For a change of pace, today I offer up a plot synopsis for this week's episode in haiku:

Lana dates a freak;
Clark is jealous, suspicious.
He is always right.

So there you have it, neatly wrapping up my least favorite things about this show and tying it with a bow. Clark is a self-righteous stalker and Lana must, like all women before her, be completely out of her mind to be interested in someone who is not her purported soulmate, but he is the good guy and she the poor manipulated weakling when all is said and done. Even Ma Kent cannot fathom how Lana could date the guy.

Of course, it also bears out that only complete whackjobs are ever interested in Lana, which I could sort of get behind.

Seth, a newly-minted electromagnetic kryptofreak, offers a lot of very interesting parallels to Clark, some of which are even explored in a way that might possibly enact a change in Clark's behavior. Seth is another of Lana's many admirers-from-afar, imbued with strange powers that he doesn't quite understand. But he approaches this a bit differently, with an upfront honesty that completely wows Lana.

The electromagnetic control he has over her brain helps, too.

It rings a bit false; although she knows Clark has some secrets he keeps from her, Lana has never really shown any sign of suspecting him of having powers anything like Seth's. (This is, because like everyone else in Smallville, she's stupid. Anyone by now should realize Clark is a bit more than your average bear.) Swooning over his honesty, making such a point of his strange powers being "cool," is meant to resonate with Clark and the audience, but it's another example of the writers being too impressed with their own clever analogies.

They misstep again with Chloe's big revelation that Morgan Edge was Lionel Luthor's childhood best friend. A revelation to Lex, yes, but not to us, the regular audience, who even if we did not know that specific fact, were plenty able to infer their close relationship from Phoenix. They will tie this, I'm certain, to the Luthor grandparents' fiery demise, because as we saw last week, everything has to tie in together, otherwise we might be too stupid to follow it.

Seth, having learned that Clark is also a little bit different in the abilities column, is doomed to end the show incapacitated, in a coma and not likely to remember anything. Once Lana has been rehabilitated from her krytpo-electro-hormonal-magnetic bad-girl ways, she of course apologizes needlessly to Clark; needless because he WAS stalking her, and he WAS just jealous, and he simply used that jealousy to justify searching out a reason for him to be right. Superpowers do not, and should not, make him right about everything, nor should the mere fact that he is the protagonist.

And so help me, the WB announcer guy has been taking lessons from the histrionic NBC promo producers. Apparently next week, we CANNOT MISS the last five minutes.

Great. More attention paid to five inconsequential minutes than to the remaining 55; I wonder if this will be as interesting a gambit as it always is on er?

Sarah Stanek