So the season, and indeed the show as a whole, is finally picking up, which I can only take as a good sign for fanboys. Certainly they had very few other places to go but up, after showings like "Relic" (enjoy it again next week!) and "Asylum," but the ratings have by no means been suffering for it, and therefore I would suppose the only reason for the recent lack of outright suckage is to finally throw our contingent a bone with some meat still on.

I wonder, though, where the remaining chunk of this season will go, and whether or not there is enough meat and momentum to get through the end of May sweeps without backsliding too much.

Adam is, at least on the surface, dead again; so much for that having a lasting impression. After Lex expressed an interest in running his father's miraculous, lucrative research lab, Lionel threw a fit and closed it down. When Adam can no longer get the injections that were keeping him alive, he returns to Smallville with destruction in his wake.

The $25,000 question: Did Adam in fact cause the destruction at the lab, killing the technicians and Dr. Tang, which is subsequently blamed on Lex? Or was that Lionel, covering his tracks? No evidence to support the latter, but the former seems a bit too convenient.

Adam's target for the evening is Lana, his former landlady at the Talon, and his intentions are to locate the few precious vials of the serum he had left behind when he vanished.

Of course, that simple story is muddied with some glowy-green time anomaly in which Clark receives Lana's panicked phone call for help from the future.

Well, actually, I'm not so sure it's meteoric in nature, but my brain is now conditioned to equate green-hued special effects with kryptonite, so my best guess is yes. Is that intentional, now in the third season, that green is shorthand for this continuity's version of "paranormal?" Or am I reading into it too much?

As is now fairly common for this show, it's completely absurd but done well within its constraints; mostly my problem is that it's increasingly formulaic. Something improbable happens (usually to Lana), Clark and Chloe demonstrate some investigative skillz, Clark uses his superpowers in as inconspicuous a way as possible, Chloe jumps to the Wall of Weird, Clark backs her up, Pete fetches and carries as needed, Lana is saved.

To be fair, a lot of episodic TV falls into this trap, including shows I've liked. Formulas aren't definitively bad; they exist for a reason, and not just to pacify lazy viewers. It's not a huge problem, and it's a vastly preferable gripe to repetitive krypto-freaks or neverending moues of young luuuuuuuuv done wrong.

Lex, accused of the lab's destruction, is in trouble with the police until he goes over their heads to the FBI, offering to give up the goods on his father in exchange for saving his own pretty skin.

Then, in a twist so subtle I damn near missed it because I never expect to need to watch beneath the surface, Lionel reveals the reason for all this extensive research. He is dying, of a rare liver disease, tying in nicely with something I ultimately decided not to mention last week.

From my notes: Still not sure how the liver disease played into it, since it was mentioned enough to notice; are the victims created in some way by LuthorCorp before being given the serum, or are they just cherry-picking these patients from existing records?

Which is nice, but frankly, a bit deeper than I think we really needed. He has been pretty well established as just plain old ordinary evil, and this kind of pathos is not really what I'm looking for in my villains. I'm sure I'll end up digging the parallels with both Lex and Clark dealing with their father's respective illnesses, because I always do, but I can't say for sure that I wouldn't rather have an ordinary evil mastermind scheme behind this miraculous krypto-serum.

He recruits another doctor and throws money at him to get his serum up and running again; it's a shame everyone has forgotten about Dr. Hamilton or Cadmus Labs, because this sure would be a great place to see them again.

But at last, the $100,000 question and my primary reason to stay tuned after six weeks of "viewer's choice" reruns: What will Lionel Luthor do? For the first time in the entire series, he looks lost, uncertain, scared. And, as my notes put it: "oh. Because he's got a gun. And he's NONO NON O NONO NO NO NO NO NON ONO NO NONON ONONONONON ON ON ON ONO NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

See you in April, Lionel.

Sarah Stanek