"Sarah! You cannot escape me!"

"The more you resist, Sarah, the more you will suffer!"

...I think this show is talking to me.

Although I was wrong last season, when I predicted that the season finale and all that came after it had to be an extended dream sequence because I just couldn't believe my eyes, this time when I said, "this cannot be for real," I was right.

Of course, I said it another couple of times long after the "dream" stuff had mostly stopped and was proven wrong again and again, but that's what I get for thinking better of this show. It just goes and disappoints me again and again.

Clark had an adventure in dreamland with another Sarah, his new neighbor in a coma, who had the mysterious power to enter his dreams and keep him under while she begs for his help. It was pretty patently obvious that the first segments were all taking place in fantasy-land, even given the show's tendency to always sound vaguely unreal. Everything that happened to Clark was the stuff of dreams or nightmares: from skinny dipping with Lana and getting a new truck from his parents to failing a history test, Chloe abandoning the Wall of Weird, and Lex learning his secret.

Yeah, even Clark's dreams are sort of dullsville.

Sarah, it turns out, is being kept in her comatose state by her evil uncle, who manifests in these shared dreams as The Traveller, a death-like being against whom Clark is powerless. Let's see. In real life, Uncle Dearest looks like Peter Gallagher, and in dreams, he's the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. I wonder if he might be the bad guy?

Clark and Lana perform some tag-team heroics to save Sarah from her fate and very little else happens. Clark ends up having to save Lana, too, but what's new about that?

Oh, and this was shoehorned into the episode, so I might as well just shove it in here somewhere, too. From the beginning, the WB has leaned hard on the cross-marketing strategy of not only featuring music by Warner Bros artists but then running a bumper at the end of each episode listing those artists and CDs. Which eventually turn into show soundtracks. Corporate synergy at its finest, though that rather defines 'damning with faint praise.'

This episode of Smallville featured, in honor of an upcoming greatest hits album, music by REM, which I can only assume was arbitrarily dropped on this one because of the tenuous link to "rapid eye movement" sleep, the state in which it is believed most dreams occur. Yes, it all makes sense now; sad, synergistic, somewhat contemptible sense, but sense all the same.

John Glover, that magnificent bastard, did salvage a few minutes of deliciously evil screen time with Lex. Their intricate, passive-aggressive father-son dance is still a highlight of the hour, even if, like everything else around it, the topic of their jousting matches matters not a whit.

(For reference: Lionel wants Lex to have psychotherapy sessions, and until he submits to the head-shrinking, he will be locked out of LuthorCorp's crucial files. "Being on the island didn't make me crazy," he insists. "Of course not," Lionel reassures him with a manly hug. "But won't it be nice to have that in writing. Hm?")

Really, it was all very frustrating because it did have potential. This kind of story is certainly not above the medium (neither comic book nor television) and can be done well enough to be sort of preposterously entertaining. But the poor pacing, leaden dialogue and terribly obvious direction made it just plain preposterous.

Here's a hint: if something happens to your characters and they wrap it all up with "gosh, I still don't know how that happened!" that's NOT okay. You don't get to create different rules for each episode. It was just another hour of stuff that will mean nothing next week, and if there's any measure of decent television, it's continuity.

So far, nothing that happened last year has had any lasting influence. Each major plot point served only to catalyze single events, with no rippling into any other stories or characters. Why make Ma Kent pregnant at all if you're going to miscarry the child and then never bring it up again after Clark has come back? Likewise, Lex's relationship with Helen: so what if the primary purpose was to drive him back to his father's evil arms, why not see the aftermath? And hey, remember the caves? Will we ever see them again, and will Jor-El suffer the same fate?

And as long as I'm at it: why wrap up everything so quickly? Lex could have stayed on the island, Clark could have stayed in Metropolis, the list goes on and on. It's not like Smallville the city so compelling we can't stay away from it.

Of course, with TV, you've got to pull your internal timeline alongside your viewers' so you have to skip summer every year because otherwise people are too stupid to follow along. Oh, wait, no, that can't be it. Because Smallville already takes place in some bizarro-Kansas where it's never winter and there are pine trees and aside from "first day of school" has never had a season-specific episode.

I know I said I wanted a Christmas episode, but what's wrong with skipping, say, large chunks of autumn? That would make perfect sense, as it's harvest time at the farm so Clark shouldn't have that much time to tilt at windmills (not "chase them," as dream-Chloe would have it). Then we could actually see the summer, when students of all stripes are usually having a good time doing things that make television exciting.

I'm no stranger to episodic television. You've got different writers, you're buying scripts on spec, half of 'em are probably worked over from old Buffy scripts... you're not looking at some overarcing narrative - unless you're 24 which I'm looking forward to sampling next week when it returns, as it no longer shares a timeslot with this show. But what exactly are Gough and Millar drawing checks for? Because they're clearly not keeping an eye on this show's development, which is a shame, because it really could be so much better every week.

Oh, and here's another hint: Leave well enough alone every now and again, and don't end every episode with a "meaningful" coda about how much Clark and Lana are meant to be. Because they aren't. And it's getting really old.

Sarah Stanek