann besieges Clark with email, inviting him to visit him in his planetarium. Clark can no longer resist, and his parents can no longer hold him back, and so begins the reasonably good part of the evening.

Swann intercepted a message from the stars 13 years ago, through one of his many satellites. Though it took him years to decode it, the message proved one thing beyond a doubt: there was something out there, and that's where Clark came from. He's followed the signal, and found nothing, and until the picture in the paper, had no idea where the Kryptonian package had landed.

So there's still a lot we don't know; the destruction of Krypton, the House of El, the kryptonite meteor rocks, the yellow sun, and a hundred other things we as fanboys may or may not be correct in expecting. Presumably these secrets are within the spaceship, so Clark returns home with his disk to start it up.

The final scene, between Clark and Jonathan, was even better than any Christopher Reeve guest spot could ever be. Give Gough and Millar credit for nothing else, but they got the father-son dynamic down. Clark grapples with his duality, as the "last son of Krypton," alone on this earth, but also as Clark Kent, son of Jonathan and Martha, adopted or not. (Seeing it purely in this light, I understand the impetus to add another person to the Kent family, if only to reinforce that part of Clark's identity, but, well, the jury's still out.)

And as it ends, he is confronted with conflicting messages from his two fathers: the one from Krypton seems to indicate that he intended Kal-El to conquer the planet as "a god among men" while the earthbound one insists that Clark is a force for good, "because I am your father, I raised you, and I know you better than anyone."

So does Smallville suck? Week-to-week, yeah, it does. Would this Clark Kent grow into a Superman I'd care about? No, and that's my main problem with the show, but maybe that's a problem with me. This isn't a story about Superman yet, the producers will insist, but I will continue to insist right back that the heart of the Superman story is Clark Kent, and I have a hard time warming up to this cold, mopey, whiny pretty boy as a strong enough heart to be a hero.

Sarah Stanek