In Kansas, not too far from America’s financial and cultural capitol, the great city of Metropolis with its well-known newspaper the Daily Planet, lies that relic of rural fifties America, Smallville, the “Creamed Corn Capital of the World.” It is a fine autumn day in 1989. Well, it looks like spring, but it’s got to be autumn, because today’s the day of the big Homecoming football game, when the Smallville High School Crows will whup the opposition. Three-year-old Lana Lang is with her aunt Nell, watching her parents drive back into town from whatever they were doing just ahead of the Homecoming parade. A young Jonathan and Martha Kent have been in town buying tulips (for their organic produce farm???) and are just leaving. Cutthroat capitalist Lionel Luthor is in town with his nine-year-old son Lex to lay the groundwork for turning Smallville into the Fertilizer (or perhaps Pollution) Capitol of the World.

And several thousand miles overhead, a swarm of rocks, fragments of a destroyed planet, are headed straight toward Smallville — along with one more regular and less identifiable object — and are about to turn the town into the Meteor Capital of the World ⁽¹⁾ and provide America with its most famous fictional immigrant.

Smallville (WB Network) was touted as being one of the best new shows on TV this season. Indeed, along with Enterprise on UPN it probably is — a fact which unfortunately says considerably more about new shows in general than it does about Smallville, which, although fun, is something of an unholy cross between Popular and Eerie, Indiana, and — so far — not very representative of the canon from which it derives.

The show takes place in 2001, in a Smallville changed in obvious and not-so-obvious ways by the meteor strike of 1989, and concentrates on a small group of high-school students. We have somewhat nerdish (and non-glasses-wearing) Clark Kent, the adopted son of Martha and Jonathan. Some hundreds of yards from his barn is the home of Lana Lang and her aunt Nell (her parents were killed in the meteor strike — goodbye, Professor Lang, an occasionally important character, if not a staple, of the comic Superboy). Redhead Lana has somehow become a brunette for this series; Lois Lane, watch out! Lana, who starts out as a cheerleader, has a jock boyfriend named Whitney, who apparently derives from “Brad” in the movies, not from any of the original characters. Clark has two close friends who were not evident in either the comic or the earlier movies, Pete and Chloe; Chloe is the editor of the school paper and the first to note all the weird things happening in Smallville, while Pete has yet to exhibit a distinctive personality.

The shows so far have centered around weirdness as a key plot element. One high-school student turns into a human dynamo; another becomes a man-eating insectoid; a third sucks the heat and life out of anyone he touches (his girl friend is all broken up by the experience); the Smallville High football coach becomes a pyrotic straight out of Steven King’s Firestarter. This all appears to be due to a lot of green-glowing rock left over from the meteorite impacts (why, in twelve years, the U.S. government has not noticed this and done a major study of it, has not yet been addressed) — though Lana wears a brooch made of said rock, without its affecting anyone except Clark, who tends to collapse when he gets too close to her (a reaction which his friends put down to a shy clumsiness).

A second element is Clark’s development of his powers and his relationship with his “parents” and his schoolmates. One wonders how fast his powers will actually develop; at the current rate, he will have turned from Clark Kent into Superman by halfway through the first season (he can now run at lightning speed, show invulnerability, and see Lana through the wall of the girls’ shower room; and he has also hovered above his bed while asleep). Having to hide them (something at which he has not yet been particularly successful — one wonders why nobody except his parents notices) has turned him into something of an odd-man-out, which he doesn’t want to be. Oh, and he’s fallen in love with Lana, who likes him, too, but is not about to abandon Whitney who, if he is a jerk, is at least a dependable one. ⁽²⁾

The third and perhaps most interesting element is his relationship with Superman’s bete noire, Lex Luthor. In the first episode, Clark saves Lex’s life, and since then the latter has been showing his gratitude in various ways. One might think from most of his actions that he is really well-meaning and good-hearted, particularly towards Clark and the Kents; but there are a few little things that suggest that he is not exactly what he seems. At the same time that he offers to help the Kents with their financial problems, he doesn’t hesitate to grab a piece of fruit from their stand at the Farmers’ Market and walk off with it without paying. He has a history of juvenile crime that his father covered up for him, and when an unscrupulous reporter attempts to blackmail him about it, Lex demonstrates an understanding of the uses of wealth and power worthy of a Stalin. Lana is dubious about him, having once — at age ten — caught the sixteen-year-old Lex skinny-dipping with a current girl-friend (“You were teaching her the breast stroke”). And though it seems that he will do almost anything for Clark (“the younger brother I never had”), there has so far been at least one scene that indicates that he knows Clark has a secret and will do just about anything, scrupulous or unscrupulous, to find it out. In the end, I suspect that — with the possible exception of X-Files fans — most people will watch this series more for Lex than for Clark and his powers or for the Smallville weirdness.

It’s an interesting show, and will almost certainly last for a couple of seasons until it runs out of plot hooks (and then will UPN grab it up, as they did with Buffy and “Roswell?) or until WB finally decides to target some other demographic group. But, overall, I think I liked Lois and Clark better.

⁽¹⁾ Some years ago, much was made of the fact(oid) that some one third of all the meteorites in North America had been found in the state of Kansas. This led one science-fiction writer to produce a very minor novel called The Gods Hate Kansas! In fact, many fringies wondered whether somewhere in Kansas (perhaps in some Shaverian underground city) there was a tractor ray drawing rocks down towards the state. More thoughtful individuals simply pointed out that in large tracts of Kansas it is particularly easy to distinguish meteorites from other surface rocks, since in those tracts the latter category simply is not represented; meteorites may be as common in the rest of North America, just harder to identify as such.

⁽²⁾ Clark has a “Fortress of Solitude” in the loft of the family barn; he keeps a small refractor telescope, inherited from his father, there, and divides his time on it between watching the stars and watching Lana’s bedroom window and front porch.

Smallville in Retrospect

(Originally posted 2002-05-29)

I am not competent to say that this was the best series of the season that just ended — after all, I only watched two (the other being Enterprise). Still, it was a lot of fun, and I actually went back and reviewed the whole series twice — something I don’t usually bother to do. I think that it was better than Enterprise, and if they were to go face-to-face I’m not sure which I would watch and which I would just record for (possible) later watching — Smallville would probably be the one that got watched real-time. ⁽¹⁾

One of the joys of the series is watching for moments of foreshadowing. Wandering through Smallville High School you occasionally get glimpses of the school emblem, a picture of a crow wearing a red cape and a big shield with the letter ‘S’ (for “Smallville”) on its chest; the ‘S’ on Clark’s naked chest in the first episode could also have stood for “Scarecrow”. When Clark’s powers are inadvertently transferred to another boy and the latter reveals himself to the public, school newspaper editor Chloe Sullivan immediately tags him “Super Boy”, an apellation that Clark considers “lame”. When the kids are musing about what kind of jobs they will have when they are adults, Clark vocally hopes that his won’t involve “putting on a suit and flying a lot”, though at a school Air Force Recruiting stand Principal Kwan’s son, looking at Clark, loudly imagines him “in a uniform, flying”.

Some of the dross from the comic-book series has been dropped, in a few cases — we may hope — permanently. There is no Kryptonite, Krypton, and Krypto the Super-Dog; there is the weird and poisonous green meteor rock that causes Clark to go into convulsions (but it has no name except “meteor rock”), neither Clark nor his adoptive parents know the name of the planet from which he comes (it may be written down on an indecipherable message that came with him, but that is for the future), and the Kents don’t seem to have a dog, though they do have cattle (“Krypto the Super-Cow”???). ⁽²⁾

There have also been some significant changes in the cast. Both Lana Lang and Pete Ross are present, but Lana has changed from a willowy redhead to a short, pert Eurasian girl, the sort of woman one expects to find flogging Neutragena on the WB network, and Pete Ross’s freckles and blond hair have disappeared in favor black skin and an African cast of features (maybe these changes follow the current comics; I don’t know, I haven’t read Superboy since the sixties). Chloe Sullivan is, to me, a completely new character, apparently the mentor who will turn Clark in the direction of newspaper reporting. ⁽³⁾ And Smallville itself has become a strange and dangerous place, where the legacy of the 1989 meteor swarm causes strange things to happen — a town where all the tall tales are true.

Lex Luthor remains the most enigmatic character in the series. You can’t help liking the guy, while at the same time you wouldn’t trust him behind your back. He cares about his friendship with Clark, he cares about the people who work for him, he cares about Smallville — but overshadowing everything is his ongoing rivalry with his own father, who to a great degree has shaped him, creating a monster that, the season finale suggests, will gladly stand by and let the old man die. The contrast between the Kent family life and that of the Luthors is one of the ongoing features of the series.

Problems? One may hope that the writers will find a different source of victims for the Smallville curse than the local high school; otherwise, by the time Clark and his friends reach the senior class they will probably be the only students left in town.

Next season? Who knows? I suspect that Clark will learn to fly, probably while rescuing Lana from the tornado that scooped her up at the end of the season finale (will the next season take place in Oz rather than Smallville?). Clark’s friendship with Lex Luthor will almost certainly be strained to the breaking point. The Kents’ eternal financial problems will only get worse. Maybe Lana will strip down to skimpy red panties and flimsy red bra again. (Not that it matters; Clark discovered X-ray vision in the third episode, while looking at the wall separating the gym from the girls’ locker room — the only time in the whole series that the exasperated / innocent expression on his face ever changed, turning into a foolish grin.)

I look forward to it.

⁽¹⁾ Perhaps not too surprisingly, this is exactly what happened in the third season …

⁽³⁾ Chloe at one point mentions a cousin named Lois Lane.