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Smallville
Nicodemus
airdate 03-19-02
Jonathan Kent, lest we forget, is just a good ole boy. Never meanin' no harm. And in this episode, he gets to act remarkably like the Duke boy John Schneider once was.
His excuse is an allergic reaction to the glowy-green pollen of the Nicodemus flower, which he's exposed to when he rescues the erratic, angry driver of the truck that nearly ran him off the road. Like father like son, indeed. The man in question is James Beals, an employee of LuthorCorp who had been helping Dr. Hamilton install some new equipment in his lab.
(Yes, he was listening to Waylon Jennings in his truck, and depending on the taping date, it might have been an homage to the late country singer as well as a Bo Duke reference. Either way, it's a fine song, especially the lesser-known final verse.)
Beals, a double agent for Lionel Luthor, stole a menacing flower called the Nicodemus. Its extremely toxic pollen caused a major epidemic in Smallville back in the 19th century, and it had been extinct until Hamilton used meteor rocks to irradiate and revive the seeds. So now it's not just toxic, it's somewhat sentient, and sneezes into the face of anyone looking at it.
I'm no botanist. I can barely keep weeds alive. I don't know why, if there were seeds left, those couldn't just be planted. Maybe Hamilton really was trying to create a monster mutant plant. Maybe he wanted to save his little ghetto florist's shop. Regardless of intent, Nicodemus infects, in order, Beals, Jonathan, Lana, and Pete.
And if this plot was anything more than an excuse for Kristen Kreuk to strip down to her lacy bra and boy-cut panties, then I'll strip down to the same.
The telltale sign of infection, you see, is acting wild and out-of-character, then angry and irrational. Inhibitions vanish, and the deepest desires come out of hiding. So Jonathan gets randy, blows off chores, and lets his temper fly. Lana does her best to look like a bad girl (but even that is pretty girl-next-door), breaks up with Whitney, and goes for a romp in the lap pool.
Dripping wet, scantily clad, and bearing a disturbing resemblance in both appearance and mannerism to Catherine Zeta Jones, she comes on to a very startled Clark and they trade spit in tight close-up. But once again, his first kiss with Lana isn't with the real Lana, and he knows it. Later in the day, she uses whipped cream to make a similar play for Lex.
The theme-o-the-week is either desire or freedom, and the ways both are tied up together. Chloe plays exposition fairy with her student poll about deepest desires; Lana's is to climb a windmill in a field to see the Metropolis skyline, but she's always been too afraid to do it. With her newfound glowy-green freedom, however, she steals Lex's car and goes off to brave the ascent.
Once the actors have flexed their muscles, the afflicted characters develop a high fever, pass out from anaphylactic shock and fall into a coma. So of course, Lana falls off the windmill and into Clark's arms. After Beals dies, the search for the antidote becomes even more crucial.
Although Pete hasn't really gotten enough screen time to firmly establish his jealousy of Lex, it's sort of a given that he'd feel a bit slighted by Clark's new best friend. So when he gets infected while searching Hamilton's lab, he grabs the doctor's gun, steals Chloe's car and heads straight for Lex. Clark heads off the assault by suckerpunching both Lex and Pete, with varying degrees of severity.
There turns out to be a Native American remedy, and everyone recovers, with no memory of their actions. Hamilton is surprised, then, to find his lab cleared out. Lex is sending him to Metropolis to continue his meteor research under the cover of the newly acquired Cadmus Labs.
The characters on this show spend so much time getting their heads all krypto-warped that I'm not sure we know them well enough to deal with an "id" episode like this. The "deepest desires" were pretty shallow and predictable for being deepest desires; why couldn't Pa Kent try to tell the world about his super-son and how proud he is of him, instead of getting it on with Ma and continuing to abuse the kitchen?
And why couldn't Lana be something other than a WB bad girl in knee-high boots? Never mind. That one I know the answer to.
