Otherwise, it's
flashbacky, over the top, mildly insightful and overall
watchable. Perhaps you could say I've lowered my standards,
but more I'm just pleased that the revelations herein were
the type that last. Odd how that so frequently coincides
with Al and Miles's episodes.
I'm also rather
pleased about the paucity of Lana Lang, not so much because
Kristin Kreuk's performance is still subpar, which it is,
but because her plotlines are the type that rev up, peal
out and stall when they become inconvenient. (People's 1:
Aunt Nell and the anxiety about her dead parents. People's
2: Her biological father, Henry Small. People's 3: Physical
therapy following her near-crippling accident.)
Seeking to recover
the seven weeks of memory his father wiped out with electroshocks,
Lex returns to Summerholt and Dr. Garner to undergo glowy-green
immersion therapy. In a longterm sense, this can't work,
obviously. The advantages of Lex remembering Lionel's wrongdoings
and his grandparents' fate would be far overshadowed by
the impossibility of him remembering Clark's secret, or
even a shred of it.
Fortunately,
this conceit did not focus even the slightest on that period
of time; no one-trick pony, the regression therapy unearths
mostly memories of Julian Luthor, the triggers for Lex's
adolescent psychotic breaks. It proves a slightly longer-term
view of the Luthor family dynamic than I'd expected, and
provides the flashback John Glover with some marvelous scenes,
but why would Lex bury those memories?
Why indeed. Julian
and Lillian Luthor both allegedly died of natural causes,
SIDS and cancer respectively; although Lex remembers taking
the fall for Julian's death, what he finally remembers is
whom he took that fall for. His mother, either suffering
from mental illness, post-partum depression or possibly
just a gripping fear of her husband's parenting tactics,
smothered the crying infant with a pillow.
Again Lex takes
the blame for another, turning his life down a darker path
trying to save the ones he loves most, casting his lot with
the demons and figuring he has little to lose. When he reveals
as much to Lionel, he realizes what he did lose -- his father's
love. Whether he lost it before or after Julian's death,
though, is rather up for interpretation.
Michael Rosenbaum
improves on his performance yet again, overlaying Lex's
unsettled mind with weight and fear and some regret. John
Glover is straight up awesome, and oddly affectionate in
his scenes with his tortured, lonely yet adoring son.
Clark is singlemindedly
against Lex continuing his treatments at Summerholt, even
begging Luthor senior to intervene. Lionel takes advantage
of that, luring poor Clark to the glowy-green tank to unravel
the secrets of his past. Since they don't seem to have a
monitor into the brain, and should probably be pretty stymied
by an alien MRI, I guess they were sort of hoping Clark
would cooperate and narrate his vision of his earliest memory.
Of course, since
being outside the meteor-infused water tank made him pass
out, that much exposure to kryptonite should probably damn
near kill poor Kal-El, but if it had, we'd miss the fanboy
interlude made especially for us, with love from Jor-El
and Lara.
Why in heaven
haven't the Kents manufactured a freaking allergy excuse?
In this day and age you have kids who may die if they're
in a room with a peanut yet they can't find a Medicalert
bracelet for "allergic to green meteor rocks, red meteor
rocks, shellfish" stamped on it?
Problem being,
we know Clark can't die. There's always a possibility that
a tertiary or even secondary character could lose when the
dice come up, but not Clark -- not unless the next few episodes
are finally going to address the yellow sun in earnest,
and since that part of continuity seems to be inconvenient,
I don't anticipate it.
Annette O'Toole
gets a very rare chance to act the hell out of a scene with
Tom Welling, both of them acting rings around the dialogue
and actually bringing a tear to my eye without saying a
word. (That word, when it's said is, of course, "Lara,"
-- Martha claims it was Clark's first word, which, well,
okay, whatever. It was a nice scene, I'm not going to pick
at it.)
Fitting, I suppose,
that Gough and Millar can tap the mother-son dynamic just
as well, a little early for Mother's Day but still a lovely
little present to adoptive mothers everywhere.
The mystery of
Pa Kent is slightly solved: he is "in Metropolis" while
John Schneider stars in 10.5 on NBC and was preparing
to direct next week's episode of Smallville. At least
if he dies this season, Ma can pull her weight in the good
scenes.
