|
|
Smallville
airdate 11/06/01
Uncontrollable X-Ray vision makes a great metaphor for getting through high school. Sometimes you can see right through people, other times you're stuck trying to figure out their public personas, and everyone can relate to that. Of course, if it's real X-Ray vision, you can look into the girls' locker room.
For most teenagers, periodically blinding headaches would just be a sign to get glasses, but for Clark, it's a sign that his eyes are about to peel away layers from reality. (Though it might, and should, lead to those glasses later.) It first hits him as a bank-robbing Lex Luthor knocks him through a window; Clark sees him as a glowing green skeleton.
Turns out that the meteor shower may have done some good in Smallville, though not without consequences. A young girl named Tina, who was born with a soft bone disease, showed marked improvement after her third birthday, and now shows marked krypto-enhanced ability to morph into other people. Tangentially, remember a time before morphing? God, I'm old. The effects are actually okay, but really, after Willow there was nowhere to go but up.
So the shapeshifting Tina, jealous of what she perceives as Lana's perfect life, is looking for her true self, bringing in our theme-o-the-week. She impersonates Lex, her (unexpectedly deceased) mother, Clark, Lana, and Whitney on her road to getting what she thinks she wants. Clark, one step ahead and right royally pissed that his first kiss with Lana was actually with Tina, corners her in the cemetery where she's imprisoned Lana in a crypt.
Lana, meanwhile, learns some things about her mother that reflect her own True Self vs. Public Persona. She and Clark have a very touching conversation about their connections with their respective families, whom they will never know in any meaningful way. Clark, to his credit (or not), does not try to look through her clothes as he struggles to control his mysterious eye problems, which work at varying degrees of depth.
This week also evinced some major developments that lead into the Superman mythos we all know and love. Lex's obsession with "Superman," or here, the idea or possibility of such a thing, grows as he hires a Metropolis Inquirer reporter to investigate why exactly he didn't die in that car crash from the pilot episode. At the moment, Lex might believe he himself is the one with super powers, and it's possible that discovering he is not could drive him over the edge.
In a slick piece of exposition, the reporter in question was actually looking for a payoff by holding Lex's juvenile record hostage. So there is an established edge over which to drive him, and a reason to suspect that the charming Lex is one of those public personas you can't see through even with X-Ray vision. Also, Lex mentions the Daily Planet, which joins last week's mention of the Metropolis Sharks as sly references that don't clunk.
There's also a "Club Zero" reference that sounded pretty fanboy, but I'm just not cool enough to know -- Editor? (Not that comes to mind, unless it's a really oblique reference to Black Zero. Readers? - Derek)
Martha and Jonathan also begin to show signs of "Ma and Pa Kent," Clark's confidantes and the dispensers of great wisdom to all and sundry. They're still active parents to Clark right now, but their respect and trust in their super-son is obviously growing and will create the adult parent-child relationship that will sustain the super-man Clark will become.
In the strongest episode since the pilot, Smallville proves itself to be a good show with bad sponsors. Please, we beg you, do not go gently in to see Black Knight.
