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Smallville
Zero
airdate 03-12-02
The infamous Club Zero incident has been referenced and foreshadowed all season, teasing and hinting that Lex was a bad, bad boy in his younger years and that his Daddy had to buy him out of some pretty nasty scrapes.
Maybe that was another incident. The one covered in this episode just doesn't seem that bad, compared to some of the other things we've seen from the krypto-freaks. It seems that three years ago, Lex took a girl named Amanda to Club Zero for some apple martinis, entertaining her while her fiancé Jude was out of town. (Apple martinis, by the way, glow exactly the same way the meteor rocks do, and that's the closest we get to kryptonite this episode.)
Except he wasn't out of town, he was across the club with some girlies. And he's Parker Lewis (Corin Nemec). Amanda throws her engagement ring at him and storms off, followed closely by Lex and Jude. There's a scuffle. There's some Yojimbo-style exposition, revealed gradually in various flashbacks.
Did the security guard shoot Jude? That's the way the story was reported in the papers. Or did Lex shoot Jude with the security guard's gun? That's the story Lex told to the late, unlamented crooked cop Phelan, who promptly spins the police report away from young Luthor. But what really happened? Because it appears that Parker Lewis can't die, and that Jude is still alive.
Meanwhile, back in Smallville: Lana is preparing for the grand opening of the renovated Talon. The Kent family's cows are mysteriously killed by LuthorCorp's industrial waste. And the theme-o-the-week is truth. Chloe has drawn Clark's name for a class assignment, and throws her journalistic little heart into writing his unauthorized biography.
Club Zero's shadow hangs over everything. The security guard shows up suddenly to talk to Lex. A mysterious package (the guard's hand in a hat box) is delivered to the Talon. Jude kidnaps Lex at the Kent farm crime scene.
In Chloe's search for the truth, she unearths Clark's adoption papers, from the slightly fishy-smelling Metropolis United Charities. Instead of outright lies or forgery, the Kents appear to have taken a more complex route to make Clark a legal citizen of Earth. Jonathan mentions something about "clearance," immediately bringing to mind visions of black helicopters and Cigarette Smoking men. I hope this particular angle has been very carefully thought out; forgive me for doubting that the Men in Black would really let Ma and Pa Kent from Smallville, Kansas keep the alien baby.
Clark asks her to back off for the sake of their friendship; Lex asks the same of Clark regarding Club Zero. Which of course, he doesn't, and is just in time to save Lex from the true villain: Amanda's jailbird brother, also the contractor from the Talon.
"Jude" was just a miraculous lookalike in need of money. Phelan is dead, Amanda committed suicide in her grief over Jude's death, and Lex is the only place to find the truth. But the truth, she hurts. Amanda is the one who pulled the trigger. Lex, knowing that his father's money would protect him, took the rap to save her.
The episode ends with Chloe's agonized decision to save the information about Metropolis United Charities, so it's obviously not the last we'll hear of Clark's past. Lex's past, it seems, just isn't that interesting.
